Chapter One

He groaned in his sleep like he had every night since it happened. Once again, the nightmare turned fluid and three-dimensional. Real. He could smell it. He could taste it. The walls of Uncle George’s oceanside shack heaved, holding their breaths as if in anticipation. Even the ceiling had something to say, its groans guttural, almost threatening as it flexed and drooled down on him like a wet-mouthed fiend. Drawing close. Receding. Reminding. Forever reminding…

Groggy with little sleep, Seth batted the foul monster away. In its wake, the stench of beer, pizza, cigarette smoke, and sweat spilled like dirty water across a hardwood floor that wasn’t really there. Not in Florida. Yet it ebbed and flowed. Forward and aft. Aft then forward. Always moving.

Seasickness threatened, yet the nausea was more of whiskey than of nightmare. Too bad that half bottle of Jack he’d commiserated with hadn’t knocked him out cold. He could use a night off.

Seth drifted, lost in memories he couldn’t avoid, no matter how much he drank or how hard he cried. All the Jack in the world had never kept her from coming back. God knew he’d tried. He just wished his nightly visitor were the woman he loved instead of—her.

Like always, the dream began in shadowy darkness. It was always too dim and nearly too dark to see beyond the faint glow cast from the amber-bubbled lampshades of Harry’s cheap wall sconces. Groggy and mostly inebriated, Seth squinted though his eyes were closed, struggling to decipher the facts from the fiction of this never-ending dream.

Moving painfully slow, lighted figures emerged through the murk. Like the night it happened, these memories cast just enough light with just enough shadow to feel believable. Not like it wasn’t hard to fool Seth. No sirree, Bob.

The noise from the packed beerhouse on Chicago’s south side grated on the number ten migraine hammering inside his aching skull. His finger automatically reached for the scar on his brow. Damn thing itched when bad things happened. That was what made this dream seem real.

He was there again. Reliving the second most painful moment in his life.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he mumbled out loud to Elliot, the buddy responsible for Seth being at Harry’s Beerhouse that night. He wasn’t ready to socialize after Katelynn’s funeral. Not so soon. But here he was.

“’S okay, bro,” Elliot insisted. “You needed a night out. Chill. Have a couple beers. If you’re not feeling it, we’ll leave. I promise, man.”

Once more Seth relented when he knew damned well he shouldn’t be in any bar. But Elliot, one of those high-energy types, always strumming his fingers, tapping his toes, or bouncing his knee, was Seth’s closest bud. After all they’d been through in high school football together, he was the one who needed the night out. Even now, his bright blue eyes scanned Harry’s backdrop for good-looking women, chin nodding when one walked by their table, whistling under his breath if they passed his standards, which were low. Elliot loved playing the field and playing the game. Flirting. Just being good old Elliot.

Wanting to feel normal again, to feel something—anything—besides the freak show of grief and pain he’d sunk into, Seth had acquiesced under Elliot’s nagging. So here he was sitting at a table in the center of the bar, more for his friend than for himself because that was what good friends did. They sucked up and they carried on. At least, they pretended to carry-on. What could one beer hurt?

Elliot had brought along three other guys Seth hardly knew, and that was fine. It gave him an out knowing that Elliot wouldn’t be alone once he bailed. The four of them ordered a couple servings of club fries smothered in extra spicy chili, diced onions, handfuls of grated sharp cheddar, but hold the jalapeños, please.

In a big show of bravado, he ordered frosty mugs of Milwaukee’s finest all around, then plussed them up with Tequila shooters, and encouraged his table to, “Drink up, mates!” Like he was a pirate on the high seas or something. Yeah. Elliot could be an idiot. Blind in one eye. Not able to see out of the other. Missing the greater picture.

Seth stared at his mug, not in the mood for the noise or the camaraderie but liking the beer. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be in the mood for reality or normalcy. What the hell did anything matter? He swiped one thumb over the condensation dripping down his frosty mug, seeing Katelynn laid out in her casket. The mortician had done a good job. She hadn’t been mangled in the accident, not like any of that mattered. She was still gone, and the hole in Seth’s heart had fully eclipsed his need to live.

Yet, here he was, still breathing in and out. Still numb, yet in the worst pain a man could ever know. Nothing made sense, not why he was drinking or why he should live another day.

But right on schedule, like he had in every nightmare, Elliot complained the chili didn’t have enough meat in it, that it was mostly beans. That Harry’s cooks were skimping on the really good stuff.

One of Elliot’s other buddies hadn’t taken his eyes off his cell phone since he’d climbed into the rear seat of Elliot’s king cab. The other guy stunk of cheap whiskey on top of rank body odor. A most wretched combination when mingled with the aromatic scents of beer and chili.

Then the night went bad.

A wiry, African American girl—she couldn’t have been more than thirteen—ran into the place, shrieked a mouthful of ugly obscenities at no one in particular, pointed to the ceiling, and started shooting. Debris spattered over everyone. Beer spilled. Several amber bubble lights shattered. Tables and chairs overturned as most of Harry’s patrons hit the floor. All except Seth. Like a white-boy Jack-in-the-Box, he’d jumped to his feet and stood there alone in the dark.

“Seth! Get down!” Elliot hissed from under his table. “She’s gonna kill you!”

Seth just shook his head, not going anywhere. For sure not laying on his belly. Maybe because of his Army training. Maybe because he was still in shock and grief. Maybe because then was as good a time as any to die. He’d already lost his heart and his soul when Katelynn died. What did living without her matter?

The chick, who he now knew was Latoya Franklin, set her evil eye on Seth. A cruel sneer lifted her upper lip. She bared her teeth, and Seth thought she looked like a mad dog in that leather and chains outfit she’d worn.

Headed his way, she aimed and took two shots, but both went wild. At least that was what several witnesses said. Ducking her head like a cocky street fighter with a shitload of attitude, she’d swaggered up to Seth, and pointed her gun in his face.

But that was the law of the jungle for you, survival of the fittest. The fastest draw.

From sheer force of habit, he’d strapped on that night, his Glock tucked in the rear holster of his jeans. Little Miss Attitude failed to consider the possibility that he might be holding a forty-five caliber pay-back in his hand. It was that dark in Harry’s that night, and a black, shiny weapon was easy to miss. Especially when you’re young, stupid, higher than a kite on adrenaline, and packing a stolen POS gun.

She’d rolled her shoulders like she had something to prove, then snapped the pink-handled weapon under his nose. His muscle training took over. Like it or not, but yeah. All that hard-earned Army training saved his life. Didn’t do much for her though.

The rest was history.

She went down with one in her forehead, another in her throat. But all Seth remembered was the terror in her chocolate brown eyes when the impact of his first round sent her flying off her feet. She flew backward, over tables and into the wall. Automatically, he’d fired again. The number one ROE, rule of engagement: Always make sure the person gunning for you is dead before you holster your piece.

But in that endless instant between impact and the cold hard truth, he saw the real Latoya. The one he’d never forget—right before the light went out of her eyes. Her tough bitch swagger and her attitude were just a juvenile mask. A disguise. A lie.

Latoya Franklin died scared and alone, something no child should have to do. She was simply a mixed-up, wayward kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, playing the odds, and believing the rampant lies told on the streets in her ghetto neighborhood. Her ‘hood’. She should’ve been playing with dolls instead of with guns, but that was life on the hard streets of Chicago for you. A kid didn’t stand a chance.

Five years. It’d been five long years since that godawful night, and you’d think after all that time, Latoya Franklin would finally leave him alone. But noooooooooo. Every night, the lost little girl returned like one of Scrooge’s three ghosts, to bug the living shit out of Seth.

An unearthly chill pushed into the room ahead of her like a warning from another world, his signal that she still had something to say. Icy dread came with her. Punching his pillow in groggy frustration, he groaned as her dirty bare feet dragged into his swept clean bedroom, scraping her heels, shuffling and whining, howling and moaning that she’d lost her shoes when he’d shot her.

Well, yeah, little girl. The power behind close-up ballistics tends to work like that.

The lament of the dead began with the usual, “It’s all your fault!”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

On and on she whined about how everything was ‘that bastard Seth McCray’s fault. Everythinggggg!’ How she’d never grow up like her ‘girlfriendssssss.’ She’d never have babies or sweethearts, proms or a ‘weddingggggg!’

Not like she’d ever been decent mom or marriage material to begin with, not headed to prison like she’d been that night. In that respect, Seth and she were the same. Seth had no wedding in his future, either. Certainly, no babies. No sons or daughters. No darling wife smiling at him at the end of a hard day. Not even a dog.

Every last dream had died on Interstate 294’s northbound center lane the day he’d come home. The happy times he’d been looking forward to with his girl? That kiss? Her hugs? Never happened. He hardly remembered the flight home anymore. Just the funeral. The viewing.

He didn’t go onto Georgia for his much-anticipated training because he went to a funeral instead. He didn’t become a Ranger, either, because he didn’t have the heart. Everything good in his life stopped the day Katelynn died, and the night he got stuck with Latoya.

In his sleep, he scraped his fingernails over his head and ended up scratching the scars in his left brow, the ones he’d gotten in South America. He hadn’t known Katelynn meant to surprise him in her wedding dress that day, nor that she’d arranged to hold their marriage ceremony right there in O’Hare, either. So, yeah. There was no joy to look forward to and none to look back on. Seth had no sweetheart and no girlfriend, no prospect of finding one, either. Those kinds of women, the good kind, came and went to other men. Never to him.

“You killed meeeeeeeeee…” His lovely sad specter whined like pitiful Moaning Myrtle of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter fame. Only, unlike Seth’s ghost, Myrtle had never killed anyone, had she? Tonight’s dire lament was more of the same, Latoya’s avoidance of guilt and casting of blame. The bitching. That never changed. “I hate yoooouuuuuuuu…”

Yeah, well join the club. Most days I hate me, too.

It was funny how death changed a person, and not just physically. That night, all Latoya’d wanted was to kill, “F-ing white guys on her turf!” Now she wanted to talk. “I’m cold, and I’m lost, and it’s all yourrrrrr faaaaaault. Because of yoooouuuuuuuu, I’m still dead.”

And yet you keep returning.

His mother’s wise and often-spouted words sprang to mind:

If wishes were fishes, we’d have a fish fry.

And if bullshit were biscuits, we’d eat ‘til we die…

Die.

Die.

Died.

Therein lay the problem. While Katelynn and Latoya had both died within days of each other, only this demented spirit—and he used the word kindly—Kept. Freakin’. Returning.

To chat!

“I’ve got news for you,” he muttered out loud, stuck somewhere between REM, nightmare, and the haze of too much alcohol. “Good things don’t happen to gals who kill people for fun. They get life behind bars, or they get dead.” You’d think she’d have figured that out by now.

A new sound interrupted the ghostly rant. Footsteps shifted across the sand beyond his open door, telling on another nightly visitor. Latoya might walk the floors, she might pass through walls and windows, but until tonight, she’d never set foot on his beach. Well, technically Uncle George’s beach.

Leave me alone already.

Another footstep answered him. Another muffled groan. Then a soft murmuring cry of distress. Real distress.

Seth jerked up from his pillow, his heart a pounding jackhammer inside his ribcage, his right arm automatically extended, and the nine-millimeter weapon from his nightstand aimed straight out the open door toward the sound of someone real.

Salt and sea, hibiscus and regret sifted past the billowing sheers, mingling in his head with the smoky, musty smells of that other night. Of other ghosts. Other deaths that never let him forget. Other footsteps. This might be just another part of the dream.

Canting his head, he drew upon his Army training and every bit of his sheer dumb luck to separate reality from nightmare. Long ago, he’d left home and Chicago in his rearview. Kabul was there in the dust, too. So were a handful of dead Taliban terrorists.

He shook it off as the memories of South America, another op gone sideways, returned. That easy mission had left him with more scars. Yet none of the people who’d died on those ops, not even his dearly beloved Katelynn, haunted him as regularly as this one little girl.

“I’m sorry,” he told Latoya what he’d told her many times before, “but if you hadn’t aimed that piece of shit pistol at me, I wouldn’t have defended myself, would I? What’d you expect was going to happen? What’d you think I’d do? That I’d let you kill me, just so you could get more street cred? Hell, you had no business being in that bar. You weren’t old enough. You should’ve stayed home with your mama” —the woman who, even now, regularly threatened to bomb Seth’s family off the face of the Earth, if she ever stopped shooting up— “like a good girl, but no, you had to be bad like your bros. Guess you don’t know they’re all in prison now—where they belong. I’m sorry, but this death, your death, Miss Latoya Franklin, is on you. You drew first. Hell, you fired two shots at me! I defended myself. Get over it and leave me alone.”

If only he could convince himself of that, she might go away.

Another non-Latoya-like moan hit his eardrums, only that one hadn’t come from his not so friendly wraith. Un-huh. Someone made of flesh and bones was on his beach—sobbing.

Out the door Seth went, his weapon lowered, its barrel pointed down, but his senses flared, reaching out into the night for trouble. Could be nothing more than a couple college kids with a case of beer, or a pothead who’d lost his pipe. Could be a sloppy drunk who’d rowed himself in circles until he’d hit shore. The warmth of the Keys attracted plenty of vagrants, beach bums, and folks looking to get lost.

He’d nearly convinced himself that he’d been hearing things, that there was nothing to worry about, when a mournful, “He… he k-k-killed you,” drifted across the beach.

He saw it then, a huddled mass of white beneath the shadowy cypress due east of his uncle’s shack. A kid? A girl? Hard to tell, but those possibilities drew him onward. Children and women had no business being out here alone. Too many bad things happened after midnight on these remote islands.

Lines of foam-peaked breakers crashed to his right. The full moon over his shoulder offered as much shadow as stark light. He approached the person stealthily. Quietly. From behind, just in case there was more than the one kneeling to contend with. It sounded like he, she, or it, was digging, the rasp of metal against sand an oddly comforting sound.

His six senses flared to detect an ambush or trouble, a habit learned the hard way after three deployments and one firefight in Chicago. Just because this was Florida and legally part of the States, didn’t mean it was fraught with peace and goodwill any more than the murder capital of the USA, Chicago, had been. How well Seth knew. Hence the comfort of the Glock in his hand. It saved his life before. It would do so again.

His target, a petite woman now that he could distinguish form from shadow, knelt with her palms in the sand, her head down, and her shoulders heaving. Dressed entirely in white, a thick mop of silvery, shot-cropped hair topped the vision. A collapsible shovel lay at her side. Slowly, she pushed mounds of sand away from her, burying something or, God, not someone.

Not wanting to startle her or add to what already sounded like grief, he stopped short and coughed politely to announce himself.

Her head came up swiftly, and… holy shit. He’d come face to face with Tinkerbell. All this tiny thing needed was a pair of luminous wings and she could pass for Peter Pan’s fairy companion.

Tugging at her short skirt, like it stood a chance of covering her knees, she scrambled to her bare feet. Her gaze fell to his weapon. As if caught and ready to bolt, she raked a hand over her hair.

“What do you want?” she bit out, hostile as hell, her bare feet spread, her weight shifted to run. Or fight. Hell, she looked ready to fly, and in that split second, he wasn’t so sure she couldn’t do just that. Her tiny fists came up as if she stood a chance of besting him in a donnybrook. Not hardly. He had her by a good hundred pounds and he was taller by a foot. At least.

Seth peered closer, not meaning to stare but needing to understand what he was seeing. Were those black streaks on her skirt blood or shadow? Was she bleeding?

Concerned for her safety, he lowered his weapon. “Excuse me, ma’am, but I’m not here to hurt you. Sorry ’bout scaring you, but I heard something, and I reacted. Are you hurt? Do you need help?”

“I had no choice,” she told him, her chin up and her stance radiating defiance. “I had to bring him here. George wouldn’t mind.”

“George?” The lump at her feet wasn’t very big. Couldn’t be an adult, and the notion of her out here all by herself and burying a child, hurt Seth’s tender heart. “Him, who?”

Her index finger stabbed where she’d been kneeling. “Him,” she said, her voice trembling and tight, hoarse with what could only be grief. “He… he killed him.”

Damn. She had buried a baby.