Yesterday’s hurricane, named Jules and a goddamned category five had torn through this part of Georgia, leveling homes, splintering trees and flooding the city. Telephone and electric poles had been uprooted, the power was out for miles and cell phone service patchy at best.

A disaster for most of the citizens of Savannah.

And a blessing for Bronco.

He crested a rise, a natural levee that had kept most of the flood waters surrounding the old home within the river’s banks. From the corner of his eye, he caught a flash. Movement. His heart nearly stopped. But it was just his stupid dog taking off through the tall grass, startling two ducks. Wings flapping noisily, quacking loudly, they took flight.

Shit!

His heart leapt to his throat, but he heard no footsteps, nor shouts, nor sirens, nor baying of hounds.

Good. Just keep moving.

Get in.

Find what you’re looking for.

Get out.

No more than fifteen minutes.

Twenty, tops.

He saw the sagging fence with its rusted No Trespassing sign dangling from the locked gate and vaulted over what was left of the mesh then spied the house, built on a rise, surrounded by live oaks, the once-manicured lawn surrendering to brush. The white-washed siding was now gray and dimpled, paint peeling, roof sagging and completely collapsed around one of four crumbling chimneys.

For half a beat, Bronco stared up at the house, its windows shuttered and boarded over, graffiti scrawled across the buckling sheets of plywood, the wide, wrap-around porch listing on rotted footings.

His grandfather’s voice whispered to him: “Don’t do it, son. Don’t. This–what y’er contemplating– is a mistake, y’hear me? It’ll only bring you trouble, the kind of trouble no man wants.” He set his jaw and ignored the warning. He’d waited long enough. Now, finally the old man was dead. As if Wynn Craven’s had heard his thoughts, his raspy voice came again: “Boy, you listen to me, now.”

Bronco didn’t.

“Y’er gonna get caught,” Wynn Cravens cautioned from beyond the grave. “Sure as shootin’. And then what? Eh? Another five years in prison? Hell, maybe ten! Could be more. Don’t do it, son.”

“Oh, shut up,” Bronco growled under his breath. Something he would have never said to his big, strapping grandfather if the man were still alive. Of course he wasn’t. Wynn Cravens had given up the ghost just two weeks earlier, his big heart stopping while the old guy was splitting wood.

With Wynn’s passing, Bronco’s fortune had changed.

This was his big chance, maybe his last chance and Bronco was going to make the best of it. After all of the bad breaks in his life, finally something good was coming his way. He took the hurricane as an omen. A sign from God Himself.

Right now all of the cops and emergency workers were busy being heroes.