There were two new sets of tire prints on the road, overlapping the marks we’d made leaving the range earlier.
I recognized one set of tracks. The vehicle was rear-wheel drive and had made frequent trips onto and off the property. They had to have been left by Winters’s Mustang.
The muscle car had driven down this road recently. But it hadn’t yet returned.
It was the other set of tracks that worried me.
They had been made by a larger, heavier vehicle: a half-ton pickup or SUV built on a truck platform. These prints clearly showed that someone had entered the club and then exited. My working theory was that it was the driver of this unknown vehicle who had carelessly locked the gate after he’d left.
Adrenaline made the blood tingle in my arteries. I pumped a shell filled with buckshot into the action of my shotgun.
Winters’s Mustang was parked oddly. It was neither in a designated spot nor parallel to the front of the building. The haphazard position of the car suggested the range master had been in a rush.
I approached the screen door and saw that the heavier door behind it was standing open.
“Mr. Winters?” I called.
There was no answer.
I stepped into the darkened interior. “Tim?”
I padded softly into the big room with the humming soft drink cooler and the list of guns for rent and the framed targets. The clock ticked off the seconds.
A soft breeze sighed through the screen door that led to the shooting range. The air smelled of sunburned grass and resinous pine cones.
I stepped outside and came to a halt at the first stall. I stared over the shooting bench before me, past the first set of bull’s-eyes, to the distant rifle targets. There, bent over the wooden rack used to secure the paper targets, lay the bloody body of Tim Winters.
Someone had used him for shooting practice.
Winters had been duct-taped to the wooden trestle, facing the club building so he could see the man or men aiming at him. There were nonfatal gunshot wounds to his arms and shoulders. And one to the pelvis he had shattered at the paper mill.
The fatal shot was a red hole the size of a dime in the center of his forehead.
I backed away from the dead man, called the dispatcher on my cell, and told him what I had found.
Afterward, I made a circle around the outside of the clubhouse. From this angle, I realized why Winters had parked his Mustang where he had. He’d hoped to keep the locked bin of gun cartridges from being noticed by whomever had forced him to drive here: presumably Dylan LeBlanc and his cronies, searching for the missing narcotics.
But Winters’s willpower had given out under the pain of being shot and shot again.
The doors of the bin stood open. Thousands of brass cartridges had spilled onto the dirt. It was here he must have hidden the drugs Tommy Winters had stolen for the man he’d called his father.
Read on for a sneak peak of
One Last Lie
Coming in June 2020
1
Before I left for Florida, my old friend and mentor Charley Stevens gave me a puzzling piece of advice. “Never trust a man without secrets.”
I thought he’d misspoken. “Don’t you mean a man with secrets?”
But the retired game warden only winked as if to suggest he’d said exactly what he’d meant to say. It would be up to me to figure out the meaning of his cryptic remark.
I went to Miami to do a background check on an air force vet who had applied for a job with the Maine Warden Service and about whose character I had vague yet creeping doubts. On paper and in a series of face-to-face interviews, Tom Wheelwright had appeared to be the ideal candidate to become our next chief pilot. A Maine native currently residing in Key Biscayne, he was a decorated combat veteran with more than enough air hours to qualify him for the position. He was quick on his toes, clear-eyed, and a family man with a presentable wife and three presentable children. When I’d asked him why he wanted to trade the salary of a Learjet pilot for that of a Maine State employee, he said he hoped to raise his kids somewhere that “still felt like a real place.”
It was a good answer.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Wheelwright was not the paragon everyone swore he was.
For the past week, I had been interrogating every aspect of the man’s life. I had started with the list of references he had provided. I spoke with his wife and parents, his brothers and sisters, his commanding officers in the air force, the management of the charter airline that employed him, former coworkers, neighbors, friends. I had reviewed multiple credit reports, paused over a criminal history that consisted of nothing but (frequent) speeding tickets, and found no red flags.
Everything checked out except for the familiar voice inside my head.
Never trust a man without secrets.
It was Charley’s dictum that had prompted me to keep digging until I unearthed a name conspicuous by its absence from any of the files I’d been given. Captain Joe Fixico now worked part-time running airboat tours out of Shark Valley in the Everglades, but during the first Gulf War, he had flown multiple sorties over Iraq as Wheelwright’s electronic warfare officer.
Captain Fixico had, coincidentally, also retired from the air force to South Florida. The two flyboys lived less than thirty miles from each other. And yet Wheelwright hadn’t included on his disclosure list the one man who could best speak to his coolness at the stick and his courage under fire.
Fixico himself seemed surprised when I finally reached him by phone. “Tommy listed me as a reference?”
“As a matter of fact, he didn’t.”
“Well,
