Chapter One

Joe-Joe came running out of the woods like his pants were on fire.

“The law’s in,” he cried and the four people working in the marijuana field froze in place.

No longer the twelve-year-old who’d sat on the bank of Possum Creek fishing as the lookout for Nate Hannacker’s still, the gangly, six-foot-one-inch teenager had been parked in his old pickup truck, hidden from the road by a thicket of elderberry bushes, “gettin’ paid to do nuthin’” as he put it, spent his time strumming on his guitar and writing country western songs while he examined every vehicle that came down Turtle Run Lane.

Riley Hannacker went from disbelief to action between one heartbeat and the next. They had talked about it, of course, knew it was bound to happen sooner rather than later, had an exit plan firmly in place — but the reality of a police raid still yanked his gut into a knot so tight it was hard to get a breath.

“Where?” Nate yelled. He was on the side of the field nearest the stretch of woods that separated the field from where the dirt track over the knob ended, the clearing where Papa’d parked his truck. The dirt track led off into the trees, up and over the knob and down to the remains of an old logging road off Turtle Run Lane.

“Three cars turned off the road. That’s all I seen before I boogied. I come straight up the creek bed and they’re on the road, so you maybe got two, three minutes.”

Riley, his grandfather Nate, and fellow growers Willie Ray Taggart and Jessica Monaghan had topped the marijuana in this field for the third and final time three weeks ago and they were here today doing delicate pruning, removing small or dying branches or leaves — snipping a little here and a little there, enhancing the plants’ final growth spurt before harvest in September.

Left to grow wild, a cannabis plant would grow up, focusing its energy on a single main stalk seven or eight feet tall and would produce one large cola — the flower where the bud develops — at the top. The other colas, growing vertically on the limbs below, would be small and leathery, shaded from the sunlight by the leaves above. Cutting off the tops of the plants forced them to bush out instead of up, granting sunlight to the lower branches, creating more, bigger and better colas.

This field was set to produce a bumper crop … except not.

Now, the plants would be plowed under by the law.

This was the same isolated field where they’d planted that first crop in the spring of 1970, the disaster crop that’d grown like weeds because that’s really all the plants had been. But they’d learned from their mistakes and the pot in this field last year had changed their lives, turned everything around. If it hadn’t been for the money they’d made off last year’s crop, none of the four of them would be living such prosperous lives, so suddenly affluent, in fact, that they’d attracted attention. Friends, neighbors … and finally the law.

“Go!” Papa cried. Jessie and Willie Ray Taggart hadn’t moved. “Hit the woods. I got this.”

Joe-Joe didn’t have to be told to run. He’d delivered his warning almost without breaking stride and was already vanishing into the woods on the opposite side of the field from the trees he had come running out of. He would make his way back to his truck by a circuitous route. Knowing Joe-Joe, he’d give a big smile and wave to the police cruisers if he passed them on their way back to town, proud that the first alarm he’d ever sounded was why the backseats of those cars were empty.

He didn’t know there’d be somebody in the backseat of one of them. That was part of an escape plan that was bare-bones simple — run! Scatter into the woods and put as much distance as you can between yourself and the field of weed.

Papa had picked them all up in the early afternoon, driving the pickup truck that was now sitting in a small clearing about a quarter of a mile away at the end of the road leading to the field. They’d made no attempt to conceal it. Papa had it all figured out. But right now, Papa’s plan didn’t seem clever. It seemed dangerous. When it came right down to it, Riley wasn’t emotionally prepared to run off into the woods and leave his grandfather here alone to face the music.

“Papa, are you sure—?”

“Get out of here, now!” Papa called out. The others were too staggered by the warning to respond. “I can handle this!”

Still, they stood frozen.

“Trust me! Go!”

That broke the spell. Jessie was on the far side of the field. Riley saw her shove her pruning shears into her overalls pocket, bulldoze her way through the bushy marijuana plants and take out running for the nearby woods.

Willie Ray and Riley had been working the center of the field with Papa on the near side. Willie Ray looked a question at Riley and Riley waved him on. He turned and muscled his way down the row between the plants and raced away from the field into the trees.

His grandfather’s voice carried across the field over the sound of approaching vehicles.

“I got this!”

Riley knew he’d screw up everything if he didn’t leave right now. As he ran across the edge of the field toward the trees, he was tempted to stop, look back, to—

To what?

He couldn’t do anything now to help his grandfather. All he could do by hanging around was get caught himself, and the domestic uproar Riley’s arrest would cause would be cataclysmic. Looking resolutely forward, he ran into the edge of the woods as fast as he could and disappeared in the trees.


NATE RAN full-out toward the sounds of approaching engines, not away from them, watching Riley vanish into the trees on the other side of the field. Nate had to get to his old pickup truck before the law enforcement vehicles got to the clearing where he’d parked it.

His mind flashed back unbidden to the time he had gone running out the bay doors of a not-tobacco barn and dived into a red Corvette Sting Ray only seconds before bullets started flying. He’d had to make it to that car or get shot — and the extra rush of danger had put a spring in his step. He had to make it to his truck, now — but if he’d been granted an extra burst of energy, he wasn’t aware of it. Gasping for breath, Nate bounced off the smooth trunk of a sycamore tree into the clearing, could hear cars barreling up the road, seconds away.

Flinging open the truck door, he snatched his .22 long rifle off the rack in front of the back window. There was a box of shells in the glove box, but getting them out would cost him seconds he didn’t have. He’d just have to make do with the ten rounds in the magazine. Slamming the door behind him, he made a dash for the trees.

If they saw him, even caught a glimpse of him, he was toast.

He wasn’t ten yards past the tree line when the first car roared up the end of the dirt road and skidded to a stop beside his pickup truck. The first vehicle was a Callison County Sheriff’s Department cruiser, but hot on its tail was a Kentucky State Police car. It probably was a trooper who’d been pressed into service to help with the raid. But it might just be Nate’s old friend, Detective Booth Graham. Given Nate’s plan, that would be a stroke of exceedingly good fortune.

Nate didn’t look over his shoulder again to see who was getting out of the cars, though, just ran through the trees, dodging branches intent on blinding him, sliding in slick pine needles and fallen leaves, feeling the pain in his gimp leg ramp up to something approaching unbearable — and beyond. But he kept running.

He had to get completely out of sight before he started shooting. And he only had a few rounds of ammunition. He would have to make every shot count.