Prologue

As he fumbled in his pocket for the keys to lock the office door, Jim Bingham sensed rather than heard someone step out of the shadows behind him. When he turned and saw the man’s face, the sixty-nine-year-old career journalist’s heart began to bang away in his skinny chest like a cook whapping a metal spoon inside a pot to call the hands to supper.

Jim recognized the sudden copper taste of terror in his mouth. The Callison County Tribune editor had felt that airless, hole-in-the-belly sensation before, too—the day he took pictures of the writhing black twister as it roared up Chicken Run Hollow, and all those dark nights with bombs exploding around him in London.

A wet-behind-the-ears war correspondent, Jim had covered the Battle of Britain, watched tracers light up the sky from the window of a closet-sized office in a building across from Westminster Abbey. The considerably-larger office he now occupied was in a building across from the Hair Affair Beauty Parlor and next door to the State Farm Insurance Agency. And the story he’d just hammered out, hunkered over his worn-out Royal Electric typewriter, was about the winner of the Brewster Elementary School spelling bee.

But the contrast was what made the big story he was working on so delicious! The irony was half the fun—a shot at a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism as an old man. Not some young buck, but a senior citizen at the tail-end of his career. And here! While he was running a weekly newspaper in a little five-traffic-light Kentucky town that didn’t have a McDonalds, a Wal-Mart, a movie theater or an open-24-hours anything. In Brewster, a community where everybody waved, whether they knew you or not, where you could pass along the juiciest tidbit of gossip with a clear conscience as long as you called it a prayer request, where you shoveled your neighbor’s sidewalk along with your own and he spanked your kids for you if they needed a backside-tanning and you weren’t around to do it yourself.

Who’d ever have guessed he’d unearth a national story this big right here in Callison County?

When he picked up his hat and stepped out into the muggy darkness, he’d been thinking about his daughter. He’d tried to call her, wanted to talk to her about the big story, but she wasn’t home so he’d left her a message.

It was probably best he didn’t talk to her, though. She’d have been worried about him, scared for him, the way he was now—so scared it tasted like his whole mouth was full of pennies.

Jim never saw the gun in the man’s hand, just the smile on his face, a cold smile that never reached his dead, shark eyes. He heard the thundering bang, though, and felt the .45 caliber slug tear into his chest and rip open his heart. Felt it for one agonizing moment before everything began to fade. Then his world dimmed, grayed out and went black.