The words and what they signified were so outlandish that at first she couldn’t make sense of them. When the full meaning of what he’d said finally sank in, she was robbed of oxygen. Those scattered thoughts she’d tried to corral moments ago were swept away completely. “You’re lying.”

Slowly he shook his head.

She sucked in a breath. “Josh…”

“Skipped.”

“He left the government’s protection?”

“Sneaked away last Tuesday morning from wherever the feds had him sequestered.”

While she was still trying to assimilate this information, he stood and started walking toward her in a measured tread. “What I think? Panella doesn’t have the thirty million he and your brother stole. Worse for him, he doesn’t know where it’s stashed. Josh does.

“And now nobody, not the feds, nobody is protecting Josh from Billy Panella.” Having reached the hood of the car where she sat, he placed his hands flat on either side of her hips and leaned over her. “Except you.”

Chapter 10

From the moment Josh Bennett determined that his best option was to make a deal with the federal government, he’d begun preparing for the day he would renege on it.

He’d been whisked to the safe house with only the clothes on his back and a small duffel bag containing a few personal items. The bag and its contents had been searched, but not that thoroughly. Special Agent Joe Wiley and company had been concerned about his secreting objects with which he could do himself in. Finding none, his duffel was returned to him with a few trinkets undiscovered.

More important than they, however, was the wealth of information he took with him inside his brain. Little did his jailers—that was not how they were referred to, but that was what they were—realize how many dozens of passwords, account numbers, credit card numbers, and such were committed to the hard drive of his memory.

Over the past six months, he could have outfoxed his guards and fled at any time, but he’d bided his time until a routine had been established, monitoring had loosened up, and the hubbub surrounding his turning FBI informant had died down.

Not that he’d been lax for that half year. He’d used the time to gradually alter his appearance. Pleading dry eye, he’d exchanged his contacts for eyeglasses. Pleading a loss of appetite for food as well as for life in general, he’d dropped the soft twenty pounds that had collected around his middle while he was cooking Panella’s books.

Always before he’d been clean shaven, but he’d let his personal hygiene routine slip and shaved only every few days. His stubble grew in an unexpected ginger color, so even close acquaintances, and they were few in number, would recognize him unshaven and bespeckled.

He’d prepared well, and last Tuesday morning, he’d made good his plan.

He’d removed his ankle monitor, which was supposed to be impossible, but wasn’t. Wearing two day’s growth of reddish whiskers, and taking only a backpack full of things he’d pilfered over time, he’d slipped out of the second-story bedroom window and made it to the nearest highway on foot.

For the most part, the people of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana were friendly sorts. In a time when whack jobs would settle unfounded grudges with a grand-scale slaughter of strangers, Josh had counted on the milk of human kindness to help him escape and evade recapture.

Sure enough, in no time at all, he had hitched a ride with an old-timer in a pickup truck who was taking his pack of hunting dogs home after a month of training in Georgia. Every once in a while the hounds bayed from their kennels in the pickup bed, and Josh learned much more about blueticks than he ever wanted to know.

He and the dog owner parted company in Greenwood, Mississippi, where Josh went into a filling station men’s room and applied a temporary tattoo to his neck. He put on sunglasses and a dirty, worn baseball cap that he’d swiped from a charity box while out shopping one day with his guards. So disguised, he walked to the center of town and joined the barely controlled chaos in a busy, crowded unemployment office.

He spent the remainder of the day filling out endless forms with information he made up as he went along. He was shuffled from one long line to another like dozens of other people being assisted by impatient and uncaring bureaucrats. It was an excellent hiding place.

When the office closed for the day, Josh tossed his stack of forms into the nearest trash can and used another men’s room to wash off the tattoo and shave his whiskers down to a five o’clock shadow. He walked a few blocks to a motel, where he checked in under a false name and using a credit card that he’d successfully smuggled in his duffel when taken from New Orleans.

He’d spent most of Tuesday evening flipping through the channels on the TV. There was no mention of his escape on any of the news sources. He figured the U.S. Marshals Service didn’t want to publicize their screwup. Law enforcement agencies would have been alerted to be on the lookout for him, but he hoped now, more so than ever, that he would blend into the woodwork.

It shouldn’t be that difficult. He never courted attention. Indeed, he’d spent most of his life shunning it, avoiding it at all costs. He was so practiced at making himself invisible, he should easily slip through the cracks of everyday life.

Even so, he decided he’d rather be cautious than caught, so he opted to stay put and spend two more nights in that motel before moving on.

Friday morning, he dressed in his unemployed-burnout getup, but omitted the tattoo and liberally applied grease to his hair, so that what showed under the ball cap looked much darker than it actually was. He hitched a ride with a long-haul trucker who preached to him about the devil’s cunning pitfalls, how to spot them, how to avoid entrapment.

Josh laughed up his sleeve, thinking, If only you knew.

After declining to be baptized but promising to think about it, he’d gotten out at the intersection of two state highways near the Mississippi-Louisiana state line and doubled back on foot to an Army Navy store he had noticed when they passed. He made a purchase, then walked to a nearby motor court and checked in.

It was there that his complacency had shifted to apprehension.

He no longer felt like laughing up his sleeve, and instead had restlessly paced the small room, waiting for something to happen but afraid of what might. He started at every sound. With the approach of every pair of headlights, he held his breath until they passed.

As the night wore on, his paranoia escalated, and he began to fear that he hadn’t been as invisible as he’d thought. Had he outsmarted no one? Were people that he’d encountered along the way remembering him and providing a description to police? Were the authorities even now within closing distance of him?

Awful scenarios of arrest, trial, and imprisonment, all spotlighted in the media, spun round and round in his head. The room began to feel like a jail cell.

Now, in a state of high anxiety, he packed his few belongings and put on the khakis he’d purchased at the Army Navy store. He pulled the cap low over his brow. As he left the motor court, he tried to keep from looking over his shoulder, but the impulse was hard to resist.

It was well before dawn, but truckers were on the highway even at this hour. Only two passed him before one stopped and invited him to hop in. Almost immediately Josh regretted doing so. He wanted only peace and quiet in which to think, but the driver was gregarious and launched into lurid accounts of his wild—and what Josh suspected were fictitious—encounters with countless women.