LITMIR.BIZ

      Thank you, Allison Lyons and Nalini Akolekar.

       Thank you to my mom, Letha McAlister, who got such a kick out of this story. This book is dedicated to my friend and fellow suspense author Sarah Andre.

       Thank you for self lessly giving me your time, ideas and encouragement. This book would not have been written without you.

      Contents

       Cover

       Introduction

       Title Page

       About the Author

       Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Chapter Eleven

       Chapter Twelve

       Chapter Thirteen

       Chapter Fourteen

       Chapter Fifteen

       Chapter Sixteen

       Chapter Seventeen

       Chapter Eighteen

       Chapter Nineteen

       Extract

       Copyright

Chapter One

      Jake aimed his pistol and flashlight through the chain-link wildlife fencing that marked where civilization ended and the Florida Everglades began. Behind him, his black Dodge Charger sat on the shoulder of a remote section of Interstate 75 that Floridians affectionately called Alligator Alley. With good reason. Alligators infested the swampy areas along this east-west corridor connecting Naples to Hialeah.

      He swept his flashlight up and down the ditch behind him. Did alligator eyes reflect in the light? He sure hoped so. That might be the only way he’d see the hungry reptiles creeping up on him, looking for a late-night Jake-snack.

      Not for the first time, he questioned his sanity in searching this dangerous area at night. But when a rare black panther had darted across the road in front of him and he’d skidded sideways to avoid it, he’d noticed a reflection in the beam of his headlights through the wildlife fence—a reflection that just might be the car Calvin Gillette was driving when he went missing three days ago.

      In theory, if Gillette had crashed, the cable barrier system should have kept his car from sliding under the fence into the woods. And hitting one of the cables would have triggered strobe lights and an automatic notification to the Department of Transportation. But the system wasn’t foolproof. A few months earlier a minivan hit a pole and went airborne, flipping over the cable without touching it and sliding under the fence into a canal. Jake figured if it happened once, it could happen again. And the few clues he had about Gillette’s disappearance all led him to this same area.

      A few minutes later, his search paid off. He found deep tire tracks in the wet grass. He hopped the ditch and pressed against the chain links—loose and floppy as they’d be if a car had hit the fence. Excitement sizzled through him. He stepped over the cable and slid through to the other side.

      Grateful he’d worn boots for this search, he trudged across the damp ground to a thick stand of pine trees and palmetto bushes. Not anxious to go much farther in the dark, he braced his shoulder on one of the trees and used his flashlight to search for that elusive reflection of metal he thought he’d seen from the road. And suddenly, there it was, behind some bushes, too big and shiny to not be man-made. But without knowing for sure that it was a car, he didn’t want to raise an alarm. Which meant he would have to go into the swamp.

      It was times like this when he seriously wondered if he should move forward with his planned

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