The Eleventh Victim by Nancy Grace

Author:Nancy Grace
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2009-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

37

St. Simons Island, Georgia

IT WAS NEARLY 3 A.M., AND THE GUERRILLAS WERE ASSEMBLED IN THE stealthiest and most mysterious black outfits they could muster, hoping to blend into the night like the cat burglars they’d seen on TV. Clustered amid the pines outside Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living, they were locked and loaded, primed and ready for the moment they’d waited for their whole lives.

There would be plenty of time ahead to plan an overall strategy for a meaningful deterrent strike at the mastermind of Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living. But for now, for tonight, the guerrillas were taking a notorious page from the Vietcong’s book.

A sniper attack was the only obvious choice for a successful strike against a power much greater than the guerrillas: a construction company out of Atlanta with big money backing.

From behind the cover of dense pine saplings, twelve pairs of eyes were trained on the solitary guard inside his shack. Biding their time, they waited, poised, for just the right moment to attack.

“Anybody seen him before?” Virginia asked in a whisper.

None of the twelve were sure who he was, although they speculated in minced whispers, until it dawned on Renee.

“I know who he is! He’s the guy that works security for the Brunswick Wal-Mart.”

“He must’ve gotten a serious pay increase,” Ken chimed in. Ken was an authority on many, many subjects, and apparently the compensation at Wal-Mart was one of them. “I happen to know for a fact the security guards at Wal-Mart eat free at the Wal-Mart grill.”

Free lunch or no free lunch, in exchange for the speculated pay raise, he was now sitting alone in a glorified outhouse at three in the morning, watching TBS.

But there he sat, apparently mesmerized by a late-, late-, late-night TBS showing of Conan the Barbarian.

After fifteen minutes or so of keen surveillance, Virginia was convinced the guard was actually going to watch Conan the Barbarian in its entirety, so there was no use waiting for him to fall asleep. The good news was he was so engrossed in the movie he wouldn’t possibly notice any movement outside.

Virginia gave the command.

The guerrillas obediently slipped through the pines.

Without speaking, they moved on, past the guardhouse—then stopped short, all of them, all at once.

There it loomed, about twenty yards ahead: a horrible, manmade clearing where once there had been a series of graceful, sweeping dunes.

They simply stood, gazing at the scarred landscape.

Then Virginia gave a firm nod.

They stepped out of the pines to begin the endless task of dragging Palmetto Dunes Luxury Living—the whole kit and caboodle, load by load—to the water’s edge

Thin pine slats lay precisely over the ground to mark the outlines where cement would be poured. Now they were yanked away and placed on bedsheets they’d brought from home. Along with the slats went the strings that had been measured, cut, and staked with an engineer’s unquestioned accuracy. Every vestige of orange marker was untied from surrounding trees. Bag upon heavy bag of dry concrete mixture was lugged across the sand.

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