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

       Extract

       Copyright

       Chapter One

      Colton shook his head in disgust and thumped the nav screen on his Mustang’s dashboard. It had to be broken. Either that or the GPS tracker he’d tucked under Eddie Rafferty’s bumper in Naples was on the fritz. Because if the screen was to be believed, the budding young criminal had driven his car off the highway and directly into south Florida’s million-and-a-half-acre swamp known as the Everglades.

      Driving a car into the saw grass marsh and twisted islands of mangrove and cypress trees was impossible unless the car was sitting on pontoons. And Eddie’s rusted-out vintage Cadillac boasted bald tires just aching for a blowout. Not a pontoon in sight.

      Colton pulled to the shoulder of I-75 near mile marker eighty-four, just past a low bridge over a culvert. This was the last location where the navigation unit showed Eddie’s car before it had taken the turn toward the swamp. So much for using technology to follow the suspect. He should have stayed closer, keeping Eddie in sight instead of relying on the GPS tracker. But when the kid had taken the ramp onto the interstate, Colton had worried that Eddie might get spooked seeing the same black Mustang in his rearview mirror the whole time he was on the highway. So Colton had dropped back a few miles.

      Where was the juvenile delinquent now? Certainly not on the highway, and not on the shoulder. Heck, even if the GPS was right and he had pulled off the road here, there was nowhere else to go. Eight-foot-high chain-link fencing bordered this east-west section of I-75 known as Alligator Alley. The fence kept the wildlife from running out onto the road and causing accidents. And yet the dot on the dashboard screen still showed Colton’s prey continuing south, past the fence.

      He eyed the tight, solid-looking chain-link mesh twenty feet away. No holes, no skid marks on the asphalt to indicate that a vehicle had lost control. The safety cable along the bottom was intact. But he supposed that could be misleading.

      Twice now, that he knew of, vehicles had managed to go airborne after clipping a guardrail and had sailed over the cables and slid under the chain links—without triggering the cable alarms that would automatically notify the police and the department of transportation to send help. Had the same thing happened to his burglary suspect? If it had, the GPS would show him as stationary. And yet that dot just kept moving. Had a gator swallowed the tracker on Eddie’s bumper and was swimming down one of the canals?

      Determined to figure out exactly what was going on, Colton got out of the car and stepped to the edge of the road. And that was when he saw it. Another road. Single lane and parallel to the highway, it was set at a slightly lower elevation than I-75, making it nearly impossible to see when driving past unless someone was specifically looking for it. The road turned a sharp right before the fence, heading back in the direction that Colton had just come from. It went down an incline, toward the culvert beneath the bridge where wildlife could cross to the other side of the highway without interfering with traffic.

      The culvert, of course.

      That must be where Eddie had gone. Maybe Colton hadn’t been as subtle as he thought he’d been when following the kid back in town and Eddie realized he