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The other officers look to one another. The lead man is not pleased in the least. “I’m supposed to believe that?”
Grace shakes her brother’s shoulder. “Argie, tell them.”
Grace waits. Argie might have a lot of faults, but he’s pretty good at self-preservation. Like Conner said, “aiding and debating”—or whatever it’s called—is a serious crime. But only if you get caught.
Argent glares at Grace through his blood-clouded eyes. He radiates a sibling hatred that could kill if it were set free. “It’s the truth,” he growls. “Gag photo. For my friends.”
It’s not what the officer wants to hear. The other men chuckle behind his back.
“All right,” he says, trying to seize what’s left of his authority. “Untie him and get him to a hospital—and go through the house anyway. Find the original file. I want that picture analyzed.”
Then they cut Argie’s ropes and haul him out. He doesn’t complain, doesn’t resist, and he doesn’t look at Grace.
After the others leave, one of the local deputies lingers, looking around at the stockpile of food. “He stole all this huh?”
“You still gonna arrest him?”
The deputy actually laughs. “Not today, Gracie.”
Now she recognizes him as a man she went to school with. She recalls he used to tease her, but he seems to have mellowed—or at least redirected his bad into good.
“Thank you, Joey,” she says, remembering his name, or at least hoping she remembered it right.
Grace thinks he’s going to leave, but he takes a second look around at the stockpiles of emergency supplies. “That’s an awful lot of potatoes.”
Gracie hesitates and shrugs. “So? Potatoes is potatoes.”
“Sometimes they are, and sometimes they’re not.” Then he pulls out his pistol, keeping his eyes trained on the large pile of potato sacks. “Out of the way, Gracie.”
8 • Connor
The deputy only suspects Connor’s presence, but doesn’t really believe it. Clearly he doesn’t give Grace credit enough to be harboring a fugitive. He thinks she’s too dim-witted to pull it off. Once he finds Connor, he’s just as likely to shoot him on the spot as not, because killing the Akron AWOL is just as good as capturing him. All Connor has in his favor now is the element of surprise, but that will be gone once he’s discovered—so the instant the deputy begins poking around the potato sacks, Connor makes his move, lunging out of the sack he’s hiding in, grabbing him by the ankles, and pulling his feet out from under him.
The man goes down, shouting in surprise, and his weapon, which he was not holding on to the way a deputy should, flies free. Grace goes for the weapon as the man lands in a stack of water bottles, sending them bouncing and rolling all over the ground.
Connor’s arms are still wrapped around the guy’s ankles, and he finds there’s only one thing he can say under the circumstances.
“Nice socks.”
Grace stands above them, aiming the gun at the deputy’s chest. “Don’t move and don’t call to the others or I swear I’ll shoot.”
“Hold on there, Gracie,” he says, trying to charm himself out this. “You don’t want to do this.”
“You shut up, Joey! I know what I do and don’t want to do, and right now I want to see you in your underwear.”
“What?”
Connor laughs, immediately getting what Grace has in mind. “You heard the lady. Strip down!” Connor wriggles the rest of the way out of the burlap sack and begins stripping down too, exchanging his clothes for the deputy’s. While Connor had thought he’d be in charge of his own escape, he lets Grace take the lead. He’s awed by what she’s managed to accomplish up till now, and as the Admiral once told him, “a true leader never puts his ego ahead of his assets.” And Grace Skinner is an asset of the highest order.
“What’s the game, Grace?” Connor asks, as he puts on the deputy’s pants.
“The kind we win,” she says simply. Then to the deputy, “Go on—the shirt too.”
“Grace . . .”
“No backtalk or I’ll fill ya full a’ lead!”
Connor chuckles at the silver-screen gangland cliché. “Technically bullets aren’t made of lead anymore—and let’s not even mention the ceramic ones they use on clappers.”
