“Call the elevators back.”
“Tell the Chief of Security to open the north service garage.”
“And tell the federal marshals in the surveillance van across the street…”
I clicked the brass buckle of my leather field boots with a clean, definitive *SNAP*:
“…that the funeral director is about to host his own wake.”
CHAPTER 2: THE CARRIAGE HOUSE AT ELM STREET
At 10:42 AM, the early winter sleet was turning the historic cobblestones of Elm Street in downtown Savannah into a dark, greasy slick.
The **Bromel & Sons Mortuary and Funeral Chapel** occupied three quarters of a city block: four stories of imposing Victorian Gothic brownstone, flanked by massive, century-old weeping willows whose bare branches scratched against the black iron fence like skeleton fingers. To the coastal elite of Georgia, the Bromels were more than undertakers; they were the high priests of generational mourning, the custodians of ancient family vaults, the men who quietly buried the state’s political scandals beneath six feet of Savannah limestone and marble monuments.
