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EXCERPT FROM BONNIE AND CLYDE: DAM NATION

By Clark Hayes and Kathleen McFall

This excerpt is from very early Dam Nation, book two in the series. Royce (the reporter investigating the story that Bonnie and Clyde never died) has just realized he is being tailed by shady characters. He loses them in a car chase, and arrives at the house of Bonnie Parker — who is now almost 80 years old — and they talk about the status of his investigation.

He watched as Bonnie, a tiny woman pushing eighty with the posture and grace of someone half her age, carried out a cut-glass decanter and poured Royce a glass of whiskey over three ice cubes, then poured one for herself. “This’ll steady your nerves. Now tell me what happened.”

Royce took a good long drink. “I saw the same black car three times, and the drivers were suspicious looking, in dark suits. Nobody in Texas wears suits. And then they followed me on the way out here.”

Bonnie got up to peek out through the blinds. “No sign of them of them now.”

“I gave them the slip.”

“Well, good for you,” she said. “That kind of driving reminds me a little of Clyde.”

“It was because of you that I outdrove them. You warned me this could get dangerous.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt about the danger,” she said.

She topped off his glass. He rubbed his tired eyes. All of his vacation time, and then some, was gone along with far too many late nights spent checking out this old woman’s wild story that she was the real Bonnie Parker, that Bonnie and Clyde didn’t die in the 1934 ambush in Sailes, Louisiana—that it wasn’t them in the car.

After weeks of investigating and interviewing, traveling to California, all on his own dime, he finally got the break he needed. Although, the ramblings of an ancient and probably demented Hollywood special effects man weren’t necessarily evidence that would stand up in court, it was certainly enough to go public and exhume the bodies and get proof, one way or the other.

“You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?” Bonnie asked.

“I’m sitting on a career-making story and you won’t let me publish it.”

He had come so tantalizingly close to, well, he could only imagine the many wonderful things that would happen once he, Royce Jenkins, small town newspaper reporter, became known worldwide as the investigative journalist who broke the story of the century. Bonnie and Clyde never died.

A Pulitzer. Book deal. Better parties.

Hell, any parties at all.

He sighed. Stupid integrity. She backed him into a corner, and why would he expect anything less from this fierce little woman, this survivor from some of the darkest days in modern America?

“Fine. I’ve found out how they faked your deaths. Now we will figure out who died in your place and who you were working for,” he said.

“Then we publish,” she said.

He pulled out his narrow spiral-bound notebook and put the micro-cassette recorder on the table between them. “Let’s get to work before the black sedan shows up again.”

She laughed. “I am sympathetic to your skittishness. I know how scary it is to feel like you’re being followed,” Bonnie said. “Like an animal being hunted down.”

“Yeah?” Royce said, clicking on the recorder. “Guess that was your life when you were on the road.”

“We always knew we were being followed when we were living as Bonnie and Clyde,” she said. “But later, when we became Brenda and Clarence Prentiss, it was different. I felt like a cornered fox with that Texas Ranger tracking us during our second assignment.”

“What was your second assignment?”

“We were trying to stop someone from blowing up Hoover Dam before they finished building it.”