Chapter 12 Pursuit #3
The co-pilot's head snapped sideways and he slumped against the door, the Glock falling from his hand into the footwell. The passenger window spiderwebbed and then shattered, the glass showering inward across the dead man's lap.
One shot. Comms and co-pilot. Both gone.
I processed it in a fraction of a second.
Ghost's marksmanship had jumped past anything I'd seen from him in his short time at the clubhouse.
The angle through a moving vehicle's window, the target selection—the radio first, then the skull, one round doing both.
That wasn't the restless kid from the motor pool. That was something else entirely.
The van swerved. The driver's hands white-knuckled on the wheel, his face a mask of shock, the dead man beside him leaking crimson onto the seat.
The vehicle fishtailed, tires screaming against the asphalt, the rear end swinging wide before the driver corrected and the van stabilized in the center of the lane.
The driver looked left. At me.
The Desert Eagle was already drawn. The muzzle aimed through his window at his head from four feet away, while my left arm kept me balanced on the bike. I made a single gesture with the hand that was pointing the gun at him—pushing downward. Stop.
He looked right. Ghost was there. Glock aimed through the shattered passenger window. The engines of our bikes probably racking the driver's senses further.
He checked the rearview mirror. I looked back. Irish was a cautious distance behind the van now, pistol aimed at the rear tires, the message clear.
He looked ahead. The swerve, the shot, the deceleration—it had all cost him speed. The rest of the convoy was pulling away. The SUV and the lead van were three hundred yards ahead now, approaching the compound gate. Not turning around. Not slowing.
He was flanked, and his convoy was leaving him behind.
The van slowed.
The vehicle rolled to a stop on the shoulder. Engine idling. Dust settling around the wheels in a slow cloud that the wind drifted east toward the compound.
I dismounted the Harley. Left the engine rumbling. Kept the Desert Eagle trained on the driver's window as I approached on foot.
The driver had a pistol now. The muzzle aimed back at me through the glass. His hand was shaking. Mine was steady. The distance between us was six feet, then four, then the length of my arm plus the barrel of the Eagle.
"Rest of the convoy stopped at the compound gate." Ghost's voice from the far side of the van. "Not turning around."
I processed the information without looking away from the driver. The Wolves had abandoned the rear van. Cut their losses. Left their man to whatever was coming.
"They're watching," Ghost continued. "But they're not coming back."
The driver's window rolled down. The pistol came through first, aimed at my chest. Then his face. Young. Sweating. The fear visible in his jaw, in the tightness around his eyes, in the tremor that ran through his forearm and made the pistol barrel trace small circles in the air between us.
"You're surrounded." I kept my voice flat. "Your co-pilot's dead. Your convoy left you. Put the gun down."
"Spur will come back." His voice cracked on the name. "He doesn't leave men behind."
"Look ahead. He already did."
His eyes flicked to the front. The compound gate in the distance. The vehicles had started to disappear through it. His jaw trembled. The pistol barrel traced wider circles.
Behind me—the sound of engines. Tank's SUV pulling up.
Then the second. Doors opening. Boots on pavement.
The driver's eyes tracked past me to the armed men spreading out around the van—Tank with the shotgun, Tyler with the Glock, patched members fanning into a perimeter.
Axel's rifle and Irish's gun aiming at a distance at the driver's head.
The noose was closing.
"It's over," I told him. "Put it down."
"You don't know Spur." The desperate courage of a man with no options trying to convince himself he still had one. "He'll kill every one of you. And for what? Saving these animals? They're not worth—"
Something behind my eyes went quiet.
The noise stopped. The calculations stopped. The rage that had been compressed and directed and waiting found its target, and the target was six feet away calling branded, enslaved, stolen human beings animals, through a car window while their bodies pressed together in the dark behind him.
"The man with the beard and the piercings." My voice came out lower. A sound I heard from the outside, as if someone else were speaking through my throat. "That's Spur?"
"The same one. A much better fucking leader than that that grave—"
The Desert Eagle's unforgiving recoil pushed hard against my arm as I pressed the trigger. The heavy crack of a large-caliber round rolled across the empty Montana grassland and echoed.
The brutal .50 caliber round hit the driver's face at four feet and erased it.
The back of the cab painted red—the seat, the headrest, the rear window, all of it instantaneously coated in a spray that the dawn light caught and held.
The pistol clattered from fingers that no longer had a brain sending them instructions.
I held the Desert Eagle aimed at the space where his head had been. The barrel smoking. The brass casing spinning on the asphalt at my feet, the metallic ring of it the only sound in the sudden quiet.
Animals. He'd called them animals. And the name I'd needed was confirmed. Spur. The man who'd choked Logan. The man I was going to kill next.
Ghost lowered his Glock from the front windshield. His visor was up. His eyes met mine across the cab—through the shattered glass, through the mess of what had been the driver, across the space where two men looked at each other and understood what had just happened without needing to discuss it.
No shock. No judgment. Agreement.
He looked back toward the compound. "Convoy's finished moving through the gate. Not coming back."
I filed it. The Wolves were retreating behind their walls instead of fighting for the rear van. Too small a fraction of the workers they had enslaved to care, maybe? Either way, they were giving us the van and the people inside it, and the decision to retreat instead of engaging nagged me.
Tank and Tyler were already at the rear doors.
Ghost circling from the front. Kai and Rosa out of their SUV, medical bags in hand, Rosa's face set in the controlled urgency of a woman who knew what she was about to find inside.
The rest of our brothers held a loose perimeter, weapons out, eyes on the compound two miles down the road.
Tank grabbed the rear handle. Pulled.
The doors swung open.
The interior was dark. Hot. The smell hit first—sweat, blood, fear, the accumulated stench of more than twenty bodies packed into a metal box with no ventilation and no light.
The bare metal floor gleamed dully where the dawn light reached it.
No seats. No benches. Nothing. Just people.
Crammed together on bare steel, their bodies shaking, their faces turned toward the sudden light with the expression of people who didn't know if the opening doors meant rescue or the next terrible thing.
And in the center, standing—Logan.
Arms spread wide. Positioned between the doors and the workers.
Shielding them with his body. His face was bruised, the skin around his jaw mottled with the purple imprint of fingers.
His throat carried dark marks—the outline of hands still visible in the damaged tissue.
His left shoulder was trembling, soaked through with blood, the fabric of his jacket saturated from the graze that had been bleeding for two hours without pressure or bandage.
His legs were braced apart, his arms stretched to either side, making himself as wide as possible.
A human wall between whatever came through those doors and the twenty people behind him.
Then his eyes found mine.
I watched the tension release. The tension that had been holding his body upright—the weight of a man who'd been bracing for the worst since the doors slammed shut—released.
The arms lowered. His shoulders dropped.
His chest expanded with a breath that shook on the way in—his body catching up to what his eyes were seeing.
He turned to the workers. Fast. His voice came out rough and destroyed but steady enough to carry.
"Está bien. Estamos a salvo. Este es el hombre del que les hablé. Estamos a salvo."
It's okay. We are safe. This is the man I told you about. We are safe.
The workers didn't move. Not yet. But a sound went through them—a collective exhale, the release of twenty-some breaths held too long, the first loosening of bodies that had been clenched in terror since the van doors slammed shut at the ranch.
Logan looked back at me. Blue eyes in a battered face. Blood on his shoulder. Bruises on his throat. Alive.
"Logan, step out of the van." Kai's voice came from behind me, firm, cutting through whatever trance had locked my body in place. "We need to look at those injuries. Now."
His hand landed on the side of my shoulder. Gentle but deliberate—the touch of a medic redirecting a man who was standing where a patient needed to be.
I stepped aside.
Rosa was already at the van's edge, one hand extended toward the dark interior, her voice low and steady in Spanish. Not coaxing. Inviting. The workers watched her hand, wanting to move, not yet trusting the opening.
I let our two medics do what they did best.
Logan was alive. The workers were breathing. Kai and Rosa would handle the wounds.
But it wasn't over. The Iron Wolves compound sat two miles down the road in the flat Montana dawn—low buildings behind a fenced perimeter, the gate closed now.
Spur was behind those walls. The rest of the Wolves with him.
One more fight. One more push. It could all end before the next dawn.
But I looked at the men around me. A small team—the one I'd built for a stealth operation, for gathering evidence, extracting witnesses, and support if needed. Not for storming a fortified compound, protected by the full strength of an MC that enabled corrupted federal agents.