Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Thunder
My hip's already screaming at me by the time we hit the county line, and we've still got the better part of the day's ride to go.
I don't let it show.
That's what I have to do right now—not let the pain show—because the second Blaze or Spur clocks me favoring the bike, this becomes a conversation about whether the Sergeant at Arms ought to be on a run at all, and I'd rather ride all day on a bad hip than sit through that at a table.
So I keep my line, keep my mouth shut, and I let the highway do what highways do, unspool out ahead of us flat and pale under a sky going white with heat.
I ride where I've ridden every mile since I got back on a bike a couple weeks ago.
The back.
I never used to ride in the back.
A Sergeant at Arms rides where he needs to, and where he needs to is usually up front with Phantom or swinging wide to watch a flank, because watching is the job and I’ve always been damn good at it.
Now I ride drag because it's the one spot where nobody's behind me to see how long it takes me to get a boot down at a stop.
And because if my leg quits on me at seventy, I'd rather take myself down than take a brother with me.
Blaze is up front.
He's got the VP flash on his cut and rides like he was poured into the seat, easy and loose, a big blond bastard who's never had a nervous day in his life as far as anybody can tell.
Spur's off his right shoulder.
The three of us, running up to Roan's charter with a saddlebag full of the paperwork two chapters don't trust to a phone, and it's a milk run, is what it is.
Simple.
The sort of thing you send three patched men on so it looks like nothing while it's really something.
Everything's something since the bunkhouse.
That's the part nobody brings up at church anymore, but every man in that clubhouse is carrying it.
We got hit at home.
On our own dirt, with our women and our kids in the house.
A man walked out of the dark and put bullets in Marlena, Banshee, and me, and damn near a kid.
The only reason we're all still breathing is luck, Bex, and a dog that took a round meant for Nash.
You don't come back from a night like that and ride easy.
You ride watching.
Which is how I catch it.
We're maybe forty miles out, a long empty stretch of two-lane with nothing on it but mesquite and heat shimmer, when the truck catches my eye.
Silver, newer, sitting a quarter mile back and holding there.
Not gaining. Not falling off.
Just sitting in that spot a vehicle sits when the man driving it wants to keep eyes on you without walking up your bumper.
I know that spot, I've driven that spot.
I've followed men from that exact distance more times than I could count back when following men was part of what Phantom paid me to do.
It holds through two curves and a straightaway.
Matches us through all three, that same clean quarter mile.
A civilian doesn't do that.
A civilian speeds up, slows down, turns off, gets bored.
A civilian lives his own life at his own pace and never once holds a perfect quarter mile off the back of three bikers for ten miles of empty road.
This truck holds it like it's on a rail.
I key the comm in my helmet.
"Blaze. Spur. Don't look. We've got a tail. Silver three-quarter-ton, quarter mile back, been on us since the Kimble line."
Up front I see Blaze's head not turn, which is exactly right, which is why he's VP.
"How sure?"
"Sure enough that I want a plate before we do anything else."
"Spur," Blaze says.
"Next curve, you're the mirror."
We run it clean.
On the next long left-hander, Spur drifts his line out just enough to bend his mirror back down the road, natural as anything, a man adjusting for a curve, and he holds it a half-second longer than he needs to.
"Partial," Spur says over the comm.
"Can't get it all from here. He's runnin' without a front plate, so I gotta get the back, and he's not gonna let me behind him."
"Then we make him show it," Blaze says.
We work him for six miles.
We have practice doing this. Been plenty of times we had to do it in the past.
But you can only do it with men who've run together countless times. It’s seamless.
No more talk than a word here and there over the comm, and even shot to hell and riding drag, I can still do this part.
This part lives in the body under the pain where the Firm can't reach and the hip can't take it.
We slow.
He slows.
We push it up to eighty and he lets the gap grow and then reels it back, careful, disciplined, and that discipline tells me more than a plate would—that's not a jealous husband or a bored kid.
That's a professional.
That hits me in my gut like a swallowed stone.
Because there's only one kind of professional who'd be sitting a quarter mile off the Shotgun Saints right now, and he wears no patch.
The last one of him walked into our bunkhouse and I've still got a piece of his work lodged against my hip bone.
Finally, coming into a wide spot where the two-lane opens to pass, Blaze makes his move.
He signals Spur up and the two of them slow hard and swing wide like they're turning into a gas station, and the silver truck has a choice—brake behind them and sit there naked, or commit and roll on past.
He rolls on past.
He has to.
And for the two seconds it takes him to clear us, Spur's got his eyes on the back plate and his lips moving, and I've got mine on the cab.
Ball cap.
Sunglasses.
Beard, maybe fake, maybe not.
Eyes front, never once turned our way, which is the tell—a curious man looks, a hunting man keeps his face forward and lets you look at nothing.
He rolls on down the road at a lawful five over and doesn't speed up and doesn't slow down and is gone over the next rise like he was never there.
"Got it," Spur says.
"Whole plate. Memorized it. Not writin' it down till we're stopped."
"Good man." Blaze's voice is flat and hard now, the easy gone out of it. "Thunder. That what I think it is?"
"I don't know what it is," I say, which is true.
"But I know what it moves like. And it moves like the last one."
Nobody says anything for a mile.
Then Blaze speaks up, "We finish the run. We hand off the paper, we act like nothing, and we bring that plate home to Phantom and Rogue tonight. Rogue'll know how to run it down."
"Rogue'll know," I agree.
Because Rogue's the one who brought this down on us.
Not on purpose.
No man chooses to have his old life come collect, but the Firm is Rogue's ghost, and Rogue's the only one of us who's ever sat on the inside of what's hunting us now.
If a silver truck is running our charter without a front plate, then the second man from the bunkhouse didn't crawl off and die somewhere.
He went home.
And he reported in.
* * *
Roan's clubhouse sits on the flat outside Lubbock, and we roll in tight and careful, three men who just got tailed forty miles and aren't in the mood to be surprised.
Roan meets us in the lot himself.
He's got Phantom's height and Phantom's way of reading a man's face before the man's said a word, and he takes one look at the three of us and says, "Who died?"
"Nobody yet," Blaze says.
"We picked up a tail comin' down. Lost him at the pass-through, but he was on us from Kimble."
Roan's jaw sets.
He was at the bunkhouse cleanup, same as the rest of us, close enough to this to know exactly what a professional tail means, and a charter president reads that in about a second and a half and likes the answer no better than we do.
"The Firm," he says.
Not a question.
"Maybe," Blaze says.
"Spur's got a plate. Rogue's runnin' it tonight."
"You'll call me the minute you know."
Roan takes the paperwork off Spur and doesn't so much as glance at it, because the paper was never really the point of this run, and everybody standing here knows it.
"And you'll tell my brother I said this doesn't get handled quietly. Last time we tried quiet, Marlena caught a bullet, and you caught two." His eyes flick to my leg, to the way I'm standing. "How's the hip?"
"Fine."
"Liar." But he says it gently, the way family says it. "Sit down before you fall down, Thunder. I'll get you boys fed for the road."
I don't sit down.
I don't sit down because if I lower myself into one of Roan's low clubhouse chairs, I'm not getting back up without a show of it, and I've taken all the looking-at-my-leg I can stand for one day.
I lean on a pool table instead like it's a choice, and I let the brothers eat.
My eyes stay on the door the whole time, because somebody on this run has to, and my body can still do that part sitting still.
Watching the door's about all I'm good for anymore.
I try not to let that thought get comfortable.
* * *
By the time we turn back toward home my hip is screaming with agony, and the ride home is a long negotiation between me and my own body about how much further it's willing to carry me before it makes a scene.
I win, but barely.
I always win, but it costs more every time, and there's a cold little voice in me now that's started asking how many wins I've got left before the leg stops taking the bribe.
I don't listen to that voice.
I get home a little before dark, ease the bike into the shed, and stand there a second with both hands on the seat, letting the leg get its story straight before I ask it to walk me to the porch.
Mama Lou's car is in the drive.
The kitchen window's gold and there's smoke off the grill out back, which means she's not only dropping off Raine, she's fed her and she's fed me too.
Something in my chest that's been clenched since the Kimble line lets go all at once at the sight of it.
Whatever's out there on the road tonight, it's out there.
In here it's my mother, my kid, and a supper I didn't have to cook.
"Daddy!"
Raine hits the screen door at a run and I get my feet set so she can slam into me without putting me on the ground.
I catch her up and swing her once even though my hip screams bloody murder about it, because you swing your kid, that's the deal.
I don’t care how much pain I’m in, I’m still her father.
"How was Grandma's?"