Chapter 4
Sam had rearranged the lot.
Blizzard stood at the office window with a cup of her brutal coffee and studied what she'd done, and the more he looked the more the grin pulled at the corner of his mouth.
She'd moved six long-haul rigs during the afternoon while their drivers slept, angling them nose-to-tail across the lot until the only way in or out was a single lane between the office building and the last rig's trailer wall.
Anyone who rolled onto the Basin Star tonight was coming through that lane or not coming at all.
"You funneled the whole lot," he said.
She was behind the counter going through the ledger, her dark hair wild at the edges and her sleeves pushed up past the tattoo on her forearm. She didn't look up. "I angled some trucks."
"You built a chokepoint out of Peterbilts."
"I parked some trucks in a different order."
He turned from the window and looked at her—really looked, the way he kept doing and couldn't stop—and felt that pull in his chest tighten another notch.
She'd spent the day turning a motel parking lot into a kill zone and she was talking about it like rearranging furniture.
No drama, no swagger. Just the quiet certainty of a woman who understood how ground got taken and had decided hers wasn't.
"You're something else, you know that?"
She did look up then. Held his eyes for a beat that went two seconds longer than it needed to. "You keep saying things like that."
"Plan to keep saying them."
"You plan to talk all night, or are you going to help me move the fire extinguishers?"
He laughed. He couldn't help it. She turned back to the ledger with that almost-smile at the corner of her mouth and he set his coffee down and went to help her move the fire extinguishers, and the whole time he was carrying red steel cylinders across the lot in the last of the daylight he was thinking about the way her mouth moved when she was trying not to laugh and how that small motion was already becoming the thing he thought about when he wasn't thinking about anything else.
They were ready by full dark. Sam at the desk with the Winchester under the counter.
Blizzard outside in the shadow of the office overhang with a clear line on the funnel she'd built.
The regulars had been warned—stay in your cabs, keep the curtains shut, don't come out until someone knocks and says your name.
Carl was in the back apartment with the door locked and the phone in his hand and instructions to call the compound if he heard anything louder than the ice machine.
The 395 was empty. The desert cold came down hard after sundown, the mineral chill of high-altitude air that sank into leather and stayed there. The neon sign buzzed and strobed, throwing pink light across the gravel in the rhythm Blizzard had already memorized without meaning to.
He waited. The wired energy in his bones had gone quiet and focused, the way it went when the mountain dropped out from under his skis and there was nothing left except the fall and what he did with it.
They came at eleven.
Three headlights on the 395, running close and fast from the north.
They swung off the highway without slowing and hit the lot at speed, gravel spraying, engines snarling.
The lead bike was already into the funnel before the rider saw what Sam had done—the wall of truck trailers closing on both sides, the lane narrowing, the office dead ahead with its light burning like bait in a trap.
The lead rider was Dutch. Blizzard recognized the shaved head and the working jaw even at speed. The other two were younger, harder, prospects or hangers-on riding hot behind their scout with the look of men who'd been told this was an easy take—one woman, one desk, rooms for the claiming.
Dutch saw Blizzard step out of the shadow and hit his brakes.
The bike slewed sideways on the gravel, the back tire breaking loose, and the two behind him nearly stacked into his rear wheel.
For one frozen second all three of them were jammed in the funnel with trucks on both sides and nowhere to go, and Dutch's face went from surprise to fury in the time it took Blizzard to close the distance.
"Wrong lot," Blizzard said.
Dutch came off the bike swinging.
He was fast for a big man—a looping right hand that Blizzard ducked under, feeling the knuckles graze his hair, and then a boot aimed at his knee that he sidestepped by an inch.
The gravel was loose and bad for footing and the neon turned everything pink and jumping.
Blizzard took a left hook on his shoulder that spun him a quarter turn and came back with an elbow that caught Dutch across the bridge of his nose and sprayed blood down the front of his cut.
The two hangers-on abandoned their bikes and rushed the office.
Sam was waiting.
The first one hit the door at a run and she met him with the butt of the Winchester across his face, a short savage stroke that dropped him sideways off the concrete steps.
The second came through behind him reaching for something at his belt and Sam stepped into him, drove the rifle stock into his gut, and when he doubled over she cracked the butt down between his shoulder blades and put him on the floor.
Blizzard heard the impacts—the solid crack of walnut on bone—and something roared through him that was hot and possessive and absolutely not about the fight. That's my woman. The thought came without permission, savage and certain, and he didn't push it away.
Dutch hit him again. A straight right to the ribs that drove the air out and folded him sideways, and Dutch was on him, grabbing his cut with both hands and driving him back toward the trailer wall.
Blizzard's back hit steel and Dutch pinned him there, one forearm across his throat, the wintergreen-and-sweat stink of him filling the world.
"Should've stayed out of it," Dutch snarled. Tobacco spit hit Blizzard's cheek. "This ain't your ground."
Blizzard got his hands inside Dutch's elbows and broke the pin. "It is now."
He drove his forehead into Dutch's face.
The headbutt landed flush on the bridge of the already-broken nose and Dutch staggered back with a sound like a stepped-on dog.
Blizzard followed him, fists working—a right to the body, a left hook to the jaw, another right that caught Dutch on the temple and turned his legs to water.
Dutch went down to one knee in the gravel with blood sheeting from his nose and his eyes going glassy.
He reached for his belt. Something metal caught the neon light.
Blizzard didn't think. He kicked the hand and heard something snap, and the knife skittered across the gravel and disappeared under a truck tire.
He grabbed Dutch by the front of his cut, hauled him up, and hit him one more time—a right hand with everything behind it that landed on the hinge of Dutch's jaw and sent him sprawling flat on his back under the buzzing motel sign.
Dutch didn't get up.
His eyes were open and they weren't seeing anything. His chest hitched once, twice, and then it stopped, and the gravel under his head went dark.
Blizzard stood over him breathing hard, his knuckles singing, blood on his hands that wasn't all his. The neon strobed pink across the dead man's face and the quiet lot and the wall of trucks that had turned a parking lot into a killing floor.
Behind him, the two hangers-on were running.
The one Sam had dropped off the steps was up and limping for his bike.
The one she'd put on the office floor was crawling through the door on his hands and knees, blood running from his mouth.
They got to their machines and fired the engines and tore out of the funnel and across the 395 without looking back, and the sound of their bikes faded north into the desert until there was nothing left but the buzz of the sign and the tick of Dutch's cooling engine.
Blizzard turned around.
Sam stood on the office steps with the Winchester in her hands and the light behind her.
Her chest was rising and falling hard but her hands were steady on the rifle and her eyes were clear, and she was looking at him the way he was looking at her—past the adrenaline and the blood and the dead man on the gravel, straight through to the thing underneath.
The regulars' rigs sat dark and silent. Nobody hurt. The lot she'd built held.
He walked toward her. He couldn't feel his hands.
He couldn't feel anything except the pull—the same pull that had hit him the first time he'd seen her behind that counter, only now it was roaring, a physical force dragging him across the gravel toward the woman who'd stood her ground beside him like they'd done this a hundred times.
He stopped at the bottom of the steps. She was one step above him, their eyes level. Blood on his knuckles. The rifle across her body. The neon strobing pink across both of them.
"You good?" he said. His voice came out rough and low and he didn't try to fix it.
"I'm good." Hers was the same.
The dead man lay twenty feet behind him and neither of them looked at him. They looked at each other, and the adrenaline was still screaming through both of them, and the night had gone so quiet that Blizzard could hear her breathing.
He reached up and wrapped his hand around the barrel of the Winchester, gently, and moved it aside. She let him. His bloody knuckles brushed her fingers on the stock and she didn't pull away.
"Sam," he said.
"Yeah."
"I'm not thinking about the next move right now."
"Me neither," she said.
The desert cold pressed down on them and the neon buzzed and the 395 stretched empty in both directions, and the two of them stood there in it with a dead man on the gravel and a war just getting started and nothing between them but the charged air and the want that neither of them was pretending wasn't there.