Chapter 9
The supply run was supposed to be clean.
Bustout rode point with Ratchet and Blizzard on his flanks and two prospects riding tail.
Five bikes in formation, the V-twins thundering through the late-afternoon cold, the Sierra throwing long shadows across the highway as the sun dropped behind the ridge.
The air tasted like sage and diesel and the temperature was already falling.
Carla was behind him on the bike.
He hadn't wanted her on the run. He'd told her flat out in the compound lot—stay here, wait, let me handle this—and she'd looked at him with those dark eyes and said the thing that had ended every argument they'd had since the Silverline.
"I know this highway better than anyone on your crew. That grade south of Washoe has a blind pullout at mile marker forty-three that road crews use to stage ambushes. If Talley's been scouting your routes, that's where he'll be. You can ride in blind or you can ride in with me."
She'd been right. She was always right about the corridor. And now she was on the back of his bike with her arms locked around his waist and the wind tearing at her hair, and Bustout was trying to run a supply route while the woman he'd claimed three nights ago held onto him like an anchor.
They cleared the Washoe Valley grade and the highway opened up—long, straight, empty. The kind of road where you could see five miles in either direction and there was nothing but sagebrush and alkali flats and the distant smear of Reno's casino lights going pale in the late sun.
Mile marker forty.
Bustout felt Carla's arms tighten around his waist. Her mouth close to his ear, voice fighting the wind.
"Forty-three. Right side. Behind the rock cut."
He gave the hand signal. The formation tightened. Ratchet and Blizzard closed ranks, and the two prospects dropped back to create space.
Mile marker forty-one.
Nothing. Empty highway. The wind pushing tumbleweeds across the blacktop.
Forty-two.
There. A flash of chrome in the rock cut on the right—sunlight kicking off a bumper someone hadn't thought to cover. Bustout's hand went up, fist closed. The formation swung left, opening the throttle, and three things happened at once.
A black Dodge dually roared out of the pullout, tires smoking, cutting across the highway to block the northbound lane.
A flatbed truck came out behind it, slamming into position to close the gap between the Dodge and the shoulder.
And a third truck—a white box van—came screaming down the highway from behind, running south in the northbound lane, boxing them in.
Classic corridor trap. Block the front, close the sides, run down whatever was caught in the middle. Bustout had heard about it from Carla and from the drivers who'd been on the wrong end of it—the ones who'd ended up in ditches on this same stretch of empty highway.
Except the club wasn't in the middle.
Because Carla had told him where the pullout was, and the formation had swung left before the trap closed, and instead of riding into the kill zone the five Wreckers bikes punched through the gap between the rock cut and the flatbed and came out behind Talley's crew with clear highway ahead and the ambushers scrambling to reverse.
"Go!" Carla shouted in his ear, and Bustout opened the throttle and the Harley surged forward with a roar that bounced off the rock walls.
The fight became a chase, and then the chase became a fight.
The box van came around hard, tires squealing, and Ratchet peeled off to the right and drew it away from the formation.
The flatbed tried to run and Blizzard was on it, pulling alongside the cab and throwing something through the driver's window that made the truck swerve wildly and clip the guardrail in a shower of sparks.
Bustout went for the Dodge.
Talley was driving. He could see the man through the windshield—big, flat-faced, unbothered, the professional road enforcer who'd put independents in ditches for years. He was trying to bring the dually around for another pass, swinging the big truck in a wide arc across the empty highway.
Bustout came up alongside the driver's door at sixty miles an hour. The wind was screaming. Carla's grip on his waist was iron. The Dodge's window came down and a gun barrel poked out, and Bustout dropped the bike into a hard lean that sent them under the shot and past the rear fender.
The bullet went wide. The Dodge oversteered on the correction, tires catching gravel on the shoulder, and the truck slid sideways for a sickening moment before Talley muscled it back onto the blacktop.
Bustout swung wide and came at the truck from behind. One of the prospects—Culver, riding fearless—had gotten ahead and was cutting across the Dodge's path, forcing Talley to brake. The truck's front end dipped, tires howling, and Bustout closed the distance.
He reached the driver's door at thirty miles an hour and put his boot into the Dodge's front tire.
It wasn't elegant. It wasn't tactical. It was a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound man kicking a front tire at speed with everything he had, and the force of it buckled the steering linkage and sent the dually into a spin that ended nose-first in the drainage ditch on the east side of the highway.
The crash was enormous. Metal screaming, glass shattering, the Dodge's rear end lifting off the ground before slamming back down with a sound like a building falling. Dust billowed up in a cloud that swallowed the highway.
Bustout laid the bike down on the shoulder—Carla rolled clear, he'd trained her on the dismount before they'd left the compound—and he was running before the dust settled.
He reached the Dodge and ripped the driver's door open.
Talley was alive. Bloody—his forehead split where it had hit the steering wheel, glass in his lap, one arm hanging at a bad angle—but alive and reaching for the gun on the floor of the cab with his good hand.
Bustout grabbed his wrist and pulled him out of the truck.
The enforcer hit the asphalt hard, and Bustout followed him down. Talley swung with his good arm—there was real power in it even now, the punch of a man who'd made a career of putting people on the ground—and it caught Bustout on the jaw. His vision flashed white and he tasted copper.
He took the hit. Let it land. Then he closed in.
Two shots to Talley's ribs. A knee into his stomach. The enforcer doubled over and Bustout grabbed the back of his head and drove his face into the Dodge's running board with a sound that ended the fight.
Talley slumped. Tried to push himself up.
Got one hand on the truck and looked up at Bustout with that flat, professional stare, except now there was something else behind it—the realization of a man who'd been the predator on this highway for years and was looking at his own ending on the same asphalt.
"You picked the wrong corridor," Bustout said.
He hit Talley one more time. Clean. Certain. The enforcer's head snapped back and his body went slack and he slid down the side of the Dodge and settled on the blacktop in a heap of broken angles and the absolute stillness of a man who wasn't going to get up.
Bustout stood over him. His chest was heaving. His jaw throbbed where Talley's punch had landed. His knuckles were split and bleeding and he couldn't feel his right hand past the wrist.
Boots on asphalt behind him. Ratchet and Blizzard, coming from their own fights, the box van dead in a ditch a quarter mile back, the flatbed smoking against the guardrail. Culver was on his feet but limping—a prospect who'd ridden into a professional ambush and hadn't flinched.
"Clear," Ratchet said. "All down."
Bustout nodded. Then he turned.
Carla was standing on the highway shoulder twenty feet away.
She'd rolled clear of the bike when he'd laid it down, exactly the way he'd shown her—tuck and roll, get away from the metal, find your feet.
She had road rash on her right arm where the asphalt had taken the skin through her jacket sleeve, and her hair was wild from the wind, and she was standing with her hands on her thighs catching her breath and looking at the dead man by the Dodge with an expression that was not horror and not shock.
It was satisfaction.
She straightened up and walked toward him, and he met her halfway, and when she reached him he put his hand on the back of her neck and pulled her forehead against his chest. She pressed into him, her hands fisting in his shirt, and they stood there on the empty highway with the dust settling and the dead man cooling on the asphalt and the Sierra turning gold in the last of the sun.
"You were right," he said into her hair. "About the pullout. About all of it."
"I know."
"You rode into a gunfight."
"I told you I know this highway." She pulled back and looked up at him. Road rash. Wind-burned cheeks. Eyes bright and fierce and completely unbroken. "Don't tell me to stay behind again."
His hand tightened on the back of her neck. The claiming grip—the one that said mine in a language older than words. She leaned into it instead of pulling away, and the heat between them was all the hotter for the cold desert wind cutting across the highway.
The brothers gave them room. Ratchet and Blizzard worked clean-up without being asked—bikes righted, weapons collected, the remains of Talley's crew handled with the practiced efficiency of men who'd done this before. Culver sat on the shoulder and wrapped his ankle and didn't complain.
Bustout looked south down the highway—the long, empty grade stretching toward the desert, toward wherever Halloran was sitting right now, not knowing yet that his road enforcer was dead on the highway he used to own.
Two layers gone. The collector. The enforcer. Only Kessler the yard boss and Halloran himself remained, and the distance between the club and the man who'd started all of this was getting shorter by the day.
Carla stood beside him, her shoulder against his arm, both of them looking south.
"He'll send Kessler next," she said.
"I know."
"Kessler's smarter than these two. He won't come at you on the road."
Bustout looked down at her—this woman who'd ridden into an ambush on the back of his bike and called the ground that saved them all.
"Then we'll go to him," he said.
She nodded. Her hand found his, their fingers lacing together—his bloody, hers scraped raw—and they stood on the empty highway in the dying light, side by side, with two of Halloran's three walls knocked flat and the man himself still out there somewhere in the dark.