Buckshot's Rage (Ozark Ridgerunners MC #21)

Chapter 1

The bleach was winning.

Tamsin Foley stripped the fitted sheet off room six in one hard pull and balled it against her hip, already cataloging what this particular guest had left behind.

Cigarette burns on the nightstand she'd refinished herself.

A boot scuff on the baseboard. Two empty tallboys of Busch Light sweating rings into the laminate.

Standard checkout. She could work with standard.

She tossed the sheet into the cart, snapped a fresh one off the stack, and had the corners tucked tight in under a minute.

Four years of corrections work had taught her a lot of useless things—how to clear a cell in ninety seconds, how to read violence in the set of a man's shoulders, how to sleep with one ear on—but the bed-making had actually stuck.

Hospital corners tight enough to bounce a quarter.

She'd done it a thousand times in the facility and she did it now in her own motel, room by room, because no one else was going to do it.

The Pines Motel sat on a quiet stretch of highway between the lakes—eighteen rooms in an L-shaped block, a gravel lot that needed grading, a vending machine that dispensed Diet Coke and nothing else on any given day, and rates low enough for the pipe fitters and roofers and long-haul guys passing through on their way to somewhere better.

She'd bought it at auction three years ago with everything she had and fixed it up room by room with her own hands.

New locks. New plumbing in seven of the bathrooms. A coat of paint the color of lake fog that the hardware store called "Morning Mist" and she called close enough.

Not glamorous. But it was hers, and it was honest, and after four years of working inside a system that was neither of those things, honest was enough.

She pushed the cart past room seven—vacant, clean—and room eight—checkout tomorrow, no trouble—and stopped at the ice machine alcove between eight and nine.

Nine through twelve were the problem.

She stood there with her hand on the cart handle and looked down the row at four doors that hadn't opened from the inside in weeks.

Rooms nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. Booked solid.

Paid in cash. Four weeks running, a man showed up every Monday in a gray Dodge Ram with Oklahoma plates and slid an envelope across her counter with enough bills to cover all four rooms through Sunday.

No ID. No name that matched anything real.

Just the envelope, a nod, and the same sentence every time: "Don't service those rooms."

She'd taken the money because she had a twelve-hundred-dollar note due on the first and a condenser unit dying in the crawlspace, and because a woman running a motel alone on a rural highway learned fast which questions bought trouble.

But she hadn't stopped noticing.

The trucks that came at two and three in the morning with their running lights off.

The men who walked the lot in the dark and never checked in.

The way room eleven's curtain moved at hours when the room was supposed to be empty.

Three months of nights she'd told herself were none of her business, and every one of those nights had scraped against the part of her brain that still counted bodies in a space the way the facility had trained her to.

She stopped the cart outside room eleven now and listened.

Late afternoon light cut low across the lot. The highway ran empty in both directions. Her own truck sat in front of the office with the windows down and a half-finished Dr Pepper going warm in the cupholder. Everything quiet, everything still—

Except the ice machine light was throwing a reflection off room eleven's window, and behind the curtain, a shape moved.

Tamsin's hands went still on the cart handle.

That room had been registered empty for six days. No checkout scheduled. No one on the books. But someone was in there, and the way they moved—slow, careful, staying back from the glass—was a way she recognized in her spine before her brain caught up. That was someone who did not want to be seen.

She'd watched women move like that in the facility. The ones in protective custody. The ones hiding from something bigger than the walls could hold.

A sound at the far end of the lot pulled her head around.

A box truck was backing down the access lane with its headlights off, moving slow, lining up with the room doors at the far end of the block.

No logo on the side. No plates she could read from this distance.

It stopped, and two men dropped out of the cab and went around back without speaking.

The cargo door rolled up. They started pulling crated freight out of the bed—heavy, wooden, the kind of crates she'd seen in evidence photos during her facility years—and carrying them into room twelve.

A room she had cleaned yesterday. A room she had left empty and locked.

Tamsin left the cart and started across the gravel.

She made it ten steps before one of them cut her off. Big, soft-looking in the middle but thick through the arms, wearing a ball cap and a canvas jacket that didn't match the July heat. He stepped into her path like he'd been waiting for her to move.

"Vending machine's busted," he said. Flat voice. Eyes that didn't land on her face. "You should go fix it."

"It's not busted."

"Lady." He shifted his weight. Not a threat, exactly. Just a man making himself bigger in a space she was supposed to leave. "Go fix the machine."

Tamsin held his eyes for two full seconds—long enough to read what she needed. He wasn't nervous. He wasn't angry. He was bored, the way men got bored when they'd done this before and expected it to work every time. That boredom was the most dangerous thing in the lot.

She turned around and walked back to the office.

Not because he told her to. Because the office had a lock and a desk and the ledger she'd been keeping since the first Monday envelope, and what she needed right now wasn't a confrontation with two men unloading stolen freight—it was proof.

She pulled the ledger out of the desk drawer and opened it under the fluorescent light.

Three months of entries in her own tight handwriting.

Every cash booking. Every date. Every plate number she'd managed to catch through the blinds at three in the morning—Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, one Tennessee.

The Monday man's description. The intermediary who called once to confirm the block booking from a number with a Springfield area code.

The nights she'd heard engines and counted vehicles.

The mornings she'd found cigarette butts outside rooms that were supposed to be empty and boot prints in the mud where no guest had walked.

She'd told herself she was keeping records for liability. Insurance reasons. Covering herself in case someone asked questions about rooms she couldn't account for.

But that was a lie and she'd always known it. She was keeping records because four years at a women's facility had taught her what happened to the people who didn't write things down. They became the ones nobody believed.

She picked up a pen and added today's entry. Box truck, no plates visible, two men, crated freight into room twelve. Shape moving in room eleven, registered empty since the fourteenth. The vending machine man and his bored eyes.

She closed the ledger and sat behind her desk and watched the lot through the window.

The box truck pulled out twenty minutes later. The two men drove off in a sedan that had been parked behind the dumpster enclosure where she couldn't see it from the office. Room twelve's door stayed closed. Room eleven's curtain stopped moving.

The lot went still again, the way it always went still after. Like nothing had happened. Like she'd imagined it.

She hadn't imagined it.

Tamsin pulled the rubber band off her wrist, scraped her hair back tight, and started going through the ledger from page one.

Cross-referencing dates. Counting the nights the trucks came.

Marking which rooms were used and when. Building the picture she'd been refusing to look at for three months because looking at it meant she couldn't pretend anymore that this was just a cash-paying block booking from men who liked their privacy.

Someone was running something through her motel. Stolen freight, from the look of the crates. And men—men who moved behind curtains in rooms registered empty, men who needed to not be seen.

Her motel. Her eighteen rooms. The place she'd rebuilt with her own hands so she'd never have to answer to a system that didn't give a damn about the people inside it.

The fluorescent buzzed overhead. The lot sat empty under a sky going dark. She should call someone. She should—

Headlights swung into the lot.

Tamsin looked up from the ledger.

A crew cab pickup rolled in off the highway and stopped in the middle of the gravel lot, engine running, high beams cutting across the room doors. Then it shut off and three men got out.

They walked toward her lit office window without hurrying.

Because they already knew she had nowhere to be.

Tamsin closed the ledger. Pulled it off the desk and held it against her chest.

The first man through the door was rangy, long-armed, with a nicotine-yellow grin and a hunting knife on his belt that he hadn't bothered to hide.

He looked around her office—at the pegboard with the room keys, at the ancient coffeemaker, at her—the way a man looks at something he's already decided isn't a problem.

"Tamsin," he said, like they'd met. "Wendell Sharp."

The two behind him spread without being told. One by the door. One by the window. Boxing the room the way men who'd done this before boxed rooms—casual, efficient, already done before she registered it was happening.

Sharp pulled a chair around and sat in it backward, his arms draped over the backrest, that yellow grin aimed at her like a flashlight.

"Heard you were asking questions about some rooms."

"I wasn't asking questions. I was doing my job."

"See, that's the thing." He pulled the hunting knife off his belt and started cleaning under his nails with the tip, not looking at her, looking at the blade.

"Your job is keys and sheets and making sure the ice machine works.

Your job is not walking across the lot when men are working.

Your job is definitely not"—he looked up—"writing things down. "

His eyes went to the ledger she was holding against her chest.

"Give me the book, Tamsin."

"No."

Sharp stood. The chair scraped back. He moved around the desk and she held her ground because backing up from a man with a knife was how you got cut—the facility had taught her that too, in a hallway outside D-block with a woman holding a sharpened comb handle and nowhere to go but through.

He took the ledger out of her hands. She didn't let go, and he ripped it, tearing pages out of the binding, scattering three months of careful entries across the floor.

Then he grabbed her arm and pushed her back against the desk edge, leaning in close enough that she could smell the Skoal on his breath and the sweat in his canvas jacket.

"Here's what happens now," he said. "You stop noticing things. You stop writing things down. The rooms stay booked, the money shows up Monday, and you run your little motel and keep your mouth shut. That's the deal. That's the only deal."

"And if I don't take it?"

Sharp smiled. Yellow teeth. Dead eyes.

"Then we find out how many rooms this place needs to lose before you understand the question."

The man by the window shifted. The one by the door cracked his knuckles.

Tamsin's hip dug into the desk edge. Her pulse hammered in her throat. But her hands were steady—they'd been steady in D-block and they were steady now—and her eyes stayed on Sharp's because dropping them was the one thing you never did.

Outside, on the highway, the sound of a motorcycle engine cut through the stillness. Getting closer. A low, heavy rumble that vibrated in the window glass and shook the pen holder on her desk.

Sharp heard it too. His grip on her arm tightened.

The engine sound grew, and grew, and then headlights swept across the office window as a bike swung into her lot—fast, gravel spraying—and the rumble died to an idle that she could feel in the floorboards under her feet.

Sharp looked at the man by the door. The man by the door looked at the window.

Tamsin looked at none of them. She was looking at the torn pages of her ledger scattered across the floor, already calculating which ones she could still read.