Chapter 2
Buckshot killed the engine and swung off the bike with the lot already talking to him.
Three things wrong before his boots hit gravel.
Crew cab parked sideways in the middle of the lot with its nose toward the highway—driver wanted out fast. Office light on, door open six inches, which Tamsin Foley never left open after dark because she wasn't stupid.
And a man's shadow moving behind the window in a room that only had one woman in it.
He'd come out to lock down a room for a sit-down between the club and a parts supplier out of Springfield. The Pines was the club's spot for quiet business—had been for two years. Tamsin took the cash, kept the rooms clean, asked nothing. Good woman. Steady hands and a mouth that didn't run.
None of that mattered right now. What mattered was the door hanging open and the shadow that didn't belong to her.
Buckshot pulled the sawed-off from the leather scabbard on his bike and walked toward the office without hurrying. Gravel crunched under his boots. The July air sat thick and wet, carrying exhaust and hot asphalt and something else—the sharp, copper-penny smell of a situation about to go sideways.
He came around the corner of the office and saw it all at once.
The ledger torn apart on the floor. A rangy son of a bitch with a hunting knife leaning over Tamsin where he had her pinned against the desk edge.
Two more men boxing the room—one at the door, one at the window—with the bored posture of guys who'd done this enough times that it didn't even get their pulse up.
Tamsin's lip was split. Blood on her chin. But her eyes were locked on the knife man and she was not shaking, was not crying, was not doing a single goddamn thing except standing her ground against a desk with three men in her space.
Something hot and simple moved through Buckshot's chest.
He didn't aim. Aiming was for men who believed in precision, and Buckshot had stopped believing in precision the night he took a load of buckshot meant for someone standing three feet to his left.
What he believed in was pattern—spread the damage wide, force everyone to move at once, and deal with what was left standing.
He put the sawed-off through the office window and pulled the trigger.
The blast took out the glass, the coffeemaker, and half the pegboard behind the desk in a shower of keys and drywall and fluorescent light cover. He hadn't aimed at anyone. Didn't need to. A twelve-gauge going off three feet from your head rearranges your priorities faster than a bullet ever could.
The man at the window went sideways into the wall and came off it scrambling for the door.
The man at the door tried to clear his weapon and caught the doorframe with his shoulder, spinning into the lot.
The knife man—Sharp, Buckshot would learn later—flinched off Tamsin and turned with the blade up, and in the half-second his eyes left her, Tamsin moved.
She got a hand on the keyring hanging from her belt loop—a steel ring with eighteen room keys and the master—and she drove it across Sharp's face from cheekbone to jaw, opening a gash that went white before it went red.
Sharp screamed. His hand came up to his face and blood poured through his fingers, and Tamsin stepped clear of the desk and stood there with the keyring dripping in her fist, breathing hard, watching him the way you watch something you've decided you're not afraid of anymore.
Buckshot racked the slide.
"Out."
One word. All it took. Sharp's two men were already in the crew cab with the engine turning over, and Sharp backed out of the office with his hand on his ruined face, blood sheeting down his neck into his collar. He pointed at Tamsin with the knife.
"This isn't done."
Buckshot stepped into the doorway and filled it. Six-one, scatter-gun build, pockmark scars catching the fluorescent light, the sawed-off held low and easy at his side like a tool he'd been carrying since birth.
"It is right now."
Sharp looked at him. Looked at the gun. Looked at Tamsin standing behind him with blood on her knuckles and not one step of retreat in her body.
Then he turned and walked to the truck and got in, and the crew cab tore out of the lot spraying gravel against the room doors and was gone on the highway before the echo of the shotgun blast finished dying in the hills.
Silence.
Buckshot stood in the wrecked office and turned to look at her.
Glass everywhere. Coffee grounds across the counter.
The pegboard hanging by one screw with half the room keys on the floor.
Torn ledger pages scattered under the desk.
And Tamsin Foley standing in the middle of all of it with a split lip and blood drying on her hand, still holding the keyring, still not sitting down.
"You need to sit down," he said.
"No."
"You're bleeding."
"It's his blood. Mostly." She looked at the keyring in her hand, then set it on the desk. Steady. Deliberate. "Who are you?"
"Buckshot. Ozark Ridgerunners."
Something shifted behind her eyes. She knew the name—everyone on this stretch of highway knew the name—and he watched her calculate what it meant that a patched Ridgerunner had just blown out her office window to pull three men off her.
"You're the ones who use room fourteen," she said.
"Yeah."
"You always pay on time."
He almost smiled. Almost. "We do."
She bent and started picking up the torn ledger pages.
He watched her do it—on her knees in the broken glass, sorting pages with hands that still weren't shaking, putting them in order by date like the world hadn't just tried to come through her office door with a knife.
Something about the way she moved—efficient, stubborn, refusing to let the mess stay—pulled at the hot thing in his chest and made it worse.
"Leave that," he said.
"No." She didn't look up. "This is the only proof I have."
"Proof of what?"
She stood with a stack of torn pages and held them out to him. Her gray eyes held his—steady, direct, a beat past comfortable—and she did not drop them first.
"Rooms nine through twelve," she said. "Someone's running stolen freight through my motel. Crated goods coming in by box truck at two, three in the morning, lights off. And men hiding in rooms that are registered empty—men who need to not be seen. It's been three months."
Buckshot took the pages. Looked at them under the broken light.
Tight handwriting. Dates, plate numbers, vehicle descriptions.
Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee.
Cash amounts and booking patterns and a Springfield callback number and notes on which nights the trucks came and which rooms they loaded.
Three months of a woman sitting behind this desk watching her own motel get used and writing down every single thing she saw.
He flipped through the pages. The plates covered four states. The cash amounts were consistent—same envelope, same schedule, same drop. The callback number was a Springfield exchange, which put it in reach of half a dozen operations the club had heard noise about in the last year.
This wasn't three guys shaking down a motel owner. This was a network. Freight moving through waypoints on a highway the Ridgerunners controlled, and men disappearing into rooms on a property the club used for its own business.
He looked at her.
She was watching him read the pages the way a woman watches a man deciding whether to take her seriously. Arms crossed, chin up, weight set on both feet. Blood drying on the split in her lip. The scar through her eyebrow catching the light.
"How long since they started threatening you?"
"Tonight was the first time. Before that it was just money and a man who told me not to service the rooms." Her jaw tightened. "I should've pushed it sooner."
"You pushed it tonight. That's what matters."
Something moved across her face—not gratitude, not relief, but the hard recognition of someone who'd been standing alone for a long time hearing that maybe she didn't have to. She shut it down fast, the way people who'd learned not to count on anyone shut things down.
Buckshot held up the pages. "I need to make a call."
"Phone's on the desk."
He stepped over the glass and the coffee grounds and the torn binding of her ledger and picked up the office phone.
She didn't leave. Didn't go to the bathroom to clean up or sit on the step to fall apart or do any of the things a woman was supposed to do after three men with a knife came into her place of business and put hands on her.
She got the broom out of the closet and started sweeping glass.
Buckshot watched her push the broom through the wreckage of her own office with the same squared-off shoulders she'd held while Sharp had her against the desk, and the hot thing in his chest settled into something heavier and more permanent.
He called the compound.
"Still." One word to the president. Then: "I'm at The Pines. We've got a problem. Outside outfit running freight and hiding men through the highway, four-state spread. They put hands on the woman who runs the place."
A pause on the line. Then Still's voice, low and even: "How many?"
"Three tonight. More behind them. She's got paper on three months of it."
"She hurt?"
Buckshot looked at Tamsin sweeping glass in her own wrecked office with blood on her lip and nothing in her body that looked like quitting.
"She's standing."
Another pause. "I'll be there in forty. Nobody leaves that lot."
The line went dead. Buckshot hung up and leaned against the desk and watched her work.
"Club's coming," he said.
She didn't stop sweeping. "How many?"
"Enough."
"And then what?"
"And then we figure out who's running product through a Ridgerunner highway and put a stop to it."
She looked up from the broom. Gray eyes, direct, the kind of look that landed on a man and stayed there until he said something real.
"Why?"
"Because it's our road. And because nobody puts hands on a woman on it."
The words came out with more edge than he'd planned. More possession. He heard it and she heard it and neither of them looked away.
"I can take care of myself," she said.
"I saw that." He nodded at the keyring on the desk, still dark with Sharp's blood. "Doesn't mean you should have to."
She held his eyes for another long moment. Then she went back to sweeping, and Buckshot stood in her wrecked office with the sawed-off on the desk and her torn ledger pages in his hand, listening to the sound of bikes on the highway getting closer.