Chapter 16
Scout's text came in at eleven p.m.—three words and a pin drop.
Truck stop. Channahon.
He knew the layout by heart. Every entrance, every exit, every blind spot where the security cameras didn't reach.
Wade Pruitt had picked the wrong place to celebrate.
"Fang. Lakeshore." Diesel found them in the common room—Fang in his usual shadow, Lakeshore nursing something dark at the end of the bar. "Gear up. We're riding south."
Neither of them asked questions. That was the thing about brothers who'd been doing this long enough—they read the situation in your face and moved.
Three bikes rolled out of the compound lot at eleven-fifteen. The Dan Ryan was quiet, the kind of late-night empty that made the highway feel like it belonged to them. Diesel led, Fang on his left, Lakeshore on his right, three wolves running south through the city's orange glow.
He'd driven this corridor for fifteen years. Every exit ramp, every overpass, every stretch of blacktop between Chicago and Joliet was written into his bones. The road didn't change. The mile markers counted down the same way they always had—steady, patient, inevitable.
Like him.
They passed the Cicero exits. Passed the spot where Lenny Shafer had died on the weigh station concrete. Passed the stretch near Romeoville where Eddie Whitman's rig had been found abandoned, doors open, cab empty, cargo gone.
Eddie's ghost rode with him tonight. So did Phil Delgado's. So did every driver who'd disappeared along this highway because men like Wade Pruitt thought the open road was a hunting ground.
Not anymore.
The Flying J appeared off the right side of the interstate, its sign glowing against the dark sky. Diesel killed his headlight a quarter mile out and took the service road that ran behind the station—a maintenance access path he'd used years ago when the main entrance was backed up with semis.
Wade wouldn't know it existed. Wade had never driven a truck in his life. He was muscle, not road knowledge. The kind of man who thought highways were just pavement between places, not territory to be understood.
That ignorance was going to kill him tonight.
Diesel pulled off the service road and parked behind a storage shed fifty yards from the station's rear lot. Fang and Lakeshore flanked him, engines dying in unison.
"Scout says Wade's got three men with him," Diesel said, keeping his voice low. "They've been drinking for two hours. Celebrating the diner job."
Fang's eyes showed nothing. They never did. But his hand moved to the knife on his belt with the casual precision of a man reaching for a tool he used every day.
"Where?" Lakeshore asked.
"Main lot, southeast corner. Wade's truck is the black Dodge with the chrome running boards. His boys are parked around it—two pickups and a sedan."
"Cameras?"
"Three on the building, one on the fuel island.
None covering the southeast corner past the dumpsters.
" Diesel had mapped this place years ago, back when knowing camera positions meant knowing where to park a rig without dispatch tracking your breaks.
"We come in from the tree line behind the lot.
Wade's facing the building. He won't see us until we're on top of him. "
"The three with him?" Lakeshore's voice was steady, professional.
"Handle them however they need handling. But Wade is mine."
Fang nodded once. Lakeshore checked his weapon.
They moved through the darkness like the animals on their patches—low, quiet, patient. The tree line ran along the station's south perimeter, a strip of scrub oak and weeds that separated the lot from a drainage ditch. Diesel led them through it single file, boots finding solid ground by instinct.
Through the branches, he could see the southeast corner of the lot.
Wade's black Dodge sat under a dead lamp—the bulb had been out for months, Diesel remembered, and the station never bothered replacing it.
Three other vehicles clustered around it.
Men leaned against hoods, passing a bottle, their laughter carrying across the asphalt.
Wade Pruitt stood at the center of it, animated, gesturing broadly. Telling a story, from the looks of it. Diesel could imagine what about—the diner, probably. The smashed equipment. The spray paint. The CB radio left on the counter like a trophy.
He was bragging about destroying a woman's life. Laughing about it.
Something cold and certain settled into Diesel's chest.
He stepped out of the tree line.
The first man never saw Fang. One moment he was leaning against a pickup, beer in hand. The next he was on the ground with Fang's knife in his throat, making sounds that weren't words anymore. The beer bottle hit the asphalt and shattered, and that was the only warning the others got.
Lakeshore took the second and third in quick succession—one with a forearm across the windpipe, the other with the butt of his pistol to the temple. Neither of them had time to reach for weapons. Neither of them had time to do anything except realize that the celebration was over.
Wade turned at the sound of the bottle breaking.
His eyes found Diesel ten feet away, and for one second—just one—his face showed the same cocky grin he'd worn at Karen's counter. The same shit-eating confidence. The same certainty that he was untouchable.
Then the grin died.
"Remember me?" Diesel asked. "Customer. Eggs and coffee."
Wade's hand went for his waistband. Fast, practiced, the reflex of a man who'd been carrying since he was old enough to hold a weapon.
Diesel was faster.
He closed the distance in three strides and caught Wade's wrist before the gun cleared. Twisted it until the bones ground together and the weapon clattered to the pavement. Wade swung with his free hand—a wild, desperate haymaker that caught air as Diesel stepped inside the arc.
"You followed her cook to his car," Diesel said, driving his fist into Wade's ribs. "Tommy. Kid was twenty-three. Worked the grill because he needed the money."
Wade doubled over. Diesel grabbed his collar and hauled him upright.
"You sat at her counter and called her sweetheart." Another punch, this one to the jaw. Wade's head snapped sideways, blood spraying across the chrome running boards of his own truck. "You watched her apartment windows. You smashed her kitchen. You spray-painted her windows."
Wade stumbled backward, hitting the fuel island railing. The diesel pumps hummed their low mechanical song beside him—the sound Diesel had fallen asleep to in truck cabs for fifteen years.
"You don't—" Wade spit blood. "You don't know who you're—Dale will—"
"Dale will what?" Diesel stepped forward. "Send Clint Harker? Harker's dead. Send Lenny Shafer? Lenny's dead. Send you?" He grabbed Wade by the throat. "You're about to be dead."
"She's just a waitress." Wade's voice was strangled, desperate. "She's nobody. She's—"
"She's mine."
The words came out like a verdict.
Diesel lifted Wade off the railing and slammed him down onto the concrete beside the diesel pump. The impact drove the air from Wade's lungs. He gasped, clawed at Diesel's hands, tried to roll away.
Diesel didn't let him.
He thought about Karen's face when she'd walked through the diner that morning. The way she'd touched the broken coffee pot. The way she'd picked up the CB radio and turned it off without a word, her hands steady while something behind her eyes burned.
He thought about Tommy, the overnight cook who'd quit because this man had followed him to his car in the dark.
He thought about every driver who'd disappeared along this corridor because Dale Berkman's crew thought the highway belonged to them.
Diesel ended it at the diesel pumps.
The sound was wet and final. Wade Pruitt's body went limp on the concrete, and the fuel island lights buzzed overhead, and somewhere on I-55 a semi blew its horn passing through the night.
Diesel stood over the body, breathing hard. His hands ached. His knuckles were split. None of it registered.
Fang appeared beside him. Looked down at Wade. Looked at Diesel.
"Clean," Fang said.
It wasn't a question. It was an assessment.
"Clean enough." Diesel stepped back. Blood pooled across the concrete, dark under the station lights, mixing with the diesel stains that had been there for years. "The other three?"
"Two down. One ran." Lakeshore materialized from the shadows. "Headed south on foot. Won't get far."
"Let him go." Diesel rolled his shoulders. "Let him run all the way back to Dale and explain what happened here."
Fang's eyebrow twitched. Almost a question.
"Dale needs to know," Diesel said. "He needs to hear it from someone who was here. Who saw." He looked at Wade's body one more time. "He needs to understand that his crew is gone. Every last one of them."
They moved fast after that. Fang wiped down the surfaces while Lakeshore repositioned the vehicles to create confusion. Diesel pulled Wade's phone from his pocket and scrolled through the contacts—Dale's number, right there, listed under "D.B."
He pocketed the phone. Might be useful.
The ride back was quiet. Three bikes on an empty highway, mile markers counting up instead of down.
Diesel felt the road under his wheels—the same asphalt he'd driven for fifteen years, the same corridor where his friends had died, the same stretch of I-55 that Dale Berkman had turned into a killing ground.
It was clean now. Harker was dead. Lenny was dead. Wade was dead. Dale's crew was scattered, broken, reduced to the one survivor currently running south through cornfields with a story that would make Dale Berkman understand exactly how alone he was.
The compound lights appeared on the horizon. Diesel rolled through the gates and killed his engine in the lot. The night air smelled like exhaust and the distant lake, and the L train rumbled past on its endless circuit.
He sat on his bike for a long moment, letting the quiet settle.
Three lieutenants down. Three pieces of Dale Berkman's operation, removed with the methodical patience of a man who'd spent his whole life understanding how things moved along a highway. Harker, the enforcer. Lenny, the coordinator. Wade, the muscle.
Dale was alone now. Sitting in his warehouse surrounded by stolen cargo and shipping manifests, calling numbers that no one would answer. The man who'd spent twelve years preying on truckers along I-55 had finally run out of road.
Diesel swung off his bike and walked toward the clubhouse.
Karen was waiting at the door.
She didn't ask. Just looked at his face, at his hands, at whatever was written in his expression, and nodded once.
"It's done?" she asked.
"Wade's done. Dale's next."
She took his hand—the one with split knuckles and someone else's blood drying in the creases—and held it between both of hers.
"Good," she said quietly.
They stood there in the doorway while the compound settled around them. Brothers parking bikes, trading low words, the machinery of the pack processing another night's work.
Diesel looked south, toward I-55, toward the highway that had defined his life for two decades.
One more mile to go.
One more stop on the road.
And then Karen would never be afraid again.