Chapter Fourteen
Mile marker forty. Ten AM. The auto shop sat fifty yards off the highway behind a gravel lot and a chain-link fence with a broken gate.
Foxfire had been in position since seven.
Three hours in a drainage ditch behind a stand of kudzu, his bike hidden a quarter mile back in an equipment shed belonging to a cotton farm that had been dead since the nineties.
The morning dew had soaked through his jeans.
Fire ants had found his left boot. The Delta sun was climbing toward the kind of noon heat that cooked asphalt into tar.
He didn't move.
Patty's map was in his back pocket. Her handwriting—sharp, practical, the same hand that wrote daily specials on the chalkboard at Harmon's—marked the auto shop as Pratt's next target. South to north. Two-hour gaps. Daylight because the man needed witnesses the way other men needed air.
Foxfire understood needing an audience. He'd spent half his life in bar fights where the crowd was half the point.
The difference was that Foxfire won his fights. Pratt was about to lose his last one.
His phone buzzed against his thigh. Crossroad: Spotter on the southern stretch. Black truck, no plates, one driver. Heading north past mile thirty-two.
Eight miles out. At highway speed, six minutes.
Foxfire typed back: Alone?
Solo. Truck bed loaded—spray cans, gas containers, tools. He's geared for a hit.
Solo. No backup. No escorts, because Garza didn't have escorts anymore—Rios was dead in a bar and Landis was dead in his own warehouse, and the smuggling boss had burned through his operators so fast that the only man left to send was a thirty-year-old arsonist who thought spray paint was a skill set.
Foxfire pocketed the phone and settled lower in the ditch.
The auto shop's owner had been warned. Crossroad had called him at six AM with a story about a gas leak and told him to keep his people home. The building sat dark and empty, bay doors closed, the hand-painted sign reading HANK'S AUTO & TIRE fading in the morning light.
Six minutes became five. Four. Three.
The black truck crested the rise south of the mile marker.
No plates. Tinted windows. The bed covered with a tarp that didn't quite hide the red gas containers underneath. The truck slowed as it approached the auto shop, the driver scanning the lot the way a man scans a room he's about to destroy.
Owen Pratt.
Foxfire watched him through the kudzu. Young—thirty, maybe less.
Wiry build. A face that held the particular arrogance of a man who'd never been hit back.
He parked the truck at the edge of the lot and sat for a full minute, checking mirrors, checking the highway, checking everything except the drainage ditch forty feet from his door.
Pratt climbed out.
He moved with the jittery energy of a man running on adrenaline and ego—bouncing on his toes, grinning at nothing, the body language of someone who'd lit a diner on fire yesterday and was still riding the high.
He pulled the tarp off the truck bed and started unloading: two gas containers, a duffel bag that clinked with spray cans, a crowbar.
The crowbar went to the auto shop's front door first. Pratt swung it twice, popping the lock, kicking the door open with a whoop that echoed across the empty lot.
He went inside. Foxfire heard the crash of shelves going over, the shatter of glass, the particular sounds of a man who destroyed things because destruction was the only language he spoke.
Foxfire climbed out of the ditch.
He crossed the gravel lot in silence. Not fast—not yet. The speed was coming, but right now the approach mattered more. Pratt was inside, making noise, lost in the performance of his own destruction. The gas containers sat in the truck bed. The truck sat between Pratt and the highway.
Foxfire put himself between Pratt and the truck.
The crashing inside stopped. Pratt appeared in the doorway with a spray can in one hand and the crowbar in the other, his grin wide and stupid and aimed at a wall he'd been about to tag.
The grin died when he saw Foxfire.
"Morning." Foxfire stood ten feet from the door, his hands empty, his weight on the balls of his feet. "Nice truck. Love what you've done with the gas cans."
Pratt's eyes went to the highway. To his truck. To the man standing between him and both.
"You're the biker." His voice cracked on the second word. The arrogance was still there, but underneath it—the first cold thread of something he probably wasn't used to feeling. "Garza said you'd come."
"Garza was right. First smart thing he's done since he started running product through my highway."
Pratt raised the crowbar. "I burned your girl's diner to the ground. Watched it go up from the parking lot. Smelled the pie cooking."
The heat in Foxfire's chest went white.
"That's what I figured." His voice was steady. The rest of him was not. "You drove to a twelve-seat diner on a highway and you set fire to a woman's kitchen because your boss told you to make noise. And then you spray-painted a parking lot because that's your idea of power."
"It worked. The whole highway saw it."
"The whole highway's about to see this too."
Pratt swung the crowbar.
He was young and fast and he had reach. The iron bar cut the air where Foxfire's head had been a quarter second before—would have been, if Foxfire fought the way normal men fought, standing in one place and trading blows.
Foxfire didn't trade blows. Foxfire traded speed.
He was inside the crowbar's arc before Pratt could reset. His left hand caught Pratt's wrist—hard, twisting, the same grip he'd used on a hundred bar-fight weapons from bottles to pool cues to a chair leg in a Greenville roadhouse. His right hand drove into Pratt's throat.
The arsonist gagged. The crowbar clattered to the gravel.
Foxfire didn't let go of the wrist. He twisted harder, heard the joint pop, and Pratt screamed—a high, ugly sound that scattered birds from the power lines along the highway.
"My girl's diner." Foxfire drove his knee into Pratt's gut, doubling him over. "Her mother's kitchen." He grabbed the back of Pratt's head and slammed it into his rising knee. Cartilage crunched. "Twenty-two years of a woman's life."
Pratt hit the gravel on his hands and knees, blood pouring from his nose, his broken wrist cradled against his chest. He tried to crawl. Foxfire let him get two feet before he kicked him onto his back.
"You spray-painted LAST brEAKFAST across her parking lot.
" Foxfire stood over him, and the grin was gone.
Nothing on his face now but the cold focus of a man who'd decided how this ended before it started.
"You burned her pie case. You burned her counter.
You burned the place where she stood every morning at five AM for six years because her mother couldn't do it anymore. "
"Garza—Garza ordered—"
"Garza ordered it. You enjoyed it." Foxfire crouched beside him. "I saw the spray paint. Big letters. Neat lines. You took your time. Made it pretty. A man who takes his time on a spray-paint job is a man who likes his work."
Pratt's eyes were wild. The arrogance had burned off like morning fog, and what was underneath was exactly what Foxfire expected—a small man who'd been given permission to hurt people and had mistaken that permission for power.
"Please—"
"You burned a woman's kitchen because you wanted the highway to watch." Foxfire picked up the crowbar. Tested its weight. "Here's the thing about audiences, Pratt. Sometimes they see the show. Sometimes they see what happens after."
"I'll leave. I'll tell Garza I'm done—"
"You're right about one thing." Foxfire straightened. "You are done."
The crowbar caught Pratt across the temple.
The arsonist dropped flat. Foxfire hit him again—jaw, ribs, the arm that had swung this same crowbar at a woman's auto shop door five minutes ago. Each blow precise. Each blow a debt collected.
Pratt stopped moving after the fourth hit. Stopped breathing after the fifth.
Foxfire stood over the body, the crowbar slick in his hand, his breathing hard but steady. The Delta sun hammered down on the gravel lot and the dead man and the auto shop that was still standing because a diner woman had mapped a route from thirty years of watching a highway.
He pulled out his phone.
"It's done." Crossroad answered on the first ring, which meant the Road Captain had been sitting on the call. "Pratt?"
"Dead. Auto shop's intact. He didn't get to the gas cans." Foxfire tossed the crowbar into the truck bed. "Send Burial's crew for cleanup. The truck's loaded with arson supplies—gas cans, spray paint. Might be worth keeping for evidence if Cottonmouth wants leverage."
"Cottonmouth wants Garza."
"Cottonmouth's going to get Garza." Foxfire looked down at Pratt's body. "But Garza doesn't know that yet. Right now he knows his escort chief is dead. His warehouse man is dead. And his message-runner just went silent on the highway where he was supposed to be making noise."
"That's three operators in two weeks."
"That's every operator." Foxfire started walking toward the equipment shed where his bike was stashed. "Garza's got nothing left. No escorts, no logistics, no intimidation. He's sitting on a dead corridor with a bunch of drivers who signed up for shift work, not war."
"He'll run."
"Maybe. Or maybe he's too proud. He built this pipeline from a two-man cigarette hustle. That's fifteen years of work. Men don't walk away from fifteen years."
"You think he'll fight?"
"I think he'll try." The grin came back—not the cold one. The sharp one. The one that showed up when the fight was almost over and the finish was in sight. "And I think he'll learn what every man on this highway has already learned."
"What's that?"
"That the fastest man in the Destroyers doesn't need operators, or pipelines, or a fifteen-year hustle." Foxfire swung onto his bike. "He needs a room and three seconds."
The engine caught. The highway opened up ahead of him—his highway, the stretch of blacktop he'd been running since the club gave him a patch, the road where a woman had watched trucks from a diner window and mapped a smuggling corridor without knowing it.
Three operators down. One boss left.
Nestor Garza was alone now. Sitting somewhere off the corridor, counting losses, watching his empire bleed out through the holes Foxfire had punched in it. No escort crews. No warehouse coordination. No message-runner to make the violence visible.
Just a man with a dead pipeline and a highway that belonged to someone else.
Foxfire pushed the throttle and pointed the bike toward the compound. Toward the kitchen where Patty would be waiting with coffee she'd already poured and questions she already knew the answers to.
He had proof for her. Pratt was dead on the gravel of the auto shop he'd come to burn, killed with his own crowbar on the highway where he'd torched a woman's legacy.
And when Garza figured out that his last operator was gone—when the silence on the corridor told him everything the spray paint used to say—the smuggling boss was going to learn something Owen Pratt had learned too late.
The highway wasn't his. The corridor wasn't his. And the street fighter coming for him didn't need a schedule, a route, or a ten-man crew.
He just needed the address.