Chapter 14
The canyon breaks swallowed the moonlight.
Hatchet killed his engine at the rim and let the silence rush in—no wind down here, no cattle, just the dry rattle of loose stone and the fading echo of truck engines somewhere below.
Lander was running scared. Good. Scared men made mistakes.
Ridge pulled up beside him, boots crunching gravel. "Two sets of tracks heading down the east wash. Truck and foot traffic—looks like they ditched the vehicle where the trail narrows."
"How far?"
"Half mile. Maybe less." Ridge checked his rifle, a bolt-action .308 he'd carried since Iraq. "Canyon funnels tight about three hundred yards in. One way out by vehicle."
"Then that's where you sit." Hatchet pulled the night-vision optics from his saddlebag—a modified scope housing he'd rebuilt from salvaged military parts, mounted to a head bracket with hardware-store ingenuity and armorer precision. "You hold the mouth. Nothing leaves on wheels."
"And on foot?"
"Striker and Rascal are flanking through the dry wash from the south. They'll push him toward me." Hatchet fitted the optics over his eyes and the world turned green and sharp. "I'll be waiting."
Ridge nodded once. No questions. No hesitation. The trust of a man who'd ridden at his back for four years and never once doubted the outcome.
Hatchet dropped over the rim.
The canyon floor was loose shale and dried mud, cracked into plates that shifted underfoot. He moved fast but quiet, picking his path by the green glow of the optics, his pistol in his left hand and his breathing steady.
His right hand trembled at his side. He ignored it.
Three feet. That's all he needed. At three feet, the tremor didn't matter. At three feet, even a ruined hand could put a round where it counted.
His radio clicked twice. Striker, signaling position.
Then once. Rascal, set.
The net was closed. Lander and his three remaining men were somewhere in this canyon with no vehicles, no escape route, and a wall of armed bikers tightening around them.
Hatchet moved deeper.
The wash narrowed. Rock walls rose on both sides—twenty feet, then thirty, carved by flash floods that hadn't run in years. The floor was sand here, soft, muffling his footsteps. He could hear voices ahead. Low, urgent. Men arguing about which way to go.
He followed the sound.
Fifty yards in, the canyon bent hard to the left. Hatchet pressed his shoulder against the rock wall and edged around the corner.
Four men.
They'd stopped in a shallow overhang where the canyon wall had eroded into a natural shelter.
One of them was on a phone, talking fast, his voice bouncing off stone.
Two more crouched against the wall with rifles across their knees.
Ranch hands—the same type who'd assaulted the compound, paid muscle with hunting guns and no training.
The fourth man stood apart.
Jack Lander was forty-two years old, six feet tall, and built like a man who'd spent two decades swinging a sledgehammer for a living. Former demolition contractor. The man who'd burned Earl Compton's barn with three horses inside. The man who'd torched hay stores and moved on the ranch house.
The man who'd made Caroline's horses scream.
Hatchet felt something cold settle behind his ribs.
Not anger. Anger was hot, messy, unreliable. This was colder. The thing that took over when a target was acquired and the only question left was distance.
His radio crackled. Caroline's voice, thin and distant, patched through from the Compton ranch.
"All three horses alive. Compton's helping me treat smoke inhalation—wet blankets and fresh air. The mare's the worst, but she's breathing steady."
Alive. All three.
Because Caroline had run into a burning barn while the roof collapsed above her.
The cold thing in his chest went colder.
Striker's voice cut in, barely a whisper. "Hatchet, we're thirty yards south of your position. Two tangos visible from our angle. Say the word."
"Hold."
Hatchet studied the scene through his optics. The two ranch hands were spooked—fidgeting, checking their phones, looking for an exit that didn't exist. The man on the phone was pleading with whoever was on the other end. Probably Pryce. Probably begging for extraction that wasn't coming.
Lander was the problem. He stood with his back to the shelter wall, calm and watchful, a compact pistol in his right hand. Not panicked. Not running. Calculating.
The man burned barns for a living. He understood fire—understood that panic killed faster than flame, that the way to survive was to stay still and let the chaos move around you.
Smart. Disciplined.
Didn't matter.
"Striker. Push from the south. Drive the two riflemen toward Ridge at the canyon mouth." Hatchet drew his pistol. "Leave Lander to me."
"Copy."
Three seconds of silence.
Then the canyon exploded.
Striker and Rascal hit from the south wash like a hammer. Muzzle flashes lit the rock walls—strobing white, casting jagged shadows that leaped and twisted. The two ranch hands bolted, rifles forgotten, scrambling toward the canyon mouth like rabbits flushed from cover.
Ridge's .308 cracked once from the rim. One of the runners went down, clutching his leg, screaming.
The man on the phone dropped it and ran. Rascal caught him at the bend, drove him face-first into the canyon wall, and put him on the ground with a knee between his shoulder blades.
Lander didn't run.
He dropped into a crouch, pistol up, and fired twice toward Striker's muzzle flash. The rounds sparked off the rock wall—close, controlled, the shots of a man who'd been under fire before.
Then he turned and sprinted deeper into the canyon.
Hatchet followed.
The canyon narrowed to a slot—eight feet wide, walls so close the stars disappeared. Hatchet ran in the green world of his optics, boots slapping wet sand, the echo of Lander's footsteps bouncing ahead of him.
The slot dead-ended at a rock shelter.
A shallow cave, maybe ten feet deep, carved by centuries of water. Lander hit the back wall, spun, and found Hatchet standing at the entrance.
Ten feet between them.
Then five.
Then three.
"Drop it," Hatchet said.
Lander's pistol was up, aimed at Hatchet's chest. His hand was steady. His eyes were hard.
"You're the armorer," Lander said. "The one with the bad hand."
"Bad hand, good aim. Your call."
"Pryce will burn your compound to the ground for this. Everything you have. Everyone you—"
"Pryce sent you to burn a barn with horses inside." Hatchet's voice was flat. Dead. "He sent you to torch an old man's hay and move on his house. He sent you, and you went."
"It's a job."
"It was."
Lander's eyes flickered. The first crack in the calm.
"You burned three horses alive tonight," Hatchet said. "You would've burned the rancher too, if we hadn't come."
"They were just horses."
Hatchet thought of Caroline. On her knees in that barn, smoke pouring over her, dragging a thousand-pound animal through the dark by nothing but her voice and her refusal to quit.
The cold thing in his chest reached his trigger finger.
"They were hers."
He fired twice.
The first round punched through Lander's sternum. The second caught him three inches left—center mass, textbook, the kind of grouping that would have made his drill sergeant proud.
No tremor. No shake. At three feet, the nerve damage was a memory.
Lander hit the back wall of the rock shelter and slid down it, leaving a dark smear on the stone. His pistol clattered to the sand. His mouth worked, trying to form words that wouldn't come.
Hatchet stood over him and watched the light leave his eyes.
It took eleven seconds.
He counted.
"Hatchet." Striker's voice in his ear. "Status."
"Lander's down."
A beat. "Confirmed kill?"
Hatchet looked at the body. At the man who burned things for a living, now cooling on the floor of a cave that would be his grave.
"Confirmed."
"Copy. Ridge has one wounded, one surrendered at the canyon mouth. Rascal's got the third zip-tied at the bend. Canyon's clear."
"Leave the wounded. Take the prisoner." Hatchet holstered his pistol. "And bring me the phone."
The phone was a burner—cheap plastic, prepaid minutes, the kind you bought at a gas station and threw away. Hatchet scrolled through the call history. One number, dialed six times in the last hour.
Pryce.
Lander had been calling Pryce. Begging for help. And Pryce had let him die in a canyon without sending a single man.
Hatchet pocketed the phone. Evidence. Leverage. Another piece of the puzzle that would put Pryce in the ground.
Three lieutenants. Three dead.
Munn. Schaefer. Lander.
The muscle, the brains, the arsonist. All gone. Pryce's entire operation stripped down to the man himself, alone and unprotected.
He'd know by morning. If he didn't know already.
The ride back to the Compton ranch took fifteen minutes.
Hatchet pushed his bike hard, the night air cold against his face, the adrenaline fading into something deeper. Heavier.
Three men dead by his hand in two weeks. Three men who'd earned it—who'd burned and beaten and poisoned their way across the Panhandle until someone stopped them.
He'd stopped them.
And he'd do it again. As many times as it took. For his brothers, for the territory, for the woman who ran into burning barns because she couldn't stand to hear horses scream.
The Compton ranch appeared in his headlight. The barn was a skeleton of black timber and glowing embers, the hay stores still smoldering. Emergency lanterns cast pools of yellow light across the yard.
Hatchet parked and swung off his bike.
He found her in the south pasture.
Caroline was walking a mare in slow circles under the stars. The animal moved beside her on a loose lead, its breathing labored but steady, its head low and trusting. Smoke stains darkened its flank. Burns marked its shoulder where an ember had landed.
But it was walking. Breathing. Alive.
Caroline looked up as he approached.
Her face was streaked with soot. Her jacket was singed at the collar. Her eyes were red-rimmed from smoke and exhaustion.
She was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.
"Lander?" she asked.
"Dead."
She nodded. Kept walking the mare. One circle. Two.
Hatchet fell into step beside her. Their shoulders touched. The mare blew out a long, shuddering breath and kept walking.
"All three made it," Caroline said. "The draft horse and the gelding are in the east paddock. This one needed more work—her lungs took the worst of it."
"She's walking."
"She's tough." Caroline's hand stroked the mare's neck. "Tougher than she looks."
"I know the feeling."
She glanced at him. A ghost of a smile.
They walked in silence. Circle after circle, the mare's breathing slowly steadying, the embers of the barn dying behind them. The stars wheeled overhead—the vast Panhandle sky, bigger than anything, indifferent to the violence that happened beneath it.
"That's three," Caroline said quietly. "Munn, Schaefer, Lander. All three of his lieutenants."
"All three."
"So it's just Pryce now."
"Just Pryce."
The mare stopped walking. Lifted her head. Blew out one final, deep breath and started grazing on the dry grass at her feet.
Caroline watched her for a moment. Then she turned to Hatchet.
"He knows you're coming for him."
"Good." Hatchet took her hand. Laced his fingers through hers—soot-stained, calloused, steady. "I want him to know."