4
We circled back to the crop duster airstrip and started treating it like our own pit garage.
We tested everything. Our tactics, our approach, our mindset. Used space in the hangar to devise mock-ups of floor plans to practice run-through after run-through.
Jules rigged up special riding gloves that lit up near dye packs and helped Cole collect information on targets.
Chief got surgical with his breaching charges, teaching me a thing or two as he tried dialing down the size of the delivery systems. Blowing stuff up in the desert is fun.
Sónia handled vinyl wrapping the bikes. Matte green one week, murdered-out gloss the next—change the look of the bike, change the narrative.
She worked in tandem with Emily, who modified the bikes’ specs.
Swapped forks, tuned ECUs, stiffened suspension for hard landings and rough roads.
Both of them were impressive to watch. Meanwhile, Ricky and Dusty boosted fleet vehicles from impounds, tow yards, and once even a Catholic church—Ricky replacing plates with ones he jacked from similar makes and models.
We used the “borrowed” vehicles as options to get us from town to town unnoticed.
“Trust me, the Lord forgives,” they both said.
We hit five jobs in four weeks. These stranded little banks had no chance—the cavalry was never coming to help them. Each time crossing a state border to cover our tracks.
Cole called it “the refine.”
Each one tighter, faster, and with more payout than the last.
By the third, we didn’t even need to talk. The rhythm was locked in: Kill the power, enter, control the room, take the cash, ride. No casualties, no arrests.
Fast money.
It felt like I was finally in motion—the desert scenery providing the best rides of my life.
I could tell . . .
Emily felt the same way too.
Anybody who’s ever been on a long ride knows how easy it can be to lose track of your riding partners. That stuff you see the Hells Angels pull, where they take up the entire lane with fifty rattling motors, shoulder to shoulder—after a heist we were trying to do the exact opposite of that.
Yet, as fate would have it, Emily and I always rode together. We never explicitly made a plan to pair up. It just kept happening.
You learn a lot about people, riding with them.
Driving in a car, simple things like decisions when to pass a vehicle go unnoticed. But on a superbike you start to see what makes someone tick. The life they want to lead signaled by when they rev the throttle and when they pull the brake, how they shift gears.
The more we rode the endless views of those Southwest roads, the more Emily and I understood each other.
Or so I thought.
One night, after a long ride back from a training run, we sat near the edge of the airstrip on rusted folding chairs, letting the silence speak for a while.
“You ever think about what you’d do with it?” I asked. “The money?”
Emily tilted her head. “Cozy house. Empty road. Maybe a cat.”
I waited, but she didn’t say anything else. “A cat? What about a person to share it with?”
“That’s the hard part, isn’t it?”
Lennox stood inside the mobile ops RV, chewing an impressive amount of nicotine gum, watching the low-res security feed being looped on a mounted monitor. It was video of a dye pack detonating in a motorcycle rider’s backpack mid-sprint—red mist exploding behind a streak of black leather.
Everyone in the RV laughed.
“Run it again,” Lennox said, smiling without joy. He didn’t hate criminals. But he kept a ledger in his head. For every smart kid who went dirty, for every civilian who caught a stray, for every hour spent cleaning up someone else’s bad idea—he tallied the cost to society.
“You rob a bank,” he said, clicking the pen in his hand, “and you think the desert’s going to keep you hidden. It doesn’t. It just buries the stupid ones slower.”
Pop. Fogged. Total confusion. Gone. The rider vanished into a dust trail like nothing happened.
“You ever seen someone eat a dye pack and not downshift?” he asked. “That’s either guts or desperation.”
On the dry-erase board behind him were mugshots and DMV scans: Cole, Chief, Ricky, Sónia, Emily—each tagged with rap sheets, timelines, and known aliases. He tapped his pen against the board. “Any one of them could be that rider. But witnesses at the bank said there were six of them.”
“We’re cross-referencing AMA Superbike rosters for anyone local who vanished off the circuit.” One agent nodded.
“Good. Filter for anyone with a crash, might find leads there. Too fast to be green.”
Another agent leaned in. “Our source says they’re working up to their biggest heist yet.”
Lennox narrowed his eyes. “How reliable is our source?”
“They’re deep in it. I just think they’re trying to play their cards by not telling us everything yet. Says they’re headed west. But we’re still in the middle of negotiating terms with them.”
“Well, what do they want? Immunity? We can give them that . . . Keep them talking.”
Lennox turned back to the monitor. A new video, from a different vantage point, was playing. Lennox paused as the helmeted rider, still dyed red, hit the peak of a stoppie turn. Lennox’s eyes locked on the still frame.
“Whoever this is can fucking ride.”
Top speed is always a number that stays in your head. Ask any rider.
Emily was no different.
She obsessed over tweaking the computer system that governed the bikes’ performance, and one day, after pulling an all-nighter coding, she asked me to go for a ride with her.
Out of nowhere, on a slight downhill stretch among the sandstone buttes of Monument Valley, Emily opened the throttle and blew right past me.
I could tell what she was trying to do: watch the speedometer click up and up until she couldn’t stand it anymore.
This impulse is always there whenever you’re riding a superbike on an open straightaway.
I’d been wary of the top speed I had in my head. It was from my racing days. An old number, now only a fuzzy memory, a story I told so many times I’d stopped believing in it.
But when Emily blew past me, on that day, I was a different person.
So I twisted the throttle with her.
At speeds that fast, the slightest change of focus can kill you—even if you’re lucky enough to slide. A high side. Forget about it.
Emily’s not stupid.
This had to have been on her mind just as much as mine. But she kept shifting gears.
Edging faster. And. Faster.
Our straightaway abruptly ended with a blind turn. One of us was going to have to slow down, or we were both dead. I don’t know what her top speed was, but I still hadn’t reached mine—only a few miles per hour shy.
With few precious seconds left to reach it.
Emily wasn’t giving up.
At the last possible instance, I broke the trance the shriek of the engine had on me and yielded just enough to allow both of us to safely turn.
And I’m glad I did—we barely dodged a minivan filled with a sightseeing family on a wholesome vacation. It makes me shudder to think of what a god-awful crash that would have been.
Emily pulled off the road at a trailhead, the sign directing visitors to natural springs. Left her bike, her helmet, and started walking in a daze. I did the same.
“Holy shit . . .” she said.
“What the fuck were you doing?!” I panted.
Our endorphins were through the roof. She began to undress, leaving a line of clothes on pristine red rock until she was down to just a sheer bra and thong—more revealing than the two-piece she wore to every motel pool. “I needed a witness. Somebody to see.”
“Yeah! But you almost got me killed?”
“You were afraid?”
“Yeah, I was afraid!”
“It’s fucking hot.” She marched into a clear pool of water. She exhaled a breath, hoping to catch her next. “Are you getting in or not?”
Usually I’d never leave my belongings unattended—too many bad experiences of getting my shit stolen back in Alpine. But there, it truly felt like we had the desert to ourselves. And she felt like the first person, other than Cole, that I could trust.
So I followed.
“Don’t ever do that again. It’s not worth it,” I said, my wits finally coming to me.
“Okay, Cole.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Or what?”
The deeper we went in the pool, the more our dopamine fired, our bodies finding themselves inches away from each other, lusting. Too close to resist. Who kissed who first? I don’t know.
The cold from the water couldn’t stop the heat between us.
She wrapped her legs around me, a wave slipping between us as I pinned her against a flat rock just under the surface.
We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. Every movement was breathless, frantic, necessary.
She bit my shoulder to keep from crying out.
I held her hips and let the weight of the world go, just for a few minutes.
Perfection.
But perfection wears thin. Especially when people start believing in it.