Chapter 14
Milepost hit the highway at ninety and pointed east.
Decker's truck was a half mile ahead—taillights bouncing on the dark asphalt, running hard toward the state line. Three men in the cab, the arsonist behind the wheel, Oklahoma forty miles out and getting closer with every second.
He wasn't going to make it.
Milepost knew this road. Every mile of it.
Every turnoff, every rest stop, every dead stretch where the shoulder dropped into a drainage ditch.
He'd ridden it solo in the dark more times than he could count, mapping it into muscle memory the way Nina mapped chord progressions—by feel, by repetition, by the particular instinct of a man who lived on asphalt.
He keyed the radio on his handlebar. "Striker."
"Go."
"Decker's eastbound on 66, running hot. I'm on his tail."
"Copy. Rascal and I are on County Road 14—it runs parallel, hits the highway at the Glenrio overpass."
"That's twelve miles ahead. Can you make it?"
"We'll make it." Striker's voice had that edge—the one that meant the chess player had already seen the endgame. "Ridge?"
Ridge's voice, steady as always. "Holding the highway exit at mile marker 38. If he gets past you, he doesn't get past me."
Three points on a closing triangle. Decker was running into a net he couldn't see.
Milepost dropped his head behind the windscreen and pushed the Harley harder. The engine screamed, the wind tore at his cut, and the gap between his front wheel and Decker's tailgate shrank.
A mile ahead, the highway crossed a dry creek bed on a concrete bridge—two lanes, steel guardrails, the kind of structure that looked like nothing until you hit it at speed.
Milepost had clocked it on three different solo runs.
Narrow approach. Guardrails tight on both sides. No shoulder, no escape.
A bottleneck.
His radio crackled. Nina's voice, cutting through the static. "Milepost."
"Go."
"Amp's recovered. Backup guitar's safe. Harlan's hosing down the stage—or what's left of it."
Something eased in his chest. Her gear. Her lifeline. Safe.
"Copy," he said. "Stay with Harlan."
"Be careful."
"Too late for that."
He killed the radio and closed on Decker's truck.
The bridge was a quarter mile ahead. Decker saw it—saw the guardrails narrowing the road, saw the concrete abutment rising out of the dark. His brake lights flared, the truck slowing for the approach.
Milepost didn't slow down.
He swung wide to the left, pulling alongside the truck on the oncoming lane. The passenger window was down—he could see the men inside, see the panic on their faces as a motorcycle appeared out of the dark beside them at highway speed.
The man in the passenger seat raised a pistol.
Milepost swerved into the truck.
Not a collision—a nudge. His front wheel came within inches of the driver's door, and Decker flinched. The truck jerked right, tires hitting the rumble strip, and Milepost swung left again as the bridge approach closed in.
Decker overcorrected. The truck's rear end broke loose on the concrete, tires shrieking, and the vehicle slid sideways into the bridge abutment with a sound like the world ending.
Metal screamed. Glass exploded. The truck's passenger side crumpled against the concrete pillar, and the vehicle spun a full rotation before slamming to a stop against the guardrail. Steam erupted from the ruptured radiator, mixing with dust and the smell of leaking fuel.
Milepost braked hard, laid the bike down in a controlled slide, and was on his feet before the dust settled.
The passenger was done—the abutment had taken the right side of the cab and everything in it. The man in the back seat was crawling out through the shattered rear window, bloody and dazed. Milepost hit him once, hard, and he dropped to the asphalt.
Decker kicked open the driver's door and stumbled out.
He was hurt. Blood running from a gash above his eye, left arm hanging wrong, glass glittering in his hair. But he was standing, and the look on his face wasn't fear.
It was annoyance.
Like a man whose evening had been interrupted. Like the fires and the destruction and the trail of burned stages he'd left across the Panhandle were just a job, a task on a list, and this was an inconvenience.
"Route 66," Decker said, spitting blood. "Should've figured."
"You burned her stages." Milepost walked toward him. Slow. Certain. "Every venue she played. Every stage she stood on."
"That's what I do." Decker backed against the guardrail, eyes calculating, looking for an opening that didn't exist. "Russell pays, I burn. Nothing personal."
"It's personal to me."
Decker's good hand went for something at his belt—a knife, short-bladed, the kind of tool a man who worked with accelerant kept for cutting fuel lines.
Milepost caught his wrist and twisted until the knife clattered to the pavement. Decker grunted, tried to swing with his broken arm, and the pain dropped him to one knee.
Milepost grabbed him by the collar and hauled him up.
The guardrail was cold steel under his hands as he slammed Decker into it. The arsonist's back hit the rail and he gasped, legs buckling.
"The Red Dust," Milepost said. He hit him. Open hand, across the jaw, snapping his head sideways. "The Wagon Wheel." Another hit, harder. "The Dusty Spur." A third.
Decker sagged against the guardrail, blood pouring from his nose and mouth. His eyes were still defiant—still carrying that professional detachment, that clinical distance of a man who set fires for money and didn't think about what burned.
"She's just a singer," Decker slurred. "There'll be another one."
Wrong thing to say.
Milepost grabbed his head and drove it into the guardrail.
The steel rang like a bell. He did it again.
And again. Each impact punctuated by the sound of metal singing and bone giving way, and Milepost didn't stop until the arsonist's body went slack and the guardrail was dented and dark with blood.
He let go.
Decker slid down the rail and crumpled onto the bridge deck. The fire specialist from Tulsa who'd burned his way across three counties and enjoyed every minute of it. Done. Finished. Cooling on the concrete like the embers he left behind.
Headlights cut through the dark from the county road.
Striker and Rascal, arriving at the overpass thirty seconds too late to join and right on time to clean up.
Striker's bike pulled up beside the wreck and the Warlord took one look at the scene—the destroyed truck, the bodies, Milepost standing over Decker with blood on his fists—and nodded.
"Clean?"
"Clean enough." Milepost flexed his hands. The knuckles were split again, the cuts from the compound fight reopened. He'd need to stop opening his hands on people's skulls. "Two alive in the truck. Decker's not."
"I see that." Striker dismounted and walked to the guardrail. Looked down at the body. "Russell's going to feel this one. Decker was his best contractor."
"Good. Let him feel it."
Rascal was already checking the wreck, pulling the dazed survivor from the back seat and zip-tying his wrists behind his back. The Sergeant at Arms worked without expression, handling the man's body like cargo.
"Message?" Rascal asked.
Milepost looked at the survivor—a Tulsa hired gun with blood on his face and terror in his eyes. The kind of man who signed up for easy money and just learned the rates had changed.
"Tell Russell Pace that his family's done on this stretch," Milepost said.
"His nephew's dead. His brother's dead. His arsonist is dead.
Every man he's sent across the state line is either in the ground or running home.
" He crouched beside the man. "Tell him the Route 66 Outlaws are coming for him next. And there won't be a warning."
The man nodded. Fast, desperate, the nod of a man who'd agree to anything if it meant breathing.
"Cut him loose," Milepost told Rascal. "Let him walk to Oklahoma. Give him time to think about what he's going to say."
Rascal cut the zip ties and the man scrambled to his feet, stumbling east along the highway without looking back.
Striker watched him go. "Russell will know we're coming."
"That's the point." Milepost straightened and walked to his bike. The Harley had survived the slide—scraped fairings, a cracked mirror, nothing that would stop it from running. He righted it, checked the engine, and swung on.
"I want the compound assault planned by Saturday," he said. "I know the roads to the Pace compound. I know the guard posts, the vehicle lines, the weak points. We end this before Russell has time to regroup."
Striker's mouth curved. The grin of a man who'd just been told war was coming and couldn't wait to plan it.
"Saturday," he said. "I'll have the brothers ready."
The ride back to the Red Dust took twenty minutes.
The fire was out—or dying, at least. The stage was a skeleton of charred timber and melted tin, smoke still rising from the ruins, the smell of burned wood and gasoline thick in the air.
Harlan's truck was parked sideways with the headlights aimed at the damage, illuminating the destruction in harsh white light.
Milepost pulled into the parking lot and killed the engine.
Nina sat on her amp.
Right there in the gravel, fifteen feet from the smoking ruins of the stage where she'd built her career.
The backup guitar was across her lap, and she was tuning it—head tilted, ear close to the strings, adjusting the pegs with the careful attention of a woman who would not stop working regardless of what the world put in her way.
She looked up when he dismounted. Her eyes went to his hands—the blood, the swelling, the story written in split knuckles.
"Decker?" she asked.
"Done."
She nodded. Plucked a string. Adjusted the tuning peg a quarter turn.
Milepost walked over and stood beside her, looking at the ruined stage. The two-by-fours were ash. The tin roof had collapsed into the debris. The string lights she'd mentioned once—the ones she'd hung herself—were melted into unrecognizable shapes.
"Harlan says he'll rebuild," Nina said, still tuning. "Insurance will cover the structure. He just needs time."
"How much time?"
"Four weeks. Maybe three if the brothers help." She looked up at him, and the firelight caught her eyes—dark, fierce, alive. "My showcase is in four weeks."
He heard what she wasn't saying. The math. The timeline. Everything converging on a single point.
"Then we make sure the stage is ready," he said.
Nina strummed a chord. Clean, bright, the backup guitar ringing out across the parking lot like a declaration. Like a woman planting a flag in the ruins and daring the world to knock it down.
She didn't say anything else. Just kept tuning, kept playing, kept sitting on her amp in the parking lot of a burned roadhouse with the smoke still rising around her.
Milepost leaned against Harlan's truck and watched her play, his bloody hands hanging at his sides, and knew with absolute certainty that he would burn the whole state of Oklahoma to the ground before he let anyone take this from her.