2. Sniper
two
Sniper
I wasn’t sweating despite the hundred-ten-degree blast. I didn’t sweat much anymore, not from heat, not from nerves. The only time I ever felt it was when I got home, and Jasmine put her hands on me, but that was a different kind of fire.
I shifted up, let the RPMs drop, and watched the rental Harley pack in my rearview shrink to nothing.
Six of them, all big frames and bigger mouths, every one with a rental contract tucked into a backpack.
I’d clocked their patches at the Bullhead City gas stop: “Ghost Riders” in Comic Sans, like a joke that cost too much.
Weekend warriors from Orange County, shirts too clean, faces sunburned on day two of three.
They’d pulled up next to me at the pump, one of them making noises about my “retro build,” like I gave a shit.
I didn’t look up, just filled my tank and went inside to piss.
On the way out, the leader tried to say something about how my front tire was “off-brand.” I didn’t correct him, because it was. I liked it that way.
Bram always said to judge a man by how much he needed to be seen.
If he came in loud, he’d go out louder. If he acted invisible, it was because he’d learned to survive that way.
I never did like noise. That was why I ran Kingman the way I did.
Clean, tight, no open beef unless it mattered.
The older crowd thought I was soft for it.
They never saw the math I did: how many favors owed, how many routes untraced by the feds, how many sons of bitches I kept alive and out of prison by not being idiots in the daylight.
Kingman sat on three arteries—west from Flagstaff, east from Needles, south down the 93 from Vegas.
Every cartel that mattered, and a few that didn’t, tried to pass their shit through here.
If we wanted to keep our place at the table, it meant we didn’t tip the cops off with a parade.
That didn’t mean I was above sending a message, though. Sometimes the only way to quiet a rumor was to bury it six feet down. I’d done that twice this year. People remembered.
The desert passed in static, creosote scrub flashing by on both sides, the heat line smearing the horizon like someone had melted the sky and poured it over the road.
At the edge of my vision, dust devils spun up and collapsed, brief and pointless.
I checked the side mirror again—no sign of the rentals. Good.
The bike’s bars buzzed under my hands, nothing but the engine and the wind.
I kept my eyes on the road, but my mind roved ahead: the meeting with Decker in an hour, the drop with the boys from Colorado, Jasmine’s schedule at the shop, and whether she’d finally get a straight answer out of the supplier who kept shorting us on parts.
She hated being lied to more than anything. That was one thing we agreed on. Everything else was compromise, but not that.
The city limits peeled up out of the desert with all the subtlety of a boot to the head. You could smell Kingman before you saw it—burnt rubber, refineries, old diner grease.
The Chevron off Andy Devine Avenue had a pump with a “NO PREMIUM” sign duct-taped over the display, and the building’s front windows were half-covered by black plastic where the A/C couldn’t keep up.
I wheeled in, killed the engine, and let the silence hit like a weight.
It was the kind of silence that made your ears ring if you sat in it long enough.
Inside, the clerk didn’t look up, just pointed at the water cooler behind the register. I took both bottles left, paid cash, and went back outside. My phone didn’t have signal. It was always like that for a couple blocks around this part of town, like the tower gave up out of spite.
I set my ass on the curb in the shade of the pump canopy, twisted the cap off a bottle, and drank half of it without stopping. My brain felt cooler before my body did.
Jasmine. I thumbed her name in my contacts. The photo was two years old, a side profile of her laughing at something I’d said, which I didn’t remember saying. She hated the picture. I’d kept it because every time I saw it, it reminded me she had better things to do than humor me. Kept me honest.
I hit call. Four rings, then voicemail. She was probably in the bay, back corner where the signal got eaten by metal walls and rebar. I waited for the beep, then kept it short: “Be home by two. Miss your face.”
I hung up, finished the bottle, and crushed it flat. I watched the traffic for a minute. A family in a minivan full of fried chicken and arguments. A red 1969 Impala with no hubcaps. Nothing to notice.
I got back on the bike, thumbed the starter, and let the engine drown out anything else.
Kingman was waiting.
***
The gate at the compound was chain-link and razor wire, ten feet high, locked with an old padlock that had seen more action than half the chapter combined.
The entry code changed every two weeks, and the motion sensor at the top was wired to a siren that went off every time someone tried to hop it.
We’d run the numbers—anyone not in the system got about twelve seconds before Blaze, or I, could be out the door with something loaded.
I throttled down, rolled up slow, and hit the remote clipped to my belt. The motor whined, the gate dragged itself aside, and I was inside before the dust even settled.
The yard was poured concrete, crisscrossed with cracks and oil stains, ringed on all four sides by corrugated steel walls.
The mechanic bay was open to the left, two prospects elbow-deep in a Dyna’s guts.
Sweat poured off them, cutting rivers through their dirty T-shirts, and the bike itself looked like someone had stolen it and tried to reverse-engineer Harley’s mistakes.
I clocked the pile of tools—scattered, disorganized—and the fact that neither of them was wearing gloves.
They’d learn, or they’d bleed out, and then they’d really learn.
To the right, the communal kitchen: a long prefab, always smelling of burnt coffee, cigarettes, and whatever Jasmine had last microwaved. There was a “NO LOITERING” sign above the door. Nobody ever obeyed it.
Blaze waited for me just outside the bay, arms folded, grease rag shoved in his back pocket. He was a walking cautionary tale: bald, wide as a semi axle, neck tattoo so faded you couldn’t tell if it was a skull or just ink gone rotten. His boots looked new. He must’ve gotten them yesterday.
“Two minutes late,” he said. He didn’t look at a watch. He didn’t own one. His body just kept time.
“Highway was a mess,” I said. “Rental parade out of Bullhead. Six deep.”
He snorted. “Ghost Riders?”
“They wish.”
He grinned—an expression that made him look less human and more like a cinder block with teeth. “You get the sample?”
I nodded, handed him the envelope from my jacket. He flipped it open, checked the contents, and stuffed it into his jeans. No ceremony, just business.
We walked toward the bike bay, sunlight baking off the hood of the ‘04 Silverado parked near the wall. “Walk me through the next drop,” I said.
He started ticking off details like we were ordering takeout. “Tuesday, five p.m., old casino lot on 68. Two crates, labeled as farm equipment, but it’s not. We’re running it to Vegas, hand-off. Their guy’s new, supposed to be a test run.”
“Quantities?”
“Forty, but I think they’re sandbagging. I’ll run a check.”
We paused while a couple of prospects hustled past, one of them clutching a carburetor like it was a goddamn newborn. Blaze didn’t even look at them.
He went on. “The contact wants to move up the window by four days. Says there’s pressure from his end.”
I frowned. That was a bigger change than I liked. “Reason?”
“Didn’t say, but I got ears. There’s a play coming from the east—maybe the Russians, maybe a cartel. They’re nervous.”
I stopped, leaned against the steel wall, and squinted at the sun. “And the route?”
He paused, then pulled out a battered spiral notebook and ran a dirty finger down the page. “Normal corridor, but with the time crunch, we’d be running right past Kingman. I don’t love it.”
“State Troopers have a new checkpoint there. Saw it myself this morning. They’re bored, looking for anything to make quota.”
Blaze nodded. “Could go through Yucca; detour adds an hour, but it’s safer.”
“No,” I said. “Stick to the plan. A detour means more eyes, more exposure. If we can’t clear the window by then, we pull it.”
He looked at me, waiting for the rest. I gave it to him: “But get a read on the trooper schedule, shift change, whatever. If you can’t find it, call in a favor from Amber at the diner. She talks to half those guys before noon.”
He grunted with approval. “Will do. And the buyers?”
“Tell them we’re on their timeline, but if they pull a stunt, they pay double next run. Get word to them by end of day.”
Blaze nodded again, but slower. “Copy.”
I pushed off the wall. “Anything else?”
He glanced at the prospects, now trying to muscle the Dyna onto a lift and almost dropping it. “Just that your new guy doesn’t know shit about bikes.”
“Which one?” I asked, not because I cared, but because Blaze always had an opinion.
“The short one. Can’t remember if it’s Denny or Cal. Looks like he could bench-press a lawnmower but probably can’t spell it.”
I watched as Denny (yeah, that was the one) lost his grip on the lift arm and nearly pinched his finger off. Cal just laughed, which was a rookie mistake. You never laughed until the other guy was gone.
“They’ll figure it out,” I said.
“Or they won’t,” Blaze said, half a smile. “You know we got three new prospects coming next month?”
“Tell them to bring their own tools.”
He grunted. “You want me to pull the Dyna until they stop fucking up?”
“No,” I said. “Let it ride. Gives them something to do besides argue.”
Blaze wiped his hands on the rag and spat into the dirt. “Heard anything from Jasmine?”
I shook my head. “She’s busy. Inventory again.”
He nodded, but didn’t believe it. Or maybe he did, but just didn’t care. Blaze had only one true loyalty, and it was to the spreadsheet in his skull where he tracked who owed what and who was disposable.
I started for the main office, boots making dull echoes on the concrete. I glanced back at the prospects. Denny’s vest had a chain hanging from the side, loose, like he’d never figured out how to finish the patching job. I clocked it, made a note to myself, then put it away.
There was always something to fix. But not everything needed fixing right away.
The main office was barely a room. More of a shipping container converted with leftover drywall and the kind of military surplus furniture that would survive a direct hit. I left the door open behind me, the hinges squealing once before giving up.
Inside was a metal desk, paperwork in razor-straight stacks, a topographic map of the Kingman corridor pinned on the wall with four red push pins—one for each place you could move something in or out without anyone noticing.
The map was older than I was, and the edges curled from sun exposure, but I liked the way it lied about permanence.
The filing cabinet to my left had a bottle of Maker’s Mark, half full, on top.
Nobody touched it unless I poured it for them.
I dropped into the desk chair, kicked my boots up, and fished my phone from the jacket. No new messages. No calls. The time at the top said 2:17, which meant Jasmine was already 17 minutes late. Not a world record, but not nothing.
I told myself she was in the shop’s back corner, cussing out the inventory system or wrestling with that supplier again.
The last time, she’d chased a guy out of the building for shorting her on brake fluid, then spent an hour scrubbing his footprints off the tile. That was her. Didn’t do half-measures.
I set the phone face-up on my thigh and looked at the map. I tried to see the day’s drop as a series of moves—arrows on a chessboard, each one predictable, each outcome already determined. I liked when things went by the math. People made sense when you tracked them as variables.
A full minute passed. I counted it by the second hand on the wall clock, ticking so loud it had to be a joke.
I picked up the phone again, checked the bars. Two, then one, then zero. I set it back down.
The world outside was silent, except for the distant sound of a prospect somewhere misjudging a torque wrench. Decker was probably grilling them for the mistake right now, but I didn’t hear it. It was too quiet in here. I didn’t like it.
I thumbed through the call log, like maybe I’d missed something. Nothing. The last text from Jasmine was the heart emoji, black, her way of not saying she loved me in words. She did it so I’d have to guess, to keep me from getting soft. I let it work.
Another minute. I picked up the phone. Still nothing. Jaw tightened, muscle pulsing once. I told myself not to call again. She hated being checked on. I didn’t want to be the guy who hovered.
I stared at the map, phone balanced on my leg, boot sole pressing a groove into the front of the desk.
There was a feeling. Not worry, not yet. Just a prickling behind the ribs, like a sliver of something sharp and invisible. I held it there, didn’t move, didn’t speak.
And in that little silence, I waited for the next move.