The Biker the Sheriff Was Meant to Hate

Prologue

Three Years Gone

~

He'd made worse ones. He was about to make a worse one tonight, most likely, and he kept riding anyway.

The text had come in an hour earlier, five words from a burner number he'd made a kid memorize instead of save: He's going out tonight.

Cody Ames was twenty-two, filed paperwork for the county three days a week, and had no business knowing anything that mattered to anyone.

But he swept the wrong hallway sometimes, stayed late when nobody else did, and he'd learned early on that if he heard something that sounded like it might end with a name in a ditch, he told Silas, and Silas made it go away before it could.

Tonight there wasn't going to be time for that kind of quiet fixing.

Tonight there was only time to try and stop it before it happened.

Sheriff Tom Doyle's cruiser sat already parked at the falls overlook, engine off, parking lights burning two dull red points in Silas's mirror a hundred yards back.

Doyle had picked the spot on purpose. Public enough that nobody could call it an ambush.

Empty enough that nobody would see two men who were supposed to hate each other standing in the same gravel lot after midnight.

Silas killed his engine early and walked the last stretch, because a man on a moving bike looked like a threat, and a man walking one looked like he had something to say.

"You're out past your bedtime, Vaughn." Doyle didn't turn around. He stood with his hands shoved in his jacket pockets, looking out at the black nothing where the falls should have been, badge catching a thin edge of moonlight on his chest.

"Heard you're headed to the old Kessler grain depot tomorrow." Silas kept his voice even, the same voice he used on a room full of men who didn't want to be told what to do. "Heard you think you're close to something out there."

That turned him around. Three years of watching each other across a county's worth of bad blood had taught Silas exactly what the sheriff's face did in the second before it decided to be angry — a tightening at the jaw, a stillness that wasn't calm so much as coiled.

"You keeping tabs on my investigation now."

"I'm telling you not to go."

"You're telling me." Doyle laughed, short and without any real humor in it, and closed the distance until Silas could see the exhaustion carved under his eyes — three years' worth, the kind that came from chasing something nobody else believed was there.

"You've got some nerve, riding out here in the dark to tell a sheriff what he can and can't investigate.

What's the matter, Judge? Getting warm?"

The name landed the way it always did, a title Silas had earned the hard way and never once corrected, because the truth underneath it was worse than the reputation people had built on top of it. He let it pass over him the way he let most things pass over him now.

"The depot isn't what you think it is. And whoever's feeding you the idea that it is wants you out there for a reason that has nothing to do with catching anybody."

"And you'd know that how."

That was the question he couldn't answer.

Not without a name attached to it — a kid with a mop and a filing cabinet key who'd be dead inside a week if this conversation ever traced back to its source.

Fifteen years had taught Silas exactly how much a man could say without saying the one thing that mattered, and tonight it sat in his mouth like ash.

"You'll have to take it without the how."

"That's convenient." Doyle's voice had dropped quiet, which was worse than loud ever was.

"You ride out here at midnight with a warning and no reason on God's green earth I should believe it, from the man half this county thinks killed a nineteen-year-old kid outside the Roadhouse fifteen years back — and you want me to just take your word for it. "

There it was. Fifteen years, and it still found its way into every conversation they ever had, a wound Silas had let the whole town misdiagnose because the real one would have cost more lives than the misdiagnosis ever had.

He didn't correct it. He never corrected it.

He'd stopped expecting to, somewhere around year ten.

"I want you to stay off that road tomorrow. That's all I'm asking."

"Why do you care?" Doyle asked, and for one unguarded second something moved under the hostility that looked almost like a real question. "You've spent three years watching me try to put your club in the ground. Why would you ride out here at midnight to save my life?"

Silas didn't have an answer that wouldn't cost him more than he had left to spend.

Not the debt he still carried from a night neither of them talked about.

Not the daughter he'd never met but had heard about from three different people in three different tones — Doyle's girl, sharp as a tack, going to make a hell of a deputy someday — who had no idea her father was three days from a lead that wasn't real and a road that wasn't safe.

Not fifteen years of silence that had taught him precisely how this kind of conversation went when a man had already decided not to hear it.

"Because you're wrong about who the enemy is," Silas said finally. "And I'd rather you find that out alive than the other way."

Doyle studied him a long moment, rain finally starting to needle down between them in thin cold threads, and something in his face suggested he almost believed it. Almost.

"I've built three years on the idea that men like you don't tell the truth," Doyle said. "I'm not about to throw that out because you rode out here looking sincere about it."

"Tom—"

"Don't." Doyle held up a hand, and the exhaustion in his voice had turned colder now, more final than tired.

"I appreciate the theater. I do. But I know exactly what you are, and I know exactly what your club protects, and I've come too far chasing it to stop three miles short because you asked me nicely in the rain. "

He walked back to the cruiser without looking back. Silas stood in the wet gravel and watched him go, and knew — the way he'd learned plenty of things too late in his life — that there wasn't another sentence in him that wouldn't cost a kid his life for nothing.

"You're making a mistake," he said, to Doyle's back, because it was true and because it was all he had left to give.

"Wouldn't be my first." The cruiser door shut. The engine turned over. The taillights pulled away down the switchback, two red points shrinking smaller and smaller into the wet dark, until the road took them and there was nothing left but rain and the sound of Silas's own breathing.

He didn't go home. He rode the long way instead, out past the depot and around it twice, looking for anything that would tell him when or how it was going to happen, and found nothing but locked gates and dark windows and his own bad feeling riding along behind him like a second passenger.

His VP was waiting at the clubhouse when he got back, which told him something had already gone wrong before a single word was spoken.

"Cody called again," Marcus said. "Twenty minutes ago. Said there was a call on the county scanner. Single vehicle, the switchback below the falls."

Silas didn't sit down. He stood in the doorway of his own clubhouse with rain still dripping off his cut onto the floor and listened to the rest of it — no other vehicle involved, no clear cause yet, county units already on scene, an ambulance that hadn't needed to hurry.

Sheriff Tom Doyle, pronounced dead at 2:47 that morning, on a road he'd been told twelve hours earlier not to take.

Silas sat down then, on the arm of the old couch that had been in that clubhouse longer than half the men who used it, and let it settle over him the way bad news always settled — slow, then all at once.

He knew two things with the kind of certainty that didn't need evidence yet.

The first was that whatever happened on that switchback tonight had nothing to do with a wet turn or a tired man's bad luck, and everything to do with someone who'd gotten close enough to something to be worth silencing.

The second was that by sunrise, the whole town would believe the Kingsmen had done it, and he was going to let them.

Because the truth — that Tom Doyle had died chasing a threat that wore a suit and sat on the county commission instead of a cut and rode a Harley — was a truth Silas had no proof of yet, a truth that would get a twenty-two-year-old kid killed the moment it left this room, a truth nobody in Amber Falls was ready to hear from the man they'd already decided was the villain of it.

Marcus was watching him from across the room, waiting for orders, the way he always did when Silas went quiet like this.

"We say nothing," Silas told him. "We let them think whatever they're going to think. And we find out who actually did this before we say a word about who didn't."

Marcus didn't argue. He never did, not about this. He just nodded once, hard, and went to wake the rest of them.

Silas sat alone a while longer, thinking, against his own better judgment, of the daughter.

Somewhere in this county a girl was about to wake to the worst phone call of her life, and somewhere down the road — not tonight, not soon, but somewhere — she was going to grow up believing a man had killed her father in cold blood, when the truth was that man had spent his last honest conversation with Tom Doyle trying to keep him alive, and had nothing left to show for it but a silence he didn't know how to put down.

He folded the guilt small, the way he'd learned to fold down every piece of guilt that had nowhere safe to go, and went out into the wet dark to tell the rest of his club that the sheriff was dead, and that whatever came next, the Kingsmen would wear the blame for it the way they always had.

It was easier that way.

It had always been easier that way.

He just hadn't learned yet what it would cost him three years on, the first time Doyle's daughter looked him dead in the eye and told him exactly what she thought he was.