Wake's Wrath (Ozark Ridgerunners MC #18)

Chapter 1

The stolen boat cut across Lake of the Ozarks at thirty knots, running dark, no navigation lights, nothing but the moon catching the wake as it carved toward the narrows.

Wake opened up the throttle on the club's interceptor and felt the twin outboards scream to life beneath him. The hull lifted, skipping hard across the chop, and the wind ripped tears from his eyes as he closed the gap.

"Got him pinched at Willow Cove," Current's voice crackled through the radio clipped to his cut. "Quarter mile ahead. He's gonna try to thread the channel."

Wake didn't answer. Didn't need to. Current had been reading water since before Wake was born—if he said the runner was heading for the narrows, then the runner was heading for the narrows.

The cove appeared ahead, limestone bluffs rising dark on both sides, the channel between them barely wide enough for two boats to pass.

The stolen vessel—a twenty-four-foot bowrider that belonged to a dock bar owner under Ridgerunner protection—was already committed, engine whining as the thief pushed it harder than the motor wanted to go.

Wake knew that engine. He'd rebuilt it last summer, replaced the impeller and the lower unit seals while the owner bitched about the cost. The 350 MerCruiser could push forty knots on open water, but the thief was running it at redline, and Wake could hear the strain in the exhaust note even from two hundred yards back.

Keep pushing it, asshole. You're doing my job for me.

He cut left, riding the edge of the bluff's shadow, and watched the bowrider commit to the channel.

The thief didn't know these waters. Didn't know that Willow Cove narrowed to a throat about sixty feet across, with a submerged rock shelf on the east side that would rip the outdrive clean off if you didn't know exactly where to steer.

Current's boat appeared at the far end of the channel, running lights blazing, blocking the exit.

The thief panicked. Wake saw the bowrider's bow swing hard left as the runner tried to reverse course, but momentum and physics had other ideas.

The stern kicked out, the hull caught the chop wrong, and suddenly the boat was sliding sideways toward the rock shelf Wake had serviced a dozen motors around.

Wake backed off the throttle and let the interceptor coast, watching the show.

The bowrider's outdrive hit the shelf with a sound like a gunshot. The engine screamed, props chewing air instead of water, and then the whole boat shuddered to a stop, canted at an ugly angle with its stern hung up on submerged limestone.

Wake pulled alongside and killed his engine. The quiet that followed was beautiful—just water lapping against fiberglass and the distant echo of the ruined motor's death rattle fading into the cove.

The thief was young, maybe twenty-two, skinny and tweaking hard enough that Wake could see the tremors in his hands from ten feet away. He stood in the listing cockpit with his fists clenched like he was considering a fight.

"Don't," Wake said. He didn't raise his voice. Didn't need to.

Current's boat eased up on the other side, boxing the wreck in. The Road Captain stood at the helm with his arms crossed, patient as the river he used to guide, waiting to see how this played out.

The tweaker's eyes darted between them. Fight or flight calculations running behind pupils blown wide enough to swallow the night.

Wake had seen that look a hundred times—on drunk tourists at the marina, on locals who thought they could skip their repair bills, on every desperate idiot who didn't understand that the Ozarks had their own rules.

"Boat doesn't belong to you," Wake said. He stepped from the interceptor onto the bowrider's swim platform, the fiberglass groaning under the shift in weight. "Owner's a friend of the club. Which means you stole from us."

The tweaker's hand moved toward his waistband.

Wake hit him before the fingers got there. One punch, direct to the solar plexus, folding him like a lawn chair. The tweaker went down gasping, whatever weapon he'd been reaching for forgotten as his body tried to remember how to breathe.

Wake stepped over him and dropped into the cockpit. The engine compartment was already accessible—the thief had popped the hatch, probably looking for something to steal while he ran. Wake pulled his flashlight, clamped it between his teeth, and got to work.

Eight years of marina grease had taught him every way an engine could die. This one was still trying to run, smoking and grinding, the outdrive shaft bent from the impact with the rock shelf. Wake found the ignition wires by feel, traced them to the starter solenoid, and pulled two connections.

The engine coughed once and went silent.

"She'll need a new lower unit," Wake said, straightening up. "Shaft's bent. Probably cracked the gear housing too."

Current whistled low from his boat. "Owner's gonna love that bill."

"Better than losing the whole boat." Wake grabbed the tweaker by the back of his shirt and hauled him up, dumping him onto the swim platform. "What's your name?"

The kid was still wheezing, tears and snot running down his face. "J-Jeremy. Jeremy Phelps."

"Jeremy." Wake crouched down, getting eye level. The scars on his hands from a decade of prop work caught the moonlight—white lines crossing his knuckles, the permanent calluses of a man who'd bled for his trade. "You know who we are?"

Jeremy's eyes went to the patches on Wake's cut. The Ridgerunners rocker on the bottom. The prospect patch where a full member's would be. Something in his tweaker brain finally connected the dots, and what little color remained in his face drained away.

"I didn't—I didn't know it was—"

"Stop." Wake held up a hand. "You stole a boat from Ridgerunner territory. Ran it through our water. Wrecked it on our rocks. You think it matters whether you knew?"

Jeremy started crying in earnest now. The tough-guy act, whatever chemicals had been fueling it, evaporated completely.

Current brought his boat alongside and tossed Wake a line. "Cottonmouth's waiting at the compound. Says he's got questions about some nomads making noise at the dock bars."

Wake tied off the bowrider's bow cleat with quick, efficient movements—the same knots he'd tied ten thousand times at the marina, back when tying boats was all he was trusted to do. "Nomads?"

"No charter marks. Rolling through the lake bars, causing trouble." Current shrugged. "Could be nothing. Could be something. Either way, Still wants intel."

Every bar on the lake was a bar where Wake had fixed a motor.

Where he'd crawled into engine compartments and rewired starters and replaced water pumps while owners complained about labor costs.

Those bars had been his territory before the club—the only places he'd ever felt like he belonged, grease under his fingernails and a motor problem to solve.

If someone was threatening them, it was personal.

"Get the tweaker to the compound," Wake said. "I'll tow the boat."

Current nodded and hauled Jeremy aboard with zero ceremony. The kid didn't fight—whatever spine he'd had left had dissolved somewhere between the punch and the realization that he'd stolen from men who solved problems with violence.

Wake climbed back into the interceptor and rigged the tow line. The bowrider was taking on water through the cracked stern, listing worse by the minute, but it would make the compound dock if he kept the speed down. He'd dealt with worse.

The trip back took forty minutes. Wake held the throttle steady, navigating by memory and moonlight, reading the water the way Current had taught him.

The lake opened up past the narrows, Party Cove dark and empty on a Tuesday night, the distant lights of Osage Beach glittering on the horizon like a promise the Ozarks never kept.

He thought about the marina while he drove.

Eight years fixing boats for old man Harmon, learning every engine that floated, becoming the best mechanic the lake had ever seen—and then Harmon died, and his worthless son Kyle inherited everything, and Wake got a handshake and a "we're going in a different direction. "

Different direction. Like Kyle knew the difference between a two-stroke and a four-stroke. Like blood meant more than eight years of proving himself through work.

The club didn't promote by bloodline. That was what Still had told him when he prospected, and Wake had believed it because he needed to believe something. You earned your patch through riding and loyalty and blood—your own and other people's. Not through whose son you happened to be.

He pulled the listing bowrider into the compound cove and tied it at the dock, then cut the engine on the interceptor and let the stillness of the lake wash over him.

Cicadas screamed in the trees. The compound's lights glowed warm through the pines.

Somewhere up the hill, he could hear brothers laughing, glass clinking, the low rumble of conversation that meant church had let out and the bar was open.

Home. This was home now. The only one that mattered.

Wake grabbed the disabled engine parts he'd pulled from the bowrider—the ignition wires and the starter solenoid, evidence of the theft and proof of the recovery—and hiked up to the workshop.

Proof was there, as expected, sitting at his workbench with a disassembled rifle spread across the surface like a metal autopsy.

"Recovered the boat," Wake said, dropping the parts on the bench. "Tweaker named Jeremy Phelps. Current's got him."

Proof didn't look up from his work. "Heard the radio traffic. Cottonmouth's looking for you."

"Current mentioned nomads."

"Making noise at the dock bars. No patches anyone recognizes." Proof's hands moved with practiced precision, reassembling the rifle's trigger assembly. "Could be nothing."

Wake thought about every bar on the lake where he'd fixed motors. Where owners knew his name and poured him a beer while he worked. Where the dock girls flirted and the regulars bullshitted and the Ozarks felt like they belonged to people who earned their place in them.

"Could be something," he said.

Proof looked up then, finally, his eyes sharp in the workshop's fluorescent light. "That's what Still said. Prospect meeting tomorrow. Be ready to ride."

Wake nodded and headed for his cabin, the weight of the night settling into his shoulders. The lake fog was already rising, ghosting across the cove, turning the dock lights into halos and the water into smoke.

Somewhere out there, nomads were making noise at bars that had been his world before the club.

He'd find out why.