Fourteen thousand dollars. Eight months of trust. Twenty-two years old with instincts I’d admired.
Danny: nineteen years old, almost twenty, with that smile asking if he’d proved himself.
I took the water with me and walked out into the afternoon.
My bike was where it had been since the day of Danny’s funeral — in my parking spot next to Colt’s, right where I’d left it. I’d wandered out a few times myself, polishing the same spot for hours at a time. But the real work had been Handful. He’d been out there with a rag and a bucket on days I couldn’t get off the couch, keeping the chrome from going dull, keeping the leather from cracking. I hadn’t asked him to. I hadn’t ridden since the funeral procession.
I stood next to it for a while. Put my hand on the seat. The leather was warm from the sun.
I thought about riding. Just out to the road and back, nothing far. See if the engine still felt the same under me, if the weight of it still made sense.
But then I remembered. Danny was dead. I pulled my hand back and walked inside.
Chapter 21
?
— Holden —
Dutch knocked on my door at seven in the morning and said, “Get your gear.” No explanation. Just that, and then his footsteps heading back down the hall.
I sat up. Looked at the window — gray early light, the compound quiet, the kind of silence that meant the rest of the brothers were still sleeping. I didn’t know what Dutch wanted. I didn’t ask. I got up, got dressed, pulled on my cut.
Dutch had already warmed my bike up for me. He was straddling his, visor up, watching me come across the lot.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“Ride.”
We went north. Not a club route — not a route at all, just Dutch pointing at the highway and going, me keeping pace. The morning was cold and low-cloud, and for the first twenty minutes the road was empty enough that I stopped thinking about where we were going and just felt the bike under me.
Somewhere around mile fifteen, the highway opened up and when Dutch pushed the throttle, I pushed mine without thinking. The engine sound, the road vibration, the particular physical language of a bike at highway speed — it came back before I’d even consciously recognized I’d missed it.
Dutch pulled off at a scenic overlook about forty miles north.
I’d been here once before, years ago, on a run that had gone sideways and needed rerouting. We’d stopped at the samepull-off, maps spread on the seat, trying to work out where to go. I remembered standing here watching the valley below and thinking it was the kind of view you’d put on a postcard if you were the type of person who sent postcards.
We sat on our bikes and looked at it for a while.
“When was the last time you rode for no reason?” Dutch said.
I thought about it. “Don’t remember.”
“Before it was the job?”
“Probably,” I said.
Dutch turned his helmet over in his hands, a slow rotation. “I’ve been watching you plan routes for twelve years. I’ve never met anyone who does it the way you do — the backups, the contingencies, the exit strategies. You’re the reason we’ve never lost a brother on a run.” He paused. “Before Danny.”
I looked at the valley.
“I used to think that was just skill,” he said. He turned to look at me. “Then I watched you fall apart.”
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again it was careful. “You know King. You know what he was like — thought he knew better than everyone in every room he walked into. Drank himself into the wall whenever things went sideways on him, and couldn’t see that the drinking was half the reason things went sideways in the first place.” He looked at the road below. “I spent the first few decades of my life running things tight enough that nothing ever went sideways on me. Trying to be the opposite of him.” He almost smiled. “Didn’t work, obviously.”
I thought about King. The way he’d overrule a route the night before a run because someone had told him something at the bar, or because he just didn’t like being told what to do by someone younger. I’d learned early not to argue. I’d just make the changes quietly — swap the fallback route, adjust the timing, move the tail rider without telling anyone why. The old RoadCaptain, Map, had stayed in the seat years longer than he should have because King didn’t like change, didn’t like admitting that the guys who’d come up with him were slowing down. So I’d backed Map up. Ran the routes in my head, fed him the better options, let him take the credit. Kept everyone safe without anyone having to acknowledge that I was the one doing it.
When Dutch took the gavel and the old guard retired with King, everything shifted. Dutch made me road captain inside of a week. Didn’t even put it to a vote — just told the table that’s how it was going to be. And for the first time, I could plan a run without having to work around the man at the top.
