Page 35 of Reaper

The club had been awake for hours. I’d heard them through the door of my quarters—boots on concrete, radios crackling, the low exchange of instructions that had started sometime before first light and hadn’t stopped. I’d dressed in the amber glow of the lamp Lila hadn’t turned off. My shoulder was stiff. The ache from the east-gate fight had settled into something dull and permanent overnight, and when I pulled my shirt over my head I felt the muscle protest, a tightness that ran from my collarbone to the base of my neck. I worked it once. Rolled the joint, felt the ache loosen by a fraction, not enough. My knuckles had scabbed over. The split skin had dried to a dark crust, the blood brown and hard in the creases, and when I flexed my fingers the scabs cracked and a thin line of fresh red welled along the deepest cut. I wiped it on my jeans and kept moving.

The cut waited on the locker hook. Leather heavy in my grip, the club’s patch rough against my palm, and when I slipped it on the weight settled across my shoulders the way it always did—familiar, certain, the heft of something that had belonged to me for so long I’d stopped noticing it was there until I took it off. I checked my weapon. Dragged the slide, felt the round chamber, holstered. The leather creaked. The sound was small in the quiet room, and Lila stirred on the cot but didn’t wake. Her hair was wild on the pillow. One arm thrown above her head, the bruise on her forearm visible in the amber light, dark against her skin. I stood in the doorway for a moment. Just a moment. Then I closed the door behind me and walked down the corridor toward the lot.

The seniors were already outside.

Six of them. Maybe seven. Spread across the gravel in that loose formation men fall into when they’re gearing up for something that doesn’t require discussion. Saddlebags buckled. Holsters checked and rechecked. Jacket zippers dragged up against the cold, the sound of the teeth closing carrying in the still air. One of them was loading magazines at the tailgate of a pickup—the metallic click of rounds seating, one after another, a rhythm so steady it could have been machinery. Another was testing the action on a shotgun, working the pump twice, the sound sharp and final against the gravel.

Nobody spoke. Not about what was coming. Not about the gate or the prospect or the forty-eight hours Gauge had been given. They didn’t need to. The math had been settled in the chapel. What was left was movement, and movement didn’t require words.

I crossed the lot to my bike.

The Harley sat where I’d left it. Dust on the tank from the ride back from the festival, the chrome catching the weak morning light and throwing it back dull. I swung my leg over. The seat was cold through my jeans. I keyed the ignition, thumbed the starter, and the engine caught on the first try—a low, gut-deep rumble that carried across the gravel and died against the clubhouse walls.

Other bikes turned over.

One by one. Not all at once. The sound built from a single growl into something layered, textured—deeper notes from the older engines, sharper cracks from the ones that had been rebuilt with aftermarket pipes. The vibration carried through the gravel and into the soles of my boots, a low hum that I felt in my chest, the way you feel a second heartbeat. Someone revved. Once. Hard. The engine note climbed, held at the peak for a beat, then settled back into idle, and the sound of it carried across the lot and died against the scrub pine beyond the fence line.

I rolled my shoulder. The stiffness had eased some. Not enough to forget it was there, but enough that the range of motion was clean. I’d be sore by midday. Sorer by night. Sore in the way that comes from using damaged tissue and knowing you’re going to pay for it later.

Gauge approached from the clubhouse. Cut on, radio clipped to his belt, his eyes doing that quick scan they always did—taking in the lot, the bikes, the men, reading the readiness the way he read everything. He stopped beside my front wheel. Didn’t speak right away. Just stood there with his hands loose at his sides and his breath fogging in the cold air, and the silence between us said what needed saying about the forty-eight hours I’d given him and the fact that he hadn’t argued about it.

“North strip first,” he said. “Then the liquor stores. Then the county line if I have to push it.”

I nodded. Once. Sharp. A nod that carried the certainty of a handshake and a blood oath combined.

He turned. Walked toward his own bike—an older Softail, paint faded to something closer to the color of the sky than the black it had started as—and swung his leg over with the ease of a man who’d been doing this longer than some of the prospects had been alive.

The engines idled. The sound built. Not a roar yet—a rumble, steady, patient, the sound of machines waiting for the signal to move. I felt it in my chest. In my hands on the grips. In the soles of my boots where the vibration came up through the gravel and into the bone.

I didn’t look back at the building.

Didn’t need to. The clubhouse sat behind me, concrete and steel, the east gate still ruined, the security light above it dark now that the sun was up. The windows were mostly dark too. Most of them. Except one.

The amber glow from my quarters window was visible from the lot. A warm square of light against the gray morning, steady, unchanging. Lila hadn’t turned it off. Whether she was still asleep or awake and sitting on the edge of the cot with her bruised ribs and her eyes on the door, I couldn’t tell from here. Didn’t matter. The light was on. That was the thing. The light was on, and it would be on when I came back, or it wouldn’t, and either way it was a fact I was carrying with me the same way I was carrying the cut on my back, the weapon on my hip and the forty-eight hours Gauge had been given to find a location instead of a body count.

The first bike rolled out.

Then the second. Then the third. Engines climbing, tires biting gravel, the sound building from individual notes into that low, rolling thunder that carries for miles on still mornings. I twisted the throttle. Felt the response in the seat, in the grips, in the particular way the machine came alive under me when the RPMs climbed. The gravel spat from my back tire. The cold air hit my face fresh, and I felt it in my lungs like something waking up.

The amber light stayed on. Visible in my peripheral vision as the lot fell away behind me, a warm square against the gray, getting smaller with each yard of road until the trees took it and the morning swallowed the last of the clubhouse and there was nothing ahead but road and whatever waited at the end of it.

I didn’t look back. The light was enough.

Chapter 12

REAPER

The fairgrounds had been dead for years before the Kings moved in. I could smell it from fifty yards out—damp straw gone sour, mud that never dried, the rot of wood left to weather too many seasons without paint. The ticket booth at the front entrance listed to one side, its awning collapsed in a rusted heap, orange and black bunting hanging off the chain-link fence in strips that the wind pulled at without enthusiasm. Broken jack-o’-lantern lights strung along the main concourse blinked on and off in no particular pattern, the bulbs weak and yellow, some of them dead entirely, leaving dark gaps in the line like missing teeth.

I moved at the front, knuckles white around the grip of my piece, breathing coming in slow, measured pulls. The ground under my boots was soft, damp straw over old mud, footing that would slow a man who didn’t know how to place his weight. I did. The men fanned out behind me in the formation we’d run a dozen times, spacing tight enough to cover each other’s backs and wide enough that a single shot couldn’t catch two.

The fairgrounds opened up around us. Overturned game booths with faded prizes still hanging from hooks, the glass fronts spiderwebbed and dark. A dunk tank on its side, the tank split, the seat dangling from a single chain. The carousel sat frozen mid-rotation, its peeling horses locked in poses that had stopped making sense when the power cut out. One of them had lost its head. The stump of its neck caught the weak light from the jack-o’-lantern strings and threw it back dull, like something that had given up trying to look like anything at all.

The smell got worse the deeper we went. Mildew rising off the damp wood, something sweet and gone bad underneath it. The wind pulled through the concourse in slow, uneven gusts, carrying the creak of the carousel’s mechanism, a low, grinding complaint from metal that hadn’t stopped trying.

I counted the seconds in my head. Forty-three. Forty-four. The men kept pace behind me, boots finding the soft ground without stumbling, weapons low and ready, the quiet of men who’d done this enough times that what was coming had settled into muscle instead of thought.

At fifty-seven seconds, the Kings’ guards showed.