Part 5 – Blood on the Leather
He didn’t knock.
He didn’t shout.
He just stood in the gray wash of dawn like a tombstone that had learned how to smile.
Reaper kept the pistol level, breath a slow grind in his chest. Inside the cabin, Eli shifted on the couch and Ghost’s nails clicked once on the plank floor, then went still. The woods held their breath with them.
“Morning, Daniel,” the man said softly, tasting the old name like it was a sin. “Or do you still prefer Reaper?”
“Only people who want to die call me Daniel,” Reaper said.
The man’s grin grew. “We always joked about that. Back when brother meant something.” He tilted his head toward the door. “Invite me in. I brought sunrise.”
“Bring your hands where I can see them instead.”
He did. Empty. Bare. But the way the trees behind him didn’t stir told Reaper everything—men out there, holding their breath, holding their steel.
“You came alone?” Reaper said.
“Never.”
They watched each other for a long moment. Thirty years of rot between two heartbeats.
“Hand me the boy,” the man said at last. “And the dog.”
Reaper’s jaw hardened. “You got guts walking up my steps asking for a son who isn’t yours.”
“Oh, he is, in a way.” The man’s eyes slid past Reaper to the dim room where Eli lay. “Blood brings stories. Stories bring power. I protect power.”
“You mean you rewrite it.”
“I keep it neat.”
Reaper took one step onto the porch, closing the distance by inches. “You kept it neat the night you cut Clay’s throat?”
The smile evaporated. Under the beard and the years, Reaper saw what he’d always known: a man who hated the mirror.
“Clay was a problem,” the man said. “He was going to cost us everything.”
“He was going to cost you,” Reaper said. “There’s a difference.”
The man’s eyes chilled. “You should’ve died with him.”
“Yeah,” Reaper said softly. “I should’ve.”
A breeze carried the scent of wet leaves and old pine. Somewhere far off, a crow screamed. The morning didn’t care who remembered what.
Inside the cabin, Eli’s voice—thin, ragged—spilled into the doorway. “What’s his name?”
Reaper didn’t turn. “Don’t feed the wolf, kid.”
“I see him every night,” Eli said, stronger now, stubborn cutting through the pain. “In the same place. A crossroads. Gravel like teeth. A porch light on a burned-out house. I see him laugh while my father bleeds out. He has a name.”
The man chuckled without humor. “Dreams. Children and drunks. They don’t know the difference between stories and truth.”
“Names matter,” Reaper said. “And I’ll say yours when I’m ready to carve it.”
Something moved in the man’s eyes then—fear, maybe, or memory—but it was gone as fast as it came. He took a half step back and snapped his fingers once.
The trees breathed again. Shapes loosened from the bark—broad men with cuts on their backs and guns at their hips. No shouting. No chest-beating. Just the quiet you get before a fellow drops a match.
“Last chance,” the man said. “The boy. The dog. You come with them, maybe I let you see sundown.”
Reaper let the pistol dip an inch—not surrender, just a shift—and in that heartbeat learned everything he needed to know about the morning. The men in the trees were young. Hungry. Teeth polished on secondhand legends. The man on his porch was the only one who remembered the world Reaper came from.
“Yeah,” Reaper said. “Sundown sounds nice.”
Then he moved.
He didn’t fire at the man. He fired past him—two shots hammering the wood rail where a shadow crouched with a rifle, splinters popping into eyes, the rifle clattering. He pivoted, put a third round into the gravel by the steps, a stone ricochet singing death past a second shadow’s ear. The porch exploded into motion.
And Ghost hit the door like a torpedo.
The dog didn’t bark. He launched straight through the man’s legs, a blur of muscle and teeth, knocking him off balance long enough for Reaper to grab the front of his cut and drive him backward into the yard.
Boots thundered from the trees. A shout, two more. The morning tore wide open.
“Eli!” Reaper roared. “On your feet!”
The boy staggered into the doorway, pale and swaying but upright. He had Reaper’s spare revolver in his hand and Ghost was suddenly there again, dragging him by the sleeve toward the side of the cabin.
“Go with the dog,” Reaper snarled over his shoulder. “He knows.”
“Knows what?” Eli gasped.
“Where not to die.”
The man on the ground rolled and came up smooth, a knife blooming in his fist like a bad idea. Reaper’s pistol clicked on an empty chamber. The sound hit the air like a punchline.
They closed.
Steel on steel, leather on knuckles, breath on teeth. Two old wolves testing who’d spent their years better. The man moved like he practiced every morning, clean and mean. Reaper moved like he’d lived through things you don’t practice for.
The knife grazed his ribs. He answered with a headbutt that cracked bone and memory. The man stumbled. Reaper went for the throat.
A gun barked from the trees. Wood exploded by Reaper’s ear. The porch post shivered.
“Back!” the man coughed, blood in his beard. “Don’t hit me, you idiots!”
Reaper took the gift. He slammed the man into the porch rail so hard it screamed, then shoved off and disappeared into the cabin as bullets chewed the doorframe. He grabbed Eli by the belt, hooked him upright, and pushed him toward the back like a wave breaking. Ghost ran ahead, turned, barked once, then raced for the yard like he’d memorized every nail in the place.
“Out,” Reaper hissed. “Move, move.”
They blew through the kitchen, breath and glass and years. The back door kicked open under Reaper’s boot and they spilled into the yard—wet grass, a sagging clothesline, the old stump that still remembered an axe. The tree line hunched close. The woods would swallow them if they made it ten more steps.
Ghost didn’t run for the trees.
He ran to the stump.
He dug.
Eli blinked, stunned. “What is he—”
Ghost’s paws were a blur, claws ripping through loam and matted roots. Dirt flew. Reaper swore and dropped to one knee beside him and started clawing with both hands because somewhere in the back of his head a map unrolled, a map he didn’t know he’d kept—this yard, that stump, a night thirty years ago with Clay laughing and a bottle going around and a promise made with a cigarette pinch: If it all goes to hell, bury it under the only thing that ever told the truth—the stump that kept taking and never gave back.
His fingers hit tin.
He tore it free—a lunchbox once, dented into a new life by rust. Eli hovered, trembling, eyes on the tree line where shadows thickened.
“Open it!” the boy rasped.
Reaper did. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, lay a strip of leather stiff as plate and a crusted ring no soap had ever cleaned. On the leather, in a hand he knew better than his own, four words matched the same on the ring’s inside:
For debts not paid.
Beneath that, a folded letter. Reaper’s name scrawled across the front in Clay’s slanted hand:
Danny—
His throat closed. He didn’t want this. He’d lived a long time not wanting this. He opened it anyway.
Danny, if you made it to this stump, you outlived what I thought you would. Good. Or bad. I never was a prophet.
If the boy found you, then the dog did his work. Don’t ask me how long a dog can carry a promise. Maybe longer than a man.
You need truth, so here it is: I wasn’t supposed to die that night. You were. They spared you because he wanted a ghost on the wind saying his story, not mine. He thinks he owns history if he leaves one brother alive to repeat his lie.
Don’t repeat it.
There’s a place you’ll remember even if you think you forgot—the old creek that bent like a question mark behind the north gully. Follow it until the stones change from gray to red. Put your back to the crooked cedar. Walk four hundred steps. The ground will sound hollow if you stamp it; it always did. That’s where I buried the rest.
If you make it that far, you’ll have to choose: put it all back in the dirt and go quiet, or open what I left and pay what’s owed. I can’t tell you which one is living and which one is dying. I only know one of them will cost blood.
If the boy is with you, tell him I didn’t leave him. I left a path. I left a dog. I left a brother.
You know which way I’d go.
Clay
Reaper didn’t realize his hands were shaking until the paper shook with them. Eli’s breath rattled beside him. From the trees, a voice floated thin and amused.
“Found your keepsakes, old man?”
The man had recovered. He stood at the edge of the yard with two dozen shadows fanned around him, his knife traded for a pistol, the pistol held like it had all the answers.
“Bring me the boy,” he said. “Bring me the dog. Leave the box for your memories.”
Reaper slid Clay’s letter inside his vest, close to his skin. The leather. The ring. He shoved them back into the tin and snapped it shut.
“You said something once,” Reaper called back. “Back when brother meant something. You said the road tells the truth, and the dirt listens. I believed you.”
The man smiled with his eyes and not his mouth. “I said a lot of things.”
“And you buried most of them with Clay.”
“History is neat now,” the man said. “The living like it better that way.”
The yard held three kinds of silence—the kind before a storm, the kind at a grave, and the kind right between two men who used to know each other’s next breath. Ghost broke it. He bumped Eli’s knee with his nose, then pointed his muzzle toward the treeline left of the stump—the thin path where deer slipped by at dusk.
“Go,” Reaper whispered.
Eli didn’t move. “You come with us.”
Reaper’s smile was small and sharp. “I always do.”
Ghost darted for the path, Eli on his heels. Two shadows in the trees shifted to cut them off, but Reaper was already moving, already firing, two fast shots that sang past shoulders and put bark in eyes. Eli vanished into green. Ghost became a streak of night.
Gunfire answered. The yard went loud. The porch shingles jumped. The clothesline snapped.
Reaper dove, rolled, came up behind the old propane tank and felt absurdly grateful he’d turned the valve off ten years ago. Bullets stitched the grass where his spine had been a second before. He counted the cadence—three eager, one careful, two slow, one boss. The careful one worried him. The boss was obvious.
“Daniel!” the man called, voice bright as a sermon. “Lay down your gun. Save your knees. I’ll let the dog die quick.”
Reaper peeked, fired, ducked. The careful one cursed and went quiet. Good. He shifted to the left, lower, belly to dirt, the world shrinking to breath and trigger and angles. The man in the yard didn’t press. He didn’t have to. The circle was tightening. Fire would be next. Men like him loved fire.
From the trees—a shout. Not a young man’s. Eli’s.
“Ghost! This way!”
Then another sound, stranger—metal on stone, a hollow bang, like a lid struck beneath the earth. Reaper’s pulse answered before his head did. The letter’s words burned behind his eyes.
The ground will sound hollow if you stamp it; it always did.
They’d found it. Clay’s last place. The thing that wasn’t neat.
Reaper wanted to run. Wanted to carve through every shadow between him and that sound and get his family—because that’s what they’d become in a day he hadn’t asked for—down under whatever waited there.
Instead, his porch flashed orange.
A bottle arced from the trees, broke on the steps, and the world’s oldest monster opened its mouth. Flames crawled across dry wood, found old paint, found a memory of summer, and roared. Heat slapped Reaper’s face like a warning.
“History burns faster than it’s written,” the man said mildly. “Bring me the boy.”
Smoke clawed the cabin’s open door, dragged history back out of the walls. The couch where Eli had bled. The table where Reaper had once cleaned a gun while Clay told a joke he never finished. The floorboards that knew Reaper’s boots better than he did.
Reaper slid one eye toward the treeline. No sight of Eli. No flash of Ghost. Just the suggestion of movement where the deer path curled into a darker green.
He looked back at the man and smiled with all his teeth.
“You ever wonder,” Reaper said, “what a dog remembers that a man forgets?”
The man’s pistol didn’t waver. “Not once.”
“You should.”
Reaper stood.
He didn’t raise the gun this time. He raised his voice.
“Run!” he bellowed at the trees. “Go north—follow the creek!”
Two dozen heads snapped toward the sound. Two dozen guns twitched a fraction. Two seconds of chaos—that’s all a man like Reaper ever asked from any morning.
He gave it to himself.
He fired left, then right, two loud lies that made the men flinch into their own shadows. He ran for the fire because no one expects an old man to run for fire. He hit the porch steps, grabbed the burning rail with his bare hand, ripped it up in a splintered scream, and hurled it into the yard. Flames leapt like mad dogs. Men cursed and scrambled. The circle broke just enough.
He dove through the smoke and out the other side, landing in the weeds, rolling, coming up low and stumbling toward the deer path with the world roaring in his ears.
Two shots chased him. One found wood. One found meat.
His shoulder went hot and dumb. He didn’t stop. He couldn’t. The woods opened their mouth and he leapt in.
The last thing he heard behind him was the man’s calm voice through the fire and the gunshots and the crows.
“Light the rest,” he said. “Let the road tell him the truth.”
The cabin whooshed into a single sound a man never forgets if he’s meant to carry anything: everything he was made of turning to smoke.
Reaper ran until the smoke thinned and the pines smelled like themselves again. He ran until the creek began talking under the brush—soft at first, then louder, then sure. He followed it left because left is where questions point when the world is finished being polite.
Ghost appeared out of nowhere, silent, sudden, teeth bright. He pressed his body against Reaper’s leg like a wedge, turning him, urging him faster. Eli stumbled into view up ahead, pale and shaking but alive, sweat shining on his brow.
“We found it,” the boy panted, pointing with a hand that trembled but didn’t waver. “The ground—listen.”
Reaper stamped once. The earth answered with a tin drum’s thud.
Clay had never lied.
Eli dropped to his knees and dragged at the brush until wood showed—a square, cut smooth long ago, now furred with moss. A hidden hatch.
Ghost set his paws on it and looked back at Reaper like a man asking a question he already knew the answer to.
“Open it,” Eli whispered.
Reaper took the ring from the tin without understanding why. He slipped it on. It hung loose on a finger callused by a lifetime of holding on. He slid his fingers under the edge of the hatch and heaved.
It lifted. Cold river breath rose from the dark.
He looked at Eli. At Ghost. At the smoke clawing up through the trees, black and busy and pleased with itself.
He thought of the letter under his vest, warm with his heat. He thought of the words You’ll have to choose.
Boots pounded somewhere behind them. Not close yet. Closer than he wanted.
Reaper smiled without any joy at all.
“Down,” he said.
Eli slid into the dark. Ghost vanished after him like a shadow remembering how to be night. Reaper lowered himself until the cool grabbed his wrists.
Then he looked back toward the trees they’d come through and saw them—headlights flickering through smoke, firelight painting faces he used to know. A silhouette at the front of the pack stood taller than the rest, shoulders square, pistol comfortable.
“Daniel,” the man called, almost gentle. “Come on home.”
Reaper dropped into the dark and pulled the hatch down over his head.
The creek kept talking like it always had. Somewhere in the black, something metal clicked into place—old locks remembering their job.
Above, the fire found new things to love.
Below, the earth waited, hollow and full of whatever Clay had chosen to leave for the living.
A match scraped above, flared, and fell through a crack in the hatch. It winked out in the damp and left a whisper of smoke.
Then another light bloomed in the darkness—not a match, not fire—an old bulb humming on a line stretched into the earth, glowing to life one inch at a time.
And in that slow light, Reaper saw shelves. Boxes. A map on the wall with a knife stabbed through a name he hadn’t spoken in thirty years.
The name of the man who stood above them with a pistol and a smile.
The only name that could still cost blood.
Part 6 – The Return of the Traitor
The light didn’t come on all at once.
It bled through the dark like a memory remembering itself—filament humming, dust turning to gold, walls easing out of black.
Shelves. Crates. Oilcloth bundles.
A workbench scarred by years.
And on the far wall, tacked above a map yellowed into autumn, a hunting knife was buried to the hilt through a single word.
Reaper stepped closer. The bulb buzzed like a hornet. His shadow crawled up the paper first, then his hands, then his face.
Eli leaned on the bench, one hand to his ribs, the other gripping steel like a promise. Ghost stood between them, tail low, eyes fixed on the ladder they’d dropped through. From above, the fire spoke in tongues. The cabin they’d burned into him was busy leaving him again.
“What does it say?” Eli whispered.
Reaper didn’t answer. The name had weight. Saying it would pull the roof down.
He reached up, wrapped his scarred fingers around the knife handle, and tugged it free. The paper sagged, breathed, and lay flat.
The letters were simple. Black ink. Neat and cruel.
HARLAN “DEACON” VOSS
Eli said it first, voice thin but steady. “Deacon.”
The name made the room colder.
Reaper slid the knife onto the bench. “He sponsored me my first year. Pulled me out of bar fights and threw me into worse ones. Taught me how to ride in a crosswind, how to lie to a man’s face and call it love. Preached brotherhood like a pulpit was welded to his ribs.”
“Then he cut my father’s throat,” Eli said.
Reaper stared at the map. Red thread ran across counties like veins, pinheads marking bars, crossroads, creek bends, and an X scratched into the paper where they stood. Beneath the map, Clay’s hand had drawn a line that wasn’t a road: Debt.
“Yeah,” Reaper said. “Then he cut your father’s throat.”
Above them, boots thudded. Muffled orders. The crackle of wood collapsing into itself. The hatch timbers creaked once, twice, then held. Whoever built this place knew the weight of men and fire.
Reaper flipped a breaker he found by touch. Another bulb coughed alive over the bench. The small room sharpened—old coffee can full of bolts, tins of .45 and twelve-gauge, a roll of photographs bound in rotting rubber. He lifted the photos first.
They smelled like wet years.
Clay grinning with his elbow in Reaper’s ribs. A summer poker game on the cabin porch—Deacon shirtless, younger, the same cold smile nailed to a warm face. The club lined up in front of a mural—winged skull, serpent tail—with a little boy on a member’s shoulders, hair the color of Reaper’s dust. The boy reached for the camera with sticky fingers. On the back of that print, Clay had scrawled: Name him Eli? Too early? Then a drawn arrow to the boy, then: He’s all noise and light.
Eli traced the ink with his thumb. “He wrote my name before I was mine.”
“That’s what brothers do,” Reaper said, throat graveling. “They speak you into the world.”
Ghost nudged Reaper’s knee, then jumped to the lower shelf and froze—head cocked, nose pointed at a tin lunch pail twin to the one from the yard. Reaper cracked it. Inside: a Polaroid wrapped in wax paper and a dog tag rod on a chain.
The Polaroid was a porch shot—Clay on the step with a dog at his feet. Shepherd mix. Ribs showing. Same eyes as the animal staring at it now. Same white tick on the muzzle, a crooked smear like a thumbprint you couldn’t scrub out.
Eli swallowed. “That can’t be… He—this photo is… thirty years?”
Reaper lifted the tag. The stamp had worn soft, but the letters still punched: GHOST. On the back, a second set: IF FOUND, FIND REAPER.
Eli looked at the dog. The dog looked back. The room shrank to breath.
“How?” Eli said.
Reaper shook his head. He’d seen too many things to think he’d seen them all. “Some promises outlast skin,” he said.
Above them, something heavy slammed the hatch. Screws screamed. Voices carried down like snakes—Crowbar. Pry it. If it gives, drop a round.
Reaper moved to the ammo tins. He checked brass with a habit more than a hope. “Load up,” he said.
Eli’s hands shook, but they worked. He fed shells into the shotgun Reaper slid over, checked the revolver’s cylinder, stowed two speed strips in his boot like he’d done it since he could walk.
On the workbench, a battered metal box waited under a spread of old rags. Reaper popped the latch. Inside, on a bed of felt, sat a cassette recorder no bigger than a man’s palm and three tapes labeled in a neat engineer’s hand: RIVER DEAL, CROSSROADS, CHURCH.
“Your father left us a voice,” Reaper said.
He slipped CROSSROADS into the machine, thumbed REWIND, then PLAY. The motor whirred. Clay came up out of static like a ghost climbing a hill.
If you hear me, you made it past the first lie.
Eli’s eyes flooded. He didn’t blink.
We weren’t jumped by rivals, Clay said. We were sold. Deacon took two handshakes—one from a cartel man who wanted our pipeline, one from a badge who wanted a banner case. The crossroads weren’t an accident. They were a schedule.
Reaper felt the old night break its ribs inside him.
I saw the deal on the river first, Clay went on. He bought legitimacy with our blood. Told the badge one body would live—it’d make the story clean. Told him it would be Reaper. Said the world loved a witness. Said he’d own the wind if he owned the tale that rode it.
Eli slapped a palm to the table to keep from falling. The recorder kept talking like it didn’t care who it hurt.
If Reaper’s alive, you tell him to stop apologizing for breathing, Clay said, voice suddenly soft, like he was sitting on the porch in the dark again. Tell him I made the choice he keeps thinking he should’ve made. Tell him I picked him to carry what I couldn’t. He’s not a curse. He’s the road I loved.
Reaper gripped the bench until the wood complained. He hadn’t let himself cry since 1971. It almost happened anyway.
On the tape, the door hinges squeaked. Clay’s recorded breath hitched.
They’re here, he whispered. If I bury this, maybe you’ll find it. Maybe you won’t. Either way—Danny, keep the boy safe. If he’s real, if his name’s the one we spoke in fun, keep him. He’s the debt paid forward.
The click of the STOP button was the loudest sound they’d ever heard.
Above, the hatch took another blow and bowed an inch. Dust sifted from the rafters like the room had dandruff.
Eli wiped his face with the back of his hand and straightened. “We have proof.”
“We have bones,” Reaper said. “Proof is what men with pens call bones when they like the shape.”
“But we can make them listen.” Eli tapped the cassette with a finger that had grease and blood in the lines. “We can make this louder than Deacon’s story.”
Reaper nodded once. “We will.”
He set RIVER DEAL aside and snapped open CHURCH. The tape rolled. Clay again, voice lower now, like the microphone was close to his mouth and his heart.
If you make it to the church, don’t go in through the front. The bell tower ladder’s rotted—step on the third rung and you’ll meet Jesus by accident. Deacon keeps a ledger under the pulpit base, inside a hollow leg he had the carpenter build. Numbers. Names. The badge’s cut is underlined twice.
Reaper stabbed a finger at the map. A tiny cross inked in the corner of a county—their county—sat two inches from a red thread: ST. IRENE’S. He remembered the church. Boarded windows. Birds for parishioners. A steeple shaped like a finger God forgot to bend.
“Ledger,” Eli said. “That’s proof even men with pens can’t ignore.”
The hatch screamed again—this time a foot of board gave with a crack. Smoke slithered into the seam. Somebody above coughed and laughed and coughed again.
“We’re out of minutes,” Reaper said. “And space.”
He scanned the room. At the back wall, a culvert pipe big enough for two men and a stubborn dog vanished into the earth. A metal grate sat crooked over its mouth, padlock rusted to the bolt. Clay had drawn a grease pencil arrow to it years ago and written: Out.
Reaper put the knife from the map between his teeth, spun the lock until the rust gave up, and kicked the grate free. Cold air pushed at their faces—wet stone, river breath, green.
Eli slid the cassettes into a canvas bag, added the photographs, Clay’s ring, the GHOST tag, and the map ripped off the wall in one careful tear. He slung the strap. It pulled him forward, like a hand at his collar.
Ghost was already in the pipe, paws silent, head low, moving like he’d done this a hundred nights with a different man’s heartbeat behind him.
Reaper flicked the breaker off. Darkness folded the room back into itself. Above, the hatch blew another inch. A sliver of day flared through smoke.
“C’mon,” Reaper said.
They went in single file—Eli first, Ghost glued to his hip, Reaper filling the pipe with shoulders and breath, dragging the grate behind until it wedged and hid the hole if anyone thought to look.
The pipe bent twice, dropped once, narrowed, widened, then sang with a sound Reaper hadn’t realized he’d been waiting for: water speaking on stone. The creek again, this time under the world, arguing with itself and losing.
They crawled until the pipe opened into a low box of concrete and noise. Ahead, a mouth of daylight burned white. Reaper listened. No boots. No voices. The fire’s language had softened to smoke and ash.
Eli twisted to look back. In the dim, he was just two bright eyes and a smear of grit. “When we get out—St. Irene’s?”
“St. Irene’s,” Reaper said. “Then we make a phone call I swore I’d never make.”
“To who?”
“Men who remember the road before Deacon paved it with lies.”
Eli didn’t ask for names. Names were heavy and sharp. He faced forward and kept moving.
They slid out under a tangle of briars into cool morning. The creek shoulder-high to ferns curved like Clay’s question mark. Smoke limped through the trees behind them. The cabin was a smear of black and orange in the gaps. Reaper looked once, then didn’t again.
Ghost waded into the water and looked back. His eyes held an order Reaper didn’t fight: follow.
“Downstream,” Reaper said. “We take the water. We don’t leave prints.”
They moved in the creek until their legs went numb, then climbed to the bank under a screen of alder and ran bent double for a half mile. Between breaths, the morning filled itself with birds arguing about seeds and sun.
When the road cut the woods like a scar, they stopped, listening. Nothing but distance.
Reaper led them to a corrugated metal shed that had been a tractor’s winter once. The padlock gave like a bad habit. Inside, among wasp nests and rust, two shapes slept under tarps.
Reaper tugged the first tarp free and laughed once without humor. A ’94 Shadow with the paint sanded dull and the pipes shortened to nothing. The second was a Honda trail bike missing one side panel and a little pride.
“Your father never trusted just one door,” Reaper said.
Eli ran a hand along the Shadow’s tank. His mouth trembled. “He rode this?”
“He kept it for when walking wasn’t fast enough.”
They rolled the bikes into the daylight. Ghost hopped into the Shadow’s sidecar like he’d been born there, turned a tight circle, and settled. Reaper’s heart did a strange thing at that: a flinch that wasn’t fear.
“You ride?” Reaper asked.
Eli shrugged at the trail bike. “I ride a bicycle like sin.”
“That’s half the work.” Reaper tossed him a helmet that smelled like shed and summer. “Follow my line. Keep your eyes where you want the front wheel to go. If you stare at the ditch, the bike will meet it real polite.”
Above the trees, a faint chorus of engines rose and fell—men circling a fire, men spreading netting. They didn’t have forever. They had now.
Reaper kicked the Shadow to life. The motor coughed, cleared its throat, and made a sound like forgiveness. Eli flooded the trail bike, cursed, kicked again, then found the song.
They took a deer path to a logging road to a slice of asphalt no county claimed. St. Irene’s lay ten miles away as the crow lied, fifteen as the road told the truth. The morning tipped toward noon. Heat primed itself. The past paced along.
Halfway there, Reaper swung them into a turnout cut in the shade of a swollen cottonwood and killed his engine. Eli skidded in behind, breathless, grin feral with the first animal joy a machine gives a boy who deserves it.
“Not bad,” Reaper said.
Eli looked like he’d just lived twice. “I kept my eyes where I wanted to go.”
“Good. Now keep your ears where danger will come from.”
Reaper walked to a rusted electrical box hammered to a post like a leftover. He pried it open with the map knife. Inside, folded in spider web and patient dirt: a prepaid flip phone sealed in a freezer bag and a matchbox with a single match.
Clay had stored more than tapes.
Reaper cracked the phone, watched it hunt the world, find a lonely bar, then two. He scrolled three numbers that were just words once: MONK, VIRGIL, RED. He picked the middle, because men like Virgil sat in the exact center of right and wrong and didn’t apologize to either.
The call connected on the third ring. A voice washed out of the tiny speaker like gravel under a truck tire.
“You’re three decades late,” it said.
Reaper closed his eyes. The road reached through his ribs and squeezed. “I’m still coming.”
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Somebody forgot to tell me.”
“You calling to sell me a ghost story?”
“I’m calling to pay a debt.”
Silence. Bird song. Eli’s breathing. Ghost’s steady pant. The long exhale of a man building a bridge he once burned.
“Where?” Virgil said.
Reaper looked at the map in his head. “St. Irene’s. The ledger.”
“You brought the boy?”
“He brought me.”
“What about the dog?”
Reaper glanced at Ghost. The animal met his eyes like a man.
“He keeps his own counsel,” Reaper said.
Another silence, this one warmer by a degree.
“The church has eyes on it,” Virgil said. “Deacon feeds the badge there on Sundays. You’ll need a hymn the choir forgot.”
“Got one,” Reaper said, tapping the cassette bag. “Bring two men who remember Clay’s laugh and one who can read numbers with a judge standing over his shoulder.”
“Judge’ll be there?”
“By the time we’re done.”
The line held a breath. “You running or finishing?”
“Finishing.”
“Then listen,” Virgil said, voice going low and old. “You come by the back, not the road. The graveyard behind St. Irene’s ain’t holy—Deacon poured the foundations himself. There’s a drain under the north wall big enough for a man with sins. You’ll hear the choir if you put your ear to the stone. If the choir’s singing, wait. If the choir’s silent, you kick.”
“I’ll kick,” Reaper said.
“And Reaper?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t die before I hear Clay’s voice again.”
The line clicked. The world was just theirs again.
Eli was already on the trail bike, helmet chin strap between his teeth, eyes bright and purposeful. “We go now?”
“We go now,” Reaper said.
They rolled out of shade and back into the sunlight the way a man leaves a porch to meet his day—old, unwilling, sure.
The last mile, the land turned to dust and weeds. St. Irene’s rose out of it like a story, boards gray as old teeth, steeple pointing at a God who hadn’t answered in a long time. The parking lot was gravel and silence. The front doors were chained. A faded hand-painted sign leaned drunkenly against a post: FOOD PANTRY SUNDAYS. Someone had crossed SUNDAYS out and written: WHEN WE CAN.
Reaper didn’t take the front.
He cut left into scrub. Eli followed. Ghost met them on foot, pawing through nettles, leading to a low dip in the earth where water once bothered the stone and then forgot its way. Moss clung to mortar. A black mouth lay in the wall, grid iron peeled back by a tool that had believed it had good reasons.
Reaper killed the engine and listened. At first he heard nothing. Then something so quiet it barely counted as noise—paper on paper, a whisper. The church breathing.
He slid the map knife between the grate and the stone. Metal groaned. The gap widened.
“Eli,” he said, “if we don’t walk out, you keep walking without me. You take the tapes and the ledger to Virgil. You hand them to a camera before you hand them to a courtroom. Deacon owns rooms. He fears eyes.”
“I don’t leave you,” Eli said.
“You leave me if the road says so.”
Ghost pushed his head under Eli’s hand, hard enough to hurt. The boy nodded, jaw set.
They eased into the drain one by one. Cool wrapped their ankles. The tunnel turned, rose, delivered them into a crawlspace under the church floor where sawdust kept secrets. Above, boots creaked boards. Voices murmured—a pair of men bored with their own authority. No choir. Just patience.
Reaper pointed to the pulpit base—a box thick enough to stop a bullet. He slid to it like a man going home. His fingers found a sliver of wood no carpenter would have left on accident. He pulled. The panel came away in his hand with a sigh.
Inside: a ledger bound in cheap black. A fountain pen with teeth marks in the cap. Three envelopes full of cash banded with a bank’s rubber stamped date from a year that had bled like all the others. He lifted the ledger.
Pages whispered—names, dates, dollar figures big enough to feed a town and small enough to ruin one man neat. On two pages, a badge number was underlined. On another, a stamp from a shipping yard that belonged to men who cut tongues for fun.
Eli exhaled like he’d been punching air since he was born. “We have him.”
“We have his spine,” Reaper said. “Men fall funny when you pull that out.”
Above them, a chair scraped. A deeper voice entered the hall. Reaper recognized it in his bones.
Deacon.
He spoke to the guards like a coach to boys. “Irene’s is mine because I’m merciful. Say it with me.”
One guard laughed. The other pretended not to.
Deacon’s boots came up the aisle slow, confident. He stopped above the pulpit. His hand fell to the wood right over Reaper’s skull. The boards hummed with his weight.
“Reaper,” he said conversationally, to the empty pews and the motes. “You’ve always been a churchgoing man at the wrong hour. Come on out.”
Eli went rigid. Ghost went still as a held breath.
Reaper closed the ledger and slid it into the canvas bag. He put Clay’s ring in his mouth like a coin he was paying a ferryman. Then he eased a single shell into the shotgun’s chamber, thumbed the safety off, and raised the barrel until the muzzle kissed the underside of the pulpit floor.
“Eyes,” Reaper whispered.
Eli nodded, mouth a hard line.
Reaper fired.
The church coughed dust. The pulpit jumped. Above, Deacon swore, stumbled, and used a word he only used when he bled. Boots scrambled. The guards shouted. A gun fired into the floor where Reaper had been a breath before. Splinters bit his cheek.
Reaper shoved the panel back into the pulpit’s leg and hissed, “Drain!”
They slid into the mouth. Ghost backed in last, teeth bared at the dark, some part of him wanting to hold the whole church in place with a growl. Reaper dragged the grate as far as it would go with one arm while he slung the bag across his back with the other.
Boots pounded above, then below. Men were learning the church had a basement. The tunnel squeezed like a fist. Eli went first, fast, then faster. The world behind them filled with shouts, a light stabbed their backs, and a voice Reaper knew too well told his men to stop shooting because money hated stray holes.
They popped out into light and thorn. Engines screamed from the lot. The bikes they’d hidden were visible as sins and twice as loud. Eli threw a leg and brought the trail bike coughing to life. Ghost hit the Shadow’s sidecar without looking. Reaper vaulted, twisted the throttle.
“Go!” he roared.
They burst from behind St. Irene’s like a story tired of being quiet. Gravel spat. The front wheel danced. Two men sprinted for their bikes, another leveled a pistol with the sloppiness of a man paid by the hour. Reaper stood on the pegs and zigged under the shot. Eli zagged the other way with beginner’s luck and stubborn grace.
They hit the road, found second, then third. The church fell behind. The morning blew all the smoke out of their lungs. For a breath, it felt like the world might forgive.
A truck pulled across the blacktop fifty yards ahead and stopped broadside. Its door opened on a man with a shotgun and a smile he didn’t earn.
Deacon stepped down, calm as a judge recessing for coffee.
He set his boot on the yellow line, pointed the barrel, and waited.
Reaper grabbed a fistful of throttle and aimed for the ditch. Eli aimed for the gap between bumper and fence because boys his age always choose the hole over the hedge. Deacon’s shotgun bloomed fire—
—and Ghost, without a sound, launched from the sidecar straight at the muzzle.