Part 7 – Fire and Steel
The shotgun bloomed fire.
Ghost left the sidecar like a bullet with teeth.
Pellets chewed the air where Reaper’s head had been a split second earlier. He threw the Shadow for the ditch, front wheel light, the whole bike floating for one impossible heartbeat before earth grabbed it back. Gravel hammered his boots. Brush slapped his face.
Eli aimed at the seam between bumper and fence because boys see holes and believe in them. The trail bike squeezed through sideways, peg scraping chrome with a scream, his knee kissing rust, then he was past, rear tire fishtailing into freedom.
Deacon didn’t flinch. He pivoted, cursed, fired again. Ghost hit the barrel, not the man—teeth on steel, a shock like thunder. The gun kicked high, the blast tearing a sheet of sky. Ghost tumbled, yelped once, then was up again, back legs skidding, eyes still on the threat because that’s what loyalty looks like when it’s borrowed from something older than dogs.
“Go!” Reaper roared, climbing the ditch, throttle buried. He saw the smear of red on Ghost’s flank, felt something hot rip through his own shoulder again—the old wound singing new words—and kept the bike pointed at away.
Eli shot past the truck and kept it pinned. Reaper popped out of the ditch and found the blacktop like a man finding faith. Behind them, Deacon stepped into the road, working the pump with a calm that scared more than the gun.
They didn’t look back again.
Farm roads stitched the county together—two-lane arteries forgetful men never repaved. Reaper led them through a lace of turns only men who had run from a sheriff and a drought knew by heart. Fences blurred. Hayfields glowed gold. A dust devil chased them for a mile and gave up like a story that wouldn’t end.
Ghost clung to the sidecar, head low, breath harsh, blood worked into the fur like old paint. Eli kept glancing over, jaw clenched. Every time he looked away from the road, the bike drifted. Every time it drifted, he corrected with a twitch you only learn by living.
“Eyes where you want to go!” Reaper barked.
“I am!”
“Prove it!”
He did.
They dove off the county road onto a farm track, into a row of cottonwoods that remembered weather better than men. A rusted barn sulked at the far end. Reaper killed the engine inside, wood swallowing the echo, dust drifting back down like time changing its mind.
Ghost stepped out of the sidecar stiffly and laid down with a sigh he did not give himself permission to make. Eli dropped to his knees, hands on the dog’s ribs, fingers coming away bright.
“It’s not too deep,” Reaper said, because a man has to say certain things before he knows if they’re true.
He ripped a sleeve off his shirt and a strip from the seat cover of a half-dead tractor, boiled both with whiskey from a bottle that had other plans, then did what his hands remembered from a jungle that still visited his sleep. Pellets had kissed the skin and left some love inside; none had found an artery. He pressed, packed, wrapped. Ghost’s eyes stayed on his face like he was reading a page.
“Not today,” Reaper told him. “You hear me? Not today.”
Eli swiped at his own eyes angrily, then stared at Reaper’s shoulder. The shirt there was black with a fresh bloom. “You’re hit.”
“Been hit since Nixon,” Reaper said, and cinched the dog’s bandage tighter. Pain flashed the room once and left.
“Stop bleeding,” Eli said.
“Already did.”
Outside, far off, engines hunted. Not near enough to count. Near enough to respect.
“We move in five,” Reaper said.
“To where?”
“To men who remember before Deacon renamed things.”
The feed mill had been dead for a decade and still smelled like corn and sweat. On the rusted side of the silo, someone had painted GOD BLESS AMERICA and someone else had written BUT DON’T TELL HER in smaller hand below. The office door was a slab of oak with a window blown out and taped over twice. Virgil stood in it like a hinge: broad, square, a man who only smiled with one side of his mouth and only at funerals that surprised him.
“Three decades late,” he said. “But you brought company.”
Eli leaned the trail bike against a post, legs shaking with adrenalin and the memory of fence. Ghost pressed his shoulder to Eli’s thigh and stayed standing with him by will alone.
“Brought proof,” Reaper said, lifting the canvas bag.
“Proof is what the men with pens call bones when they like the shape,” Virgil said. “But I’ll look.”
“Where’s Monk?” Reaper asked.
“Already broke a chair,” Virgil said, jerking a thumb inside.
Monk filled the room like a fridge fills a kitchen. His beard was a white flag that had refused to surrender. Red was smaller and louder, a scar like a zipper inside his hairline, a laugh that arrived early and left late. A fourth man stood with his hands in his back pockets like a judge at a county fair. Folks called him Stitch when they didn’t need stitches; when they did, they called him Doc.
“No cuts inside,” Virgil said. It sounded like etiquette. It felt like prayer.
Leather hung on chair backs and nails—colors turned into something quieter. The room got older, kinder, meaner all at once. Reaper set the bag on a table that had been a door once. He slid out the ledger, the photos, the tag stamped GHOST. He laid Clay’s cassette recorder down as carefully as men lay their dead.
He didn’t say please. He pressed PLAY.
Clay rose out of static and thirty years like he’d been waiting under the table the whole time. The way his voice filled the dead feed mill made the room feel like a church built out of bolts and spilled coffee.
When the tape told the truth about the crossroads, Red swore and went quiet. When it named the badge number underlined twice, Monk leaned on his fists and put a dent in history. When Clay said Reaper wasn’t a curse but a road, Reaper looked at the floor and counted three nail heads until he could breathe right.
Eli stood with his hand on Ghost’s head and listened like a son listening to a father through a wall. When the tape stopped, it was the kind of quiet that knows the price of its own silence.
Virgil pointed to the ledger with his chin. “Open that.”
They turned pages. Names like debts. Numbers like funerals. A stamp from a yard men were killed for mentioning out loud. The badge number again. The tithe carved out for a man who called himself a deacon and taught boys how to pray with a knife.
“Proof,” Eli said. Not a question.
Virgil’s mouth did something dangerous. “It’ll make a camera look, and a judge sweat.”
“We’ll need them both,” Reaper said.
Stitch unstuck his hands from his pockets and stepped to Ghost without a word. He squatted, set a clean towel, cut the bandage with gentle hands, and looked like a man who had learned how to see truth in holes. “He’ll keep his leg,” he said. “If he stops pretending he’s metal.”
Ghost tolerated the examination with the dignity of someone who knew he was being talked about and liked the conclusions. Eli blew out a breath he’d held since the shotgun.
Virgil poured coffee that had been waiting since Reagan and tasted like patience. “You ain’t got time,” he said. “He’s moving.”
“How many with him?” Reaper asked.
“Enough,” Monk said. “Too many for a prayer and not enough for a war. He’ll make it ugly and fast. He’ll try to make it look like our fault.”
Red flicked ash into a mason jar that used to hold screws. “He’ll want the kid alive, the dog dead.”
Eli’s jaw set. Ghost leaned harder.
Virgil pointed at the cassettes. “We put Clay’s voice in a thousand ears before sundown. We put the ledger in a pair of hands Deacon doesn’t own. We ride the courthouse steps and make the badge choose daylight or Deacon.”
“He’ll block the road,” Reaper said. “He’ll set a stage and invite a bullet.”
Monk’s grin showed two teeth he’d married to gold for fun. “Then we bring a different stage.”
“What stage?” Eli asked.
“The only one we ever had,” Virgil said. “The road.”
He slid a box from under the table—old GoPro, newer batteries, three burner phones, two cheap body mics, a roll of gaffer tape, a handful of thumb drives, four sharpies, and a preacher’s collar from a joke gone mean years ago.
“Men like Deacon win in the dark,” Virgil said. “We turn the lights on.”
Red lined up the burners and wrote numbers big enough to read with your heart beating in your eyes. “We send Clay’s voice to every number in my book with thumbs that still work. We send pictures of the ledger pages to three reporters who hate me. We call a judge who owes Monk’s sister a thing she never cashed.”
“Who’s the mole?” Reaper said quietly.
Three heads turned. The room’s middle sagged a half inch.
“What mole?” Red said.
“The road ain’t that smart,” Reaper said. “He keeps getting there a minute before the map. Means somebody’s folding the paper for him.”
Monk’s eyes moved slow to Virgil. Virgil’s eyes didn’t move at all.
“We keep it tight,” Virgil said. “We ride with five. Everyone else meets us at the steps, or not at all.”
A noise from outside ended that conversation. Not engines. Not boots. The thin glass sound of a bottle being taught to fly.
“Down!” Stitch yelled.
It hit the doorframe and burst into a mouth of fire that licked the tape on the window and spit at the weekdays on the office calendar from 2002. Virgil kicked the bottle’s guts back out into the yard. Monk flipped the table without asking permission from the coffee. Red was already by the side window, pistol in two hands, eyes glass-flat.
Three young faces showed for a blink between the feed bins—clean patches, borrowed swagger. Deacon’s scouts.
Reaper put the ledger and tapes back into the sack, shoved it at Eli. “That bag doesn’t leave you.”
Eli nodded and then did the only dumb thing a smart boy could: he stepped in front of Ghost.
The first kid fired wild. The second jerked like a man who’d never been inside a shot he just took. Red put one in the metal above their heads to make them count their heartbeats, then one into the dirt to teach humility. Monk took the door with his shoulder and the wall with his joy and became the kind of problem that makes boys rethink careers.
Reaper went through the busted window into grain dust and sunlight, took the left flank because the left is where liars hide. He hit the first kid with a sweep that put his spine in a new arrangement and the second with the truth about what a fist feels like when it’s learned its trade. The third dropped the bottle and ran because gravity works on courage too.
“Enough!” Reaper barked.
The one with the new spine groaned. The one with the new truth spat blood and bad words. Reaper hauled him up by the collar and walked him into the shade.
“What’s the plan?” Reaper asked.
“You’re dead,” the kid said.
“Try again.”
The kid’s eyes flicked sideways. Red stood over the other one like a lamp nobody wanted to be under. Monk had weighed the bottle and found it trivial.
“Devil’s Needle,” the kid said finally. “The pass. Dusk. Trucks. Fire. Pictures. Badge. All neat.”
“How many trucks?”
“Enough to look like an accident.”
“Who told you to bring fire to a feed mill?” Virgil asked from the door.
The kid smiled too slow. “The man with a Bible name.”
“Go home,” Virgil said. “And if I see you again, you don’t.”
They let them limp. The smell of spilled gas and old corn explained itself to the sun and dried into dust.
“Devil’s Needle,” Eli said.
“Skinny road on a rock wall,” Red said. “One way through, two ways down.”
“He wants a funeral video,” Virgil said.
“Then we give him a documentary,” Reaper said.
He took the GHOST tag, slid the chain through the ring on the dog’s collar, and fastened it. Ghost stood like a soldier at a pinning he didn’t ask for. The tag clicked once, and the sound worked into Reaper like a promise being hammered.
Monk taped a body mic under Reaper’s collarbone and another on Eli’s chest, high and out of the way of pain. Virgil strapped the old camera to Reaper’s bars and the newer one to Eli’s shoulder because redundancy is why old men get to be old. Red stuck a burner in Eli’s vest and another in Reaper’s pocket with the same number keyed into both.
“What if the mole’s in here?” Eli asked.
“Then he’ll have to work harder than we are,” Virgil said.
Stitch finished Ghost’s bandage with a wrap that would hold in a hurricane. He touched Eli’s cheek like a father does a son he’s trying to love quietly. “Don’t be a hero,” he said.
“I don’t know how,” Eli said.
“That’s the right answer.”
They pushed the bikes into the sun. The mill’s shadow held the heat a little longer than the rest of the county. Out by the road, the afternoon stood and waited.
“Once more,” Virgil said, voice low. “We ride Devil’s Needle at dusk. We keep cameras hot and tapes on our chest. We get through or we don’t. If we do, we make the courthouse steps our living room and invite the world. If we don’t, the world still gets an invitation it can’t ignore.”
“What about the judge?” Reaper asked.
“Red’s sister cashed her favor,” Virgil said. “He’ll be on those steps at eight, wondering why.”
“And the badge?”
Virgil’s smile was a knife you use to open a birthday present. “He’ll be there. He loves cameras until the numbers in our book read him back to himself.”
Ghost hopped into the sidecar without waiting for permission. Eli swung onto the trail bike and tied the canvas bag across his back with a knot that knew it was important. Reaper rolled his shoulder until the pain fitted tighter to the bone.
“Ready?” he said.
Eli nodded. “Ready.”
Monk slapped the Shadow’s tank like he was blessing it. Red lit a cigarette and let it die in his fingers. Stitch turned back to clean up because some men sanctify a room after history drips on it. Virgil stood in the door like a gate, then stepped aside.
They rolled.
The first blocks felt like calm lying. People on porches looked up with the faces of people who remember a thing before it cost them taxes. A little boy pointed. A woman folded a towel against her chest and didn’t wave. The sky did what skies do—it pretended it wasn’t on anyone’s side.
A mile out, the streetlights along the county road blinked once and went dead. All of them. From the mill to the bend by the old dairy.
“Power cut,” Virgil said through Reaper’s earpiece. “He’s impatient.”
Ahead, beyond the bend, a rail crossing arm lowered with a slow, deliberate grace. No bell. No train. Just the arm, all the way down, as if a polite hand had asked the road to wait.
Red’s voice in the ear: “I don’t like polite hands.”
Reaper rolled off the throttle and feathered the front brake. Gravel whispered under the tires. Eli matched him—wobbly for a breath, then steady.
Ghost stood in the sidecar, ears forward, body a taut line pointing at the crossing.
On the far side of the tracks, three trucks eased out from behind the grain elevator, nose to nose, blocking the road. Behind them, silhouettes climbed onto the roofs like men discovering they were statues.
Deacon liked symmetry.
Reaper tightened his grip, felt the old ring Clay had left bite his palm through the glove.
He breathed once.
Twice.
“Cameras hot,” Virgil said.
They were.
Across the tracks, a man stepped up onto the middle truck’s hood and spread his arms like a preacher welcoming sinners to a service already paid for.
Deacon.
His mouth moved. The microphones caught nothing at first—just the wind and the faint, awful click of safeties being decided.
Then his voice rode the evening clean: “Bring me the boy.”
Ghost’s growl answered before Reaper could. The crossing arm stayed down, the lights stayed dead, and somewhere out past the wheat a thunderhead rolled its shoulders.
Part 8 – The Last Ride Begins
The crossing arm stayed down like a polite threat.
Three box trucks blocked the far lane, white as teeth.
Deacon stood on the hood of the middle one and spread his arms like a sermon you don’t want.
“Bring me the boy,” he called.
Wind worried the wheat. A thunderhead rolled its shoulders in the distance. The power was out for five miles in every direction—streetlights dead, storefronts dim, the county holding its breath.
Reaper’s bars trembled under his hands. Eli’s front tire twitched, then steadied. Ghost stood in the sidecar, hackles up, a line of bandage bright against the blood that had dried into his fur.
“Cameras hot,” Virgil said in his ear, voice low and level. “If he talks, the world listens.”
Reaper thumbed the bar cam. Red’s burner chimed once in his vest: LIVE. Clay’s tape had already gone to a hundred phones; the ledger pages were climbing inside inboxes like ants. This moment needed eyes.
Deacon smiled into the lenses he couldn’t see. “You always did love an audience, Daniel.”
“Name your price,” Reaper said. “Let the kid ride.”
“The price is yesterday,” Deacon said. “You can’t pay it.”
He hopped down off the hood with a cat’s economy. Two men in borrowed swagger climbed up to take his place. Their rifles pointed high. They wanted posture, not holes.
Reaper looked right. A drainage ditch. A fence beyond it. A field rolled toward a brushy cut the maps forgot. He looked left. The tracks ran parallel to the road, a service path hard-packed by men who hated ties and loved shortcuts.
“Eli,” he said. “Eyes where you want to go.”
“I see it.”
“Say it.”
“The service path.”
“Good.”
Deacon lifted his hand, palm out, a mockery of mercy. “The dog stays.”
Ghost’s growl rode the air like a saw.
Reaper didn’t count to three. He never had.
He stood on the pegs, leaned the Shadow left, and knifed underneath the crossing arm before it finished shaking. Eli snapped in behind, the trail bike light and eager, his shoulder cam catching Deacon’s face in a stuttering pan that would look like anger when the internet looped it.
A rifle barked. The arm splintered behind them. Gravel hammered the undercarriage. They hit the service path hard enough to taste iron and kept it pinned.
“Left at the junction,” Virgil said. “You’ll see a maintenance gate—rusted chain, no lock. Two miles. Keep your heads down.”
Ghost lowered himself into the sidecar and braced. Eli’s breath came hot on the channel—fast, controlled, all grit. Behind them, trucks revved. A useless horn bellowed. Deacon didn’t chase. Deacon never chased; he set tables and let men seat themselves.
The service path bent with the tracks through a patch of scrub oak and out into a flat that looked empty until you remembered who could hide in grass. A kite hung on the wind and didn’t decide. The first fat drops hit hot metal and disappeared.
Reaper kept the speed at a number he’d never admit. The Shadow floated over washboard ruts; the trail bike bucked and learned.
“Talk to me,” he said.
“I’m on you,” Eli panted. “Bag’s tight. Camera’s blinking.”
“Keep blinking.”
At a culvert, a county truck idled with no driver. The gate beyond was looped in chain but not locked; the world is full of men who like the look of authority. Reaper cut it and rolled through.
“Devil’s Needle in eleven,” Red said. “He’s building a stage. I’m seeing traffic cams wink off in sequence like candles. Virgil?”
“Judge is on the courthouse steps by eight with a deputy who still believes in oaths,” Virgil said. “You get to town, the world will be ready to hear. You don’t—”
“Then they’ll hear anyway,” Reaper finished. “Copy.”
They crossed a cut where the land fell away and climbed again. The storm shouldered closer. Lightning spidered without thunder. The air smelled like rain and hot wire and newsprint. Ghost watched the horizon with an expression Reaper had never seen on an animal, or a man: contempt.
“Question,” Eli said between breaths. “How does he keep finding the door before we knock?”
Reaper didn’t answer. The mole had a face. He just hadn’t let himself put a name to it yet. If he said it out loud, the roof would fall.
The road pinched into Devil’s Needle exactly like Red had said: a single lane carved into a rock wall, guardrail dented like a jaw that had more opinions than teeth. On the outside was nothing but distance. On the inside, scrub pines clung to stone with fingernails.
At the pass’s mouth, two pickups idled nose-to-tail, facing out, red flares spitting on the pavement. A DPW sign had been set at a dutiful angle: ROAD CLOSED: WASHOUT.
Deacon’s neatness again. He liked municipal fonts wrapped around private plans.
“Stop and we die,” Eli said.
“Not today,” Reaper said.
He threaded the Shadow between flare and bumper, boot kissing fender. Eli slid through with a teenage miracle. A man in a reflective vest dropped a cigarette and found his radio too late. The pass swallowed the sound.
Halfway in, the first truck appeared—sideways, a wall of grill and chrome. A man on the roof checked his watch like they were late to court.
Brakes. Weight. Decision.
Reaper didn’t brake. He threw the Shadow toward the inside wall, found a gap between bumper and rock big enough for a lie but not a truth, and made the bike smaller than physics preferred. Metal scraped stone loud enough to make all three hearts flinch. Eli saw the move and trusted it. The trail bike whispered through with paint left behind and a peg that would never fold the same again.
Pop. Pop. Not guns. Firecrackers. Men on the far truck roof tossing little celebrations into the air for the cameras. Deacon loved noise that didn’t cost blood until it did.
“Two more trucks,” Red said. “He stacked them deep.”
“End of the line promised?” Reaper asked.
“Looks like a scenic overlook to me,” Virgil said. “Scenic like a cliff.”
The second truck was backed up tight to the overlook’s chain link, tailgate down. Men stood atop it with cameras—phones mostly, one proper rig on a gimbal. The third truck had a camera crew’s laugh in its bed and a badge leaning on the hood, arms crossed, sunnies dead. Under his badge number, Clay had drawn two lines in the ledger.
“Camera left,” Red said. “Your story owns their story if you push first.”
Reaper coasted to a crawl. Deacon stepped out from behind the second truck, slicker thrown over his cut like a pastor hiding a tattoo. He held out both hands as if catching rain.
“Show me the bag,” he said.
“Show me the ledger,” Reaper said back. “We’ll hold them up for the cameras and let the county vote.”
A hush came down. Men loved a stunt almost as much as a fight.
Eli did a foolish brave thing. He swung off the trail bike and kept the canvas bag on his back, facing the cameras, chin up. He looked like Clay for a blink. The idea split Reaper clean through.
Deacon smiled too easily. “Good boy.”
He snapped his fingers.
Two things happened at once.
From the rock face above them, a steel cable sang, dropping on a pully like a guillotine. It didn’t come for necks. It came for space—suddenly the gap they’d ridden into was a cage.
From the third truck’s passenger side, a sliding door in a panel van they hadn’t clocked snapped open. Two men in riot pads poured out, not with rifles— with a net gun and a baton on a cord.
Eli pivoted. Ghost launched.
The net boomed. White mesh flowered in the pass like a bad parachute. Eli’s arm went through a ring and stuck; he wrenched, twisted, cursed. Ghost hit a man square in the chest and made him forget physics. The baton rang off the sidecar and left a dent like a new moon.
Reaper stood the Shadow and went for the ring on the cable with the map knife, all wrist and old rage. The steel screamed against steel. Sparks flared. The cable bit deeper. He thought of Clay’s letter and the creek and the way choices don’t care about knees.
“Eli!” he roared.
“Go!” Eli shouted back. Not fear. Command.
Then the badge fired one round into the air to remind everyone where money stands when it wants quiet.
The cameras ate it. The mics swallowed it. Clay’s voice was already climbing the state like ivy. This shot would be the picture under the headline.
Two of Deacon’s men hit the net from behind and dragged. Eli’s boots skated. He threw an elbow that would have broken a stranger’s nose; this one belonged to a man who gave up eighteen years ago and decided not to be bothered again. It had no effect.
Ghost came over the top, turned sideways in the air, and put his teeth on the arm of the man with the baton. The man screamed and swung. The baton connected with Ghost’s ribs with a sound everyone in the pass would remember when they were old.
Reaper cut the cable. It didn’t fall. It bit the ring and held like guilt.
Monk’s voice in his ear: “Left ridge. Count to three.”
“Do it,” Virgil said.
Monk counted anyway. He always had.
On three, something that didn’t belong to the present rolled down the slope and kissed the second truck’s front tire. It was a brake drum full of gas and nails and anger, and it didn’t explode. It boomed into smoke and noise and the kind of light men hate but cameras love. The second truck leapt, the men on its roof forgot how to be statues, and the badge flinched so hard his sunglasses fell.
“Run the wall!” Virgil yelled.
Reaper put the Shadow against the inside rock, boot heel scraping granite like a flint, and pushed. The bike tried to climb out of the world; the world said no; the tire said maybe; the light said yes. He slashed past Deacon’s outstretched hand and made it five yards toward the chain link.
Behind him, the net dragged Eli into the van’s mouth. He twisted like a fish refusing a bucket. The bag strap caught on the bumper. The strap snapped.
“Eli!” Reaper bellowed.
“Ledger!” Eli choked, voice ripped. “Get the—”
The van door slammed on the word. The sound it made was final and familiar. The van lurched forward, then back, then forward again, as if changing its mind could undo what it had chosen. It shot through the third truck’s hole and vanished around the bend where the pass widened to trouble.
Ghost ran after it.
He ran like the first version of running and the last. Men dove out of his path because something in them remembered ancestors who respected omens. He didn’t bark. He didn’t look back. He hit the bend and was gone with the van into a slice of road that dropped to county and church and courthouse steps and whatever was waiting under the judge’s shoes.
Reaper hit the chain link and climbed it on a motorcycle because men who live long enough to be old sometimes decide physics owes them a favor. The bike thrashed, skittered, came down wrong, found the world again, and lived. He bounced into the overlook’s gravel and saved it with a prayer Jack London never wrote but would’ve liked.
Deacon laughed once—short, confused, careful. He doesn’t laugh often. It didn’t fit him.
“Let him ride!” he shouted, anger cracking through the slick. “He’ll follow the boy to me!”
Men scattered like coins off a table. The badge put his sunglasses back on to do the only brave thing he had planned—nothing.
Reaper threw the Shadow at the bend. The trail bike’s high-pitched snarl faded behind; the kid was in the van now, the bag in the pass gravel.
He skidded to the canvas, leaned out, snatched it by a strap like a man taking a child out of a river, and slung it across his back in one motion that would either be remembered as strength or mocked as vanity.
“Virgil,” he said into the channel, voice thin with rage. “They’ve got him.”
“Where?”
“Heading south. They’ll cut to County Two and then the Old Pike. Deacon doesn’t do random; he does familiar.”
“Courthouse clock says seven twenty-two,” Red said. “Judge is on the steps.”
“He’ll wait,” Virgil said. “He loves patience when it’s wearing a robe. Monk, break off. Red, get eyes on Pike. Stitch, tell the sheriff I’ll owe him a favor his grandkids can spend.”
“Already did,” Stitch said. “He asked how many ambulances.”
“Say none,” Reaper said. “Say we’re not finished yet.”
He hit the corner. The van’s tail lights flashed once at the top of the straight, then vanished over the sunburned rise like a car going into a whisper. Ghost wasn’t in sight. He might have been a few breaths ahead. He might have been under a bumper. Reaper refused both pictures.
The pass spit him into open country again. The storm finally decided to speak—rain slashed sideways, hot and mean, lifting the oil out of the blacktop and making it a rumor. The Shadow swallowed it and kept chewing. Reaper’s shoulder bled under the tape at a rate the weather couldn’t wash.
He saw what he knew he’d see.
At the crossroads where the Old Pike tipped left toward town and right toward no one, a single porch light burned on a not-quite-abandoned house.
Gravel like teeth.
A question mark creek somewhere behind.
Clay’s nightmares had always picked this angle.
Reaper didn’t slow.
He took the left, because rage wanted right and he didn’t trust rage to know maps. The pines closed in and opened again. The road dipped, twisted, climbed. The storm punched him in the face and apologized with a gust. He stabbed the horn out of habit and hope; sometimes old country dogs move if you tell them you’re coming.
“Red,” he said. “You see my tail?”
“Past the silo,” Red said. “Two back. Virgil is three. Monk is trouble.”
“Good.”
Ahead, two taillights splashed to life where there had been none. The van broke out of a pocket in a hedgerow like a rabbit that had been crouching a little too cocky. Ghost was there—Reaper saw him in the same breath, a low dark streak on the shoulder, rib-bandage bright, closing.
“Hold on, old son,” Reaper whispered—he didn’t know to which of them he spoke.
The van swerved at Ghost. Ghost swerved at the van. The physics came down right and wrong blew past. Ghost found the running board, hit, slid, bit. His teeth found plastic. His forepaws scrabbled. The passenger kicked with a boot a man buys when he plans to die in it.
Reaper was twenty yards back. Fifteen. Ten.
“Eli!” he shouted, though it was insane.
The van’s brake lights flashed an answer that didn’t come with a message.
The road straightened like a decision. Old Pike’s last half mile to the county line ran narrow and vain, flanked by ditch and wire. Deacon loved wire. The van’s engine note climbed a third it didn’t earn.
Reaper rolled the throttle open and closed the gap until the world was two bumpers and a belief. He reached with his left hand and found the bag strap at his chest. He thought of plastic cases and cassette spools and numbers with names. He thought of a judge waiting by accident to be brave on purpose. He thought of a little boy pointing at a camera in a photo that smelled like rain.
He bumped the van.
Just once. A lover’s nudge. A reminder.
It fishtailed. The passenger’s boot missed Ghost’s head and hit door. The door clanged. Ghost found purchase and a new angle on an old promise.
“Now,” Virgil said in his ear. Not an order. An affirmation.
Reaper hit the van again, harder.
The driver overcorrected. The rear slid out. The van rotated ninety degrees with a grace it didn’t deserve and planted its nose into the ditch like a pen writing full stop.
The passenger door blew open. A man in pads spilled into the weeds and remembered he had lungs. The driver kicked his door and got memory for free. The back doors stayed shut.
Reaper skidded the Shadow sideways and came off it already moving. The world narrowed to five feet and a handle.
He ripped the back doors wide.
Eli lay against the wall in the net, wrists bound in a way that would make monkeys shake their heads. His lip was split. His eyes were bright and furious and good. The bag strap was still on his shoulders.
“About time,” he said.
Reaper cut him loose with Clay’s knife. Eli fell forward into him, hot and shaking, then pushed away because boys his age hate help until they don’t.
“Ghost?” he said.
Reaper turned.
The passenger had hauled himself to all fours, found a pistol he shouldn’t own, and pointed it at a dark shape in the ditch weeds that was not moving.
“No,” Eli said and moved without decision.
Reaper did too.
The gun went off.
The sound tore the air into a sheet you could write on.
The passenger spun like men do when physics introduces itself properly. The pistol went into the ditch, where it belonged. Red stepped over the driver with the bored competence of a butcher’s apprentice and put a knee on his neck with a pressure that was administrative.
Eli slid down the ditch bank on his knees and skidded to the dark shape.
“Ghost,” he whispered. “Ghost—look at me.”
The bandage was torn. There was blood in places Reaper didn’t approve of. Ghost’s breaths were there and then small and then there again. His eyes blinked once. He lifted his head an inch like a man nodding to a friend across a bar that had just been raided.
“I’ve got you,” Eli said, voice cracking. “I’ve got you. Stay.”
Ghost’s eyes went past Eli. Past Reaper. Past the road. Past the storm that had finally decided to mean it.
Reaper put a hand on Eli’s shoulder and squeezed hard enough to anchor two hearts.
“Virgil,” Red said, voice flat from the shoulder of the road. “We’ve got the boy.”
“And the dog?” Virgil asked.
Eli’s breath hitched. “He’s—he’s here.”
“Hold him,” Stitch said in all their ears, gentle and steel. “I’m two out. I’ve got a kit and I’m mad.”
“Deacon?” Reaper said.
Red lifted his chin toward the county line. Far off, under the storm, three box trucks idled in a row like a choir practicing a hymn they didn’t believe. Deacon stood on the last one’s hood, hands in his pockets, the kind of stillness that means someone has made a promise to themselves they intend to keep.
He raised one hand and drew a lazy circle in the air with a finger, as if stirring a cup of coffee that had forgotten it was hot.
The trucks turned as one and rolled away.
Eli looked up from the ditch with Ghost’s head in his lap, blood on his thighs, rain in his eyes. “He’s breathing,” he said, voice a thread. “But he’s fading.”
Sirens were finally discovering their purpose somewhere back on County Two. The courthouse clock would hit eight in twenty-one minutes. The judge was waiting. The ledger weighed warm against Reaper’s chest.
He stared down the empty road Deacon had left like a dare.
“Choose,” Virgil said in his ear, as gentle as a gun. “Courthouse or clinic.”
Reaper looked at the boy. He looked at the dog.
Then he said a word that would change which story the county told itself in the morning.