"Kill the comm." Tyler's voice was low, barely audible over the wind. "Don't want him hearing us coming."
I switched off my radio, felt the silence settle around us like a blanket. Just the thunder of our engines now, and the wind tearing past.
Tyler pointed left, toward a turnoff I would have missed in the darkness—a dirt road, barely visible, cutting between two low ridges.
"I remember this." His voice carried across the space between our bikes. "You showed me, during the lessons. Said it loops around to the old mining track."
I remembered. A scenic detour I'd taken him on, back when teaching him to ride had been an excuse to spend time together. The road wound through rough terrain, eventually connecting to a network of abandoned mining trails that stretched for miles. The perfect place for a man who didn't want to be found.
We turned onto the dirt road without slowing, our tires kicking up plumes of dust. The surface was rougher here—loose gravel, ruts, the occasional boulder that required quick maneuvering. Tyler handled it well, his focus absolute, his body moving with the bike instead of fighting it. The fear that used to live in his shoulders was gone. Whatever chains Cross had wrapped around him, they'd finally broken.
We rode for another fifteen minutes, climbing gradually into the foothills. The old mining track appeared ahead—a wider path, better maintained than I'd expected, cutting along the side of a ridge.
Tyler slowed, then stopped. I pulled up beside him, killing my engine.
Silence. The desert held its breath.
"There." Tyler's voice was barely a whisper. He pointed toward the ridge, and I followed his gaze.
Dust. A faint cloud of it, catching the moonlight, drifting up from somewhere beyond the next rise.
"Could be an animal." The words felt hollow even as I spoke them.
"Wrong pattern. That's a vehicle. Moving fast."
I studied the dust cloud, trying to calculate distance and direction. Tyler was right—the dispersal pattern was wrong for wildlife. Something mechanical had stirred up that dirt, and recently.
"He's heading for the old silver mine." I pulled up my mental map of the area. "There's a collapsed shaft about two miles east. Good place to hide a vehicle, wait for pickup."
"Then we cut him off."
Tyler was already moving, his Sportster roaring back to life. He didn't wait for me to take the lead—just pointed his bike toward a narrow gap between two rock formations and hit the throttle.
I followed.
The shortcut was brutal. Loose rock, steep grades, sections where the "road" was nothing more than packed dirt between boulders. Tyler navigated it with a precision that would have been impossible amonth ago, his instincts filling in where experience left gaps.
I watched him lean into a sharp turn, his knee nearly brushing the ground, and felt my heart clench with something that had nothing to do with fear. Pride. Admiration. The bone-deep satisfaction of watching someone you cared about become exactly who they were meant to be.
We emerged onto the mining track a hundred yards ahead of where we'd estimated Vince's position. Tyler killed his engine again, coasting to a stop behind a cluster of boulders that would hide us from view.
Silence returned. We waited.
The desert at night had a particular quality of stillness—the kind that made every sound carry for miles. I could hear my own heartbeat, the tick of cooling metal from our engines, the distant cry of a coyote somewhere in the hills. Beside me, Tyler was motionless on his bike, his focus absolute, every sense straining toward the darkness ahead.
The sound reached us before the light did—the whine of a smaller engine, pushed hard, echoing off the rock walls of the ridge. Then headlights, cutting through the darkness, moving fast along the track we'd just intercepted.
Vince.
He was riding a Honda—lighter and faster than our Harleys, better suited for this terrain. No wonder he'd chosen this route. On open road, we'd run him down eventually. Out here, his advantage was significant. But he didn't know we were here. Didn'tknow we'd cut our radios, taken the shortcut, positioned ourselves directly in his path. He thought he was alone in the darkness, running free toward whatever extraction point Cross had arranged.
Tyler caught my eye. Nodded once.
Our Harleys roared to life simultaneously, the twin thunder of V-twin engines shattering the desert silence. Headlights blazed on, flooding the track with harsh white light. Vince's silhouette jerked—surprise, recognition, the split-second calculation of a man who'd just realized he was trapped.
He wrenched the Honda's handlebars left, searching for another route, but Tyler was already in motion. The Sportster shot forward, cutting across the track at an angle that forced Vince to choose: brake hard, or collide.
The Honda's rear tire locked up, skidding on loose gravel with a shriek of rubber on stone. For a moment I thought he was going down—saw the bike lean past the point of recovery, saw Vince's leg shoot out to catch himself. But he was good—Cross wouldn't have used someone who wasn't—and he muscled the Honda back upright, wrenching it around to face the way he'd come.
