Not the complicated happy of a man processing recent trauma, not the cautious happy of a man who knew the war wasn't over. Just happy. The simple, uncomplicated, full-body happiness of a man riding a motorcycle through the desert with the wind in his face and a healed leg beneath him and two men back at the compound who loved him and whom he loved back,and if that wasn't enough to make a person grin inside a helmet, I didn't know what was.
The ride to Hawthorne traced the same route we'd taken for the depot raid, and the familiarity of it felt different now. The last time I'd been on this highway, it had been after midnight, no headlights, engines muted, twenty men riding toward a compound full of armed strangers. The tension had been a living thing, coiled in my chest, tightening with every mile. Now the same road stretched ahead in broad daylight, the heat shimmer making the asphalt ripple, and the only tension in my body was the pleasant ache in my thighs from three hours in the saddle.
Hawk had told me himself when I'd briefed him on the real estate findings: the Wolves' depot was shut down, locked behind FBI tape, crawling with federal investigators cataloguing the weapons cache Nolan had documented. Whatever Holt and Kolev were doing, they weren't doing it on this highway. The trafficking compound was dead. The route was clean. And none of the four properties we'd flagged as potential hideouts were anywhere near Hawthorne. Tonopah was a hundred miles west. Fallon was north. Reno was northwest. The Toiyabe cabin was buried in mountains east of Austin. Wherever Holt was hiding, he was hiding far from the road between Henderson and the hardware store.
We'd stopped for gas an hour back, a truck stop off Route 95 with a single pump and a cashier who looked like she'd been sitting behind that counter since the highway was built. I'd bought four bottles of water and a bag of beef jerky and made a joke about the cashier's cat calendar that earned me a smile so reluctant it qualified as a diplomatic achievement. Radio check with the compound at every thirty-minute mark, as Dec had requested. Each one clean. Each one a confirmation that the world was, for once, cooperating.
Mendez rode point. Solid, quiet, twelve years patched, a rider who held his line through a crosswind without adjusting his grip. Behind him, Reeves, younger, eight years in, built like a middleweight and perpetually amused by things only he found funny. I was third. And at the tail, Ortiz, the oldest of the group, a man whose silver beard and leather-cracked hands spoke to decades on a Harley and who rode with the patient, measured cadence of someone who'd learned that the road rewarded consistency, not speed.
Good men. Reliable men. Men who didn't need babysitting and who treated a supply run with the same professionalism they'd bring to a combat operation, because that was the culture Hawk built.
I was in a diamond formation, technically. The proper riding arrangement for a four-man group on open highway. But the proper riding arrangement was boring, and I was Irish, and three hours of straight desert road had turned my rebuilt self into a coiled spring of restless energy that needed an outlet.
I opened the throttle. Surged forward between Mendez and Reeves, my Harley roaring as I split the formation, weaved left around Mendez with a clearance that was technically sufficient and spiritually reckless, then fell back into position with a whoop that was audible even through the engine noise and the wind.
"The fuck, Irish?" Reeves, through the comms. Laughing.
"Just checking if you're awake."
"We're awake. You're insane."
"Both things can be true."
Behind me, Ortiz's low chuckle crackled through the speaker. Even Mendez, who smiled approximately twice per fiscal year, shook his head in a way that communicated reluctant amusement.
I settled back into position at the rear of the diamond. Let the formation hold. The highway stretched ahead, flat and empty,the white line flickering under four headlights. My Harley rumbled beneath me with the deep, steady vibration that lived in my bones the way music lives in a musician's hands, the engine heat rising through the frame, the pegs buzzing against the soles of my boots, the handlebars transmitting every imperfection in the asphalt through the grips into my palms.
My leg held. No pain. No stiffness. The rebuilt muscle warm and engaged, absorbing the vibration, holding the peg with the same steady confidence it had shown in the dock fight. Four months of hell, and the body Rosa had rebuilt was the body that let me ride like this, free and fast, with the wind pulling at my cut, the sun on my back, and the bone-deep satisfaction of a man who'd been broken and put himself back together.
I was already thinking about getting home. About walking through the door and finding Dec and Nolan wherever they'd settled for the afternoon. Nolan at the desk, glasses on, lost in data. Dec on the bed, cleaning a weapon, the steady rhythm of his hands doing the thing his hands always did when his mind was elsewhere. I'd drop the hardware store bags in the hallway and kiss whoever was closest first and the other one second and start an argument about dinner that would last twenty minutes and end with all three of us eating whatever Maria had left in the kitchen.
The thought made me grin. The grin made me warm. The warmth spread through my chest and my stomach and my rebuilt leg, and the desert was beautiful, and the sky was infinite, and for approximately four more seconds, the world was the right size and shape and contained exactly the right number of people.
The rifle crack split the air like the sky itself had fractured.
I didn't hear it first. I felt it. A concussive snap that traveled through the air and hit my chest before the sound registered in my ears, sharp and flat and wrong, the sharp signature of a high-velocity round breaking the sound barrier, and in the fraction of a second between feeling and hearing I watched Reeves come apart.
The bullet caught him in the upper chest. At highway speed. The impact was instantaneous and catastrophic, jerking sideways with the force of a round that had traveled faster than the noise announcing it, his hands ripping off the handlebars, his weight shifting in a way that physics could only resolve one direction. The Harley went sideways beneath him. He separated from the machine in a tumble that was not a tumble but a destruction, the bike screaming across asphalt in a shower of chrome and sparks, Reeves hitting the ground shoulder-first at sixty miles an hour and rolling, the leather of his cut shredding against the pavement, his limbs moving in angles that human joints weren't designed to accommodate. The bike cartwheeled off the road and hit a cluster of desert rocks with a sound like a building collapsing, metal crumpling and glass shattering and the engine dying in a choked, final gasp.
Reeves didn't move. The dust cloud that followed him settled over his body like a shroud.
My brain processed the sequence in reverse. The body on the road. The bike in the rocks. The sound. The crack.
Sniper.
"CONTACT!" My voice tore out of me before the tactical thought had finished forming. "Sniper fire! Reeves is down!"
Mendez was already braking, his back tire skidding, the ABS kicking in. Ortiz, behind me, swerved hard right, his boot scraping asphalt, his hand going to the holster on his hip. The three of us decelerated in a controlled chaos of tire smoke and engine noise, bikes slowing from sixty to twenty to stopped in a stretch of road that had become a kill zone.
Reeves lay on the ground forty yards behind us. Motionless. The dust settling over him like a shroud.
"What the fuck?!" Ortiz, his voice raw, his weapon drawn, the barrel sweeping the ridgelines on both sides of the highway. "Where did that come from? Where the fuck did that come from?"
I had my Glock out. Scanning. The terrain was flat on both sides, scrub and rock, visibility a quarter mile to the nearest elevation. A sniper could be anywhere. A sniper with that kind of accuracy, that kind of timing, could be half a mile away on a ridge I couldn't even see.
"Eyes on the ridges!" Mendez, barking orders, his experience overriding the shock. "Both sides! Look for?—"
The sound came from our left. Not a gunshot. An engine. Deep, heavy, the growl of a large vehicle accelerating hard across packed earth.
