The officer with the coffee stops talking. He starts to turn his head toward the road.
I brace for what’s to come, heart slamming against my ribs.
But then another officer taps the clipboard again, speaking up, drawing his partner's attention right back to the paperwork.
We are so close I can smell the stale coffee and the heavy exhaust of the idling police cars. We drift through the shadows. Ten yards. Twenty. Fifty.
The road levels out as we enter the towering steel skeletons and massive dirt berms of the Morenci Mine complex. Our momentum begins to die. The bike slows to a crawl.
Noah doesn’t wait for us to stop. He doesn’t look back either. His heavy boot finds the kickstart and comes down hard.
And the engine explodes into life, the violent roar echoing off the corrugated metal siding of the mine buildings like a bomb going off.
“Hold on!” Noah yells over the sound.
He drops it into gear and rips the throttle. The back tire fishtails, screaming as it finds traction on the asphalt, and then we are gone—shooting like a bullet into the labyrinth of the mine.
Far behind us, the floodlights pivot, and the sirens begin to wail.
53
NOAH
The shriekingof sirens bounces off the sheer limestone walls, a chaotic, overlapping scream that promises a cage if they catch us, but that’s the thing…
They have to catch us first.
I cut the handlebars hard, veering off the paved access road and plunging us onto a dirt haul road. The Morenci Mine isn’t just a hole in the ground; it’s a mechanized hellscape of terraced rock, towering dirt berms, and industrial steel.
The air instantly turns thick with red dust.
We crest a steep incline and drop into the active pit. Floodlights the size of cars illuminate the terraced walls. Ahead of us, a massive haul truck—its tires twice my height—groans under the weight of crushed copper ore.
I don’t brake. I lean into the turn and shoot the gap between the truck’s massive rear axle and the sheer rock wall. The vibration of the machinery rattles my teeth, and the thick cloud of red dust the truck kicks up swallows us whole.
It’s the perfect smokescreen.
I weave the bike through a maze of conveyor belts and corrugated steel processing buildings, taking every blind turn Ican to break their line of sight. But the wail of the sirens is still bleeding through the industrial roar of the mine.
They can’t see me, but they can hear me. The Harleys’ straight pipes are a beacon. Every cop in the county is going to follow that sound until we hit a dead end.
If they think it’s worth it.
I grit my teeth, the exhaustion settling deep into my bones. My left arm is aching, the gunshot wound a throbbing, white-hot anchor dragging me down. I’m running on pure, burning adrenaline, and I just have to hope I don’t hit my fucking limit.
I spot a row of abandoned, rusted-out shipping containers and an old equipment shed at the edge of a secondary quarry.
I kill the engine and let our momentum carry us into the shadows between two of the containers. The sudden silence hits my ears like physical pressure.
I kick the stand down. “Off,” I wheeze, my chest heaving.
Rue scrambles off the seat, her eyes wide, coated in a fine layer of red dust. “Why are we stopping? They’re right behind us!”
“The bike’s too loud,” I say, unstrapping the duffel bag from the rear fender. I throw it over my good shoulder. “And the cops have radios. They’ll lock down every exit road out of this pit in five minutes. We need a ghost.”
I look down at the Knucklehead. The chrome is caked in mud, the engine ticking as it cools. It kept us alive. It got us here. I liked it. But it’s a dead weight now.
I’d burn the whole world down if it meant keeping Rue out of a cell.
