“I can take you,” he said.
The turkey paced around in a circle and took a short run at him, its chest puffed out and ruffled. When he didn’t react to the aggression, the bird thought better of it, shook itself, and headed back into the trees.
“You’re lucky I always hated Thanksgiving,” Clay told it as he let his jacket fall back over the gun. The sound of a car engine drifted up the road and caught Clay’s ear. “Finally.”
He pushed the bike back upright and revved the engine. The back wheel fishtailed briefly in the dry dirt at the side of the road, kicking up a cloud before it finally grabbed some traction. Clay tightened his thighs around the bike as it surged forward, and he pulled back onto the road.
This time when he checked his rearview mirror, the car was back.
Clay kept an eye on the speedometer all the way back to Sweeny. He didn’t want to lose them again.
Everything was going according to plan. Right up until the black Chevy going the other way down the road suddenly swerved over the white lines. It clipped the bike, Clay’s leg pinned against the driver’s side door, and for asecond, Clay thought he could recover. He could feel where he needed to shift to rebalance the bike.
Then it all just spun out from under him. He hit the road hard, bike on top of him, and they scraped along the concrete in a shower of sparks and smoke. Something in Clay’s knee went loose and hot as it pulled in the wrong direction, and he felt it give. It didn’t hurt yet. That was a bad sign.
He slammed to a stop against the Welcome to Cargill County sign, hard enough he felt the metal struts buckle. That hurt. Then the bike slammed to a stop against him, his holster jammed so far into his side he figured he’d see the imprint for a year, and he felt the sharp, almost heady bloom of pain as his ribs compressed around his lungs.
Pain had an audio track. People never talked about it, but it crackled through his ears like static and drowned out the world around him. Clay grabbed the saddle of the bike and pushed at it. The weight of it didn’t shift.
He dropped his head back to bounce against the road and screwed his eyes shut as he tried to focus.
The singsong inflections of someone in the middle of panicking cut through the static first.
“Jesus Christ. JesusChrist!” someone repeated. It took Clay a second to place Errand Boy. “What did you do? You’ve killed him. We weren’t supposed to kill him. Judge Parker was very clear and—”
“She was,” someone else said calmly. “To us. He’s more useful alive, but he’s less trouble dead. Something he should remember.”
Clay tried to shift the bike again. This time it moved enough he could squirm out from under it. He used the sign to pull himself to his feet, his chest tight and unhappy about him breathing.
“Remember? I should get that stitched and framed,” Clay said. “That’s the family motto.”
He spat blood onto the fuel tank of his bike and took stock of Charity’s new muscle. Five of them, if you counted Errand Boy. The other four were masked, black gaiters pulled up over their mouths and noses. They looked like cops to Clay. They just carried themselves like it; it was in the way they moved as they fanned out around him.
“Get down on your knees,” one of them said as he pulled a gun from under his jacket. He pointed it at Clay and used the muzzle to point to where he wanted Clay to go. “Now!”
The Kentucky accent cracked into something thicker, the Pashtun edge harsh as a dead man echoed the words. His brain cast a shadow over the scene because it had been nighttime when it happened, and he could smell smoke and charred meat.
That had been him. Clay sliced bacon, scraped off to cook on the fire-melted sand.
Clay grinned, blood salty and slippery on his teeth, and drew his gun in one smooth, easy motion. The muzzle was rock steady as he pointed it back at the masked cop. He hurt—some places more than others—but he’d felt worse.
“What if I don’t?” he asked.
The leader shook his head. Despite the mask, he managed to look contemptuous.
“You can’t shoot us all.”
Clay winked at him. “But I can shoot you.”
And he did. He aimed low and to the side. The last thing he wanted was the complication of a dead cop if he didn’t need it. The bullet punched through the leader’s thigh and blew out the back. Blood sprayed out in a fine mist that splattered over Errand Boy’s hands and white shirt
He squawked. The leader yelped and staggered back into the car, his weight on one leg as he grabbed at the hole in his thigh with his bare hand.
“Get him!”
Clay could have probably taken out Errand Boy, who looked increasingly terrified by how things had turned out, but he hesitated, and the other three swarmed him before he could pick a new target. One of them yanked the gun out of his hand and tossed it to the side. It bounced away into the undergrowth.
Two of them grabbed him by the arm and tried to wrestle him to the ground. The third threw a punch that caught Clay on the side of the face. It would have broken Clay’s jaw if he’d not yanked his head back.
