Page 11 of Thunder

"Can't get it all from here. He's runnin' without a front plate, so I gotta get the back, and he's not gonna let me behind him."

"Then we make him show it," Blaze says.

We work him for six miles.

We have practice doing this. Been plenty of times we had to do it in the past.

But you can only do it with men who've run together countless times. It’s seamless.

No more talk than a word here and there over the comm, and even shot to hell and riding drag, I can still do this part.

This part lives in the body under the pain where the Firm can't reach and the hip can't take it.

We slow.

He slows.

We push it up to eighty and he lets the gap grow and then reels it back, careful, disciplined, and that discipline tells me more than a plate would—that's not a jealous husband or a bored kid.

That's a professional.

That hits me in my gut like a swallowed stone.

Because there's only one kind of professional who'd be sitting a quarter mile off the Shotgun Saints right now, and he wears no patch.

The last one of him walked into our bunkhouse and I've still got a piece of his work lodged against my hip bone.

Finally, coming into a wide spot where the two-lane opens to pass, Blaze makes his move.

He signals Spur up and the two of them slow hard and swing wide like they're turning into a gas station, and the silver truck has a choice—brake behind them and sit there naked, or commit and roll on past.

He rolls on past.

He has to.

And for the two seconds it takes him to clear us, Spur's got his eyes on the back plate and his lips moving, and I've got mine on the cab.

Ball cap.

Sunglasses.

Beard, maybe fake, maybe not.

Eyes front, never once turned our way, which is the tell—a curious man looks, a hunting man keeps his face forward and lets you look at nothing.

He rolls on down the road at a lawful five over and doesn't speed up and doesn't slow down and is gone over the next rise like he was never there.

"Got it," Spur says.

"Whole plate. Memorized it. Not writin' it down till we're stopped."

"Good man." Blaze's voice is flat and hard now, the easy gone out of it. "Thunder. That what I think it is?"

"I don't know what it is," I say, which is true.

"But I know what it moves like. And it moves like the last one."

Nobody says anything for a mile.