Page 3 of Iron and Ivory

Dusty's too eager on a good night so tonight he looks like a coiled spring somebody forgot to release.

Crow don't look like nothin'—just a still shadow with that air of I'm ready, but I'm not sure for what. Like breathin' is a risk he maybe can't afford.

I roll through without stoppin'. They know I'm back. That's enough.

The chain link closes behind me and the hard metallic clatter is a final-sounding clank that feels like a seal on my fate.

The garage is dark. Ratchet's bay doors are shut, and the lights are off, and the whole structure just squats there in the compound like something that's been holding its breath, waitin' to exhale.

When I left, that place was loud. Now it's quiet enough that I can hear the wind comin' off the flats.

I count the bikes without meanin' to, the way you count exits when you walk into a room or faces before you figure out which one's gonna be a problem. It's reflex now. Pure survival math. Three years in Whitefall taught my eyes to do math before my brain even asks the question.

Half. Maybe a little less than half. Where fifty machines stood this mornin' lined up like soldiers fixed for war, there are maybe twenty-somethin' now. The gaps between 'em are wrong. Too much space. Like missin' teeth. Like a row of men where some of the men aren't comin' back.

When you kill a biker you gotta get rid of his ride same as his body. Same urgency. Same paranoia. Same cold math. I can still hear Ratchet this mornin', voice bouncin' off the garage walls like a round off concrete.

"Not a single fuckin' part." He said it slow. The way a man says somethin' he's said before and has to say again because somebody didn't listen the first time. "Not a goddamned grip, not a motherfuckin' peg, not a seat, not a carburetor, not even a fuckin' bandana—do you little girls hear me? It all goes in the pit."

And he meant it.

'Cause an outlaw's bike is a fingerprint. It's not a machine, it's a record.

Every mod, every custom part, every piece of leather or chrome a man bolted on 'cause it spoke to him—that's evidence. That's a trail. I don't care how small the piece is, I don't care how unlikely the odds, that shit carries a man's identity the same way his face does.

One day, three years from now, you're gonna think ya got away clean. You're gonna be standin' in some parking lot somewhere out in the world, feelin' light, feelin' free, feelin' like the past is buried so deep it's hit the water table. And then some motherfucker is gonna walk up to you with that look—that slow recognition crawlin' up from his jaw to his eyes—and ask where you got that seat.

A seat.

Somethin' you liked.

Somethin' somebody else had, and somebody else loved, and somebody else rode ten thousand miles on and broke in with their own weight.

Somethin' you took from 'em when you took everything else.

And this guy in the parking lot, he remembers that seat too. Maybe he was there. Maybe he wasn't there but he knew the man, rode with him, drank with him, watched him bolt that seat on in the garage on some forgettable Tuesday. And the question starts small but it don't stay small.

It grows.

And come to think of it, he'll say, all casual like… whatever happened to that bro?

And then it's over.

Just like that. Just that fast.

This isn't some fuckin' movie. This life isn't a TV show where the credits roll and the guilty party disappears into the narrative.

Nobody's gotta prove a goddamn thing in this world.

Nobody's waitin' on a courtroom, on a jury, on evidence submitted and argued and deliberated.

Suspicion is enough. It's always been enough. Suspicion gets you a conversation in a dark room that ends with you on the floor, and nobody files a report on that, either.

So there are two pits out beyond the compound, dug deep into the hard Montana dirt.

One for bodies.

One for bikes.