Man Made Murder (Blood Road Trilogy Book 1) (4 page)

He’d napped at rest stops, the Cougar wedged between rumbling semis, but sleep, actual sleep? What the fuck was that anymore? The last good night’s sleep he remembered getting was in 1976, and he’d been kicking himself in the ass for wasting precious time sleeping ever since.

The map vibrated in his hands—the caffeine, the hours of guiding a steering wheel. The shakiness didn’t help his orientation. Where he needed to be was marked with a scribble. Where he
was
on the other hand…He leaned toward the windshield, tilting to see around the school photo and St. Michael medallion hanging from his rearview mirror. Squinting, he made out the street sign, his lips moving to commit its name to his scattered memory long enough to locate it on the map.

When he finally found the street he was looking for, after circling around and going up the wrong street twice—when he found the
bar
with the eight motorcycles parked out front, he laughed, an exhausted, lonely, half-losing-it sound that hung in the car’s cabin like cigarette smoke.

A one-story wooden building stained black, the bar was like a smudge of char. Its windows were shuttered. No sign with the bar’s name hung outside, but who needed that when you had three Triumphs, an Indian, and four Harley hogs sitting out front?

He sat forward, his back barely grazing the seat. This was it. That was what he’d come for. He swung down the next major street and came around again, stopping alongside a sidewalk three blocks up from the bar.

He cut the engine.

Peered around.

The street was dead, the shops, cafes, and municipal building closed. Across from the bar sat a squat cinderblock building, looking like it had been shunned by the more picturesque downtown area that started closer to where Carl was parked. A fifty-foot radio mast loomed behind it. Call station letters—WHAK—rose three feet high on the concrete building’s face. Out of curiosity he wanted to dial in the station, but the stereo’s light would draw attention to the car, the same way taking his edge off with a few cigarettes would, so he slouched in silence, reached for the last dregs in the cup of caffeine he’d bought in Keene, and put his attention on the bar.

His information could be wrong. Sure, he was looking at bikes, but they could be any club’s bikes. Nothing outside the bar or, that he could see,
on
the bikes, marked this as Black Sun Riders territory. He cupped a hand over his wrist and pressed the button to light up his watch face for half a second.

Two a.m.

It wasn’t likely they were living in the bar, so they had to be coming out sooner or later. Walker, the last P.I. he’d hired, had tracked them to this point, but either hadn’t been able to go any farther, or hadn’t wanted to. Carl was never sure, from their conversation on the phone. Something in the man’s voice, or something in the spaces between his carefully selected words.

When he lifted his eyes, his gaze reached long, toward the bar again, but the photo hanging from his mirror caught his attention. He brought his focus closer, picking out Sophie’s face in the dark shadows of the car. She had that almost squared-off smile she forced on for photos. In real life, she’d had a great smile—contagious, especially when it was paired with a laugh—but every photo she posed for, going all the way back to when she was in diapers, she put the square smile on, like she thought the point of it was to neatly frame her teeth for the camera.

He kissed the tip of his finger and touched her face. The gold Los Campos High School seal in the corner glinted in the light from a streetlamp.

The damn packet of school photos had shown up in the mail the day after her funeral.

Movement caught his eye. He shrank down, knees knocking the underside of the dash. From the dim yellow glow of the bar’s interior stepped a biker, about two hundred and fifty pounds, wide shoulders, black leather jacket. Gloves with the fingers sliced off. He swung a leg over the farthest bike in the row, straightened it between his legs, kicked the stand up. With the stomp of a foot, he cranked the bike to life, its rumble crowding the dead street.

Carl’s heart beat slow but hard. This wasn’t his guy. But he watched, fascinated, anyway. Because this guy probably
knew
his guy.

Were all the Black Sun Riders like his guy? Carl had pored over the stories in biker magazines, the crazy first-person tales of gang rape and strapping dead bitches to the back of their bikes, the smell of burning flesh as the corpse’s leg burned on the muffler. He could believe they were all—in these outlaw gangs at least—like his guy.

As the biker pulled out, swinging his bike up the street, the wind swept his blond hair back, and Carl ducked close to the driver’s side door, turning his face toward it so only his dark hair showed. The engine rattled his eardrums, vibrated the door against his cheek. It dropped off as the bike kept going. He let out his breath, waiting until the engine was just a fading buzz before lifting his head. The bar was unchanged, just a black bump at the edge of a streetlamp’s reach. He shifted around to look out the back window.

The bike was gone.

Seven more to go.

After an hour, the bar’s door swung open again, someone leaning in the frame, watching the street as he smoked a cigarette. An engine growled from behind Carl. He slouched, watching over the dash. The blond again, returning.

The P.I. before Walker had sent him a photo, a black and white print of a group of soldiers in Korea. On the phone with that P.I., Carl had said, “This has to be his father. I mean, come on.” In the photo, Sergeant David “Grip” Gershon stood smirking beside a Lieutenant, his arm hanging over a gun of some kind he had on his shoulder. And it did look like his biker, but the photo was twenty-five years old.

I’m just telling you what I found
, Sanderson had said with a sigh, and Carl had gone looking for yet another P.I.

Watching the blond exchange words with the guy in the doorway, Carl wished he could take a look at that photo now. It was in a folder in the back seat, but it’d just be a smudge in the dark unless he was willing to draw attention to himself by holding it up near the windshield.

It was stupid. He’d had nothing but catnaps for two days. Even if he had the photo in his hand and the fucking dome light on, so what if a guy in an old black and white photo looked similar to another guy a hundred yards away? It wasn’t like the world didn’t have plenty of large men with blond hair.

The guy at the bar door crushed his cigarette under his foot, and the both of them went inside.

During the drive from New Mexico, Carl had pictured how this was going to go. He was going to walk into the bar, spot his guy, draw the gun out of his waistband, extend his arm. Pull the trigger.

And go to jail, but that was all right. He could do time for this if it meant justice was finally served. Or maybe they’d kill him before they called the cops. That was all right too. He only had one thing he had to do in this life; after that, nothing else mattered.

But he’d pictured himself getting here earlier, imagined the bar being rowdier, neon beer signs in the windows, people coming and going. Women laughing.

Not this shadow of a building.

What if his guy wasn’t in there? He’d stand out like a neon light, wandering into an unmarked bar in the early hours of morning, in a town that had otherwise gone to sleep.

By four, his knees were stiff. He turned sideways, putting his back against the driver’s door, legs over the console. His feet itched. His scalp itched. The coffee he’d gone through on his way across the state pressed against his bladder. He shifted to get some weight off it, the steering wheel in the way of his elbow. His eye caught his sister’s photo again. He touched it with the tip of a finger.

He’d get the guy. He’d put his sister to rest.

The numbers on his watch said it was nearly six. First light wasn’t showing yet, the stars still glinting in the sky, but on the ground shapes picked themselves out of the shadows, the grays softening, the details sharpening. If it weren’t for the bikes still parked out front, he’d take off, find a hotel to grab a few hours of sleep in. No one was awake this time of the morning except the people who needed to get up to go to work. But he wanted to see who owned the bikes out front.

At the rumble of an engine, Carl drew himself straight.

Up a side street it came, swinging onto the main drag, slowing as it neared the others. In the pool of a streetlamp, one of the side mirrors hung crooked. A tailpipe was crumpled. The bike stopped, and the rider back-walked in alongside the others.

At the sight of the knife jutting from the biker’s thigh as he toed the kickstand down, Carl swung his feet back under the dash and gripped the steering wheel. Dark hair, long sideburns. Carl wished he could see better from where he was parked. The biker swung his leg off, his hand releasing the clutch.

Carl strained to make out the patch on the back of the jacket. Binoculars—he needed to find a K-Mart first chance he got. Didn’t know why he didn’t think to have some already. (Oh right: because he was going to strut into the bar and take care of the whole thing in one swoop.)

The biker stepped onto the sidewalk, yanking one glove off by the fingertips. His step had a hitch, something a little off to it. He threw open the bar door and plunged off-kilter inside. The door fell shut.

Everything returned to dead silence.

Carl squeezed the steering wheel, his breath flooding from him.

It was him—the hawk nose, the thin mouth. He’d seen him pull his gloves off like that once before, from about the same distance, when he’d watched the man stride up the steps of the Los Campos High School gymnasium, Sophie standing at the top, her fingers fidgeting with the buckle on her purse. She’d seemed to barely notice the biker approaching. Older than her by ten years at least, not worth paying attention to, her eyes had searched past him, looking for someone her age. She’d been waiting for the little snot who’d asked her to the basketball game, then hadn’t shown up. Carl, kicking back in the Cougar in the school’s parking lot, was ready to wait for as long as it took her to give up. Ready to wait until the game let out, even if the kid did show—just in case.

You couldn’t trust a guy who showed up a half hour late for his first date, although maybe he was related to Jonesy Randolph, one of the team’s best players and habitually late for everything. Carl had seen Jonesy getting out of his brother’s car not long before the game would have started, had watched him jog into the side of the building, his uniform all but spilling from under his arm. Tim Randolph’s car, dark burgundy and about fifteen years old, nearly dragging its muffler behind it, had pulled around, getting lost in the traffic from kids showing up to watch the game. And Carl had gone back to watching Soph watch for her date.

Later he’d learned that the kid she was waiting on had diabetes, the kind you got as a kid, and had been rushed to the hospital when his blood sugar tanked. His family hadn’t even thought about the ball game or the little girl who’d be waiting on the steps for her date to show. But that was later.

In his car in the high school lot, after everyone else had gone inside, Carl had watched the biker tug his gloves off as he mounted the steps, one finger at a time. He’d had patches on the back of his jacket, a smudge of black and white. Soph might have dismissed him, but Carl didn’t. His hand had moved to the door as the guy said something to Soph. In the wash of security lighting, she pointed down the road, like she was giving directions. The biker turned, following her arm. The security light picked out details on the back of his jacket—a skeleton on a motorcycle, it looked like. The outline of an oversized moon. The biker said something else to her. She nodded and said something back, just a tiny thing standing up there in her new dress with its long, tapered sleeves and flared short skirt, her dark hair parted neatly down the middle.

The car’s dome light had come on, Carl unintentionally opening the door just enough to trigger it.

The biker glanced toward the lot, said one more thing to Sophie, then turned with a nod and headed back down the steps, slapping his gloves against his thigh.

Carl had let his breath out and settled back to wait some more, pulling the door shut. Thinking he’d take his sister for ice cream when she finally gave up.

He’d stayed in his car that night—had taken his attention back off Soph when the danger had passed.

It had cost him everything.

He reached under the passenger seat now, feeling around the carpet. His fingers bumped the handgun, shifting it. He reached farther, caught a finger in the trigger guard, and dragged it across the scratchy carpet until he could grip it in his hand, solid and cool.

He straightened and stared at the chrome lined up outside the bar. The bar’s black door. The building itself, closing the biker inside.

He yanked the door handle and stepped out, his left leg tingling with pins and needles as it unfolded.

He pushed the handgun into the back of his jeans, settling his windbreaker over it.

He looked both ways before he loped across the street.

While the buildings were closely packed on the block he’d parked, they spread out as he headed south—a law office that looked like a home, set back from the street with a neatly tended yard, a frame shop with a sign made to look like a collage of picture frames. A convenience store on a corner, its door set at an angle so it could pick up foot traffic from either direction.

He picked up his pace, feeling exposed in the middle of the road. When he reached the other side, he veered a little, heading for the side of the clapboard bar. He leaned his back against it, catching his breath, collecting his courage. The gun pressed against the wall. Against his back. His heart ramped up to what felt like two hundred beats a minute. He reached back, one hand on the gun, the other scrubbing his forehead. Trying to work out how this was going to go. Was someone inside the door going to throw an arm out, barring the way, arguing him back out of the bar?
Members only. You don’t even look like you own a scooter, you little pissant
.