Man Made Murder (Blood Road Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  His heart a bomb ticking toward explosion.

  He pressed the gas, flicking his eyes toward the rearview.

  Darkness. Trees.

  A foot came down beside him, the toe of a boot resting on the open window.

  The truck swerved and corrected as Dean elbowed it out of the way. He scrabbled for the window crank.

  A car swept past the mouth of the driveway, as though just over the line, where dirt met hardtop, the normal world existed. Reality. He had a crazy thought that the front end of his truck would crash into an invisible barrier, that he was trapped in this fucked up alternate dimension where nightmares lived.

  The biker’s boot jammed down hard on the window before he managed to get it up more than a few inches.

  Dean pried at it, keeping an eye on the road that was coming up way too fast. He couldn’t risk slowing down. He needed to get the fuck out of there. Wind buffeted the open wound in his neck, the pain sharp as he shifted and twisted his arm to force the boot out again.

  The leg kicked in at him, its sole shoving, gritty, against his cheek. He slammed on the brake and grabbed it around the ankle. But it just kept pushing in.

  The other boot dropped down, getting its footing on the window.

  Fuck this. Just fuck this.

  He jammed his foot on the gas. The tires spun. The truck shot forward, knocking him back. He peeled onto the road, cranking the wheel hard. A horn blared. Headlights swerved. The truck’s tires caught the far shoulder, bumping the guitar off the seat. He floored it again. Dirt spit. His tires caught pavement, and the truck shot forward.

  The other boot tried to come in.

  Dean cranked the wheel.

  The truck’s back end fishtailed on the pavement.

  His lips were numb, his back and neck hot.

  He grabbed the biker’s foot by the heel and forced it back out—as soon he let go, it swung back in, getting him at the top of his ear, making it smart.

  He stepped on the gas again. Caught the wheel with one hand while using the other to knock the boot back out the window.

  The biker couldn’t be holding on to much on the roof.

  He took the truck up to forty, trying to roll the window up again. He made it halfway before the boot stepped down on it again.

  He stomped the brakes hard enough to throw himself against the steering wheel.

  Put it in reverse and peeled around.

  The weight on the roof shifted backward. Boots kicked for purchase against the side of the cab.

  Sweat dripped off Dean’s hair, trickling down the side of his nose.

  His scalp prickled tightly.

  Back in drive, he floored the gas until the truck shuddered—sixty, seventy, eighty on the curving back road.

  A fist banged the window.

  He flinched with every thud.

  Gravity pulled on the truck as he rounded a curve going too fast. Two of his tires lifted off the pavement. The body on the roof shifted toward the inside of the curve.

  He slammed on the brakes.

  The truck juddered as it landed back on four wheels, making Dean’s teeth click together.

  The body on the roof tumbled down the windshield.

  Dean pressed back in his seat, hands braced on the steering wheel.

  The biker banged to a stop on the hood. One arm reached back, leather-gloved fingers feeling for something to hold onto.

  The biker’s face turned toward him, his mouth distorted, black with blood. But still grinning. Eyes feverish and sparkling.

  Dean jerked the shifter into reverse and tore backward.

  The biker bumped down the hood and spilled over its edge, boots flying into the air, then gone.

  Dean forced the gearshift back to drive and gave it all the gas he could.

  The truck bumped hard, its front tires riding over the body. A split second later, the back tires bumped over it. All four wheels hit pavement again, the truck speeding away.

  Dean fought the urge to ease up and look back. He hunched forward, blinking through sweat, clenching the wheel, focusing on the road.

  He needed to get to a hospital.

  His shirt clung to his back. The steering wheel was sticky with blood. He didn’t hurt—shock had taken him away from that. But he needed to get to a fucking hospital.

  He checked the rearview. Nothing but darkness beyond the red glow of his lights.

  All the blood in his shirt. His mouth flooded with saliva. A clamminess crawled his scalp, draining the heat from his cheeks.

  His lips felt thin, numb. His fingers were thick and clumsy.

  He glanced in the rearview.

  Trees and empty road.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. He tried to remember where the hospital was, what roads he needed to take to get there. He could picture the place—ugly sprawling white with a squared-off canopy over the front entrance—but the road leading to it was as black as the night behind him.

  “Jesus.” He was shaking.

  That thing had just killed him.

  His blood was pumping out of his neck as fast as his heart could beat, and that thing had just fucking killed him.

  Warmth slipped through him, a floating feeling of comfort. He fought his eyes back open, back to the reality of his situation. He tried to watch the road. Something familiar would come along. Something would snap into place.

  His hands were like blocks of Styrofoam, useless and light, like they were going to float right off the wheel. He focused on them, on keeping hold of the wheel.

  His speed slipped to forty.

  He sent a signal down to his foot to put more pressure on the pedal, but lowering that foot was like asking it to climb a mountain with a ninety-pound weight tied to it. The speedometer wavered toward forty-five before starting to sink back.

  He wanted to sink too.

  Just sink into blackness and not worry about anything…

  A crossroad came up. He turned without signaling, afraid to let the wheel go with either hand. He took another turn, wide, the truck ranging into the other lane. He came close to swiping a car parked on the street before correcting. Another turn—no idea where he was going, only that he wanted to be off the road he’d been on, to make it difficult for the biker to track him down.

  He wasn’t willing to believe running over the guy had killed him.

  Jesus.

  He saw a dog in the road suddenly—a Newfoundland so black it was only thanks to its eyes that it caught Dean’s attention. He swerved, feeling for a second like he wasn’t going to be able to get the truck back on the road, and then he had it, the dog disappearing behind him.

  Two blocks later, he was drifting toward darkness again. Wanting so badly to just give in to it.

  The truck crept to ten miles an hour.

  His legs felt like lead. He was losing the fight to stay conscious.

  He coasted into a dirt lot beside a disheveled concrete building, its windows boarded. The dirt in the lot was so dead, it didn’t even have weeds growing in it.

  The truck rolled to a stop in the building’s shadow.

  His fingers fumbled the keys until he got hold of them and turned the one in the ignition. The engine cut off.

  He stared into the dark shapes of trees behind the building.

  Fuzzy shadows swelled at the edge of his vision.

  He made a sharp sound, a chh through his teeth. The skin behind his ears prickled as he strained to hear a bike, a dog barking—the whomp whomp of wings.

  The engine ticked, cooling under the hood.

  The urge to throw up tightened his stomach, but he was detached from it. His body couldn’t get itself together enough to carry half-digested food up his esophagus.

  Air rushed in his ears, like the inside of a seashell—and the blackness came again.

  The engine ticked.

  Then there was silence.

  2.

  * * *

  Carl Delacroix eased his Cougar alongside the curb, engine idling. So far he
’d only seen New Hampshire in the dark, and his impression was there were a lot of trees, most of them ashy black until the Cougar’s headlights washed them gray, but he’d seen trees that made him think of bones too, their bark white and peeling.

  Colonial homes lined this street, silent and boxy and severe-looking, with either no shutters at all or narrow dark rectangles framing dark windows, hardly any roof overhang, which said to him that sun wasn’t the same thing here as it was in New Mexico. Short white fences edged the yards, collecting fallen oak leaves in their pickets.

  He flipped the dome light on, unfolded the map he’d picked up at a Sunoco in Keene. It’d been a thirty-four-hour drive across the country, mile after mile of highway. He could have flown—probably should have, but then what? Pay for a rental on top of airfare? That was assuming anyone would even rent to a twenty-year-old.

  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.