"Sarah, take her into the walk-in freezer in the kitchen. Close the heavy steel door. If anything goes wrong, that steel will absorb the blast."
"Where are you going?" Sarah asked, her voice panicking again.
Cade walked toward the front doors. "I'm going to give Silas exactly what he asked for. And then I'm going to end this."
Chapter 3: The Highway Marker
The rain hit Cade like a wall of ice the moment he pushed open the glass doors of the diner.
He stepped out into the parking lot, the heavy door swinging shut behind him. The neon sign above was dark, leaving the asphalt slick and illuminated only by the pale, sickly yellow of a single distant streetlamp.
Cade walked deliberately toward his motorcycle. He unbuckled the heavy leather strap on his right saddlebag and pulled out the titanium lockbox. It was heavy, filled with the financial ledgers, blackmail material, and extortion records that Silas had used to control the county for five years. Cade had stolen it to protect his own brother, but his brother was dead now. The box was all the leverage the Vipers had left.
Cade walked out to the edge of the parking lot, stopping near the crumbling concrete highway marker.
He set the lockbox down on the wet pavement.
Headlights flared to life from the tree line across the two-lane highway. A matte black van rolled slowly out of the shadows, its tires crushing gravel. It crossed the road and pulled into the diner parking lot, stopping twenty feet from Cade.
The driver's side door opened. Silas stepped out.
He was a tall, gaunt man in a heavy trench coat, holding an umbrella in one hand and a modified cell phone in the other. Two other Vipers stepped out of the sliding side door, holding heavy shotguns aimed directly at Cade’s chest.
"Look at you, Cade," Silas called out over the sound of the rain. "Playing the hero for a stray kid. I knew your conscience would get the better of you."
"The box is yours," Cade yelled back, his hands empty at his sides. "Text me the bypass code for the vest."
Silas laughed, walking slowly toward the lockbox. "You've been out of the game too long, Cade. There is no bypass code. Rusty didn't program one. The vest is hardwired. Only way to take it off is to detonate it."
Cade's jaw tightened. "You're going to blow up a little girl just to make a point?"
"No, I'm going to blow up a diner to erase my tracks," Silas corrected him smoothly. He nudged the titanium box with his boot. "Retrieve it," he ordered one of his men.
The man with the shotgun hurried forward, scooping up the heavy box, and retreated to the van.