The boy coasted the last twenty yards, dropping his bike in the gravel. He kept running, chest heaving, and stopped four feet from Riker’s Road King. He stood with his hands on his knees and his head down, pulling air like every breath hurt.
Riker cut his engine. He stepped off the bike and stood there—six feet three, two hundred and forty pounds—with a face that looked like it had been carved from the same hard material as the mountains around them. A scar cut along his jaw from a night in eastern Afghanistan that he never talked about. On the back of his cut were the words: Road Captain, Steel Saw Chapter, Hells Angels.
He looked at the boy. Nine years old, maybe ten. Dark hair stuck to his forehead with sweat. Jeans with holes in both knees. On his left shoulder, visible where his T-shirt had shifted, was a bruise the size of a fist. It was fresh, deep red at the edges. The color of something done deliberately.
Riker crouched down to the boy’s eye level. “Take a breath,” he said gently but firmly. “Then tell me.”
The boy looked up with eyes that were terrified yet absolutely certain—the specific combination that only exists in people who have seen something real and are fighting hard to be believed.
“They’re waiting for you around the corner,” he gasped. “The men with the guns. They’re going to kill you.”
The boy’s name was Leo Montgomery. He lived three blocks off the mountain road in a house that needed paint, with a mother who worked double shifts at the county hospital and a bicycle that was three years too small for him.