Page 1 of Shadow Strike
CHAPTERONE
Hill’s Tavern
Blackridge, Montana
The two menin the back booth hadn’t ordered a second round.
Regan noticed things like that.It was a professional hazard—six years of true crime journalism had rewired her brain into a pattern-recognition machine that couldn’t be switched off, not even on a Wednesday night when all she wanted was to get through last call without any drama.
She noticed the couple by the window who’d stopped talking forty minutes ago and were now performing the particularly painful mime of two people pretending to look at their phones.
She noticed the guy at the bar who’d switched from beer to water without being asked, which meant he was either driving or had made a decision she respected.
She noticed that the jukebox had been stuck on the same classic rock rotation since seven p.m.and that nobody had bothered to change it.
She noticed the two men in booth seven who’d been nursing the same drinks for ninety minutes hadn’t once looked at each other.Men who came to a bar together and didn’t talk were either cops or trouble.
Regan was fairly certain these two weren’t cops.
Third Thursday in a row, she noted mentally, filing it the way she filed everything — date, time, observable details, behavioral pattern.Two males, late thirties to mid-forties, in motorcycle leather cuts with no visible patches on the front.Boots.The specific kind of stillness that came from practice rather than personality.
She picked up a rack of glasses from behind the bar and carried it toward the back, taking the long route through the room because she was absolutely not doing a threat assessment on her own customers.She was just collecting glasses.This was a completely normal thing for a bar owner to do.
The closer one tracked her movement without turning his head.
Yep.Definitely trouble.
“Last call in twenty,” she announced to the room at large, which earned her a groan from the couple at the window—ironic, since they’d been actively miserable for the better part of an hour—and a nod from the sensible water-drinker at the bar.
The two men in booth seven said nothing.
By twelve-fifteen, the place was empty except for her, the faint smell of spilled beer that never fully left the floorboards, no matter how many times she mopped, and the silence of a closed room that used to be loud.At least the MC bikers hadn’t caused any trouble.
They also hadn’t left a tip.
She’d always liked this part of the night, back when it was her father’s bar, and she was a teenager doing homework in the back booth, listening to the sounds of closing.The specific sequence of it—glasses washed, chairs up, lights dimmed in the right order—had felt like a ritual then.Comforting in its predictability.
Now she owned the ritual, and it felt less like comfort and more like a checklist nobody else was going to complete.
She finished wiping down the bar, wrung out the rag, and started on the tables.She put a slow song on the jukebox, one her father had loved, her nightly tip of the hat to him.Outside, a car passed on the empty highway, headlights sweeping briefly through the front windows.
She found the envelope under the back door.She almost stepped on it.Would have, if the corner hadn’t been sticking up.She stopped and flinched as if it were a spider scrambling across the floor.
White envelope.No writing on the outside.It was the second one this month.
The first had arrived three weeks ago on a Monday, tucked under the door with the same lack of ceremony.The number inside had been insultingly specific—four hundred dollars a month, the message read,for the continued goodwill of certain interested parties.For your protection.
Regan had read it twice, taken photographs of it, placed it in a labeled folder, and then poured herself two fingers of her father’s good bourbon and stood at the bar for a while thinking about what her father would have done.
He would have called the police.She could almost hear him telling her to do so now.
She hadn’t called them because she’d spent six months researching the Canon Outlaws, and she knew the names of two Blackridge deputies who attended their rallies, called them friends, and went fishing and hunting with a few of them.
And that was before you got to the judges.
She pulled on latex gloves, crouched and picked up the envelope, carried it to the bar, and slit it open with the letter opener she’d started keeping within reach three weeks ago.It sat next to her father’s loaded shotgun.A girl needed to be practical, especially one running a biker bar in Montana.
The monthly rate had gone up by fifty percent.There was a handwritten line at the bottom of the note that hadn’t been in the first one.
