Page 1 of Race With The Devil

CHAPTER ONE

Tanner

I’d been given the GPS coordinates to the airfield by a very strange dude.

Even the guy’s name was suspect. Wolf Glaser. Like a craftsman from the old country. He was anything but. “Here’s how it’s going to go down, my man. You land on Mescal Mesa. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with the psychedelic, but you might have to avoid hitting a few hippies during their morning ablutions, waving smudge sticks around to avoid getting sucked up into the psychic vortex. You then proceed, carefully I might add, tiptoeing with that precious cargo of yours, past the Unexploded Ordnance shed . . . “

UXO my ass. I was getting in and getting out, especially after what he’d told me about the hippies. I’d grown especially attached to my fleecy dog I was delivering to this assclown. Beetle was, as best as I could estimate, a Leonberger-Great Pyrenees mix about three months old by now. He’d been born with Swimmer Puppy Syndrome which meant that, left alone, he’d never walk. His limbs stuck out to the side and he “swam” along the ground. In this case, it was probably caused by the owner raising the pups on a slick surface like newspaper where they could get no traction.

The backyard breeder decided to euthanize Beetle, but my friend Brandi came to the rescue. Literally. She scooped up Beetle and brought him to me for a few weeks of training. I hobbled him. I made a sling so he didn’t sleep on his stomach, massaged his limbs, and encouraged him to walk up a rocky hill in my garden. He was a plucky little guy. Because my favorite dog, Paddington, had been born with Swimmer’s Syndrome, I felt especially close to this trooper. I knew he was destined for greatness. But . . . Wolf Glaser?

I became even more tore up as the asshat continued. “Now, don’t be deterred by the ocean of Harley Davidsons outside the hangar. That’s just us, the Bare Bones MC. We’re a motorcycle club, see? If you can’t handle that, then you need to turn tail and run crying back to St. Louis or whatever Midwest hellhole you hail from. Because we’re badass and we know it.”

I took several issues with this. St. Louis was God’s country, even though I didn’t even really “hail from” there. It had saved my ass after barely stumbling half-alive out of the Arkansas Department of Corrections, Tucker Unit. Getting away from the setting of my painful youth did me a world of good, so how dare this yahoo from the tie-dyed land of Arizona poke fun at it?

Then. Prison. Harley Davidsons. I think I could take on these dudes.

As for a guy named Wolf Glaser being badass, well, we’d see about that. I couldn’t believe I was handing over my beloved Beetle—and he’d probably rename him something like Diesel or Mack—to this airheaded dotard. But it was something I owed Slushy, the club’s lawyer. I’d vowed to Slushy of my own free will and I was bound to follow through on it.

So I really wasn’t surprised to be forced to wade through maybe twenty woo-woos who dotted that pitted, decrepit runway. I’d flown into old military airports like this before. Unused for decades, the government was turning them over to civilian use, building McMansions, which was a damned shame. We’d regret that one day when some twatwaffle from the Orient proved to us how big his button was. The hippies drifted toward me like zombies, their arms out to touch the puppy, walking unsteadily on a leash. He’d been kenneled while flying from St. Louis in my four-seater Piper, but when we landed we practiced leash walking.

“Okay, Scruffsters,” I said. “Like it or not, this is your new home.” He stood alert like a sphinx, his head a powderpuff of cuteness, as he looked to the hangar. Well. There are always plenty of motherly chicks hanging around bikers. They’ll spoil him.

True, it was fairly gorgeous out there. I shook myself rid of the featherheads and strode up a butte of red crimson sand. It was still morning in the middle of autumn, so the cliffs alternating with cherry and garnet were lit up like a church window. Wolf worked here, sort of a supply man for the bikers’ construction company. I consoled myself that Beetle would get the run of this colorful joint. Just don’t rename him Bear.

There were two sets of steps, one up each side of the hangar, so I chose the one with the most Harleys parked out front. However, a couple of civilians smoking on the landing told me to try the other wing, where Wolf was in “church.” Heading that way, I called him on my cell, but it went straight to voicemail.

I shoved open the heavy metal door that led to a long hallway. It thudded hollowly behind me, not unlike a prison door. Not a peep in the place, though. I peered into a few rooms. Looked like people lived there. One had cheerful, feminine touches, like a calendar on the wall, a poster of a kitten hanging from a rope, and a flowered bedspread. Another reminded me of Cell Number Four in my old barracks with its unkempt single mattress clothed in filthy sheets. Except I never had a desktop computer tuned to a porn station. Or a bunch of weed strewn across an open copy of Newcummers magazine.

Okay, so boys and girls shared this barracks—I mean hangar. Beetle vibrated eagerly as I went from door to door, listening. Nothing.

Finally, muffled and heated voices emanated from a room. I practically put my ear to the door. I only caught fractured sentences.

“Fentanyl!”

“Built his own mass spectrometer!”

“Busted cooking meth in Oklahoma!”

“A fine man!”

“Tutti Morgan!”

“Anusbrain!”

“Condom breath!”

“I vote we terminate!”

Now we were getting into my comfort zone. I may have been out of prison for eight years, but I have to admit I still gravitated naturally toward crime. And if this wasn’t crime, then I’d take a bath with a toaster. I opened the door and stuck my head in.

A couple guys at the back noticed me, but said nothing, too caught up in the heat of the moment. I edged in farther, my back to the door. One enormous white plastic bucket by the door held twenty cellphones. Another held everyone’s piece. As though if they went in there armed, they might use it against their fellow club members. I had no piece, so I wasn’t worried. Who needed a piece when flying rescue dogs around the western states?

At the head of the long table sat, I assumed, the President, or Prez as I’d heard them called in other clubs. He was a very striking fellow WOP with silken eyebrows and dark flashing eyes. He poked the table with a determined finger, a gavel in his other hand. “I’m telling you, I’ve always had a bad feeling about Tutti Morgan. What sort of guy builds his own mass spectrometer?”

A redheaded guy straight from Dublin spoke. “A guy who knows his shit, Ford. A guy who wants nothing but the most impeccable purity for his product.”

“A mass murderer!” cried another guy who looked like Ford’s twin. “That’s who, Fox! Speaking as a producer of product myself, if I was making something fifty times stronger than heroin, my goal would be to kill people, not ensure purity!”