Page 9 of Riding with the President Biker

"Traffic cameras," I tell Luke. "Mill Road and the surrounding two-block radius. Last thirty minutes."

"Already on it."

"Municipal traffic grid," I tell Cole. "Any van on this side of town moving outbound after the depot call."

He nods without looking up.

Miller materializes at my shoulder. He is quiet and practical and does not waste words, which is why I trust him in moments that have no room for wasted words. "Known Deadwood locations?"

"Run a sweep on the three closest. Don't approach yet, just eyes." I pause. "Get Hitch on the quarry road. Deadwood has used that area before."

He is already walking away.

The clubhouse sounds different now. The noise is tight and purposeful, the energy in the room drawn inward like something coiling. Men are on phones. Maps are spread flat on the main table, weighted at the corners with whatever was nearest.

Grave comes to stand beside me at the table and he is barely inside his own skin. It comes off him in waves, not visible to someone who does not know him, but I have known him for several years and I feel it the way you feel barometric pressure, something that precedes the storm rather than being it.

He looks at the map and then at me and his hands are flat on the table with too much intention.

"We should be moving," he says, low.

"We move when we have somewhere to move to."

"Hansen—"

"I hear you." I keep my voice even. "Moving without a location costs time, splitting resources right now gives Deadwood exactly what they want."

"She is in a room somewhere." The sentence comes out controlled, which tells me how hard he is working to keep it that way. "With Deadwood."

"I know where she is." I say it before I have fully confirmed it, but I say it with enough certainty that he hears it the right way. "Give me twenty minutes."

He exhales through his nose and says nothing else.

Luke pulls partial footage of a white panel van running a red light two blocks from the compound at 1:14 in the morning, plates obscured, but the vehicle matches and the timing is right and that is sufficient to work with. Cole traces it three intersections before the municipal feed goes dark in the area it was heading, which puts it on a dead-straight line toward the old industrial corridor beyond the highway.

Quarry road. Hitch's call comes in five minutes after that. Movement at the abandoned concrete plant. Vehicles. Lights inside the structure, low and intermittent.

I look at Grave. He already knows.

We need information before we go in blind, and the information requires a conversation with someone who will not volunteer it.

We need to move.

There is a Deadwood affiliate named Reyes who runs a transport arm out of a residential address on the east side, a quiet street that does not look like anything because he has been careful. He has been careful for three years. Tonight his carefulness stops being useful to him.

We pull up without headlights two houses down and sit for thirty seconds.

The house is dark except for a light in the back left room, kitchen or rear office, visible as a thin bar beneath the shade. A single car in the driveway. No movement at the windows.

I kick the stand down and dismount without speaking. Grave and Miller do the same behind me, the engines ticking into silence one by one.

We go around the back.

The rear door is a standard residential lock, it takes Miller eleven seconds. The door opens into a mudroom, boots on a mat, a coat hanging on a peg, the mundane evidence of a life that does not advertise what it actually is. The kitchen is to the left, lit by the overhead, and Reyes is standing at the counter with a glass of water halfway to his mouth when we come through the doorway.

He sees us and the glass comes down hard on the counter, and for a half-second I watch him calculate his odds, and the calculation takes long enough that the half-second is all he gets. He goes for the drawer to his right and Miller is already there, closing the distance before the handle is pulled, and Reyes makes the decision to fight anyway, which is the kind of decision fear makes for a man before his brain catches up.

He is not a small man, and he has some training behind him, enough to make it take effort rather than routine.