The Savage President

The first shot took the taillight off Danny Keller's bike, and Cade Rourke knew before the glass finished falling that somebody had sold them out.

He was three bikes back in the staggered line, a hundred feet of cracked asphalt between him and the front, and the river road was black on both sides. Down the slope to his left the Ohio slid by, wide and slow and indifferent. To his right the hillside rose in a wall of sumac and dead oak. Eleven Iron Saints were riding home from a handshake in Parkersburg, and every one of them had been told the route was safe.

The second shot found Danny himself. Cade saw it happen the way you see a thing in a dream, in pieces that did not connect. Danny's shoulders jerked. His front wheel wobbled. The big Harley slewed toward the guardrail and Danny went with it, sliding, a dark shape trailing sparks down the center line.

"Down!" Cade's own voice, hoarse, already moving. "Everybody off the road, now!"

Engines screamed. Somebody laid a bike down hard behind him and the sound of steel on blacktop went through his teeth. He dumped his own machine at the shoulder, felt the heat of the exhaust sear his shin through the denim, and ran. Gravel bit his palms. A third shot cracked from the hillside and chewed the guardrail beside his head, and he threw himself the last ten feet and landed on his knees beside Danny.

Danny was alive. That was the cruelty of it. His eyes were open, wet and bright under the streetlight that did not exist, because there were no streetlights on the river road, only the headlamp of a bike still burning where it lay. Blood came out of the corner of his mouth in a slow, steady line.

"Prez," Danny said. He said it like a question.

"I've got you." Cade pulled him against his chest, one hand clamped over the hole beneath his collarbone, and felt the warmth go through his fingers faster than any man could stop it. "Stay with me. Boone's calling it in. Tessa's on her way. Look at me, Danny. Look at me."

"Thought you said it was clean."

The words went into Cade like a blade. He had said it. He had stood at the head of the table in church that afternoon and told eleven men that the route was clean, that the only people who knew it were the people in that room, and every man had put his hand on the wood and sworn it. He had looked each of them in the eye. He had trusted every one.

"I know," he said. "I know I did."

The shooting stopped. In the silence that followed he could hear the river, and the tick of cooling metal, and somewhere up the slope the unhurried crunch of boots on leaves, moving away. Whoever had done this was not afraid of them. Whoever had done this was walking.

Danny's fingers closed on his sleeve. They were cold already. "Don't let it be Hatch," he whispered. "He'd never. Not him. Promise me."

Cade stared at him. He had not said Hatchet's name. He had not been thinking it, had not let the thought come within a mile of his skull, and yet here was a dying man handing it to him like something he had been carrying a long time.

"Danny. Why would you say that?"

But Danny had stopped looking at him. His gaze had gone past Cade's shoulder, up toward the black hillside and the stars beyond it, and whatever he saw there made his mouth soften into something almost like a smile. His hand loosened. The blood slowed. The river kept moving.

"No," Cade said. "No. Danny."

Boone Hale knelt down on the other side of him, his face gray in the firelight, a phone still clutched in one fist. He did not say anything. He did not have to. He laid two fingers against Danny's throat, held them there for a long, terrible moment, and then looked up and shook his head.

Cade did not weep. He had learned that lesson at nineteen, in a different bar fight and a different kind of grief, and he had built an entire man on top of it. He closed Danny's eyes with his thumb. He eased the body down onto the cold road with a care that was almost tender. Then he stood, and the other Saints were rising out of the ditches and the weeds, bloody and shaking and watching him, ten men waiting to learn what kind of President they had.

He looked at their faces one at a time. He looked at Hatchet last.

Lyle Dunn stood at the edge of the firelight with his jaw set and his hands open at his sides, and there was blood on his sleeve that Cade could not account for. Hatchet met his eyes. Whatever passed between them lasted less than a second, and it was enough to freeze the marrow in Cade's spine.

"Somebody put a gun in the dark and told it where to point," Cade said, and his voice came out low and level and utterly without mercy. "Somebody in this club. I don't care how long it takes. I don't care what it costs me. I will find them, and I will burn down everything they ever loved."

Nobody spoke. Out on the water a barge horn sounded, long and lonely, the way it had sounded every night of his life.

And on the hillside above them, a man in a dark coat lowered a pair of binoculars, thumbed a number into a phone, and said four words to whoever answered: "The Savage is awake."