“Just a second.” I breathe, looking back at the man I shot. “Cover me.”
Walking forward, I look down at the gasping man. A high whistle accompanies each breath, and a black circle the size of a dinner plate has soaked his shirt.
“He’s gone,” Tim says from behind me. “We need to get the girls into the Yukon, Penn.”
“Go do it. This guy said he had a message for me.”
“I can’t leave you.”
“You work for me, Tim. I’m ordering you to cover the girls. I can take care of myself.”
The ex-SEAL’s shoes scrape as he sprints around the corner of the service station.
Kneeling beside the wheezing man, I move so that he can see my face above his.
“You the mayor?” he rasps, his breath almost corrosive with decay.
Meth addict, I think. “That’s right.”
“You shot me, motherfucker.”
“You asked for it.”
He raises a leather-clad arm and tries to grab my throat, but I easily bat his weak limb out of the way.
“You said you had a message for me.”
“Call the paramedics, man. I’m hurt bad.”
“Give me the message first.”
“Call the medics or I won’t tell you!”
“Tell me the message, or I’ll shoot you in the heart and tell the FBI you tried to stab me with that knife in your boot.”
The man starts to speak, but his words disintegrate into a wracking cough that sprays a mist of blood between us. I jerk back instinctively.
“Tell me, damn it!”
“It’s not for you. It’s for your old man. The doc.”
Something in me goes cold. “What?”
“Your daddy’s nigger lawyer’s gonna try to blame that old woman’s death on Snake.”
“What old woman? Viola Turner?”
He coughs again, but this time I manage to dodge the spray. “That’s the one,” he hacks. “The nigger nurse.”
“How the hell would Snake know what Quentin Avery is planning to do?”
The man shakes his head. “I’m just passing the message, man. Snake says: ‘Wives and children have no immunity.’ Those exact words. You got that?”
“I heard you.”
“If Avery tries to blame Snake, your daughter won’t live to hear the verdict.”
“You’re paying a high price to be a delivery boy.”
“Call the ambulance, man! You got the message.”
“I don’t like that message. I’ll call you an ambulance from the road. But I’ll be honest with you: I don’t think you’re gonna last till they get here. Better make your peace with whatever you believe in.”
His eyes roll back, then lock onto me again. “You son of a bitch.”
I rise to my feet and wipe my face on my sleeve.
“If I die,” he croaks, “you’re a dead man. And not just you . . . your whole family. That’s VK law.”
“VK? What the hell’s that?”
“The Kindred, man. You let me die here, you’ll find out more about it than you ever wanted to know.”
“Guess I’ll deal with that when the time comes. You shouldn’t have threatened my little girl.”
The roar of an eight-cylinder engine shakes the ground and buffets the air to my left. I look up and see Tim beckoning me from behind the Yukon’s bulletproof glass. I can’t see the girls, but after I climb in, I realize why. They’re hunkered down in the well between the second-and third-row seats. Safe as houses. The Yukon’s armor package will stop .308 Winchester FMJ rounds. After hugging both girls from above, I kneel on a second-row seat with my pistol out, ready to provide defensive fire if we’re attacked.
As we pull onto the dark ribbon of Highway 65, bright metal glints in Tim’s headlights. He brakes when the lights pick out the silhouettes of two big Harley-Davidson motorcycles parked on the shoulder only forty yards from the station.
“They must have been following me with their lights off,” he says. “Did it feel like a simple robbery attempt?”
“No way. He had a message from Snake Knox.”
“What was it?”
“He couldn’t get it out.”
Tim shakes his head. “Too bad. They must have followed us all the way from the prison. It’s time to call the FBI.”
“Daddy?” Annie whispers from the darkness behind me.
“Stay down, Boo. We’re all okay.”
“Are we going home?”
Scanning the dark road and shoulders, I reach back into the blackness and squeeze what feels like Annie’s shoulder. “Not yet. We have to go back to the gas station and talk to the police. But we’re not going back until it’s safe. Maybe half an hour.”
“We heard shooting. Is everything going to be all right?”
“Absolutely,” I tell her, but it’s a lie. Given what just happened, things are going to get worse before they get better.
The question is, How much worse?
Chapter 3
John Kaiser got three FBI agents to the service station within thirty minutes of the shooting. To my relief, the biker I shot had been dead for some while when they arrived. He hadn’t even survived until the local deputies who first reached the scene found him. Kaiser himself showed up a half hour later. He was sorry I’d had to kill the guy, but after examining the corpses, he couldn’t hide his excitement. Both dead men were wearing black leather jackets, and among the various insignia on those jackets, the letters VK were emblazoned on the right arm of each in a kind of neo-Gothic script.
“Most cops think VK stands for ‘Viking Kindred,’” Kaiser tells me as he crouches in the dark with a flashlight aimed at the jacket patch. “Actually, the true gang name is Varangian Kindred. ‘Varangians’ is an old Slavic name for Vikings, and ‘vikings,’ of course, means ‘raiders.’ But Varangian Kindred is too hard to remember, so the name devolved into Viking Kindred, or in most conversations, just ‘VK.’”
“Why the hell would these VK guys be following me to deliver a message from Snake Knox?”
Kaiser continues to study the various insignia on the jacket. “In the last couple of years, we’ve started to see a cross-pollination between white supremacist prison gangs and the one-percenter biker gangs. You know what those are?”
I had dealings with one-percenters like the Bandidos MC when I was an assistant district attorney in Houston. “The term comes from Heraclitus, right? ‘In any battle, out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t be there. Eighty are just targets. Nine are good soldiers, and we’re lucky to have them. But one, that one is a warrior, and he will bring the others home.’”
Kaiser’s eyes stay on mine for a few seconds. “I actually found that to be true in Vietnam. The old Greeks knew a thing or two.” The FBI man gets to his feet and walks to the restroom door, then turns, seeming to check the angle of the body.
“That was good shooting, Penn.” He looks back at me. “Are you sure he didn’t tell you what the message was?”
I lied to Kaiser because I didn’t understand the meaning of the message. I mean, I understood it on a literal level, but I also sensed that there was more to it. And to find out if I’m right, I’m going to have to see my father.
“Positive. He could barely talk. All he did was cuss me. Threaten me.”
“Okay.”