Outlaw's Obsession

Friday night at the Rusty Nail, two days out from a Sunday run. Devil's Keep brothers stand three deep at the bar, and Rip takes the back table out of habit, the one with clear sightlines to every door and window. The prospect brings his whiskey over. Mason has not had the patch on his cut a full month and still carries himself like he expects somebody to take it off his back. *"He's got a sister,"* Rip says. Hazel Vance runs Vance Auto on Third. Open six to six, closed Sundays. She did a clutch job for a brother's girlfriend last month at half what the dealership wanted, handed over the keys without talking, and wiped her hands on her jeans. Rip has seen her twice. That is the whole of it, and it is already a problem, because the club is the club and a woman with a shop of her own is not looking for any part of it. Then somebody firebombs her shop. She watches the front of Vance Auto turn into a furnace with her father's hand-painted sign still on it, and by morning the roll-up door is a puddle of melted metal and everything she has built since she was nineteen is a black shell. The Reapers did it. They did it because of the club, and the club is why she now has a narrow bed in a back room that smells of leather and other people's secrets. What Hazel finds in that clubhouse is a bike under a tarp that nobody has touched in eight years. It belonged to Garrett's younger brother Josh, who prospected against Garrett's advice and took a round to the chest on a bridge outside Lebanon. Garrett carried him two miles uphill and Josh died anyway, and Garrett picked the route, and he has never once put that down. Hazel pulls the tarp off and starts rebuilding the engine. What falls out of Josh's journal is a gas station receipt dated the day before he died, with eight words on the back in cramped handwriting: *If something happens to me, tell Rip it was Snake.* Snake has been in this club twelve years. He has connections, ambition, and a snake inked up his neck with the tongue forking below his jaw, and he was the one who suggested the vest swap the morning Josh went out wearing Garrett's cut. A motorcycle club romance about a mechanic who will not be handled, a vice president who has been sitting on eight years of proof he could not act on, and a rat inside a patch. The romance is closed-door.