Chapter 1 - THREE MINUTES WAS ALL HE ASKED FOR
The first biker reached me with a knife in his right hand and confidence in his face.
Confidence is useful right up until reality hits it.
He slashed high. I shifted left, trapped his wrist, and drove him shoulder-first into the edge of the pool table. The knife clattered away. Before it stopped spinning, the man with the pool cue swung for my head.
I ducked.
The cue cracked against a hanging light.
Glass rained down.
Someone screamed.
“Back off!” I warned.
Nobody listened.
The third man charged from my blind side.
Rex barked once.
That single bark saved me.
I turned just enough to catch the biker’s shoulder instead of his fist with my jaw. Pain shot down my arm. I grabbed the back of his vest and used his momentum to send him straight into the man with the broken cue.
Both crashed into a table.
Plates exploded across the floor.
Butch was still on his knees in the water, clutching his arm and screaming curses.
“Kill him!” he yelled. “I don’t care how—just put him down!”
That changed the room.
The fifth biker reached beneath his leather vest.
Not for a knife.
For a gun.
My stomach dropped.
“Rex!”
I didn’t need another word.
He launched.
One second he was against the wall. The next, seventy pounds of trained muscle hit the biker’s forearm. The pistol flew free and skidded beneath the counter.
Rex released instantly when I shouted, “Out!”
The biker staggered backward, pale and shaking.
I stepped between him and Rex.
“Everybody stop.”
For the first time, they did.
Then sirens screamed outside.
Too fast.
Way too fast.
I looked at the waitress. Her face had gone white.
“You called them?” I asked.
She shook her head.
The front door burst open.
Four deputies flooded the diner with weapons drawn.
“Hands where I can see them!”
I raised mine.
Butch immediately pointed at me with his good arm.
“He attacked us! That psycho set his dog on Dale!”
“You dumped water on the dog,” the waitress snapped.
A deputy swung toward her.
“Stay out of this, Mia.”
The way he said her name told me they knew each other.
The sheriff entered last.
Mid-fifties. Gray mustache. Clean uniform. Calm eyes.
But the moment he saw me, his expression changed.
Not surprise.
Recognition.
He looked at my fatigues, then at Rex, then directly into my face.
“Well,” he said quietly. “Jack Mercer.”
Every muscle in my body locked.
I had never been to this town in my life.
“Do I know you?”
“No.”
He smiled without warmth.
“But somebody told me you might be coming.”
A deputy cuffed my wrists.
As they dragged me toward the door, Mia brushed past me with a towel in her hands.
Something small pressed into my palm.
A folded receipt.
I didn’t open it until I was shoved into the back of the patrol car.
Four words were written across it.
THEY WERE WAITING FOR YOU.
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