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.’”