“We’ve wasted enough damn time,” Hunter yells over the two rumbling Harley engines. “Let’s get this debt settled before dark. I’d like to make it to Indiana.”

Wheeling the knuckle backward, pointing the front tire toward the highway, they roll out of the lot and onto the pavement.

Miles and miles down the road, immersed in the thick green of trees and ditch-weed hemp, he drinks in the smells of pine pollen and lupine blossoms that line the long driveway of patched gravel and potholed dirt. Opening up to a menagerie of white and tan goats, chickens, and stray hounds trotting about and barking as if to convince someone they’re earning their keep. The landscape is littered with broken-down swing sets, vehicles in varying states of decay and disrepair. A young woman with long brunette locks and impressive breasts is slouched comfortably in a rusted lawn chair. A sweating five-gallon bucket of ice and longneck beers sits beside her in easy reach. She wears a Pabst Blue Ribbon bikini, white on sunburn pink. Next to her sits a pale-skinned, potbellied male whose hair looks to have been bleached out with lemon juice. His do is all business on top and a party in the back—a full-on mullet—set off strangely with wraparound gangster-chic shades. To complete the ensemble, he wears a snakeskin-patterned Speedo and cowboy boots with a riding heel. Standing up from a wooden rocking chair that has seen better days, he waits for the boss lady to stand upright and approach her visitors.

Before the bikes are parked and throttled down, the three guys who took Itch’s bike emerge from a barn with an open front. A large motor hangs by a rusty log chain slung over a double six-by-six roof joist. A huge circle of grease and oil blackens the earth beneath the engine. All three men appear squirrelly and underfed. Their jeans are filthy with dirt, crankcase oil, and bearing grease. Heads buzzed down to a thin fuzz, beards decidedly not. Arms and necks stenciled with bad ink.

Hunter mumbles, “What the shit did you get us into, Itch?”

Two hounds with chocolate-and-white coats spiked up by mud and chicken shit muster the boldness to come bawling and nipping at Hunter’s and Nugget’s bike tires.

Nugget shakes his head. “Think somebody needs to feed these mutts.”

Sizing up his surroundings, Hunter takes in two weathered and dented trailers sitting off in the distance. With cardboarded windows and rotted decks painted by mint-green mold, they sit apart from an old farmhouse with flaking paint and a barnacled roof. All this is surrounded by maybe a square mile of mixed woods.