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could see dust rising over the nearest hills. Then, in a notch between the two closest hills, they saw a flash of sun on chrome. There was just time to glimpse Race, bent almost flat over his handlebars, long hair streaming out behind, and then he was gone again. A second after he disappeared—surely no more—the truck flashed through the notch, stacks shooting smoke. LAUGHLIN on the side was no longer visible; it had been buried beneath a layer of dust.
    Vince hit the Vulcan’s starter and the engine bammed to life. He gunned the throttle and the frame vibrated.
    “Luck, Cap,” Lemmy said.
    Vince opened his mouth to reply, but in that moment emotion, intense and unexpected, choked off his wind. So instead of speaking, he gave Lemmy a brief, grateful nod before taking off. Lemmy followed. As always, Lemmy had his six.
    Vince’s mind turned into a computer, trying to figure speed versus distance. It had to be timed just right. He rolled toward the intersection at fifty, dropped it to forty, then twisted the throttle again as Race appeared, the bike swerving around a tumbleweed, actually going airborne on a couple of bumps. The truck was no more than thirty feet behind. When Race neared the Y where the Cumba bypass once more joined the main road, he slowed. He had to slow. The instant he did, LAUGHLIN vaulted forward, eating up the distance between them.
    “ Jam that motherfuck! ” Vince screamed, knowing Race couldn’t hear over the bellow of the truck. He screamed it again anyway: “ JAM that motherfuck! Don’t slow down! ”
    The trucker planned to slam the Harley in the rear wheel, spinning it out. Race’s bike hit the crotch of the intersection and surged, Race leaning far to the left, holding the handlebars only with the tips of his fingers. He looked like a trick rider on a trained mustang. The truck missed the rear fender, its blunt nose lunging into thin air that had held a Harley’s back wheel only a tenth of a second before . . . but at first Vince thought Race was going to lose it anyway, just spin out.
    He didn’t. His high-speed arc took him all the way to the far side of Route 6, close enough to the bike-killing shoulder to spume up dust, and then he was scat-gone, gunning down Route 6 toward Show Low.
    The truck went out into the desert to make its own turn, rumbling and bouncing, the driver down-shifting through the gears fast enough to make the whole rig shudder, the tires churning up a fog of dust that turned the blue sky white. It left a trail of deep tracks and crushed sagebrush before regaining the road and once more setting out after Vince’s son.

    Vince twisted the left handgrip and the Vulcan took off. Little Boy swung frantically back and forth on the handlebars. Now came the easy part. It might get him killed, but it would be easy compared to the endless minutes he and Lemmy had waited before hearing Race’s motor mixed in with LAUGHLIN’s.
    His window won’t be open, you know. Not after he just got done running through all that dust.
    That was also out of his control. If the trucker was buttoned up, he’d deal with that when the moment came.
    It wouldn’t be long.
    The truck was doing around sixty. It could go a lot faster, but Vince didn’t mean to let him get all the way through those who-knew-how-many gears of his until the Mack hit warp-speed. He was going to end this now for one of them. Probably for himself, an idea he did not shy from. He would at the least buy Race more time; given a lead, Race could beat the truck to Show Low easily. More than just protecting Race, though, there had to be balance to the scales. Vince had never lost so much so fast, six of The Tribe dead on a stretch of road less than half a mile long. You didn’t do that to a man’s family, he thought again, and drive away.
    Which was, Vince saw at last, maybe LAUGHLIN’s own point, his own primary operating principle . . . the reason he had taken them on, in spite of the ten-to-one odds. He had come