Chapter 2 - Shadows in the Garage
By midnight, the winter wind had picked up, howling across the empty interstate ramps outside Beckford and driving stinging sleet against the windows of the Iron Lantern clubhouse.
The clubhouse was a converted two-story automotive garage with grease-stained concrete floors, a pool table missing two balls, and a massive iron stove in the corner that smelled of burning cedar and stale cigarette smoke.
Twelve of our brothers sat around a long wooden workbench, their leather cuts draped over the backs of metal folding chairs. The air was thick with tension and the sharp scent of black coffee.
Rook slammed his heavy boots against the concrete floor as he walked in, peeling off his wet leather gloves and tossing them onto the workbench.
“Give it to me straight, Boomer,” Rook commanded, pulling a bottle of lukewarm water toward him. “What did the feds want?”
Boomer, a burly mechanic with a grease smudge running from his left temple down to his jaw, wiped his hands on a rag and shook his head. “They weren't local state troopers, Dean. Two suits out of Cincinnati. They had federal badges and a manifest for the truck axle we pulled off that overturned semi on Route 4 last week.”
“An axle is an axle,” Cutter, our road captain, grunted from the corner. “It was abandoned in a ditch. We hauled it out so it wouldn't cause a pileup.”
“It wasn't an ordinary axle,” Rook said quietly, his voice cutting through the chatter like a bandsaw. He walked over to the chalkboard on the wall where a map of Ohio was pinned. “That truck was carrying encrypted server units belonging to a defense subcontractor out of Dayton. Someone didn't just run it off the road—they dumped it to hide a data breach.”
The room went dead silent.
I leaned against the tool rack, feeling the chill of the garage seep through my jacket. “Does the club have the hardware, Rook?”
“It’s buried under four tons of scrap steel in the back bay,” Rook said, his eyes narrowing as he stared at the map. “And if the federal government is looking for it, that means the people who ran that truck off the road are looking for it, too.”
“Then we hand it over,” Cutter argued, standing up and slamming his mug onto the workbench. “We’re a motorcycle club, Dean, not a mercenary courier service. We look after our own, we help kids like that little boy at the hospital, but we don't play hide-and-seek with federal intelligence agencies.”
“We don't hand over anything until I know whose hands are clean,” Rook growled, turning around to face the room. His presence was massive, filling the garage with an authority born of decades of survival and hard-earned respect. “A man died in that truck wreck. The driver was a veteran out of Fort Knox. I saw his dog tags in the cab before the state police cleared the scene.”
Rook walked back toward his desk, pulled open the bottom drawer, and tossed a battered pair of military dog tags onto the wooden surface.
The metal clinked loudly against the wood.
I stepped forward and looked down. The name stamped into the dull steel read: BENNETT, ARTHUR J.
My breath caught in my throat.
Arthur Bennett.
May you like
The father of eight-year-old Eli Bennett and six-year-old Lucy Bennett.
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