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I ran the options in the space of about four seconds. Fast math, and it came out one way.

Hospital meant a mandatory gunshot report. Police involvement before Freak was even off the table. Questions we couldn’t answer. Paperwork we couldn’t file. A brother with a bullet hole and no good story for how it got there, lying to cops who’d seen enough gunshots to know the difference.

The compound meant watching him bleed out on the pool table in the backroom. We had bandages. We had whiskey. We had exactly zero of the things that stopped arterial bleeding in a shoulder. Dread’s clinic was locked. His supplies were behind a keypad I didn’t have the code for.

Neither of those was an answer.

There was a third option. A rural veterinary clinic on County 9. I’d passed it a hundred times on runs south.

It was the only play.

“Brazil. Listen to me. County 9. Rural vet clinic south of the junction. You know it?”

A pause. The engine noise shifted. He was turning.

“Yeah. I know it.”

“Keep pressure on that wound. Keep him talking. If he stops talking, you pull over and you check his pulse. You understand me?”

“Copy.”

“Stay on the line. Don’t hang up.”

I turned to Leo. The kid was standing at the gate with his Prospect patch bright on his cut and his eyes wide. He’d heard enough.

“Gate’s yours. Lock it behind Yankee. Headcount to Fox at eight. Tell him I’m out on club business and I’ll radio when I have details.”

Leo nodded. The kid was scared but he was holding. Good.

I crossed to the hook board inside the gate shack. My bike keys hung on the third peg. I pulled my helmet off the seat and thumbed the headset on the way down to my ears. Twenty years of taking calls on the road. I’d stopped being the man who pulled over for a phone call about nineteen years ago.

I grabbed the keys and was moving before they hit my palm. The reading glasses bounced in my cut. I left them there.

Brazil was still on the line. I could hear Freak in the background now, his voice thin and high. He was saying something about his bike. About the paint. About how his jacket had armor in the shoulder and what the hell was the point of paying extra for armor.

“Keep him talking,” I said into the phone. “I’m on my way.”

I hit the bike’s ignition and the engine caught clean. The headlight threw a white bar across the gravel. I kicked it into gear and pulled through the gate without waiting for Leo to open it all the way. The kid jumped back. The tires bit gravel, then asphalt, and then I was on the county road with the call in my ear and Brazil’s breathing coming through the speaker and Freak’s voice behind him, getting weaker.

The night air was cold. I opened the throttle and let it push against my chest. I had to get there first and make the case to whatever vet was working late on a Friday night.

I didn’t have a plan for that part yet. I would by the time I hit the county line.

The bike leaned into the first curve. The call stayed live. Brazil was counting Freak’s breaths now, loud enough for me to hear. Twenty-eight a minute. Too fast. The blood was dark but it was flowing. That meant venous, not arterial. Better. Not good, but better.

“Tell him about the Saints game. Fox won the pool again. Fifty bucks.”

I heard Brazil relay it. Heard Freak’s weak laugh crack through the static. Heard the engine push harder beneath Brazil’s voice.

The road opened up ahead of me. Dark. Empty. Forty minutes of asphalt between the compound and a vet clinic I’d never stepped inside, and a brother bleeding in the back of a truck because somebody on a county road had decided today was the day.

I thought about the clock and the distance. Dread was on a beach. Freak was bleeding. And the only pair of hands inside forty miles that could do anything about it belonged to whoever was still working late in a building full of animal medicine, and I had no idea who that was. I had about thirty seconds to think of a reason for them to open the door. I had nothing in my saddlebags but a trauma kit I’d never opened.

The headlight ate the center line. The engine screamed. I pushed it to ninety and held it there.

The headlight cut a white tunnel through the dark. County roads at night were empty. Nothing out here but fence posts and the occasional reflector nailed to a mailbox.

I heard Brazil shift. Heard him say something to Freak I couldn’t catch. Heard Freak’s voice come back, thin and slurred. Words without shape. Something about a bike. About paint. About how it fucking hurt.