The Biker In The Barn And The Legacy Of Wyatt Stone
CHAPTER 4: THE THUNDER OF THE DISCIPLES
The darkness of the barn was illuminated by the violent blue-and-white hissing flame of an oxy-acetylene cutting torch. Sparks showered across the dry sawdust floor as two men in black tactical windbreakers and Kevlar chest rigs torched the heavy steel chains securing the Indian Chief to the floor anchors. A third man stood by the open double doors with a suppressed tactical carbine, guarding a heavy four-wheel-drive Ram 3500 pickup truck with an aluminum loading ramp lowered onto the hay floor.
Standing near the hayloft ladder, shouting frantic orders in a hoarse, panicked whisper, was Harrison Vance. He had traded his tailored navy jacket for a heavy hunting coat, his eyes wild with terror and greed.
“Hurry up, damn you!” Vance hissed, checking his gold wristwatch under the glare of the torch. “The federal warrants will be on the state police wire by midnight! Cut the floor brackets and drag it onto the bed!”
“Don’t light that timber, boys,” a voice rumbled from the hayloft shadows above. “Sawdust burns faster than an alibi.”
The tactical shooter by the truck swung his carbine toward the loft, but before his finger could touch the trigger, Bear’s massive six-foot-six silhouette dropped from the timber crossbeam like a falling anvil. Bear landed directly on the shooter’s chest, the impact driving the wind from the contractor’s lungs in a violent wheeze as the carbine went clattering across the floorboards.
Mac Callahan stepped with slow, terrifying deliberation from the pitch-black shadows behind the antique combine harvester, the blued steel barrel of his 12-gauge Remington shotgun held clamped firmly against his hip at the ready.
“Shut the torch valves down, son,” Mac ordered, his deep gravelly voice cutting clean through the roar of the pressurized gas. “Before you turn this timber frame into your own crematorium.”
The contractor holding the torch panicked completely, losing his nerve. Instead of dropping the rig, he swung the hissing, five-thousand-degree cutting tip in a violent horizontal arc toward Mac’s face, attempting to use the white-hot jet as an improvised flamethrower. Mac didn’t give ground. With the instinctive reflexes of a veteran who had fought through hand-to-hand room clearances in the desert, he ducked beneath the searing arc of sparks, stepped inside the welder’s guard, and drove the checkered walnut butt of the shotgun upward into the man’s solar plexus with crushing force.
The breath exploded from the welder’s lungs in an agonized gasp as his knees buckled. In a single, fluid sweep of his left arm, Mac wrenched the brass cutting torch from the man’s leather gloves, spun the high-pressure oxygen regulator wheel shut with his thumb, and kicked the cylinder cart clear of the sawdust pile. The roaring flame died instantly, plunging the cavernous barn into the dim, amber half-light of the portable tactical drop-lamps.
A second contractor lunged from the shadow of the central oak support post, wielding a black eight-inch tanto-blade combat knife in a reverse grip. Mac pivoted on his left boot, parried the downward slash with the steel barrel of his shotgun, and clamped his massive right hand around the contractor’s wrist like a pneumatic pipe vise. With a brutal, practiced twist of leverage, Mac hyperextended the joint. The radius and ulna clicked sickeningly, and the tactical knife tumbled uselessly into the dry fescue hay as Mac drove his left elbow into the man’s temple, slamming him backward into the massive rubber lug-tread of the tractor tire, where he slumped unconscious.
Harrison Vance scrambled backward across the threshing floor on his hands and knees, sawdust spraying around his boots, until his spine slammed violently against the polished crimson rear fender of the 1947 Indian Chief. He clawed frantically at the inner pocket of his heavy hunting coat, his trembling, sweat-slicked fingers emerging with a snub-nosed blued-steel .38 Special revolver.
“Stay back, Callahan!” Vance shrieked, his voice cracking into hysterical desperation. “I’ll blow this machine to pieces! I’ll destroy the tooling dies!”
“You won’t shoot that tank, Harrison,” Mac said, walking slowly down the center aisle, racking the shotgun with a terrifying, mechanical clack. “Because without those dies, you’re just a disbarred county lawyer facing forty years in a federal penitentiary for fraud and conspiracy. You shoot that bike, you kill your only bargaining chip.”
Vance’s hand shook so violently the revolver barrel wobbled in small, erratic circles. Outside the barn, the distant, wailing sirens of four approaching emergency vehicles echoed through the Ozark hollows, their sound bouncing off the granite bluffs of the mountain.
Vance looked at the open barn doors, saw the flashing blue lights reflecting off the trees a mile down Highway 7, and made his choice. He turned, sprinted out the rear pedestrian door into the dark woods, scrambling down the rocky drainage gully toward the river road where an accomplice was waiting in a secondary vehicle.
Bear stepped to Mac’s side, wiping blood from his knuckles. “You want me to run him down, Mac?”
“Let him run for now,” Mac said, his breathing slow and steady as he looked down at the pristine crimson Indian Chief resting completely untouched and undamaged upon the wooden auction platform. “A frightened rat always runs straight for his nest. There is only one high-speed crossing over the Little Buffalo River between here and the Missouri turnpike, and the road winds through a two-lane granite gorge where an Escalade has zero room to maneuver. The boys from the valley chapter are already setting up the heavy iron on the asphalt. Harrison Vance won’t make it five miles past the river bend.”
