The Biker In The Barn And The Legacy Of Wyatt Stone
CHAPTER 6: THE HIGHWAY TO JASPER
The mountain fog was thick as cold milk along Highway 7 as Harrison Vance drove his black Cadillac Escalade through the treacherous curves of the Ozark canyon at ninety miles an hour. His knuckles were bone-white on the leather-wrapped steering wheel, his suit soaked in sweat, his eyes darting frantically between the foggy blacktop and his rearview mirror.
In the passenger seat sat his leather briefcase, stuffed with forty thousand dollars in emergency cash and his Canadian passport. He had bypassed the state route, cutting through the narrow timber gaps toward the Missouri state line, convinced he had slipped through the state police cordon.
Suddenly, through the dense wall of fog three hundred yards ahead, a brilliant, piercing beam of high-intensity halogen light cut across the highway.
Then another. And another.
A solid wall of twelve heavy touring motorcycles—the Disciples of Iron—was parked three abreast across the two-lane concrete bridge spanning the rushing waters of the Little Buffalo River. The chrome engines of the heavy V-twins thrummed with a rhythmic, earth-shaking rumble, their headlight beams forming an impassable barrier of blinding white brilliance.
Standing squarely in the center of the bridge deck, bathed in the blinding glare of twelve high-intensity quartz halogen spotlights, his heavy arms crossed loosely over his leather riding vest, stood Mac Callahan. His silhouette against the river mist looked like an immovable monolith of frontier justice, completely indifferent to the roaring three-ton machine bearing down upon him at eighty miles an hour.
Vance’s face contorted into a mask of manic, homicidal panic. His bloodshot eyes went wide as he realized there was no escape through the woods. With a desperate shriek of rage, he jammed his foot down flat on the accelerator pedal, determined to use three tons of heavy American steel and four hundred horsepower to plow straight through the motorcycle line, smash Mac into the river rapids below, and clear the bridge to the interstate.
“Die, you bastards!” Vance screamed, the speedometer climbing past eighty.
Mac didn’t flinch. He raised his right hand, dropping his fingers in a sharp, decisive downward slash.
From the wooded embankments on either side of the bridge approaches, two heavy commercial timber logging skidders—massive sixty-ton armored tractors equipped with eight-foot steel tires and front-mounted bulldozer blades—rolled out of the brush, dropping their massive steel blades directly across the asphalt with an ear-shattering crash.
Vance slammed both feet onto the anti-lock brake pedal with all his strength.
The heavy Escalade skidded sideways, its tires smoking and screaming across the wet asphalt. The vehicle spun a full three hundred and sixty degrees, its rear quarter-panel slamming into the heavy granite rock face on the shoulder, and came to an abrupt, violent halt three feet from the edge of the timber skidder’s steel blade.
The driver’s side airbag exploded with a loud bang, throwing white cornstarch powder throughout the cab.
Vance coughed, his head swimming, blood dripping from his nose where the airbag had struck him. He reached with trembling fingers toward the glove compartment, clawing for his spare .38 revolver.
Before his fingers could touch the grip, the driver’s side window shattered inward in an explosion of tempered safety glass.
Mac Callahan’s massive, gloved hand reached through the breach, seized Vance by the collar of his hunting coat, and hauled the attorney through the window frame like a sack of damp grain, dropping him face-first onto the rain-slicked asphalt of the bridge.
Mac brought the heavy, steel-lugged sole of his combat boot down squarely upon Vance’s right wrist, pinning the lawyer’s trembling fingers to the wet asphalt with immovable pressure until the blued steel revolver clattered free, tumbling across the concrete deck before falling through the drainage grate into the roaring dark waters of the Little Buffalo River below.
“The ride is officially over, Harrison,” Mac said, his voice dropping into that flat, ancient tone that brooked no appeal. “You played your dirty games in the dark for twelve years, but the sun just came up over the mountain.”
Behind the roaring sixty-ton timber skidders, four marked interceptor cruisers of the Arkansas State Police and two heavy four-wheel-drive federal tactical Suburbans rolled in rapid convoy onto the bridge approaches. Their flashing red, blue, and amber light bars ignited the swirling river fog into a dazzling kaleidoscope of color, their synchronized sirens screaming through the narrow granite gorge.
Armed state troopers and federal marshals in tactical armor poured across the bridge deck with carbines held at the low-ready position. Two state troopers seized Vance by his elbows, hauling the mud-spattered, bleeding attorney to his feet, pulling his arms behind his back and ratcheting heavy stainless-steel handcuffs tightly around his wrists. A federal investigator knelt by the open passenger door of the wrecked Escalade, bagging the leather briefcase packed with forty thousand dollars in unrecorded hundred-dollar bills, duplicate forged deeds, and Vance’s foreign passport.
Vance twisted in the troopers’ iron grip, his styled hair plastered to his forehead with blood and sweat, his eyes bulging with wild, venomous hatred as he glared at Mac Callahan.
“You destroyed everything, Callahan!” Vance shrieked, his voice echoing off the limestone cliffs like a wounded animal. “You destroyed a fifty-million-dollar international defense consortium! You ruined the most powerful development syndicate in this state for an old broken motorcycle and an illiterate hillbilly brat!”
Mac looked down at the screaming lawyer with calm, unblinking eyes that carried only the cold, unyielding weight of justice.
“You destroyed yourself, Harrison,” Mac said softly, his words cutting through the wail of the sirens. “The day you thought an honest veteran’s family had no one left to fight for them. You forgot that in these mountains, a brother’s debt never expires.”
