Uneasy Rider

CHAPTER ONE

A trucker with a load of produce found Billy by the roadside, supine, arms spread, eyes wide open, staring into the sun. He pulled aside the jacket and saw the 12 bloody holes in Billy’s shirt. Billy had bled out. Even if help had arrived sooner, he wouldn’t have wanted to live: his C3 was crushed, and at best he would have been a parapalegic.

Wyatt survived, however. The tumble down the blacktop shook him up, sure enough, and a few pellets caused flesh wounds to his left thigh. But most of the shot was absorbed by the Harley’s top end--including the pellet that hit the carburetor and caused the explosion.

And it could have been a lot worse if he were not wearing leather pants. Even so, he suffered burns to his genitals that effectively unmanned him.

There was a silver lining to this darkest of clouds: Billy had been holding the marijuana, but Wyatt had the cash.

You might have thought, but the money was in the gas tank, and went up in flames. Not so. Needing to pay for breakfast that morning, Wyatt had pulled the tube that the money was stashed in out of the gas tank. After paying he put the tube in his pocket, not wanting to replace it in the diner’s parking lot. He meant to re-stash somewhere down the road, but events intervened.

That money--ten times more than Wyatt had earned in all his scuffling days, as jack leg carpenter, iron worker, apple picker, and that stint in the Merchant Marine--would not restore the one thing that he relied on without even thinking. But it just might help him get even.

Frozen in Wyatt’s memory was that blue ‘55 chevy, the barrel of the 12 gauge--and the whale-like man in the white shirt; his fleshy face, his beady eyes beneath thick brows--in that split second before the blast. Captain America would find him, if he had to search to the ends of the earth.