She nodded once and let go of her son’s shoulder.
The boy didn’t cry. Didn’t fight. Just looked up at Pike with those huge sunken eyes and said, “Are you taking me to my dad?”
Pike couldn’t answer. Couldn’t get the words out.
I knelt down next to him. “We’re taking you somewhere safe, buddy. You’re gonna be okay.”
People in that diner were staring. A waitress had her phone out. I could see her thumb hovering over the screen.
I didn’t blame her. I’d have called the cops too if I didn’t know what I knew.
What she didn’t know was that we weren’t strangers to that boy. What she didn’t know was that the man who’d been starving Caleb for two years wasn’t his mother’s boyfriend at all.
That man was my dead brother’s son.
His name was Travis. He was thirty-one years old. He was my nephew.
And he had killed my brother to keep this secret.
Let me back up two years.
My brother Jesse was the kind of man who would give you the leather off his back in a snowstorm. He’d been riding since 1978. He’d been my best friend my whole life. He was sixty-two years old when he died.
The official report said heart attack. They said he collapsed in his garage working on his Shovelhead. They said he’d had warning signs for months and ignored them, because Jesse was Jesse and Jesse never went to a doctor.
I believed it. We all believed it. We buried him on a Tuesday in October.
