LITMIR.BIZ

       4

      JACK RILEY LEANED BACK against the wall at the Headlights Ice House, a bustling food and drink establishment where picnic tables and stacked crates formed eating areas that were anything but private. The lights were bright, the noise was loud, but with thunder rumbling in the night sky outside, it offered a warm, dry place where a man could fill his belly and get a crash course in who was who in Dahlia, Tennessee.

      Stretching his long legs out across the bench seat of his table, he took a long swig from his second bottle of beer.

      He’d come here to catch a criminal. Or two. Or six. Or however many sons of bitches it took to stop the flow of drugs and money that he’d traced from Nashville back to this deceptively innocent spot on the map.

      Located about thirty miles east of Nashville, Dahlia had once been home to plantations, horse breeding and tobacco. According to his current investigation, Dahlia had nearly died during the Great Depression. But one of its founding families, the Fisks, had built the Dahlia Speedway in the 1960s, and the town was reborn. Now, instead of racing thoroughbreds, they raced cars.

      The Chevy Camaro he’d been working on since he was a teenager—a lifetime ago, it seemed—was Jack’s ticket into town. Secured in the trailer he was hauling behind his pickup, the modified street car would qualify him as an entrant in the track’s Outlaw 10.5 Division Drag Racing Series.

      He needed to become a part of the track.

      He needed to become a part of this town.

      Because someone here had murdered his partner.

      When Lorenzo Vaughn had agreed to reveal his source for the drugs he’d sold in Nashville, in exchange for a reduced sentence, a fatal chain of events had been set into motion.

      Vaughn had sent Jack and Eric to a chop shop. The business of tearing down racing cars from across the country and selling parts on the black market had also been a front for the even more dangerous business of smuggling heroin and other drugs inside some of the vehicles. But by the time the task force moved in to make an arrest, the business had closed up and moved its location. To ferret out the new distribution center and the men behind the drug import scheme, Eric had gone in undercover as a buyer looking to make a purchase. He’d stayed with the job, perfected the role of a new dealer in town, worked his way up through the hierarchy of thugs and lieutenants to the men in charge of the operation—who made him as a cop and had him gunned down in the street. Whoever was running the Dahlia-Nashville smuggling connection was going to pay.