Chapter One
Derby
Hell Road is the kind of back Kentucky road that makes a man believe the devil got bored and started designing shortcuts.
It cuts through the dark outside Hell, Kentucky, narrow and mean, with trees leaning over the blacktop like they’re waiting to snatch handlebars. The curves come too sharp. The shoulders drop too fast. The ditches hold fog even when the rest of the county is dry. Locals say you don’t take Hell Road after midnight unless you’re drunk, desperate, running from somebody, or too stupid to know better.
I ain’t drunk.
Desperate is debatable.
Stupid depends who’s asking.
Widowmaker eats the blacktop beneath me, her engine snarling through the night like she’s got her own grudges to settle. She’s all steel, black paint, chrome, and attitude, built for men who know better and ride anyway. The headlight cuts a mean tunnel through the dark, catching flashes of barbed wire, slick ditch grass, and pastureland rolling black beyond the fence line.
Dead Man’s Curve waits ahead.
Worst bend on the whole damned road.
I know this stretch. I’ve ridden it more times than I can count, usually too fast and usually with somebody in my ear telling me I’m going to die young if the law, women, or my mouth don’t get me first. The curve drops hard to the left, then snaps back right where the trees crowd so close they look like they’re whispering secrets over the asphalt.
Damn thing’s littered with so many crosses…
Nobody with sense trusts Hell Road.
That’s the first rule.
The second is older and dumber, which means it gets repeated more.
There’s a woman out here.
The Widow.
Men swear they see her near Dead Man’s Curve right before a wreck. Pale dress. Long hair. Face like moonlight under water. Folks say she was a bride who died on her way to a wedding that never happened. Some say she was a woman running from a husband who swore he loved her right up until he drove her off this bend. They say she was one of the girls Pearly Gates overlooked, and if you talk to the old-timers, they get quiet fast like there’s real dirt behind that story.
Me?
I believe roads remember things.
That don’t mean I believe every drunk bastard who sees fog and calls it a ghost. It means I’ve ridden enough blacktop in this county to know some places carry more than tire marks. Hell Road has teeth. Dead Man’s Curve is hungry. If the Widow is real, she ain’t got much use for men who behave themselves.
Lucky for me, behaving ain’t my best skill.
I lean into the bend, wind beating at my cut, Widowmaker roaring under me.
I don’t see a woman in white.
I see cotton.
Big, pale, granny-looking cotton.
Right before it slaps me in the face.
At first, I think it’s a bird.
Something pale whips out of the night, smacks across my visor, and tries to smother me at seventy miles an hour. I jerk one hand off the bars, cuss loud enough to scare Jesus out of the ditch weeds, and damn near kiss the yellow line before I get Widowmaker back under me.
“Son of a bitch.”