The Matching Tags
Chapter 02 - The Matching Tags
Mack read the note three times.
The words did not change.
The man who killed Danny is living in our house.
For nine years, Mack had believed his son died after losing control of his truck on a rain-soaked highway. The police report said Daniel had been drinking. The town said he had been reckless.
Mack had buried his son beneath a stone carved with words he had never fully believed.
Now Daniel’s child stood in front of him with a bruised face.
“What’s your name?” Mack asked, though the note had already told him.
“Eli Harper.”
“Harper?”
“That’s my stepdad’s name.”
Mack crouched so he was no longer towering over the boy.
“Where is your mother?”
Eli’s lower lip trembled.
“I don’t know.”
The men behind Mack exchanged uneasy looks.
Ray Collins, an older biker everyone called Bear, moved toward the gate and locked it. He did it quietly, without being told.
Eli reached beneath his sweatshirt and pulled a metal tag from a chain around his neck.
It was brown with age and shaped like a military identification tag. A small motorcycle emblem had been stamped into its center.
“My mom said you’d have the other one.”
Mack stopped breathing.
He reached inside his shirt and pulled out the silver tag he had worn for nearly twenty years.
Daniel had made both tags in high school shop class. He had given the silver one to Mack and kept the unfinished brass one for himself.
Father and son had worn them until the night they argued for the last time.
Eli raised his tag.
Mack placed his beside it.
The marks matched.
Even the tiny crooked line beneath the motorcycle emblem was identical.
Eli’s eyes filled with tears.
“Does that mean you’re really my grandfather?”
Mack had faced bar fights, military deployments, bankruptcy, and his son’s funeral without letting anyone see him cry.
But the word grandfather broke something open inside him.
He placed one hand behind Eli’s neck.
“Yes,” he said. “It means you found me.”
Eli leaned forward suddenly and pressed his face against Mack’s chest.
Mack wrapped both arms around him.
Then he felt the boy flinch.
Not from fear.
From pain.
Mack gently pulled back and saw bruises circling Eli’s wrist beneath his sleeve.
“Who did this to you?”
Eli looked toward the locked gate.
Before he could answer, an engine roared outside the fence.
A black pickup stopped in front of the garage.
May you like
Eli went pale.
“That’s him,” he whispered. “That’s Grant.”
