As soon as the wreckage was safely out of sight, 47 freed the winch cable, and took the time necessary to back the truck into the shed before returning to the bridge. He had been assigned to work in the asylum’s slaughterhouse at the age of ten, so the assassin was used to looking at dead bodies, and felt nothing beyond a sense of annoyance as he scanned the roadway for the top of Johnson’s head. Fortunately the chunk of skull and upper jawbone were still tucked inside the minimal half-helmet that so many bikers preferred. The bloody mess lay next to the road where it had come to rest and it was a simple matter to kick dust over the bloodstains and drop the brain bucket into the watercourse below.

With that chore out of the way, it was time to remove the now-sagging wire and coil it up as he made his way back to the point where the badly mauled corpse lay. Having stowed the wire in his back pocket, the assassin got a good grip on the back of Johnson’s vest and began to drag the body toward the shed. He was only halfway to his destination when a large cloud of dust appeared to the south. It seemed that something big—and potentially nasty—was on the way.

The assassin weighed 187 pounds, and even without the top portion of his head Johnson topped 225, so it wasn’t easy to haul the dead biker across the intervening space. Agent 47 tripped and fell over backward, as the sound of the diesel grew louder. Genuinely concerned now, he scrambled to his feet, sought a new grip, and put everything he had into towing the body to the shed. As darkness wrapped itself around 47 a huge motor coach topped the nearest rise and thundered onto the bridge.

There were plenty of holes in the side of the ancient shed and the assassin peered through one of them as the maroon bus rolled over the very spot where Johnson had been killed fifteen minutes earlier. He saw the rig bounce slightly as it came off the bridge deck and heard gravel rattle as it flew back over the bridge. An expensive mural had been painted along the side of the coach. It featured a biker on a chopper, a coyote howling at the moon, and jagged mountains in the background.