Northern Renegade

GUNNERY SERGEANT LIAM Reinhardt, former United States Marines sharpshooter, veered his motorcycle to the left, avoiding another pothole in the pockmarked gravel road. It wasn’t much better than the goat trails leading from one remote Afghani village to the next. Except, this wasn’t Afghanistan and he wasn’t tracking some insurgent leader through dusty mountains.

Nope, he was back in the U.S. of A. Afghanistan, Iraq and some places he couldn’t divulge were his past. As was his ex-wife and an honorable discharge based on some faulty heart valve that had shown up when he was being patched up from that last mission. That assignment had been the pinnacle of his career. It was right up there with the SEALs taking out bin Laden back in 2011, only Liam’s mission had had a lower profile.

Growing up, hunting in the woods of Minnesota and Wisconsin, he’d known early on he wanted to be a sharpshooter. The irony wasn’t lost on him that while he’d been fully prepared that enemy fire might take him out at any time, he’d never expected to lose his life, as he knew it, due to a personal plumbing defect.

Neither had he planned on Natalie bailing on their marriage two years ago because she couldn’t handle his deployments. What the hell? She’d known his career path when she married him. Now it was time to regroup because all of that was history. At thirty-one, he was starting all over. Starting what? Doing what? He’d be damned if he knew.

Rolling to a stop, he pushed up his helmet’s bug-spattered visor and surveyed his immediate future. Good Riddance, Alaska, spread before him. A single road cut through the collection of buildings flanked at the rear by evergreens.

Over the throb of his bike, he heard the drone of a plane. Bush plane. It was a far cry from the sound of F-15s and recon drones or the fractured chop-chop-chop of a Chinook. Sure enough, a bush plane, coming in low, touched down on the landing strip to the right of the town.

A breeze carried the scent of spruce and the odor of bear. While the trees were everywhere, bears would remain scarce. For the most part, they avoided people. He knew the feeling. He wanted to be left the hell alone.

Back home in Minnesota, that had been damn near impossible with his mom hovering over him. He and she operated on different planes, and after his dad died, their differences had seemed more marked than ever.

Liam craved the solitude he remembered from when he’d visited Good Riddance as a teenager. And his uncle, Bull Swenson, a tough-as-nails vet who’d spent some time in a Vietcong hellhole back in ‘Nam, had found a new start and a new life here. Liam had followed in Bull’s footsteps joining the military. He figured he might as well follow Bull’s lead afterward, as well. Good Riddance seemed like an all-around good decision—or at least a decent enough option to make it worth checking out.