by Bourne, Lena
But Matt was in the army. I’m sure he’s dealt with many dangerous guys, and I’m sure he’s killed some of them too.
* * *
Doc
The clubhouse is less than a mile from here, but it’s still taking Ink a long time to bring the truck I asked him for. The cop car is gone from the hospital parking lot, and I’m assuming Anne’s husband left with them, but I can’t be sure. I did check all the places in the hospital where he could be waiting for her, but couldn’t find him anywhere. Hopefully he’s gone, because it’s full light out now, the sun already very bright, while the streets are still empty, because it’s Saturday. We’ll be easy to spot if he’s lurking somewhere nearby.
Anne’s fully dressed when I return to her room, sitting on the edge of the bed, her shaking hands clenched together tightly in her lap. She looks half asleep despite her wide-open, fear-filled eyes.
“We need to find a place to hide you,” I tell her.
Now that the excitement of finding out who she is and meeting her husband has worn off a little, that FBI badge he was flashing is starting to shine a lot brighter in my mind. I will help her get far away from him, I owe that much to her brother, but I can’t get the MC involved at all. That might not be easy though. Her husband didn’t appear like he’s going to stop looking for her anytime soon. Just asking Ink for the truck was risky.
“A motel will be fine, I guess,” she says quietly. “But maybe somewhere in the next town over. Or…maybe I should go and try to get my car back…though that’s probably not an option now that he’s in contact with the local cops…Maybe I could just get on a bus…but my purse with all my money in it is still in the car…”
She sounds so damn defeated, and what I really want to do is make sure she never has to worry about him again. I could make that happen. But that FBI badge is shining real bright in my mind. The MC doesn’t mess with cops. The consequences of that are too horrible to imagine.
“If he knows about my car crash, he probably has my purse and all my things now,” she continues in an even more broken voice. “All my money and documents were in my purse. I won’t get anywhere without it, will I?”
I guess that badge of his is shining real bright in her mind too.
“I can get your car and bags back for you,” I say without thinking. I shouldn’t involve the MC in this, it’s too dangerous, but she’s my dead best friend’s sister. He was like family to me, closer than my own brother. I will help his sister escape. I have no other choice.
She looks up at me, her face brightening for a moment, but then it turns real dark again. Dark like a frozen, empty, forgotten plain.
“He has all my stuff and now he’s waiting for my call. Maybe I should just do that,” she says in a hesitant voice, like the words she’s uttering aren’t fitting together in the right way. “No need to put you in danger.”
“That’s a crap idea, Anne,” I say sternly, since the defeat in her voice is making me angry. I shouldn’t snap at her, but I’m totally useless at controlling my anger at the best of times. And this situation is so far removed from that it’s not even funny. “I can keep you safe from him and help you start a new life wherever you want. Don’t worry about it, he doesn’t frighten me.”
Her eyes are swimming with hope and thankfulness, but I think she’s about to protest again. Luckily my phone starts buzzing and prevents it.
Out in the parking lot I can see one of the MC’s trucks parked right at the entrance to the ER.
“Let’s go, the car’s here,” I say. “You don’t have to make the decision about what to do just yet. Maybe all your stuff is still waiting in your crashed car and all we have to do is go get it.”
I smile, but she doesn’t return it. I shouldn’t be making her all these promises. If she has nothing and her fed husband knows where she is, it’ll be hard for her to disappear. The better course of action would be to make him disappear. But Cross will never sanction something like that, especially not for such a trivial reason, as me needing to help the sister of a dead childhood friend. But I don’t have a choice. I have to help her.
She’s a beautiful woman, that’s also why you wanna help her. The thought firing off in my brain comes in Tank’s sarcastic voice. But it’s speaking truth. I haven’t desired a woman in a while now, but the more I look at her, the more I desire Anne.
That’s another reason why I need to get her as far away as possible, and as quickly as possible. I’m not looking to find a woman and settle down, that was never part of any plan I ever made. I’m a lone wolf, I fly solo. If I acted on my desire for her, it’d be a timed thing from the start, destined to end. I can’t do that to the sister of my best friend. She needs to be on her way before I end up hurting her with my lone wolf ways even more than she’s already been hurt.
We don’t speak as I lead her down the back stairs used only by the staff, and out through the side entrance, to where Ink is waiting next to the truck. He’s checking Anne out and smirking.
“Now I see why you woke me up before the sun even rose this morning,” Ink says as he holds out the keys to the truck. “I always figured that cabin of yours was just a cover story.”
“I’m helping out a friend,” I tell him as I lead Anne to the passenger side and help her climb in.
I don’t much like the knowing smirk on Ink’s face when I turn back to face him. “A friend, huh? Well she’s certainly the most beautiful friend you got.”
“You can find your own way back to the clubhouse, right?” I ask him a little too venomously, maybe, but he just grins wider and shrugs.
“Anything you need, Doc,” he says and I know he means it. “Just seeing a beautiful woman is reason enough to get up too early in the morning. Though that bruise on her face looks like she’s been kissed by the night. I hope it fades soon.”
I could do without his poetic talking, but it comes with the package where Ink is concerned. About nine months ago, a brother brought a badly beaten and stabbed Ink to the clubhouse asking if I could patch him up. The nasty knife wound in his side wouldn’t heal for the longest time and after awhile, I got the feeling Ink didn’t want it to. I had a couple of long talks with him after that, and found out all about why he didn’t really feel like living anymore. But I managed to convince him living is better than dying no matter what, like I’ve done for countless soldiers who lost a lot more than Ink had, and like I’m constantly doing for myself. Ink got better and he joined the MC not long after. He says he owes me his life, which I disagree with, but his insistence on it is the reason I asked him for this favor today and not any of my other brothers. But bringing a car over is as far as I care to get him involved with an FBI agent’s runaway wife.
“I’ll see you around,” I tell him and get in the car too.
Ink gives me another knowing grin before walking away. And just in time too.
Anne’s husband just walked out of the ER reception area and he’s glaring at me. He probably saw Anne too, but he’s still far enough away for us to drive off and get lost before he can follow us. He’ll get the license plate though…what if he traces the truck back to the club?
No, that won’t be a problem. The license plates on the trucks are all safe.
Despite remembering that, the question, What the fuck are you doing, Doc? is echoing loud in my head as I speed across the near empty parking lot. I don’t have an answer. All I know is that I’ll do what I can to help Anne. So I’m happy to ignore it for now.
* * *
“He saw us,” Anne says breathlessly, looking back over her shoulder.
Her husband is following us in a black sedan. He made a run for his car as soon as he saw us and wasn’t far behind when we pulled out into the street. I hoped for more time.
“I’ll lose him, don’t worry,” I tell her and make a U-turn at the first intersection we reach, then gun it down the near empty, Saturday morning road.
More traffic would serve us better, but there are enough cars to prevent him from ma
king the same U-turn I just made. But before long he does, and the siren atop his car is flashing and wailing, as he weaves in and out of traffic to catch us. He’s willing to pull out all the stops to get her back, that much is clear. But I know the roads around here much better than he does, since I sometimes get insomnia and I like to ride then. I can lose him, easy. I know every back road around here, and I know how to get back to Sanctuary following any one of them. That’s not where we’re going though. I can’t take her to Sanctuary.
Soon we’re out of town and in the country, the wailing siren no longer audible. I drive for a couple of more minutes and finally stop at a picnic area with a nice view of a valley. My heart is pumping and I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a car ride this much. But Anne is as white as a sheet and her whole body is trembling when I turn to her.
“I have no choice,” she says blankly. “I have to call him. He’ll never stop looking for me.”
“If you go back to him now, he’ll kill you,” I say, since I think that’s a very accurate assessment of the situation.
She turns to me slowly, her bottom lip shaking, but I don’t think she’s about to cry. She’s just very frightened.
“How could this happen?” she asks. “I put all my strength, and it wasn’t much, into leaving him. How could he find me so fast? How could I fail so fast? I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”
She’s not really asking me, she’s just voicing her own desperate thoughts and hopeless fears. I’ve had to look into the faces of enough military widows and bereaved mothers and fathers and tell them I couldn’t do what was necessary to save their husbands, sons, sometimes daughters, to recognize that same hopeless desperation in her face now. I hate losing patients, but I hate seeing the sadness on the faces of their loved ones even more. No one died here yet, but she thinks she will. No, she thinks she’s already dead. But she’s not. That’ll only happen if he finds her. I can save her.
“I have a cabin in the middle of nowhere in the woods near here,” I hear myself say. “He won’t find it. You can hide out there until you get back on your feet.”
Confusion replaces some of the dejection in her face. It’s not much, but it’s better than the stony defeat that was on there before I made my offer.
“You’ll be risking a lot. Benji is well connected,” she says, some more sharpness returning to her face and her voice.
I just chuckle. “His name’s Benji? That’s a dog name.”
Her lips curl up into a tiny smile. “He’s Benjamin, but everyone calls him Benji. I think he likes it because it sounds so benign. But he’s a very dangerous guy, don’t let his puppy dog name fool you.”
“Like it fooled me,” she adds more quietly, and unnecessarily. I already understood it from her tone.
“Your brother was like a brother to me, so that makes you my little sister. I’ll make sure you’re alright.” I’m surprised at how choked up my throat got from saying that. The truth is, I haven’t thought a lot about Billy after he died. I couldn’t. He’s always there anyway, far in the back of my memories, but I don’t like to rummage around in that stuff.
“You don’t even know me,” she says, but I think what she actually means is that she doesn’t know me and therefore can’t trust me.
“Like I said, I know all I need to know and besides, you need help and I’m a doctor, so helping people is what I do,” I say and smile.
“There’s no way he’ll find you up at the cabin, and you just have to stay there long enough for me to get your things back from the police, or wherever the hell he has them stashed,” I add, nodding along since that sometimes help people agree to things.
I want her to agree to this more than I’m willing to admit to myself. And as much as I’m trying to tell myself it’s just because I don’t like leaving things unfinished, and that Billy would want me to take care of his sister, I know there’s more to it than that. I like looking into her clear blue eyes. I like how well they reflect the trees around us. It’s kinda like looking out the window at my cabin, only more peaceful and calming, more like the way it’s supposed to be.
But her eyes are still scared right now, and I’m not sure she’s gonna let me help her. The problem with battered women is that they’ll often return to their abuser even after they’ve already fled successfully. It’s what gets the majority of them killed. Maybe a wish to return is behind her urge to call him now. Maybe him causing that scene at the hospital to find her, and chasing us the way he did, made her think he still loves her and can’t live without her. But that kind of delusion is a complication I’ll deal with later. Right now, I have to get her to safety.
“OK, fine,” she finally says in a quiet voice, just as I was about to start convincing her again. “Thank you.”
“It’s my pleasure,” I say, and get back on the road, driving fast to give her less time to change her mind again.
* * *
Anne
What else could I say? No? Take me back to my husband? I couldn’t say any of those things. But he is a stranger, although a stranger that seems to have been sent to help me by my dead brother straight from heaven. I never needed a friend more than I needed one in that hospital and he appeared. But he is a stranger, and a cold weight of fear grows in my stomach as the trees lining the road get denser and thicker.
Can I really trust him?
Matt and Billy were best friends since before they learned to talk properly. That’s how my mom described it. He was always around and for awhile, when I was very young, I thought I had two brothers, not one. I can trust that guy. But is he still that guy? I think he is. I hope he is.
His eyes and his voice tell me I have nothing to worry about, but I’ve been duped before. Badly. So badly it nearly killed me more than once.
For the last three years, since my husband started showing his true nature, I’ve been choosing the evil I know by staying with him, over what I’d face if I ran away. But today, saying yes to Matt’s plan of hiding me in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, I might have said yes to an even greater evil.
But maybe I said yes to hope.
That’s what this feels like. Hope for better things. An end to pain. A second chance. I won’t waste it.
4
Anne
He veered off the main road before long, and we’re riding along a dirt road now, the redwoods all around growing denser and denser, until only very narrow streaks of sunlight penetrate the canopy. It looks like a fantasy forest, a hopeful and magical place, but we are deep in the woods and I’m alone in a car with a near stranger. I have no phone, no money, and no idea where I actually am. Maybe coming here with him wasn’t such a bright decision.
I don’t know the man he became. Sure, he’s a doctor, and the people at the hospital know him and trust him, but he might also be a psycho. I mean, my husband is an FBI agent that everyone likes, and look at him. I was a nurse who volunteered as a counselor for the abused and the downtrodden, and look at me now. I’m a bad judge of character, that’s what I am.
That train of thought halts abruptly as the dirt road ends in a clearing with the coziest looking cabin I’ve ever seen at the center. It’s seems like something straight out of a country living magazine and my first thought is that this is the perfect place to hide from the world and all my problems. Maybe my problems would never catch up to me if I stayed here permanently. It’s just a simple wooden house with a wide porch and large windows. The sun is bathing it, creating a pool of light around it and making the planks its made of glitter.
“You like it?” he asks, pulling me out of the daydream of waking up inside the cabin then having a cup of coffee on the porch with nothing but birdsong and the sweet smell of redwood trees for company. He’s holding my door open and smiling.
“It’s very nice,” I say and climb out then follow him to the door.
It opens into a little hallway that in turn opens to the kitchen on one side and living room on the other, while a narrow wooden staircase leads
upstairs. The living room is tastefully, but very sparsely decorated, and the kitchen looks brand new.
“Do you live here?” I ask, since it looks comfortable enough to be a permanent home. When he first mentioned a cabin in the woods, I imagined a small, one-room affair with a sofa, a bunk bed and maybe a camping stove.
“Not yet, but one day I plan to make this my home,” he says, sounding like he really wants that plan to work out, but has his doubts it ever will.
“Well, it’s gorgeous,” I say and smile so widely it makes the bruise that now covers almost half my face hurt. “If you don’t decide to live here, you could always rent it out as a fancy weekend getaway.”
“What, and have strangers sleeping in my bed? No thanks,” he asks, kind of jokingly, kind of seriously.
“I’m a stranger,” I tease, not even sure why.
“No, you’re not really,” he says and his eyes are telling me he wanted to say a lot more than that. I’m kind of glad he didn’t, but also kind of wish he had, because I’m giddy and flirty for some reason, and I’d like to keep this conversation of sleeping in beds going with him. He’s grown up into a very attractive guy, and I have always been a flirt, but those days are so far behind me, I hardly remember them anymore. So I don’t know if me acting this way is the aftermath of the concussion, or of my memories of happier, carefree times that were stirred up by meeting him. But either way, I’m more hopeful and happy than I’ve been in a very long time.
I did always have a teeny-tiny crush on him when we were young. Nothing too serious, since he was so much like an older brother to me, but it was there. He was tall and blonde and an excellent horse rider. I remember admiring that about him. But all that ended abruptly with my brother’s death and Matt leaving our hometown for good. A lot of things ended abruptly then, my childhood and innocence among them. Maybe my hope for a good future too. Maybe that’s why I kept hanging on to the wrong men for too long, thinking it was the best I could get and better than nothing. For some reason, I’m seeing all that very clearly right now.