by Hazel Parker
But there wasn’t much fun about this side of the job. This was the price we paid for being an outlaw brotherhood.
We may not have dealt in hard drugs and guns before, but we had an inescapable relationship with death and violence.
Chapter 2: Jane
Why I felt the need to do this in person, I will never know.
But here I am.
Just do it for two years and get the hell out of Green Hills. Never to return to this place ever again.
About two weeks ago today, I had driven up and seen the signs for Green Hills. “Welcome to the luscious land of Green Hills, population: 14,000. Where everything is bright and looking up.” I had to snicker with sarcasm at the sign—the only thing bright here were the sparks brought about by guns, and the only thing looking up was the crime rate.
I assumed as much, at least. I hadn’t returned in the decade before, having graduated from New York University and begun my medical school journey at Johns Hopkins. Whenever people asked me where I was from, I just answered Los Angeles—which, if you stretched the limits of the metropolitan region far enough, I suppose could qualify as true. Only a couple people knew I was actually from Green Hills, and even fewer knew what my childhood had looked like.
But none knew why I hated it so much. None knew why I had decided to come back. No one, not even myself sometimes, understood why I had decided to come back.
But here I was, throwing on scrubs for my shift as an emergency room doc, shaking my head in the mirror as I pondered what it all meant. The internal dialogue never got any easier, never became smoother, and never felt settled. It was as if my father, from afar, was saying, “I thought I told you to stay far away.”
At least I hadn’t seen any sign of the Savage Saints still existing.
Of course, the shop still existed. Peters Automotive Repair. The damn shop felt like a giant, living tombstone of my father’s, mocking me every time I passed by it on the way to Green Hills General Hospital. Double GH provided me the only sense of normalcy I had being back in this town.
It’s not all bad, though. Were the individuals really that bad? I mean, Sensei was great. And Tracy…
Witnesses to my father’s death.
Just do this for two years and get the hell out of Green Hills.
I headed out to my car, sat down, and revved the engine.
But just before I backed up, I listened closely. There, in the distance, like the ominous stampede of wildebeests, came the rising roar of that which I hated most, that which had killed my father, that sound which told me whatever I had not yet seen only meant that one sense had not experienced the return of what I feared most.
The biker club.
The Savage Saints.
“Damnit!” I roared in my car.
I was almost brought to tears as I thought about that night once again, that night when my father died in my arms, that night when BK had tried to take me somewhere else and I had slapped him. BK didn’t even get angry. He just looked sorrowful and ashamed.
After I’d slapped him, I cried some more, falling to my knees. Only one person had actually gotten me to move—Tracy. He’d gotten me to the ambulance where my father was taken, wrapped a blanket around me, and told me he’d do whatever it took to make me this better.
He was the only person that night from the Saints who had spoken to me not as a representative of the club, but as an individual. He was the only one who seemed to recognize that I didn’t want a goddamn word with the MC, just with a human. He was the only one whom I refused to call by their nickname.
He was not Trace to me. He was Tracy Cole, a guy that grew up just a block from me, a guy who went to the same schools as me, and the guy who always said he’d watch over me no matter what. He was someone whom, though I never dared to admit it to my father, I found rather handsome and attractive. He never got on social media, which left it up to the imagination to wonder who and what he had become in the years since I last saw him at my father’s funeral.
Sometimes, the imagination, admittedly, ran a little wild. But I never let the thoughts get too crazy, even when I committed to coming back for my own reasons. I was here for professional, financial purposes, not personal ones that bordered on fantasies.
Tracy, I hope that you can watch over me by not coming near me. Keep your little club away from me—this girl isn’t a friend of yours anymore.
That’s… yeah, that’s what I want to believe.
Eventually, the sound of the bikes died down, and I was able to gather myself together slowly. I took a deep breath, kept backing the car out of the driveway, and headed toward double GH for my next twelve-hour shift.
When I got in, the place seemed buzzing with activity, certainly more so than it normally had. I looked at one of the doctors, who didn’t even acknowledge me. I looked curiously at the receptionist, who looked at me as if I were a fool for not understanding already. What the hell’s going on?
The ER, however, didn’t have much activity. Someone had come in for a broken foot, which Dr. Grace had already taken care of. Otherwise, I would just remain on call until something came in and needed surgery. I went up to the ER’s receptionist, a local college student named Tara, and smiled at her.
“Seems this place is pretty happening, huh?”
“You haven’t heard, have you?”
I looked at her with an expression that answered her question for her. I already had a feeling, though, of what was going on.
“Some new member of the local biker club was killed by a rival club. Or something like that. Some gang warfare.”
“They’re not gangs,” I said instinctively, remembering my father’s words, but my mind had long gone past that by the time I finished speaking.
Instead, all of the worst of Green Hills seemed to come rushing back at that moment. The Savage Saints claimed to have done a lot of good for the town, and maybe they did, but most days, it seemed like they were protecting the town against empty threats, against enemies that didn’t really exist. I’d heard of the Devil’s Mercenaries, but they were a town over and had not struck much before my father’s death.
And now… well, it looked like the Savage Saints would suddenly have a reason to abide by their principles of combat and action.
“Well, whether they’re gangs or not, I do know that we’re about to get a whole lot more people in here. You know—”
“I know how it works, Tara,” I snapped.
She looked taken aback by my sudden attitude. It occurred to me she had no idea why this topic would have triggered me so strongly.
“Sorry,” I said. “I had relatives in the club. Had.”
“Oh, Doctor Peters, I’m so sorry, I didn’t—”
“Don’t,” I said, stopping her dead in her tracks. “Don’t worry about it. Please. Just… let’s take care of this as we go on, OK?”
Tara nodded her understanding, although I knew she didn’t actually understand me. I also knew I didn’t much care if she understood as I whirled around, heading for my office. I closed the door, put my head in my hands, and groaned.
What did I really think was going to happen once I came back here? Did I actually believe “progression” would eliminate the Saints? They were too well embedded in Green Hills to just up and out because social media became a thing. The Saints were too strong and too smart just to roll over and die.
They’d adapt.
But I was perhaps the bigger fool.
Because some meaningless, ethical desire in my mind that the Saints probably wouldn’t even allow me to fulfill had driven me here, I had put myself right back in the arena of chaos, death, and heartbreak. You just had to do it in person, didn’t you, Jane? And now look at you. A wreck in your first week back.
Why did you expect any different?
Especially as an ER doctor. You know now you’ll definitely see them then.
I tried my best to shake my thoughts, but now morbid curiosity was getting the better of me. I wanted to see what
bloody mess the Savage Saints had produced or had suffered. I waited a few minutes just in case my pager buzzed, urging me back to the ER, but when nothing came, I sneaked down to the autopsy room.
Though the various doctors poking and prodding at the body made it difficult to see, I caught enough glimpses to see that the young guy—who couldn’t have been any older than me—had met a brutal end, with multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and some sort of markings on his neck. I had never known the Saints to desecrate a body but perhaps times had changed.
Although, since Tracy had become president, I had my reasons for doubting that.
“Dr. Peters.”
I turned abruptly to see the chief medical officer, Dr. Pamela Burns, standing there. With gray hair, glasses, and wrinkled skin, no one ever confused her for anything other than her role.
But she was not a hard ass administrator with an authoritarian bent to her ways. In fact, ever since I could remember, she had been something like the mother I never had. She knew my family background, she knew how much I yearned to get away, and she did everything she could to keep me out of harm’s way. She had helped me get shadowing opportunities at the hospital, and she had made sure that I was protected when my father had club business to handle.
“A moment, please?”
I nodded, checked my pager, and followed Dr. Burns to her office. She sat down, folded her hands, and leaned forward on the desk.
“You didn’t have to come back.”
I sighed.
“I already went through this with Tara up front.”
“Did you? Seems to me she just said you were upset about the news. You didn’t say anything about why you came back.”
I didn’t respond to that, instead leaning back in my chair.
“Look, Jane,” Dr. Burns said, dropping all pretenses of formality. “You were one of the smartest we ever had in this small town. In no way did it surprise me to see that you wound up at Hopkins, one of the best in the country. But it does surprise me to see you back here. I need to know right now if there is anything I can do to help.”
The implication of her words was clear. She seemed to believe, perhaps not without justification, that I was being bribed, forced to come back here, or here against my own will.
That was kind of true, I did want to be somewhere else, but the choice was mine and mine alone.
“I’m fine; thank you though,” I said. “I… I had some things I needed to do back here.”
Dr. Burns sighed, looked behind me, and stood up for a moment. She shut the door and locked it, then turned off a camera overhead.
“I noticed that on your HR forms, you asked us to cut you a check instead of direct deposit,” she said. “Almost as if you wanted easy cash.”
I bit my lip. I wasn’t going to tell Dr. Burns anything—though she was like a mother figure to me, I’d been gone too long for me to tell her the truth. And the truth, honestly, was embarrassing and a little dirty; I didn’t want her to know that.
“Jane, please, listen to me. If you don’t want to tell me what you’re doing with the Saints, I get that, fine. Believe it or not, I like what they do for this town. But they’re losing control.”
I tried not to hide my disturbance, but the swallow that followed probably gave it away.
“The warfare between the clubs has picked up in recent times. The Red Hills nickname has only gotten worse as the years have gone by. Your father’s presence—”
“My father has nothing to do with why I’m here.”
“I know. But Jane, please. Just do me a favor. Be fully honest with me. How long do you need to be here to do whatever it is you need done?”
I knew the answer off the top of my head. I’d done the math far too many times not to know it.
“Two and a half years.”
“And at the end of those two and a half years?”
“I leave, and I’m never coming back.”
Dr. Burns nodded.
“And you live somewhere secure?”
“Yep.”
Not that there’s anywhere that’s truly secure in Green Hills here, let’s be honest.
“Just do your best to stay above the madness, Jane,” Dr. Burns said. “None of us ever fully stay beyond it. You know that. I’ve done everything I can to protect you and will continue to do so. But I can’t hold your hand for you. You’re a grown woman now. If you choose to get involved, just know you’re walking into some dangerous situations.”
Of course, I knew that. I’d seen my father die at the hands of a club war.
But…
I guess that was part of the reason I was here. So that I could wash my hands of anything associated with the Savage Saints, so that nothing in my bank account, life, or associations could ever be traced back to the Savage Saints, so that I could finally live as Jane Peters, M.D., not as Jane Peters, daughter of the founder of the Savage Saints.
Maybe this would follow me around for the rest of my life, even when I finally cleaned out and purged any affiliations with them. But I’d figure out how to fight that mental block when the time came. For now, I just wanted to collect my paycheck every two weeks, do what I needed to do, and then move on.
“I understand,” I said. “Thanks, Dr. Burns.”
“Just call me Pamela, Jane,” she said with a smile. “You know I’m still here for you in that role.”
“I know,” I said, flashing a smile for the first time all meeting.
And I knew she meant it. I knew “in that role” meant as my mother, since my real mother had died giving birth to me.
But I also knew “in that role” meant therapist, counselor, protector, and just about anything else that I could think of.
I really didn’t know where I’d be or how I’d handle the next two and a half years without Dr. Burns here in double GH.
As I stepped out of the office and saw two of the Saints rush by, I immediately recognized them both.
One was Splitter.
And one was Tracy.
And… goddamn, he had grown into something of a man.
But before I could do anything more than try and see what all his tattoos were, he’d turned the corner to where his club member had been wheeled.
Professional, Jane.
Keep it professional.
Chapter 3: Trace
I dumped my cell phone in the box outside the hall and waited for everyone else to do the same. Once they had all entered, I shut the door behind me, not bothering to prevent it from slamming. Splitter coughed, but otherwise, there were no sounds coming from anyone at all.
It had been a rough day for me, and that was the understatement of all understatements. A prospect had been killed. War seemed inevitable, especially with my rising anger, with the DMs.
And to top it all off, I’d realized the rumors were true. Jane had returned.
Admittedly, she looked mighty pretty, and the thought briefly crossed my mind when I saw her later hovering over the desk that whatever age gap had existed before didn’t matter so much.
But that didn’t mean shit right now, not with the present danger at hand.
“You all know why we’re here,” I said. “The damn maggots have decided to strike at us, killing our most recent prospect. I received a message from Diablo saying that it was for running interference on their cocaine operations, but you all also know that that could not be more full of shit.”
I thought of all of the meetings we’d had and how I’d done my best always to act as Paul Peters had—with control, emotional stability, and a hint of snark for the outside world.
But right now, the only thing I felt was pissed off. I was in a world of anger over what the Devil’s Mercenaries had done, and I was sick of their bullshit games. The time for outward diplomacy and hidden attacks had come to an end. It was time to strike at them.
“I know that we don’t have the ammo and the guns to launch an all-out assault on them, but that isn’t what I would want anyway,” I said as I took a puff
of a cigarette. “They are like anything else. Cut off the head, and the body dies. Perhaps Diablo thought that because they killed Paul, we would wither and die. Perhaps, because it’s been a decade and that hasn’t happened yet, he’s becoming desperate. I don’t give a shit. I want him fucking dead.”
“You know he’s about as easy to catch as a fly buzzing around your face, right?” Sensei said. “I’ve been hunting this motherfucker down now for over two decades, first with Paul and now with you. You think you got intel on him, and then you don’t. You see him when he wants you to see him.”
“Fine then,” I said. “We let him come to us and we kill him.”
“Ain’t gonna happen,” BK said. “He ain’t gonna come out of the woods for some time. Motherfucker knows better than to show his mug in any capacity right after he killed one of our prospects.”
I wanted to sigh but instead took a big puff of my cigarette, the better to avoid looking so desperate around the officers. I looked to Splitter, the one who was with me when this all had started.
“Thoughts, VP?”
“I think we should retaliate,” he growled. “Fucker’s been pushing around the better part of a decade, Trace. We’re Saints, so we don’t fall so easily. But how many lives are we gonna leave unavenged? Tell me that.”
“I can’t tell you that,” I said, taking one more puff. “But I can tell you that we’re going to put this to a vote right now. Retaliation tonight? Or hold back?”
Proposing the question made me start to think that maybe there was some merit in waiting. When else would the DMs expect a retaliation more than in the immediate aftermath? They would know we were coming, they’d know we’d be pissed off, and they could manipulate us accordingly. The only saving grace was the medics—and probably Jane—had the prospect’s body, meaning they couldn’t torment the Saints with various parts as they so loved to do.
But, honestly, fuck it. I considered myself an actual saint for having the patience of ten years not to run roughshod over the DMs. We could gather all of our guns, our personal stocks, whatever we needed to do to teach them a lesson.