by Jessie Cooke
“What did you tell your dad?”
It was her turn for the hateful laugh. “I didn’t have to tell him anything. He never noticed I was gone. You know how he was back then. He always had a different girl up in his room, and half the time I just didn’t go home because I couldn’t stand to listen to it. He didn’t notice. God only knows how long I would have lain in that bed dead before he noticed me. I was invisible, Cody, and at that point in my life, I felt like Jimmy was the only one who could see me.”
“He used that…”
“No! Don’t say that. He never intended for anything to happen between us. He was being a good friend.”
“A good friend who used all of that against you only a few hours ago because his feelings were hurt. He always wanted you.”
“And he never made a single advance. He never said a single word, even after you went to prison. He was always only my friend. When I got better, I was so grateful and still so lonely…it was me. I was the one that came onto him first, sexually. He told me it was wrong, that we couldn’t do that to you. I was the one that convinced him that if you cared about any of us you would have come to us before you ran off and got yourself into that kind of trouble. At that point in my life, I really believed that. Jimmy may not have, but if I’d never made the first move, he and I would have never gotten together. It was all me, Cody. You’ve been pissed off at the wrong person.”
“No, Macy, I’ve been just as pissed at you as I have been him. How far along were you when…when you had the abortion?”
“Almost four months. You’d been gone for two months by then and I had been getting sick every morning for a while. At first I didn’t think anything of it, because my world was such a mess. But when it continued to happen consistently and I wasn’t having my period, I finally figured it out and took a pregnancy test.”
“Where do we go from here?” he said. Macy almost laughed again. Cody was looking at her after everything she’d just told him like she had all the answers. She was about to tell him that she had no more idea than he did when there was a knock on his bedroom door.
“Who is it?”
“Cody, it’s Dax, open up.”
Cody mumbled under his breath and pulled the door open a crack. “Hey, Dax, what’s up?”
“Is Macy here?”
“Why would you think…?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Cody. She’s not at home and she’s not with Tank. I fucking know she’s here. Jimmy’s been in an accident.”
14
Cody paced the waiting room of the ICU. He’d been in there for four hours, alone. He’d drunk a pot of coffee, and he was ready to pull his hair out if someone didn’t come and tell him something soon. Macy was inside with Jimmy. Dax had brought them both in Angel’s car just as the sun was coming up. Macy looked green, like it was all she could do to keep from throwing up, and Cody was worried about her. Dax had dropped them off, given Cody a phone and some money, and they’d gone into the ER. Macy almost lost it when they told her Jimmy had already had surgery and been taken up to ICU. They went up there, and Macy went in and promised to come out and let Cody know what was going on as soon as she could. So far, the only live people Cody had seen was an elderly Chinese couple that didn’t speak English and several tired-looking nurses as they got off shift. He was on the verge of just busting in through the double doors the next time they swung open and demanding to know what the fuck was going on.
He’d had too much time to go over and over in his head what Macy told him. He had a better understanding of how she and Jimmy ended up together, but that didn’t mean he was okay with it still. He wasn’t even sure how he felt about Macy having the abortion. Like he’d told her, he was still in County at that time, awaiting sentencing, and she could have easily gotten Dax to bring her to visit him. They could have talked about it at least. It probably would have saved her a lot of pain and suffering, and him a lot of heartache later. But instead, she’d tried to handle it on her own and when that hadn’t worked, she’d turned to Jimmy…who Cody still wasn’t convinced didn’t just take advantage of the entire situation. Maybe that wasn’t fair. Maybe Jimmy was the good guy in all of this. Cody knew even back then that Jimmy had a crush on Macy. What hurt him the worst was that he never would have believed his best friend would have done anything about it.
He looked toward the closed door again, cussed, and sat back down. With his head in his hands he thought back to that time in his life. Things were good for him for a couple of years after Dax brought him to the ranch. He still saw his brother all the time, but for the first time in his life he had stability and he didn’t have to live in that filthy trailer and be afraid of getting the shit kicked out of him all the time. His whole life up to that point had been about living in constant fear of the old man. He and his brother were both convinced that at least one of them would die at their father’s hands before they reached adulthood. When Dax took him away from there…and then the old man disappeared…Cody felt like the heavens had opened up and he’d been sent an angel to take care of him. He knew in his heart that Dax had everything to do with the old man’s disappearing, but he’d never tell anyone that. He was just so fucking grateful. He had enough to eat for the first time in his life. He lived down the road from his best friend and the girl he loved. He had a lot of freedom, but he still had someone looking out for him and someone he could turn to if he needed anything. And then that one fateful night when he’d gone into town to hang out with Keller for a few hours, his life was irrevocably changed.
He had walked up to the trailer and the first thing he noticed was that the screen door was hanging open at an odd angle. After the old man “left,” Keller had cleaned up the nasty trailer and fixed most of what was broken. He was making himself a real home and he seemed happy too. He’d put that screen door on brand new just a few weeks before, so when Cody saw it, he got a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Just like he could always sense when the old man was about to unload on him, he could sense that something very bad had happened in that trailer.
He remembered walking up the steps and calling out to Keller as he did. When his brother didn’t answer him, Cody still didn’t go in right away. He looked around and saw the bike. Keller loved his bike and he didn’t have any other means of transportation. If the bike was there, so was he. Cody finally stepped up into the trailer. The inside door was wide open and the living room was trashed. Drawers were dumped out and furniture turned over. There was blood smeared on the walls and the back of the couch…bloody handprints that Cody tried to ignore. He found out quickly that was impossible as he followed them down the hall toward the bedroom. There was only one bedroom in the trailer and even after the old man was gone, Keller refused to use it. He slept on the couch and only went in that room to clean it out when he was sure the old bastard wasn’t coming back. He’d thrown everything in it out back and doused it with gasoline and lit it on fire. It was like he was trying to turn his memories into ashes as well.
Cody had stepped over the trail of emptied-out drawers in the hallway, still calling out to Keller, still holding out hope. His hope was gone forever the second he pushed open the bedroom door. His brother lay in a bloody heap in the middle of the dirty carpet with his head twisted in an unnatural angle and his body broken in so many places that he barely resembled the six-foot-two man that he had been. Cody lost his mind a little bit at that point; he wouldn’t even find out the extent of what they’d done to his brother until a few weeks later. That was when the coroner told them that there had to be more than one killer, probably two, and they had used a steel pipe and maybe a baseball bat to subdue him before they beat him to death with their hands and feet. The man at the coroner’s office hadn’t wanted to answer Cody’s questions about how long Keller survived, but Cody knew that his brother was used to taking beatings. By eighteen, he was an old pro at it, and because of that he was sure that Keller survived long enough to suffer unimaginable pain.
When he
was able to stop hugging his broken brother and get up off the floor that night, he’d gone for Dax first. Dax called the cops, but he promised Cody that night that he would take care of whoever did this to Keller. It was the only promise Dax ever made to him that he hadn’t kept, and Cody suspected Dax only told him that to keep him from doing something stupid…something exactly like what he did.
Cody made it through the next few weeks of hell. At the memorial services, he was given the urn with Keller’s ashes and he’d taken them up in the hills to his and Keller’s favorite spot and he’d scattered them in the wind. His brother was finally free of his miserable life and that was the only comfort Cody could find except…Macy. She was there for him throughout it all. It had only been a few weeks before that when they had gone “all the way.” They’d made love under the stars in that spot, and later when he scattered his brother’s ashes there he had told her that he intended to kill whoever had done that to his brother. That was the night Macy begged him to let it go and let Dax or the police handle it. She told him that she’d love him forever, but she wouldn’t promise that she’d wait for him if he was in prison.
Cody didn’t let that register at the time. He was too deep in his own head and trying to manage his own emotions. His fate was sealed the day he walked in on Dax and one of his guys talking to two of O’Toole’s men that had been seen in town the same day that Keller was killed. They’d tracked them down to a motel just on the outskirts of town off the freeway. That was the first time Cody had ever heard O’Toole’s name, and it had been burned into his memory ever since. Dax was obviously planning something, and Cody probably should have left it alone. But he was too angry and impulsive back then.
Dax shut up when Cody came in the room, but Cody had been around bikers long enough to know that if you give one enough sex, drugs, or alcohol, they’ll tell you whatever you want to know. He gathered his own information once he had a name and found out the two guys had left town after Keller’s death and only returned to deal with “other” business. Since they were from Jersey, Cody figured this was his only chance and he took it.
He tracked them to the no-tell motel on the edge of town. Before he’d gone out there, he had honestly thought about talking to Macy or Jimmy about what he planned to do, but he couldn’t even put into words what he was feeling, much less a plan. It was like something was eating him from the inside out. Little bits of pain interspersed with deep, sharp stabs of it wracked his body each time he thought about what they did to his brother. He couldn’t sleep or eat, and he was afraid that he might never be able to again as long as the men that killed his brother were still alive and out on the streets living the good life. He was driven to see them hurt as badly as Keller had been. He had been in plenty of fights in his life. His old man had taught him that was how to handle your shit. But never once had he felt the blinding, all-consuming, murderous rage he’d felt that night. It consumed him.
He left the ranch without anyone knowing that night, boosted a car in town, and drove it to the motel. It was the first and only time that he’d ever driven a car and he probably broke every traffic law ever written. When he got to the motel he realized he had no idea which room they were staying in. He took the tire iron out of the trunk of the car and started knocking on doors. He was amazed to this day that no one called the cops before he even found the guys. He’d knock and when the door was pulled open, if it was a woman or a kid, he’d move on to the next one. He was about six doors in when a big, ugly guy with swollen knuckles answered the door. Cody had the crowbar behind his back and back in those days he presented a pretty, non-threatening picture. The fat guy looked at him and said:
“What the fuck you want?” in a thick New Jersey accent. Cody swung the bar and it struck the man so fast and hard in the face he didn’t have a chance to react. He was knocked backwards into the other guy, who had come to the door to see what was going on. It was convenient for Cody that the fat one was unconscious on top of the other one. He tossed the iron bar aside and went to work with his fists. He had no concept of time, and to this day he had no idea how long he spent in that room before he heard the sirens. He did know that he talked the whole time he beat them, asking them questions about his brother’s last moments that they didn’t answer. When he heard the cops coming, he didn’t have the mental capacity to even consider running. When they told him to come out with his hands in the air, he did. He saw a photograph of himself months later in the local paper while he was still in county lock-up. He was standing with the door of the motel open in the background. He had his hands up and they were covered with blood. His face was almost unrecognizable thanks to the blood and pieces of flesh that were open and oozing. His white t-shirt was bright red and so were his blue jeans. His eyes were big and round, and to the cops he probably looked like a maniac from one of those slasher movies. He was pushed down on his face after that and cuffed and as they pulled him up off the pavement he heard the sounds of Dax and some of the guys coming to stop him, but they were too late.
“Mr. Miller?” He looked up into the blue eyes of a nurse in the doorway.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Kearns is awake now. You can come back but only for ten minutes, okay?” Cody had been waiting for this moment for four hours, but now as he followed the nurse he wondered what in the hell he was going to say when he saw Jimmy, and Macy.
15
Cody could see into the room before they got there. It was a square, glass fishbowl kind of room. Macy was sitting in a chair at the side of the bed. She looked even more pale and drawn than she had four hours ago. Jimmy lay in the bed, hooked up to IVs and wires that made colorful waves on monitors above the bed. Cody could see that one of his legs was in a brace or maybe a cast, but he couldn’t see Jimmy’s face or the rest of his body. The nurse left him at the door and Macy looked up as he slid it open. He couldn’t read the look in her eyes, but in his guilty brain it was accusatory. He walked to the other side of the bed and looked down at Jimmy. He had one hell of a black eye and his lips looked swollen and bloody. There were bandages covering almost all of his right arm and that thing on his leg was a cast, not a brace. His eyes were closed and he looked like he was sleeping.
“How is he?”
“They said he’s stable. He just woke up again a few minutes ago and stared at me, but he didn’t say anything.”
“Is that bad, that he’s not staying awake?”
She shrugged. “The doctor said he was awake before and after surgery. He consented to it and he gave them Dax’s number to call, so he was alert and that’s good. He’s on a lot of pain medication, I guess, and the anesthesia is still wearing off, so that’s probably why he’s sleeping.”
“What kind of surgery?”
“He went into a tree. His leg and arm were trapped between the bike and the tree and the gas tank caught fire. His leg was crushed. His arm has first and second degree burns.”
“Shit. Where did the accident happen?”
She looked like she wanted to tell him to fuck off. She was tired, that much was obvious. She looked mentally exhausted. But each time he wanted to take her in his arms and tell her that everything was going to be okay he had to remind himself that Jimmy’s accident wasn’t his fault and that he was still pissed at Macy for never telling him that she was pregnant with his child. “On that first curve on the way into town. They said he took it too fast.”
“Where in the hell was he going?”
She sighed. “It was after our blow-up last night. He was probably headed to Spirits to get drunk. That’s usually where he goes after we get into a fight. Did Dax come back?”
“No. He had a business thing out of town. I doubt he’ll be back until tomorrow.”
“Jimmy was supposed to ride out with them this morning.”
“Yeah, me too.” Cody said. He thought about that first ride when he and Jimmy almost seemed to be trying to get past all the bullshit. And then at the barbecue things hadn’t been bad either. But the
breaking point for Jimmy had been finding out Cody and Macy had sex. Cody found that slightly ironic.
“Jimmy loves being part of this club, and he can’t wait until he’s full-fledged and not just a prospect.” She was looking at Jimmy’s face as she talked. Tears were forming at the corners of her eyes. “If Dax tells him to do something, he does it, no questions asked.” She looked at Jimmy again and her face grew even sadder as she said, “He’s loyal to a fault…”
“Macy…”
“Don’t, Cody. Just don’t, okay?”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t tell me that this isn’t my fault for not being loyal, because that’s not going to change the truth. Accident or not, he would have gone home and gone to bed with me if I hadn’t stayed behind.”
“I’m in no mood to make you feel better about yourself,” he said, coldly. “But as far as the accident is concerned, it’s just a fact that it wasn’t your fault. I’m beginning to think we all need to learn how to handle our personal responsibility and stop blaming each other for our problems.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” she said. “I stayed to clean, but also because you were on my mind and I was hoping to work it off before going home and going to bed with Jimmy. If I’d just gone with him in the first place, he wouldn’t have walked in on our conversation and he wouldn’t have told…” She stopped and rubbed her temples.