by Lena Bourne
“We have to go to the house first, so I can change,” I say. “Then to the lawyer’s office.”
“Yes,” she says as she hardly rolls to a stop at the STOP sign at the end of Axle’s street.
“I have some good news, Mom,” I say. “Well, I hope it’s good news, anyway.”
I love him for making the offer to rent my mom a new place for cheap, but I’m not sure she’s going to accept it. Not with the way she’s been so fatalistic about the whole thing lately.
She looks at me and my wide smile skeptically, and for too long, almost missing a red light. I’m propelled forward as she slams on the brakes just in time.
“Careful,” I say.
She curses quietly and apologizes. “My head’s not right today. I’ll be glad when this ordeal is finally over.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I say.
She shakes her head without looking at me again. “I don’t want to have this conversation again. I’ve made my decision.”
“Axle says he’ll rent you the place on Magnolia Drive, the boarded up place next to the juice shop,” I blurt out. “He’s willing to make it affordable.”
She gasps, but doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at me. So it’s a hard no. Oh, well. It is her decision to make.
She starts slowing down, eventually coming to a complete stop at the side of the road. Her hands are shaking when I look at her. She’s still not meeting my eyes.
“What’s going on, Mom?” I ask, kinda panicky.
She finally does look at me, her eyes brimming with tears. “This is the best news I’ve had all year,” she manages to say before her voice cracks and tears spill down her cheeks.
“You can think about it,” I offer. “I know you’ve decided to retire, but I also know you don’t really want to.
She wipes her cheeks furiously with the back of her hand. “Why the hell am I crying?”
She asked that of herself, not me, so I don’t answer.
“You don’t have to decide right away,” I say. “Maybe we can go see the place, talk about it—“
“Yes!” she says and smiles wide, looking twenty years younger. “Yes!”
I smile too. “I’m so happy to hear it. But we still have to see the lawyer today. So let’s go.”
She drives off, checking first for traffic this time. “Didn’t I always tell you Axle was a good man? The kind you don’t just leave behind?”
She did, but only in the beginning. Then she accepted my reasons for having to leave him. All those have turned out to be bad thinking now.
“I’ve recently come to the same conclusion myself,” I say and smile, causing her to look at me sharply.
“Watch the road, Mom,” I say and chuckle.
“You’re giving it another chance?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, we are.”
“Good,” she says, keeping her eyes on the road this time. “I can still count on a couple of grandkids then.”
I laugh. “Let’s not get our hopes up too high, Mom. And I don’t know about a couple.”
But it doesn’t sound like a bad idea. It sounds like a plan actually, like something to look forward too.
The first thing I did when I reached my bedroom at Mom’s house was sit down on my untouched bed and texted Axel to tell him she said yes to his offer. Then we got to texting about how grateful I am to him, how grateful both me and my mom are. He suggested we meet for dinner at his house instead of me coming by the garage, and we decided six o’clock would be perfect.
By the time I finally started getting ready, I only had about fifteen minutes left to dress and do something with my hair. The tight pencil skirt and matching jacket are confining, especially after the freedom of jeans and a t-shirt and the wind in my hair of last night’s ride. The black, Italian leather stilettos are too, even though the shoes are the only thing I really love about my courtroom attire.
Despite being wet, my hair just wouldn’t stay put in the neat bun at the nape of my neck that I tried to force it into. So I opted for a ponytail instead. Not the pin-up girl type I wore on our first date, though, but the more sensible back of the neck type.
I’m breathless and a little annoyed at being forced to get all decked out like this for what will be a very short meeting anyway, when I hear thudding footsteps on the stairs.
“I’m almost ready, Mom,” I yell from the bathroom. “I arranged for us to have dinner at —“
The half-open bathroom door slams open, and a pair of the darkest, deadest eyes are staring at me through the mirror. He’s a tall and wide man, hair mostly grey, wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket and matching pants. Of his face, only his eyes are visible. The rest is covered by a black bandana.
“Who are you?” I snap, turning to him and holding the mascara brush as though I mean to use it as a weapon. “What do you want?”
“You,” he says and chuckles.
He’s joined by two more men, dressed the same as him.
I look at the window, but there’s no way I can reach it before he grabs me. And little hope of squeezing myself through it if I do.
“Get her,” one of the men on the landing says and the grey-haired one advances. I back up, my hip hitting the sink. I scream for him to get away, scream as loud as I can.
He reaches me, grabs me by the arm and covers my mouth and nose with a gloved hand. It stinks of old leather, dirt and sweat.
He twists my neck, exposing it, and before I can wonder why, before I can even be afraid that I’m about to breathe my last, another guy plunges a needle into my neck.
I start to go limp almost immediately, my body turning to jelly, but my mind not following suit.
They grab one of my arms each and maneuver me out of the bedroom, then half carry, half drag me down the stairs. I hear the thuds my feet make against the wood, but don’t feel the pain. And my mind’s starting to go to.
“Mom!” I slur, willing my arms to move, my legs to kick, but I have no control over them anymore.
“What should we do about the old one?” one man asks.
“Leave her,” the one holding my right arm answers. “She won’t wake up. I got her good.”
“No!” I meant it as a scream, but it came out as a slurred whisper.
My heart’s thumping, trying to pump enough adrenaline for me to break free. But all it’s doing is making the drug they injected me with circulate faster. By the time they drag me through the front door, the world looks like I’m watching it from underwater, and that, “No!” is echoing in my mind, the only word I can still form.
23
Axle
I spent the day re-cataloguing my collection of cars in the warehouse, only mildly annoyed by the banging out back while the rest of the guys dismantled the cars Hawk brought in the other day. I was hoping to get a clearer picture of which cars I want to keep and which can go, but as usually happens when I try to do this exercise, I just decided I want to keep them all.
But it was a pleasant exercise nonetheless, especially with Mia’s visit to look forward to. Dinner at six, and then her mom will be out of the house by eight, nine tops. We’ll have the whole night to ourselves. Again. And again. And many more after that. I’d begun to fear I’ve lost all drive where women are concerned, but Mia has shown me otherwise. Shown me how very, very wrong I was. If she was here right now, sharing this incredibly spacious and surprisingly comfortable back seat of the Model T with me, I’d do her in a split second. And with exactly the same amount of drive as back when I was twenty.
Just like me, she never needed a road name of her own either. She got one at birth too. Mia. Mine. Finally.
“Hey, Ax,” Diesel yells out from the open double doors of the warehouse. “Hawk’s here. He wants a word.”
I climb out of the Model T’s cab, willing away the hardon thinking about Mia’s visit caused.
“What is it?” I ask as I approach the door.
“You’ll see,” he says.
&nbs
p; And as soon as I walk out of the warehouse, I do. Hawk is standing by his bike in the middle of the lot, surrounded by five black limousines and two SUVs. The sight alone is enough to drive all thoughts of Mia’s porcelain, willing body from my thoughts. I don’t like dismantling cars. I much prefer putting them back together.
“I need these gone before tomorrow morning,” he says as I approach. “Sooner if you can.”
I groan. “I’m not a fucking car-vanishing magician over here.”
He doesn’t even crack a grin at my joke. Which is the correct reaction, since I wasn’t trying to be funny.
“Today you’ll have to be,” he says.
I shrug then nod and tell him I’ll do it. He anticipated the need for more hands on deck for this one. Ten or so MC brothers are milling around the cars, and I don’t recognize half of them, which is just one more sign that it’s time for me to move on.
There’s no point telling Hawk I have plans. It’s immaterial. I may not take a very active life in my MC, but I’m always here when they need me. No dinner tonight, but maybe, just maybe, I can still get some of the dessert.
I text Mia to that effect while the gate is creaking and clanking shut after Hawk leaves the lot, since we’ll be closed for regular business for the rest of the day. She doesn’t reply right away.
Or six hours later, when it’s almost time for our dinner.
I don’t want to read anything into that, and I’m trying real hard not to. So hard I take a ride to my house at five to six to make sure she didn’t just somehow miss my text canceling dinner. I even wait in the driveway until half past. But she’s not there. She sent no text. She just didn’t show up.
I figured I’d be more upset to find out all her promises were most likely just empty words, just something to placate me while she made her second escape. But as it is, I’m just numb. And sick of it all.
24
Axle
It was past four AM when we finally finished getting rid of the cars and I didn’t even bother going home to sleep. I just lay down on the lumpy, stinking and dusty sofa that’s been in one of the back rooms of the garage since my father’s time and tried to will myself to sleep. I hadn’t checked my phone for messages from Mia since midnight, and I refused to after I lay down to sleep. Or tried to sleep, more like. Though sheer tiredness won out in the end.
Not that it was a restful sleep, not by a long shot, nightmares and creepy dreams kept waking me. All the old favorites. From finding my father cold and dead on the pavement in front of the garage, to everything I own burning down.
The incessant buzzing that finally rouses me at just before eleven AM does not help at all. I lay there, listening to it for a while, waiting for whoever it is to go away or for someone else to see who it is, before realizing that I gave everyone the day off and that the buzzing won’t stop.
And that it could be Mia.
That thought propels me off the couch, my lower back cramping up in protest.
But by the time I limp and curse my way to the buzzer in the office I’m convinced it is her, and that everything will be all right now.
But one glance at the door camera is enough to tell me it will most likely be the exact opposite of that. Two uniformed officers are flanking two plain-clothes detectives out on the sidewalk in front of the gate to my garage, which they’ve blocked off with their vehicles.
“Yes?” I ask as I press the intercom button, after a long few moments of deliberating whether I should at all and in the end deciding I better, since they’ll just keep hounding me until they find me. That’s how cops work.
“We need to speak to Axle Wright,” the shorter and balder of the two detectives says. “Is he here?”
“Come on in,” I say and press the buzzer to open the door.
I run my fingers through my hair a couple of times, smooth down my t-shirt and tighten the belt of my jeans. Unfastening it was the only thing I did to make myself more comfortable before lying down last night, since I didn’t expect to sleep at all.
“What’s this about?” I ask the approaching procession of cops as I step out into the lot.
“Are you Mr. Wright?” the short detective asks.
I nod. I’ve never seen him before, but I recognize the other one vaguely, as well as the two uniforms. Not that I’ve had many run-ins with the law so far.
The detective introduces himself and his companion, neither bothering to offer a handshake.
“Could you tell us where you were from eleven AM onwards yesterday?” the detective asks.
I shrug and gesture with my hands to encompass the entire garage. “Here.”
“All day?”
“I arrived at eleven and didn’t leave again,” I assert.
He looks at me pointedly, as though trying to read off my face that I’m lying.
“What’s this about?” I ask again, more curtly this time.
“Mia Edwards was abducted yesterday and her mother was gravely injured,” the detective says, the words hitting my stomach worse than any fist. “We’ve been told you were one of the last people they were in contact with.”
The breath I’m trying to take isn’t reaching my lungs and all I want to do is run out of here and go find her, but I can’t do that and so I don’t fucking know what to do.
“Is that information correct?” the detective asks.
I shouldn’t speak to them or give them any information at all. That’s how it’s done. That’s how you keep cops off your back. That’s how you make their job harder and give yourself time to cover your tracks better. I know this. Have always known it. Have used it to my advantage for my whole life.
But this is about Mia, not some stolen car.
And I will do everything to get her back. Everything and anything!
“She left my house at around ten yesterday morning,” I say. “Her mom picked her up.”
He looks at me skeptically. “How come? Doesn’t she have her own car?”
I point at the SUV still standing in the middle of the lot. “She brought her car in for me to fix. She was supposed to pick it up last night.”
I pull my phone from my pocket. “We texted at around eleven. Made dinner plans. Look.”
I open the conversation and stick the phone in his face.
“Tell me what happened,” I say. “Where is she? Who took her?”
The two detectives lean in as they examine the texts I’m showing them.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out, Mr. Wright,” the short one finally says. “The neighbor, who was on the phone with the mother when it happened says that a group of five bikers broke in to their house, assaulted the mother and dragged the daughter out through the front door at just past eleven. She called 911 right away, but by the time they arrived the perpetrators were long gone.”
Bikers?
A bike rumbled by in the street outside while he was talking, the echoes still settling down.
Who the fuck did this?
“Do you know anything about this?” the other detective, the vaguely familiar one asks. “Did your friends do this?”
He means the Devils. While I don’t flaunt my membership in the MC, it’s no secret that I am one of them.
“Absolutely not,” I say.
“Maybe she wouldn’t be with you, so you decided to get your friends and force her,” the man insists. I don’t like the gleam in his eyes or the smirk on his face. I want to wipe it off with my fist. But the last thing I need right now is to get booked for assault on a police officer. What I need is for them to leave so I can go look for Mia myself.
“I didn’t see her for almost twenty years before she came back to town a couple of days ago,” I say, as calmly as I can. “But before that, we were together for seven years. Check me out as much as you want, but don’t focus on me. I had nothing to do with this. She’s the last person in the world I would ever harm in any way.”
The annoying detective opens his mouth to speak, but the shorter one beats him t
o it. “All right, Mr. Wright. Thank you for your time.”
“Find her,” I say as they turn to walk away.
“We’ll do everything we can,” he assures me.
As soon as the metal door by the gate shuts behind them, I dial Hawk’s number. He’s the one that knows shit. The one who finds people for our MC. He better be able to find her. I’m afraid he’s the only one who can.
“I’ll be right there,” he says as he picks up and promptly disconnects again.
A few minutes later, the rumbling of a bike cuts off at the gate and Hawk strides in through the door, slamming it after him.
“Talk inside,” he says as he approaches and I enter the office, leaving the door open for him.
He slams this door too.
“What was that all about?” he asks. “What did they want?”
“It wasn’t about the cars,” I tell him. “My girlfriend Mia’s been abducted. By bikers.”
“The woman who was here the other day?” he asks and I nod.
“I need you to help me find her.”
He looks at me for a couple of seconds, something I can’t read flitting across his face.
“Can you do it?” I ask impatiently.
“I think I know where I’ve seen her before,” he says slowly, his eyes fixed on me and kinda soft like he’s getting ready to give me some very bad news and doesn’t know how.
“Where?” I snap.
“I’ll have to check to be sure,” he says and takes another infuriatingly long pause. “But I think we were contacted to take her out a couple months ago.”
Devil’s Nightmare MC is a mercenary club. That’s all we do. We get hired to take people or sometimes whole clubs out. It’s how it’s always been. I’ve never been a part of that side of club life and neither has my father. We just fixed their bikes and cars, or get rid of both when they needed us to.
“And you accepted?” I ask, the room literally spinning around me.
He shakes his head and grimaces. “Of course not. That’s not the kind of jobs we take, never have. She’s some kind of lawyer or something? A prosecutor?”