Hard Reality

by Debra Kayn

  "Same guy I spotted snooping around here, and you've seen drive by the house a dozen times." He stopped at the door. "His name's Cross."

  "Anyone else on the camera?" Wayne took the keys offered to him.

  "Nope." Rich removed the pistol from his lower back and handed the weapon over, too. "Take this."

  "What are you doing?" Wayne held out the gun. "You'll need this."

  "I don't want it. If he's in there, I'll use my hands." He motioned toward the door. "Open it."

  Wayne looked at the others and then silently slipped the key into the lock.

  Thad took the side, and Rich stepped over the threshold the moment the door swung open. He scanned the living room and walked forward, his arms loose and ready.

  "I'll take the kitchen." Thad moved ahead of him.

  Wayne followed. "Garage."

  That left the upstairs for him. He walked up the stairs, his gaze on the hallway, taking in the closed bedroom doors and the open bathroom at the end. Everything looked the same as when they'd left earlier.

  It took him two minutes to sweep every room and go back downstairs. Wayne and Thad shook their head, finding no one in the house. He watched them put their pistols away. If he was out on his own, he could wait for Cross to make his move. Hell, waiting meant he lived another day. But, with Notus involved, he wanted to find Cross and take care of business. He only had to figure out a way to search on his own. And, figure out what to do with Cross once he had him.

  The others all had a woman at home. They should be with the one they love, safe, knowing tomorrow would come.

  "It's Saturday." Thad shrugged. "Let's do a search."

  "Rich doesn't know the procedure." Wayne cocked his eyebrow. "I'll call Chuck and Glen."

  Rich walked over to the window. The digs that he wasn't a part of Notus rolled off him.

  His gaze landed on his motorcycle. He'd stuffed two bottles of whiskey out of the hallway of Vavoom's in his duffle bag earlier when he'd gone to the bathroom and Gracie went into the kitchen at the bar. His plan to come back to her house, go to the guest room, and drink until he no longer hurt and his regrets disappeared was canceled at the sight of Gracie scared to death.

  Cross would need to be taken care of first, and then he'd have time to make himself forget.

  A half-hour later, every member of Notus rode away from the house on a search to find Cross after pointing Rich in the right direction on where to look and giving him a meeting place for when his laps around the blocks ended.

  It was hard to understand how the others could search for missing persons, one after another, and not get depressed about the failures. He couldn't imagine going through losing Thalia again or not finding a child. The ghosts would haunt him.

  He'd loved Thalia as much as a twenty-year-old kid could love someone. She'd been pure, innocent, and his world. Life back then, before her murder, was perfect. He had his friends at his side, Mr. and Mrs. B. in his life, guiding and loving him, and a few times a week, he might've caught his mom sober, and she'd ask how he was doing. Every dream he had back then was at his fingertips.

  The night Thalia disappeared, everything had been ripped from him.

  Something had snapped inside of him.

  He'd done the unthinkable.

  At the time, he couldn't control himself, but he could stop the upcoming disaster that would fall on Notus and the ones he loved if he'd stayed in St. John's. He'd left. There was never any hesitation. It was the only answer.

  He scanned each house on his assigned route looking for the obvious. A motorcycle, an abandoned house Cross could crash in, and Cross himself. He looked back at the house at the beginning of the street. Tim Tanini used to live there when he was a kid, and he wondered whatever happened to him. Tanini had planned to hit the Nascar track and then spend his time with his head under the hood.

  Stopping at the stop sign, he spotted an empty house with a For Sale sign in the front yard. Going on gut instinct, he skipped checking it out further. There was only a carport and nowhere to park a motorcycle out of view of the street.

  Turning right, he continued on. It was ridiculous to search each house. Cross could be anywhere, even staying at one of the motels in the business district or downtown Portland. It'd be better if he fucking stood on a street corner and put a target on his back. Cross would come gunning, and he wouldn't have to wear down the rubber on his tires.

  Fifteen minutes later, he stopped beside the St. John's Fire Department. Wayne arrived first and shook his head as he shut off the engine to his Harley. Being alone with his oldest friend, the bottles of whiskey in his bag behind him called his name. It would be more enjoyable to drink himself numb than look in Wayne's face.

  Wayne leaned his forearms on the handlebar without getting off the bike. "We paid for your mom's burial out of the club fund." Wayne lowered his gaze and rubbed the dust off the chrome bar. "She's laid to rest over at Willamette Cemetery. We were all there, and as soon as...if you want to visit her gravesite, we'll show you where she rests. Far as your mom's house, the bank took it back. We couldn't find you to straighten out her shit, so we didn't step forward and purchase the house when it went to auction."

  He looked down the road. His mom's house was never a home. He'd spent more time growing up at Thad's house or Wayne's house or bullshitting with Chuck's dad who seemed more like a grandpa than a parent. Even Glen's parents welcomed him into the house anytime he needed to get away from the chaos when his mom was on a bender.

  Rich gazed around, Cross in the back of his mind, and said, "What do you want from me?"

  Wayne heaved a sigh of frustration. Rich glanced at him. Every Notus member wanted to dance around the reason for why he was here and pretend that it was some kind of fucking reunion.

  "I left Notus twenty-five years ago. I joined Komoon Motorcycle Club after I left." Rich gritted his teeth, trying to keep neutral. "You've seen my leg. You know where I stand now."

  Wayne glared. "That fucking black square is a fresh tattoo and not done by you. Don't give me some bullshit reason to explain where you stand. You're Notus."

  "I rode with Komoon."

  "Fuck Komoon." Wayne clenched his hand into a fist and pounded his chest. "I know what's in here. You never betrayed us."

  Rich's lip curled. He wanted to argue the point. They were never supposed to search for him for twenty-five years. He wanted them to move on with their lives—from what he'd learned, they had.

  Except, for one part. They'd never forgotten him.

  Thad, Chuck, and Glen rode in from different directions. Glen lowered his hand off the handlebar and raised his palm up. Rich started his Harley, recognizing the universal signal to hurry. Following the others, he turned in the middle of the road and fell into line in front of Chuck who rode at the end.

  Glancing in the side mirror, he caught Chuck's hardened face as he rode. He had a shit ton of feelings he couldn't control that had put distance between everyone in his life.

  His life after losing Thalia had taken him down a dark path, and he couldn't turn back. He could only move forward. Alone.

  Glen motioned ahead. Rich accelerated and passed everyone but Wayne. Pulling abreast of the president, he spotted the motorcycle two houses down from the end of the block. He shouted, "Pull over."

  He downshifted, veered to the curb, and cut his engine. When the noise from the motorcycles quieted, he shifted on the seat. "If I go in now, I'll lose him. It's broad daylight. He's surrounded by other houses. I don't want him spotting us, so we need to turn around. I'll come back under darkness."

  "We're coming, too." Thad rolled his bike backward. "Let's go to Wayne's house before we're seen."

  He wasn't going to argue against Notus coming with him tonight. Somehow, he'd finish the job that needed done, for them, and he'd stay long enough to make sure Komoon wouldn't send anyone else to St. John's, while keeping Gracie safe. Then, he'd ride out of St. John's and disappear without Notus knowing what kind of man he'd becom
e.

  Chapter 18

  The Notus men drank a beer together in the garage after returning from searching Gracie's house. She folded her arms in front of her and stood on the outside of the circle behind Clara, who leaned against Wayne. She couldn't believe how they were acting.

  They let Rich walk out of the house alone.

  They drank beer around Rich when they knew he was recently sober.

  Why couldn't they involve Rich in the club business and treat him the way they obviously cared about him?

  "This is ridiculous," she muttered, gaining her sister's attention.

  Clara looked over her shoulder and mouthed, "What?"

  She pressed her lips together and shook her head, giving a wild eye roll for Clara to look around. Getting a confused shrug in return from her sister, Gracie whispered, "I'm going outside."

  "I'll go with—"

  "No." She squeezed Clara's arm. "Stay here. I'll be fine."

  She walked back into the house and peeked out the front window. The thought of going outside when someone was breaking into houses, snooping around properties, made her nervous. Nobody had said anything on the return back to Wayne's house, but she had a feeling what they'd found out wasn't something a neighborhood watch program would be interested in.

  Someone was after Rich. They knew he lived at her townhouse. There were two incidents with someone snooping around.

  She wanted to know who it was, what they wanted, and how they planned to make it stop?

  At first, she failed to spot Rich outside, expecting him to be sitting on his motorcycle. Then, she found him at the end of the porch, staring out into the street.

  Not wanting to interrupt, but wanting to check on him, she quietly slipped out the door and stood against the railing. She kept her distance, giving him room to walk past her if he objected to her joining him outside.

  Comfortable in the silence that always permeated the air when they were together, she followed his gaze and found him looking at the house to the left of Wayne's home. She'd heard the story many times about how Wayne, Thad, Glen, Chuck, and Rich had all grown up on the same street, and she understood he was looking at the home he'd been raised in.

  At the same time, she understood that twenty-five years changed him in a way that it hadn't affected the men inside the house. Rich had cut ties. He had different experiences. He'd created a life—whether voluntarily or involuntarily—away from Notus. But no matter the degrees of separation, he'd built a foundation that involved the others, and that inner strength and security couldn't be forgotten.

  He couldn't outrun his history.

  She'd learned the history of her past when her mom's serial killer brought her to a crime scene and forced her to experience what her mother had lived through. If she hadn't been abducted, she would've remembered a loving mother. The absent mother of the story from her father would've continued to breathe. Instead, she was violently pushed past her breaking point, taken from her twin, and forced to accept the ugliness and cruelty her father had tried to protect her from.

  Rich wasn't alone. Their facts, their history, their experiences were different. But, she understood the emotions that had the power to cripple everything she thought she knew as truth.

  "I returned to St. John's, too." She wondered if he could even hear her. The echo of her words in her head muffled her hearing. "It was after my dad died four years ago and left my sister and I some money, which set off a...rabbit hole of information that'd been kept from us our whole life. My dad had raised us believing our mother had left us when we were five years old, and when we were going through his records after his death, we found out the truth about our mom. She hadn't run away. She'd been murdered in St. John's. Our father had thought he was protecting us by moving us away and keeping the truth from us. He thought it was better if we believed she'd left us, and maybe for him, he was right. Clara and I were so young. We missed our mom, but believing she didn't want us made the hurt feelings turn to indifference as we got older."

  Her fingers ached, squeezing the porch railing. She couldn't let go if she tried.

  "When we found out about the crime done to our mom and her killer hadn't been caught, we moved back to St. John's with the idea of meeting Notus Motorcycle Club. We knew they searched for missing persons and we had the idea to pay them to find our mom's killer. That all happened four years ago, but it seems like a lifetime ago." She glanced at Rich. "We wanted to make him pay for raping and killing our mother, and what better way than to ask a biker gang to do the job. We were naive and stupid."

  He hadn't moved. He still stared over at the neighbor's house. She absorbed the shudder that rolled through her. He couldn't see her, but the tension and stillness in his body told her he was listening.

  "But, Clara fell in love with Wayne. I let her take the lead in how we progressed getting to know Notus and gain their help. I don't fault her for taking her time and second-guessing our plan. I don't." She closed her dry eyes.

  "What happened?" whispered Rich.

  She opened her eyes and looked down at her hands on the railing. "Our mother's killer found us before we found him. He broke into our house—Clara still lived with me at the time. Then, one time when Clara was driving us to Vavoom's Bar, she drove through a green light, and a car T-boned us in the middle of the intersection. I was abducted out of the passenger seat in front of all the witnesses and taken to the man's home where he tied me to the same bed he'd raped and killed my mother twenty-two years earlier."

  She couldn't stop the emotional dam from opening. The words pushed to come out as if she deflected what happened to her onto Rich, she'd somehow understand him better.

  "I-I heard every detail of what he did to my Mom." She panted, knowing she had to go on and tell him what she knew. "There were other women he'd killed. H-he had a ritual. A certain type of female he killed." She repeatedly swallowed, keeping the bile from escaping her throat. "He was a serial killer, and he was doing things to me that he was saying he did to the others. And, the whole time I couldn't move. There was a smell...a smell of his excitement and what he was doing to me." She gagged and swallowed the bitter taste down. "All I wanted was my sister."

  "Gracie...?"

  She shook her head, putting her hand up. If she stopped now, she'd never finish.

  "Notus Motorcycle Club found me. They saved me before he could finish what he'd planned. I've never told anyone all the details, not even my twin sister, what happened before Notus barged into the room where the killer planned to rape, torture, and kill me. I didn't tell the police every detail of what happened afterward because I would do anything to protect the men who saved my life, but I'm going to take a chance and tell you because the men inside the house right now trust you."

  He shook his head. She ignored his need to stay oblivious to what was happening and what had happened in St. John's since he'd left. He needed to hear what she had to say.

  "Wayne ordered the others to take the killer outside while he stayed with me and untied my arms and legs. He tried to buffer what was happening outside, but I was aware of the conversation, the meaning behind the actions, the loyalty that bonded every Notus member to each other." She turned toward him but kept her distance.

  Rich's gaze snapped up, and the intensity of his stare strengthened her. She lifted her chin and braced herself. He was listening, and she needed him to hear everything.

  "The man who'd raped my mother and killed her was the same man who abducted, tortured, and planned to kill me." Her eyes burned and dared not blink because her information was too important. "There were other women over the twenty-two years that the man killed. H-he had this ritual where he always carved the same name on the female's chest with the knife he used on me that day he stole my life."

  Rich turned away from her. She held her ground, knowing he would want to escape the truth.

  "The day Notus saved me, Thad killed Roy Jenson, the serial killer, in the front yard, away from me, to protect me. But, I unders
tood why he was the one chosen to put a bullet in the killer's head." Gracie's head pounded, she could no longer hear what she was saying. "Roy Jenson was the one who also kidnapped, raped, and murdered his sister...Thalia Bowers. She was killed because Jenson had an obsession with my mother, Barbara Nelson."

  Rich's hand came up to his face. Gracie stared at his broad back. She hadn't planned to share that part of her life with him, but his alienation from the club wasn't right, and she wasn't sure if Wayne, Chuck, Thad, and Glen would ever tell him the information he needed to heal from the past.

  They were all strong and stubborn men, loyal to a fault, and she believed if Rich understood the history of what happened, he'd open himself up to talking honestly with the Notus members. That he'd be able to heal from the answers only she could provide.

  Rich lowered his arm and turned around. She couldn't read the blank expression on his face or the fire in his eyes. He walked past her and stepped off the porch, heading toward his motorcycle. Worried he planned to leave and it would be her fault for telling him the truth, she hurried after him, and when he sat on his bike, she stepped up on the peg and slid down behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist.

  The engine rumbled underneath her, and the roar filled her ears. She closed her eyes, prepared to go wherever he rode, not knowing the reason why she couldn't let him leave alone.

  Chapter 19

  After crossing the St. John's bridge on the back of Rich's motorcycle, Gracie lost track of time and location. He'd gone onto the backroads, climbing higher in the coastal mountains. At first, she worried he'd gone off not knowing where he was going. But, then it hit her.

  Rich stayed off the main roads because they'd both taken off without wearing their helmets—which was illegal in Oregon.

  Through the shock of information she'd handed him, he continued to keep his head. He safely rode the bike and stayed aware of her on the seat. She only wished she understood the emotions he struggled with and how she could comfort him.