by Jessie Cooke
“Did you tell her I was only extending an invitation and it wasn’t a fucking order?”
“Sure, boss. But she was getting all dolled up to go somewhere and she wasn’t really interested in talking...”
“What do you mean, all dolled up?” Blackheart and Sally had an agreement since they were in their early twenties and something had happened that made them both realize they were better friends than they were a couple. Since then, Blackheart had taken care of his needs whenever he wanted, with whomever he wanted, and Sally hadn’t objected...but, in all of that time, Sally had only dated a few men and none of them ever seemed to stick. He knew it wasn’t fair and it further proved that he was an asshole, but he preferred to believe she’d not slept with any of them. Blackheart had been the one she turned to after each of those “relationships” hadn’t worked out, and when he showed up on her doorstep...not counting this past week...she rarely sent him away unsatisfied.
“She looks awful pretty, boss. She’s wearing this blue dress that’s cut down to...”
“Stop,” Blackheart said, frowning. He didn’t need to imagine how good she was trying to look for another man. “Where was she going, and with who?”
Le Singe grimaced before saying, “She said if you wanted to know that, you could ask her yourself the next time you saw her...or better yet, you could mind your own business.” Blackheart sat up straight and Le Singe flinched slightly. The two men hardly ever had words and Blackheart had never even tried to hurt his VP, but for just a second, Le Singe looked scared. It was gone just as quickly and with a crooked smile he said, “Her words, boss. I waited down the street for a while. Some guy in a blue sports car picked her up.”
Blackheart narrowed his eyes. “Some guy? That’s all you got?”
Le Singe smiled. “Of course not, boss. I’ve got the plate number.”
Blackheart couldn’t help but smile. Why he ever doubted his VP was beyond him. Le Singe hadn’t ever let him down. He set a piece of paper down on Blackheart’s desk with a plate number and “Louisiana.” Blackheart looked at the paper. He had a friend at the motor vehicle department who would look up the plate number and get him a name and address. What he’d do with that once he had it, he wasn’t sure...but right or wrong, he needed to know who Sally was spending time with. “What does he look like?”
Le Singe cocked an eyebrow and again looked like he didn’t want to say. But at last he said, “Blondish hair, styled...you know, like those big city pussies wear it. Had on a jacket and some fancy pants and shoes.” That description sounded as far from Blackheart as a person could get, one who didn’t have a vagina anyway. What the fuck was Sally trying to prove?
“Alright.” He needed to change the subject because he could feel his chest filling with rage that he knew he had no right to. “Gabriel getting out today?” The kid had been patched up. His grandfather had beaten the cops to him and Gabriel told the cops the same story the rest of them had. The cops still had a lot of questions once they were able to look at the scene in the daylight. Petit told Blackheart they’d counted at least twenty-five shots from five or six different weapons. That was about right...but Blackheart had simply shrugged and Petit had left with a heavy sigh and roll of his eyes. Blackheart knew if it weren’t for his new overzealous partner that Petit would probably brush it all under a rug somewhere. He’d come on strong years before when he first made detective, but years of never being able to pin anything on the Jokers that stuck had worn him down...and he’d also discovered there were more benefits to being their friend than their enemy. The cops had collected several guns the day they’d come to the club with a warrant. Those guns were all legally registered, and none of them matched the one that had shot Gabriel. All they had was a club that had gotten ambushed and a kid who had taken a bullet, and Blackheart knew it had to really piss them off.
“Supposed to,” Le Singe said. “I got Booger on him. Told him to call when they got the okay for him to leave.”
“Okay. I need you to meet Le Plant over at the Ocean Grille at noon, he’s got some paperwork for us.” Le Plant worked in the county coroner’s office, and he was also on Blackheart’s payroll. He was supposed to have a copy of Christoff’s autopsy report, and Blackheart was hoping it would also tell him where they found Christoff’s body. He hadn’t been able to find out anything about who was feeding information to the cops, or who was shooting at them, and every day that went by, he got more pissed off. Throw the shit with Sally on top of it and Blackheart was quickly becoming a walking time bomb. He usually prided himself on his self-control, but he felt himself losing his grip on it...and fast.
Sally hadn’t been on a “real” date in years. She’d almost told Lucien she’d meet him at the bar they were going to have drinks at before their dinner date, but had talked herself out of it. For one, she had a Jeep that hadn’t run in over a year. It wasn’t like she couldn’t take it out to the clubhouse and have one of the guys fix it, but she just enjoyed her bike so much more she hadn’t worried about it. The idea of dressing up for a night out and arriving with helmet hair hadn’t appealed to her, so she’d made sure the tiny pepper spray canister on her key chain was full and now here she was, sitting in a little sports car, next to a handsome man that smelled good enough to eat and hoping she wouldn’t have to use it.
Sally already felt like she knew Lucien, which was the other reason she hadn’t been too nervous about riding with him on their date. They’d spent the previous week talking, either in person at the coffee shop she often stopped at on her route, or on the phone. She’d found out that he’d grown up in New Orleans, but when he was a teenager, his family had moved to Mississippi. Once he graduated high school, he joined the Marines and spent four years mostly overseas. When his tour was up, he’d come back home and settled in New Orleans. He told her that he worked with hospitals and big businesses in the area as an environmental consultant. In other words, he helped them figure out ways to do their business while making the least amount of environmental impact possible. He knew a lot about the flora and fauna of the swamps, and it was refreshing to Sally to talk to someone about something other than fishing, nursing, or illegal activities, which had practically become her norm over the years. It was also refreshing to be treated like a lady, something she hadn’t even realized she’d missed, since she’d never really had it. Lucien had told her how beautiful she looked when he picked her up, and although Sally never really saw herself as anything but average, the sincerity in his voice and his eyes when he looked at her almost made her believe it. He also opened and closed the car door for her and gently held onto her elbow as they walked into the crowded bar, filled with hipsters and tourists. They sat at a high-top table and he waited for her to choose her drink before ordering hers, asking if she’d like an appetizer to go along with it. Most of the men she’d been out with in the past had simply ordered them both beer and sometimes shared the bowl of peanuts on the counter with her.
Once they had their drinks Lucien said, “So Sally, you haven’t ever told me what made you want to be a nurse.” Sally shuddered, involuntarily, and her observant date noticed.
“I’m sorry, is that a subject you’d rather not talk about?”
She smiled at him. She’d found that he was so easy to talk to, mostly because he was so sensitive to the change in her tone or mannerisms. She didn’t have to tell him what she did or didn’t want to discuss, he just seemed to get it, and more often than not, he’d simply change the subject before she had to admit that the topic was something she wasn’t comfortable with...like the time he asked her why she’d never married, or chosen to have children. “Don’t be sorry,” she said, picking up the drink the waitress had set in front of her and taking a sip. “It’s a logical question. The story behind it is a little gruesome, though. I’m not sure you want me to darken our date with it.”
Lucien looked at her with sincerity in his beautiful eyes and said, “I can’t imagine anything you said darkening this date. I’m so h
appy you agreed to go out with me. I’m the envy of every man in the room.”
Sally laughed at that. Okay, so maybe he did lay it on a little thick sometimes...but maybe she also needed that. “Well, thank you. But it really is a dark story. I’ll share it with you though and let you decide if you’re sorry you asked or not. When I was a kid, my friend and I found a woman’s body in the swamp.”
Lucien frowned. “A body? Dead?”
Sally nodded and tried not to picture it, but to no avail. She saw that woman a lot, in her nightmares. She wasn’t sure sometimes if she’d never forgotten what she looked like, lying on her side, one eye open and staring up at her and Evan from the mud...or if her imagination had played the memory over so many times in her head that the vision had been made more gruesome over time. “Yes, she was dead. My friend’s father came right away and he told us to go home, but we didn’t. We hid in the trees and watched when the police came. We saw them pull her out of the mud. She was naked, and I didn’t know a lot about sex back then, but even so, from the way they were examining her, I knew she’d been violated somehow.”
“You poor thing, that had to be awful for a child. How old were you?”
“I was eleven.”
They were both silent for a few seconds and then he asked, “So what about that made you want to be a nurse?”
She chuckled softly and said, “It’s silly, really. After that day, I started having nightmares about the lady and they got so bad that I was hardly sleeping at all. Then one night while my Paw Paw was trying to calm me down, he came up with this idea. Of course if you knew him like you say you did, you won’t be surprised to know that he framed it as a ‘spell.’ He said that if I drank this chocolate drink he made for me...which I’m sure was simply cocoa, sugar, milk, and cinnamon,” she said with a wink, “that instead of seeing that lady dead, I’d be able to close my eyes and see myself saving her. It sounds silly, but it worked. After that night, every time I dreamed about her, I dreamed that we found her while she was still alive, and I stitched up her neck and blew into her mouth and made her breathe again...” She chuckled nervously, realizing that Evan was the only living person she’d ever told about all of that. Suddenly, she wondered what Lucien would think of her, but the look on his face and in his eyes was nothing but pure empathy and it calmed the knots that had formed in her stomach. “So anyway, all that nursing I did in my head made me just naturally be drawn to the profession, I think.”
Lucien reached across the table and laid his hand across hers. He looked, talked, and dressed like a professional man, but his hands weren’t soft the way Sally might have imagined them to be. She could feel the calluses on them, and the contrast between that and the rest of him was oddly sexy. “You’re amazing,” he said.
Sally felt her face go hot and she knew she was blushing. Compliments were not something she was used to, at least not sincere ones from men who weren’t on the verge of getting into her pants. “That’s kind of you, but really, I’m not. I worked in a hospital for ten years, but decided I didn’t care for all that blood and suffering, so I went a completely different direction and these days. I’m not really saving any lives.” Unless of course, you counted all the “patching up” she’d done for the Jokers, and even then, if they were bad, like Gabriel, she insisted they be taken to the hospital. Evan and the others sometimes confused the fact that she was a nurse and not a doctor and she had to set them straight.
“Are you kidding?” Sally had explained her job to Lucien the first time they’d met for coffee, and he’d told her he was impressed. He looked like he still was as he said, “You save the lives of those children, the ones who are born without half a chance. I’ll bet when they’re grown and working as doctors and lawyers, or president of the United States, you’ll be the first on their list of people to thank.”
Sally chuckled again and tried to picture little Josette as presidential material, and of course, she couldn’t. She just hoped that what she did kept the babies healthy enough to make it to adulthood and if one in ten made it out of the swamp and into college, she might call herself “successful.” “Enough about me,” she said. “Tell me more about what you and my Paw Paw talked about on all of those fishing excursions.” Lucien had told her that Andre Guidry had taught him most of what he knew about fishing. Sally knew her Paw Paw loved to fish, and Lucien said he’d even taken him “noodling” a time or two. Noodling was something her Paw Paw had been doing since he was a boy. It was the “art” of sticking your arm, or leg, into a deep hole underneath the water and getting the catfish to bite down so you could pull them out. Paw Paw’s right arm was crisscrossed with battle scars and he wore them proudly.
Lucien still had his hand draped across hers and she felt him squeeze slightly as he said, “We talked about everything, and nothing...and we talked about you.” His eyes were locked into hers and she felt almost mesmerized by them, especially when he added, “And those conversations, Sally...those were my favorite. I felt like I knew you, and I knew before I ever laid eyes on you that I’d like you.”
9
There was a party going on at the clubhouse to welcome Gabriel home. Of course there weren’t many nights that someone in the Jokers crew didn’t find a reason for a party, and usually Blackheart was in the midst of it. But that evening, he wasn’t in the mood to talk, laugh, drink, or carouse. He wanted Sally. He was craving her, even more so since Le Singe told him she was out on a date with some fancy-ass city-boy in an expensive car and fancy clothes. He’d even been so preoccupied that he’d taken the autopsy report Le Singe brought him and put it aside with nary a glance. Christoff was still dead; he could deal with that shit later.
He’d left the clubhouse just after the party started. Gabriel had invited a nurse he’d met while he was in the hospital, and after Blackheart briefly met her and thanked her for taking such good care of the boy, he told Le Singe to hold down the fort and he got on his bike and left. He’d only been planning on going for a ride in the finally cooling-down night air, but before even he knew it, his Harley had found its way to Sally’s street. He cruised by the house and thought about letting himself in and waiting for her, but when she’d given him the key she’d made him promise to only use it for emergencies. Although his body felt like needing her was emergency enough, he doubted that Sal would see it the same way. So, he kept going, but half an hour later found himself back again, this time parked around behind the house in the alleyway wondering if what he was doing would qualify as stalking. He decided that it would, but that still didn’t convince him to leave. He sat there, smoking one cigarette after the other for what seemed like hours, before he finally heard the smooth sound of the man’s fancy car as it pulled up into Sally’s driveway. His stomach clenched when he heard the engine turn off and he wondered if Sally was going to invite the man into her house...and more importantly, into her bed.
Blackheart sat there, listening to the sounds of the car doors slamming, and then waiting...waiting to hear the engine start back up and the car drive away. He sat there for a long time, imagining the other man with his hands on Sally, his lips on hers...growing more agitated by the minute, as he began to imagine their clothes coming off...and then like a beacon of light in his miserable day, he heard the car start up and finally, at last, the man driving away. He might have gotten a good night kiss, but there was no way he had time to undress her, and worship that perfect body. Without thinking about how pissed he had to know Sally was going to be about his stalking, he climbed off his bike and let himself into her yard through the back gate. The big cypress tree and all the ivy made it pitch dark and he’d only taken about two steps when he heard the pump of the shotgun. He stopped dead in his tracks. “Sally! It’s me!”
“You stupid motherfucker! I almost pumped a shotgun full of lead in your belly. What the hell are you doing sneaking around back here?”
Sally flipped on the back-porch light and Blackheart had to put his arm up to keep the floodlight from blinding him
. “I’m not sneaking around. I was coming to see you. I’ve been trying to call you for a fucking week.”
“And how dare I not answer, huh? I think I was clear with Le Singe earlier. I told him to tell you I’m not one of your patches. I’m not obligated to ask how high when you say jump.”
“Put the damned shotgun down,” he said, taking a step...albeit a cautious one...toward her. He’d known her her entire life, and she was still unpredictable. Another thing about her that made her so intriguing to him, but also made her slightly dangerous. “Come on, Sal,” he said, taking another cautious step. “You’re not going to shoot me.” Sally lowered the gun, and it was his first chance to really look at her. Le Singe had been right, that blue dress was cut low, and for a few seconds his eyes landed on her cleavage and couldn’t move.
“It’s late, Evan. Go home. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
He finally tore his eyes from her breasts and put them back on her pretty face. She was wearing more makeup than he’d seen her wear in a long time. It enhanced her naturally pretty features and he got another pang of jealousy that another man had gotten to spend his evening looking at her. She was even wearing high heels, which made her already long legs look like they went on forever. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her in heels, except when they were having one of their sexy little role-playing sessions. He realized at that moment that it had been a long time since they’d had one of those. Lately their time together had been so quick that it was almost rushed, and he’d left immediately after each time. He sighed, mostly at his own stupidity, and said, “I just want a few minutes, Sal, please.”