Burn Down the Night

by M. O'Keefe

  She lifted her eyebrows like she was surprised that in the seven years that had gone by, I was just as alone as when I left here.

  “Well, let’s park your car—” She turned and stopped. Her eyes on the backseat. Max.

  Stress tears. More stress tears. I could not make them stop. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my face.

  “This trouble. Does it have anything to do with the body in the backseat?”

  I nodded, afraid if I opened my mouth I would sob.

  “He dead?” she asked without panic. Yes. This…this was why I came here. She was not going to freak out. She could handle shit like this. Army nurse. Hardcore.

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, let’s see about getting him inside.”

  Thank God. After all these years.

  I could finally see a blessing when I landed on its doorstep.

  Chapter 7

  I parked the Buick in the far corner of the parking garage. Fern gave me a parking permit and a handicapped tag.

  It was like camouflage, those permits and tags. My shitty Buick that had felt so conspicuous before was now rendered invisible, surrounded by other giant sedans. Older model Buicks and Cadillacs. All with handicapped tags hanging from the mirrors. Every one of them looked about the same.

  “All right, soldier,” Joan said as we opened the back doors. “On your feet.”

  Max blinked open his fever-bright eyes.

  “Aunt Fern? The nurse?” he asked in a dry whisper. His face was pale beneath the bruises. His lips dry.

  He needed more fluids. My few stops to pour water down his throat hadn’t been enough.

  “That’s right,” Fern said. “I’m going to take care of you.”

  “No hospitals.”

  Fern gave me some serious side-eye. Fern wasn’t an idiot. Only a person in serious criminal trouble would want to avoid a hospital in the condition he was in.

  I glanced away, no match for this moment.

  “This isn’t a hospital. But I need you to walk,” Fern said, taking charge of things. Good, I thought. Please, take charge of things.

  Max nodded like his head weighed seven thousand pounds. He sat up and the blanket over his chest slipped and Fern got a good hard look at his leather cut. The white patches splattered with blood that declared him the president of the Skulls.

  She stood up and took a step back away from the car. I had no choice but to stand up straight beside her.

  “You’re running with the Skulls now?” she asked. Her words sharp, her tone clear: I knew you were reckless, but this is crazy.

  “I’m not running with anything,” I insisted, trying to keep my own tone clear of all the disdain and petulance I had in my gut. But these were old roads, worn smooth between us. Habits, dark and awful that had no place here right now. “He…he’s a friend, and his club, the brothers, they tried to kill him.”

  She blinked. “So you brought him here?”

  “It’s the only place I could think of. He needs medical help and I can’t take him to a hospital.”

  “Are those brothers of his following you?”

  “No,” I shook my head. Emphatic. “No one is following us.”

  “Cops?”

  “He’s not in trouble like that. It was…it was a club thing.” I didn’t say anything about the cops possibly being after me. I figured the less Aunt Fern knew, the better.

  Fern muttered under her breath, but she bent back down into the car. “You ready to get up?” she asked Max.

  “Ready…as I’ll ever be,” Max said.

  There was a lot of swearing on just about everyone’s parts as we got him out of the car.

  “It’s his ribs,” I said, as if to explain the curses he lobbed our way as we slung his arms over our shoulders.

  “Funny, I thought it was his charm,” Fern groaned under his weight.

  We got him through the garage and into the freight elevator.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Florida,” Fern said.

  Max shifted and pulled away, dragging us all off balance, and I landed hard against the wall of the elevator.

  “You’re okay.”

  “Florida…bad idea. Club is everywhere.”

  “Not here they’re not,” I assured him. We were dead center in retiree-land with its early-bird specials and old couples looking for shells on the beach at low tide. The only clubs here were bocce ball and bridge.

  But Max wasn’t hearing it. “Can’t be here,” he insisted, and I was losing my grip on him. Losing my strength. I was so fucking tired, and I didn’t know where to find the will to fight him. Convince him.

  “Stop!” Fern said in the commanding voice I remembered all too well. “You need medical attention and you need it now. Whatever problem you have with this location will have to wait.”

  Surprisingly, that shut Max up.

  The freight elevator doors opened and we stepped out into a coral hallway. A long tunnel of pink.

  The hallway was hot and close and endless and my stomach was turning. My head spinning.

  I can’t…I thought. I can’t keep going.

  When the going gets tough, we get tougher.

  That’s what I used to say to Jennifer until it stopped working. Until the tough got so tough I gave up.

  I can’t lie, I really wanted to give up right then. Just lie down on the concrete and vanish from the earth.

  “Olivia?” It was Fern. Max swore between us. “You all right?”

  “Fine. Just tired.”

  Finally we stopped in front of a door, and Fern pulled a substantial key ring out of the pocket of her robe. She got the door open and we stumbled inside. At this point Max was roughly the weight of a white rhino.

  “Is this yours?” I asked. “Did you move?”

  The condo was totally empty. There was a love seat and an easy chair. A few marks in the cream carpet where there had clearly been tables. The walls were bare, spotted with darker squares where I imagined there had been family pictures. Plaques that said “It’s always five o’clock at the beach.”

  There was an empty TV stand with a statue of some kind on it.

  “No. It’s Mary Gensler’s. Her kids moved her into one of those retirement places a few weeks ago, and they are going to put the condo on the market in the new year. Until then, it’s just sitting here empty.”

  Fern led, half-pulling, half-carrying Max into the dark bedroom. All the blinds were closed, but the bright morning sun found its way through the cracks. Max flopped down on the bed with a moan.

  “The fuck,” he muttered.

  “What have you given him?” Fern asked, she lifted his eyelids and he reached forward and grabbed her wrist. She swatted him away like he was nothing.

  I told her about the antibiotic. The QuikClot.

  She nodded once in approval and I could not stop the small bloom of pleasure that nod gave me. I wondered in some dark, small part of my heart what would have been different if she’d nodded at me like that before.

  When I needed it.

  “Do you know what happened to you?” she asked Max.

  The groggy MC president was awake and—for the moment—fully with it. I wouldn’t say he was sharp, but he knew what was happening.

  “Shot,” he finally said. “Once in the leg. Another bullet grazed my head.” He turned his head as if to show her the wound and I took a deep breath, sagging against the doorframe. “I think I’ve got a cracked rib,” he said. “Maybe a concussion.”

  “Those brothers of yours really tuned you up.”

  In his gory face his lips twisted and it was almost breathlessly eerie. A terrible reminder that he might be laid low for the time being but he was still the devil.

  “Family,” he said with terrible irony. “What can you do?”

  Fern glanced over her shoulder at me.

  “I understand the sentiment,” she said.

  I took the stone she threw at me as my due. She could insult me all sh
e wanted. As long as she got Max back up on his feet.

  “Go lay down before you fall down,” Fern said, watching me over her glasses.

  I saluted her, an old mocking gesture from our lives before. The second I did it I regretted it. I owed her a debt of gratitude. There was no room for my shitty teenage behavior.

  She turned away, face hard.

  “Fern?” I said.

  “What?” She was helping Max take off his vest.

  “Thank you.”

  She didn’t say anything and I could feel Max watching me, his blue gaze sharp. Always too sharp, cutting away little pieces of me that I needed. Pieces of armor that kept me safe. Protected.

  I went back into the living room and collapsed onto the love seat. For a moment I wondered what this was going to cost me. What I would have to pay for coming back here.

  And could I pay it?

  Because I had nothing left. Not one extra thing. It was me and survival. That’s all.

  And Jennifer.

  I let that thought comfort me. I wrapped myself around it like a hot stone keeping me warm. I had Max and he would help me get Jennifer back and then everything would be right. Everything would be okay.

  Sleep came so fast and so hard it felt like falling.

  —

  I woke up with a start, nearly sliding off the love seat.

  Where am I?

  The walls and love seat looked totally unfamiliar. Was that a…? It was. A JFK statue where the TV should sit.

  Nothing here gave me a clue about where I was.

  And then it all came back. The bombs. Lagan.

  Max.

  I kicked off the blanket Fern must have put over me while I’d been in my coma and a piece of paper fluttered down to the ground.

  CALL ME.

  I recognized Fern’s handwriting. Its hard lines, its deep downward slashes. She wrote like she didn’t approve of me. That’s how deep this went between us. She could not hide her feelings even in her handwriting.

  I got to my feet, wobbly and dizzy with sleep, hunger, and thirst. Beside the door was one of my garbage bags of luggage and I had to hope it was the one with clean underwear in it. With it tossed over my shoulder, I stumbled down the small hallway and found Max in the bed.

  What had been an empty bedroom with a bare, queen-size bed, was now a pop-up hospital room.

  Max was sound asleep with an IV in his arm, the saline bag hooked over the lamp. His face had been washed, his body cleaned up. He had stitches in his head. The skin was pink and tender around the sutures. His chest was bare, revealing all his tattoos and the Technicolor bruises along his ribs. I lifted the covers off his leg revealing the snowy white bandage, the straight exact lines of the surgical tape. The pink shaved skin at the edge.

  Aunt Fern had removed the bullet.

  And put in a catheter.

  Jesus. Aunt Fern.

  Max was lying in a bed made with clean sheets. His black beard sleek and trim. His body clean. He was sleeping easy.

  Peeing into a tube.

  “You’re not so tough,” I whispered, because it was funny. Because he was a murderous son of a bitch.

  But at the moment he was my murderous son of a bitch.

  In the bathroom I peed and then drank mouthfuls of cold water straight from the tap. Then I peeled off my sweaty and smelly clothes. The shower seemed like too much work so I just splashed water from the sink in the general direction of my body and called it clean enough.

  From my garbage bag I pulled out a pair of underwear and a black tank top. A pair of handcuffs. My fake DEA badge, my fake FBI badge, and my fake University of North Carolina faculty badge. And—praise God—a toothbrush.

  I scrubbed my teeth and felt nearly seven thousand times better.

  The air-conditioning thunked on and blew across the back of my neck, sending chills over my body.

  I needed to call Fern—I owed her an explanation but I didn’t have it in me just yet.

  I was nauseous with exhaustion. I picked up my garbage bag and contemplated returning to the love seat, which was really tiny. And uncomfortable.

  My neck hurt from the nap I had already taken there.

  Fuck the love seat.

  I returned to the living room, grabbed the blanket, wrapped it around my body, and went back into the bedroom.

  I needed to stretch out, so I did on the edge of the queen bed. With my garbage bag of belongings beside me, my blanket that smelled just slightly of Aunt Fern wrapped around me, I closed my eyes, willing that falling sensation that meant sleep.

  But instead my brain kicked on.

  What are you doing? The thoughts crept in, pushing me up onto the hamster wheel that could keep me up all night. What are you going to do now? What are you going to say to Fern? To Max? You don’t have any money. Do you think he has money? He owes you…sort of. What—

  Don’t. Stop. Sleep.

  And I did.

  —

  I woke up to a hot breath on my face and a terrible pressure across my throat.

  “What the fuck happened?” Max asked, his blue eyes inches from mine. His forearm across my throat.

  I opened my mouth to tell him to let me up. To tell him that I couldn’t breathe, but I couldn’t even get a breath to say that.

  I bucked my body, pushed at his arm, but he slipped his body over mine. Controlling my hips with his. Fuck he was heavy. Big.

  “Can’t…” I gasped. “Breathe…”

  “Where is Rabbit?” Max whispered, his eyes darting up toward the door and then around the room like we were surrounded by his enemies. Like any moment they could storm in.

  “Are you working with him?” he asked.

  Fuck this. There were stars behind my eyes, so I ducked my head and bit him. Not with all my strength, but enough of it.

  He hissed and jerked and I shoved him away, rolling to the side of the bed and falling on the floor.

  “Max!” I got to my feet but kept my distance from the bed.

  “Where’s my gun,” he muttered, sitting up in the bed, even though it clearly cost him. He was holding his ribs, like he could cup the pain in his hands. And under the bruises, his face was a snarling wince.

  I held my hand out like I was a lion tamer with a chair and a whip, instead of a stripper in my underwear. “Max?”

  “Where’s my fucking gun!” he yelled, and then as if that roar had drained the last of his reserves, he flopped back on the bed. “What happened to me? Why…why am I here?”

  “Poor life choices, probably. A lack of proper role models?”

  His head rolled and he faced me, his blue eyes burning in a flushed, bruised face.

  I grabbed the edge of my black plastic luggage and dragged it across the light-blue carpet to my feet.

  With one eye on him, I pulled out the handcuffs waiting for my moment.

  “What did you do to me?” His face wrinkled, and then he winced as all the bruises pulled and tugged. He tried to get up again, no doubt to beat me to death or something equally biker, but he couldn’t even lift his head.

  “Shhhh. You’ve been hurt. You’re safe.”

  “God.” His eyes drifted shut. “Tired.”

  He was out again, his tall, pale body still on the bed.

  As fast as I could, I got one handcuff around his wrist and the other around one of the metal spindles of the old cast-iron bed.

  I jerked back, waiting for him to rear up but he didn’t even moan. Didn’t even twitch.

  “It’s for your own good, Max,” I said. “And mine. So you don’t…you know…kill me accidentally. Basically it’s for me.”

  I put shaking fingers on the muscle of his shoulder. Hot. His skin was burning up. I touched his forehead with the back of my hand.

  Fever.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to his inert figure. The bright sun was no longer slicing between the blinds and the shadows were thick and fuzzy. The skin of his chest and shoulders, taut and pale over his sleek muscles lo
oked like moonlight. The black ink of his tattoos stood out in vivid relief and I nearly reached down to touch the swirl beneath the words “Brothers In Arms” beneath his collarbone. Like it might be soft.

  Like one of those touch and feel books from the library when I was a kid.

  Feel the soft little bunny.

  Feel the dangerous biker.

  “Oh God, Max…I’m really sorry.” I should have taken the bullet out in Atlanta. I shouldn’t have waited. And now he had a fever, and I’d lived with Fern just long enough and had just enough nursing school to know that wasn’t good.

  Adrenaline had me fully awake, so I pulled on some cutoffs and went back into the living room and kitchen. There was an old rotary phone sitting on top of the kitchen counter. For a second I stared at it, trying to remember if I’d actually ever seen one outside of old movies.

  I hadn’t. It was like a saber-toothed tiger or something.

  And dead like one, too; when I picked up the receiver I didn’t get a dial tone. I had to go out to my car and grab my phone.

  Now. Where the hell were my keys?

  I found them on the other side of the counter. Next to three phones. Two of them were mine. One was Max’s.

  Fern. Fern had done that. She had taken the bullet out of Max’s leg, covered me with a blanket, and went out to the car to grab my garbage bags and my phone.

  I pulled open the fridge, and just as I suspected, there was juice and apples. A Tupperware container. I knew before popping the lid on the thing that it was tuna salad.

  Tuna salad with grapes in it. And walnuts. Just like she made for us seven years ago. Jennifer had loved it. Ate it with a spoon right out of the fridge.

  “Fruit and fish?” I would say to her. “Gross.”

  “More for me!” She’d give me her wide-eyed happy look and dig in.

  The Tupperware lid snapped back on and I shut the fridge.

  My debt to Aunt Fern was growing past the point I knew how to pay it.

  I shelved the emotions that couldn’t help me right now. Guilt. Regret. They’d be fuel for the hamster wheel at night. Today though, I needed to get back to the business of saving Jennifer. And that meant saving Max.

  I brushed my thumb over my phone which was plugged into the charger and sat on the counter. No messages. No texts. No nothing.