“Bye.”
“Bye, baby.”
Stephanie pushed out the door of the locker room the same time I slid my phone back into my pants, leaving me with two laughing men who were doing it at my expense.
“What the fuck is her problem?” I hissed, staring at the closed door for a few long seconds before returning my gaze to the two men.
Tough grinned.
“Welcome to our world,” Tough gestured to himself and then to McClain.
“What the fuck is her problem?” I crossed my arms over my chest, repeating the question in hopes they’d give me an answer I could deal with.
Tough looked at McClain, then back to me.
“She’s pissed at you because you got the dog and the hours she wanted,” McClain piped in.
My instincts weren’t off then. Whatever she had against me was personal.
She may be a bitch in real life, but nobody was that big of a bitch without a freakin’ reason.
“Are you ready or am I leaving by myself?”
I looked up to find Stephanie at the door, waiting with barely restrained patience.
Her foot was tapping and she was glaring at me like I’d just shit on her front porch.
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled. “I’m fucking ready.”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use coarse language in my presence. It’s vulgar and offends me.”
With one final look at the two men silently laughing their asses off, I headed to my doom.
***
The first call of the day started out fairly normal. It was at an apartment complex just east of the city. A call about suspicious activity out in the parking lot. A man had called to say he thought there was a drug deal going down in the parking lot, but without getting closer he couldn’t be sure.
Then things had gone to hell and shots had been fired.
The kicker, though, was that the man who had witnessed the crime had seen a kind of blue car go north—and that was it. No facial descriptions. Not how many were there. Nothing.
Which was how we ended up cruising the road just a few blocks away from my apartment.
“Do you know this area well?” I asked Stephanie as she did yet another U-turn.
She looked over at me from her position in the driver’s seat and sneered.
“Of course I know this area well. I’ve been working the streets of Mooresville a lot longer than you. I moved here five years ago.” She gave me a pointed look. “From what I understand, you just got here a little over eight months ago.”
Wrong. I’d been a patched member of the Dixie Wardens for a little over eleven months. I’d prospected for over six months before that, though I’d been staying at my mom’s.
That wasn’t even counting the years I’d spent here every summer since my parents had divorced.
I didn’t say that, though.
Instead, I let her turn yet another U-turn in her search for a street that wasn’t one way.
Something that she really would’ve known had she been in this section more than once.
It took everything I had not to tell her where to go—something I instinctively knew she wouldn’t appreciate—and sat in my seat, waiting for her to either happen upon the car she was searching for, or call dispatch and tell them she couldn’t locate the car.
“Here we go,” she murmured, heading in the right direction finally. “You see the blue car?”
I saw a lot of blue cars.
One was at a house that looked to be in desperate need of repair. Another was driving toward us—a mom, most likely, since I could see the tops of three baby seats in the backseat. Then there was a blue sedan that looked to be more white than blue due to the fading the Alabama sun had wrought upon it.
“Yep,” I pointed down the street at what little I could see of the faded blue car. “Headed that way.”
“That’s not blue, it’s white.”
I clenched my teeth.
“The witness said the car was either white or blue. He was fairly sure it was closer to blue than white. That car is blue, but the sun has faded the paint in certain spots, making it appear almost white. That’s the car.”
She pursed her lips.
Luckily, she chose to follow instead of arguing and drove at a fair enough distance back that the car wasn’t likely to see us.
Meaning she was so far away that if the car decided to turn down a street, we likely wouldn’t find it again since she didn’t know what the hell she was doing.
It took everything in me not to demand she drive faster.
Then the car turned, and I sat forward, knowing for a fact that the car had just turned into the parking lot of my apartment complex.
“Stop,” I ordered.
She sniffed and kept driving.
I grabbed a hold of the wheel and yanked it, pulling us hard to the curb while Stephanie instinctively braked.
The moment we were stopped, I was out my side of the car and Tank was following me without prompting.
“Don’t you fucking dare drive any further than right here,” I growled into the car before I set out on foot to the parking lot.
I thought for sure she’d listen.
I should’ve known she wouldn’t.
Should’ve realized that she thought she knew better than me.
I’d just gotten to the corner of my apartment complex, and I could see the blue car idling at the curb, when my eyes lit on my woman.
She was with Davis.
Davis was walking tightly at her side as she hurried with her head down to her car.
She was dressed in her dirt and grease coveralls that she worked in, and Davis’ face was a mask of pain, as blood welled from a cut on his head. He had a white towel covering half of his face, and still blood was leaking down his neck.
I’d just taken the first step toward them when fucking Stephanie pulled into the lot in the cruiser.
Her lights went on, and the siren whir-whirped.
And everything went fucking crazy.
Guns were pulled.
Men who’d started to loiter outside of our apartment complex dove for cover. The men I could only assume owned the car dove inside said car, and throughout all of this, Imogen stood motionless.
In front of the car.
By the time the first gunshot sounded, she was moving, but not fast enough.
I saw the instant the bullet hit her.
The man behind her had been aiming at the cop car. Imogen had been in between the cop car and him.
Before the bullet could hit her, though, she’d thrown Davis. Picked him up like a fuckin’ caber and tossed him bodily into the bushes at her side.
He fell, the bullet hit her and she went down.
Right into the path of the car that floored it to get out of the parking lot.
My gun was in my hand before I’d even consciously been aware of pulling it.
Aimed at the man driving, I took two shots. Straight through the back window.
The car swerved toward the bushes, and my heart started to hammer.
Then, like a fucking divine miracle, the car swerved the opposite way, narrowly missing Imogen’s legs as she lay lifeless on the concrete.
“Don’t move!” I bellowed.
Every single man—ten in total—froze at the sound of my voice.
I unhooked Tank’s collar, who’d been surprisingly docile until then, and he sat, quivering in anticipation at my side.
“Any one of you moves, he’s going to be let loose,” I growled.
The man closest to me started to reach for something, but Tank was there before he could get his hand into his pants pocket.
Tank’s teeth latched onto the man’s arm and clamped down. A distinct pop and crack sounded, and the man started to scream.
“I told you not to move,” I growled, then I called for backup.
Although it killed me to not check on Imogen, I kept my
eyes on the men.
“Roll to your bellies and put your hands behind your heads.”
That’s when Stephanie finally came back online.
When she started to move toward me and bark orders, I said one word, and one word only.
“No.”
She hissed in a breath.
“I…”
“No!” I growled.
She didn’t say anything again.
Instead, she walked over to Imogen and felt for a pulse.
Satisfied by whatever she felt, she moved to the bushes and checked on Davis who I knew was okay, albeit shaken up.
“Tank,” I whispered.
Tank backed up until he was sitting back at my side.
“Hands, boy,” I growled to the fool who thought I was bluffing about moving. “Put them above your head and roll over onto your stomach.”
“I can’t,” he cried. “My wrist is broken!”
I didn’t care, and told him as much.
“I don’t care if you’re currently bleeding out your goddamned eyes. Put your fuckin’ hands above your motherfuckin’ head.”
“Language.”
That was said not by Stephanie, but by Imogen.
I chanced a quick look in her direction to find her on her knees, her hand covering her arm with the opposite hand.
She was also trying not to laugh.
I wish I had that same problem.
I was trying not to shoot every one of these motherfuckers—which completely went against my paramedic-to-the-bone grain. I was supposed to save lives, not take them.
But something happened to me the moment my wife almost killed me.
Something that I still wasn’t quite sure about.
I had a dark side. A side that screamed to come out and play.
A side that would gleefully light every one of these motherfuckers up like a match and watch them burn to the ground.
“Everyone okay?” I barked at Stephanie.
“As good as they’re gonna get without medical help,” she answered shakily. “I have flex cuffs in the car.”
“Get them,” I ordered.
She got them, and was back at my side thirty seconds later.
“Start tying each one of their hands up,” I ordered. “Watch their moves. I can see at least eight of the ten have weapons on them.”
I could feel Imogen’s eyes on me the entire time we were securing them, and I nearly smiled when she sighed at watching me work.
The moment back up arrived, as well as the ambulance, I was ready to jump out of my skin.
Tank was sitting happily at my side, tongue lolling, as the last person was cuffed, searched, and moved to sit against the apartment complex’s wall where he would wait for transport directly to jail.
No passing go and collecting two hundred dollars for these motherfuckers.
Chapter 16
Do your boobs hang low? Can they touch your camel toe?
-T-shirt
Aaron
“Sometimes, when I’m going to the bathroom, I use my penis to tap things on my phone screen.”
Nothing but silence followed Truth’s statement.
“There are things we need to know, and there are things we don’t need to know,” I finally settled on. “This is one of those things that we don’t need to know.”
Imogen, who was high on the good pain meds, started to giggle at my side.
I turned and pulled her into the curve of my arm, and rested my cheek against the top of her head.
It was a half a day later, twelve hours and two minutes to be exact, since I’d seen her get shot right in front of me.
She was okay, despite being shot in the arm, as was Davis who’d only suffered minor abrasions due to falling in the bushes.
Although, he did have to get stitches in his forehead due to playing on the playground and falling, busting his head open on the slide he’d been standing next to when he fell.
All the men were now wards of the county, including the driver who I’d shot in the shoulder.
I was now fresh off my second shift and barely able to contain the urge to strangle Stephanie.
Trying to calm down from my annoyance, I’d come to the clubhouse with Imogen, who’d assured me she wanted to get out of the house, only to have to hear Truth spout utter bullshit.
“You know you have a stupid confession,” Truth challenged.
“Today I had one,” Tommy Tom offered. “Though it’s not my own penis confession.”
“HIPAA!” Sean bellowed.
I rolled my eyes. When Tommy Tom referred to ‘HIPAA’, he was actually referring to a ‘HIPAA’ violation. Meaning that by law, you weren’t about to talk about a patient to anyone who wasn’t directly involved with that patient’s case or designated by the patient as a medical proxy. Sure, it was still spoken about, but it wasn’t something to fuck around with in the end game.
Everyone snorted, which was the running joke between the two men.
Both men still talked about their patients, though, HIPAA or not.
“We had a kid come in today that wanted to have sex without a condom, but his girl wasn’t on birth control,” Tommy Tom started.
“Oh, God,” I muttered. “Was this that kid that we caught screaming in the street?”
Tommy Tom’s grin was answer enough.
“So he goes on to tell me that he glued his dick hole closed so the semen wouldn’t come out. But now that it’d been a while, it hadn’t come open and he had to pee.”
“So what’d you do?” Ghost asked between sips of beer.
“There’s a compound that dissolves the glue. Only problem is, that it burns like a motherfucker.”
Every man in the room winced, me included.
“That’s epic,” Truth finally settled on. “Come on, you know you all have one.”
“When Sean was fourteen, he zipped his dick up in his pants and had to have the ER staff remove his foreskin from his zipper teeth,” Big Papa volunteered.
Sean’s eyes narrowed. “And I had to have a circumcision at the age of fourteen. It was the worst day of my life.”
Ghost grunted.
“My wife once dyed my dick hair purple.”
Silence proceeded that announcement.
Imogen looked at him curiously, not understanding the undercurrent that was currently racing through the entire table of men. “I see the ring you wear. I just thought she had left you.”
Blunt, as always.
“No,” Ghost grunted. “She didn’t leave me, I left her. It’s for the best.”
“Why?” Imogen pushed.
See, here’s the thing. If Ghost hadn’t already been three sheets to the wind, I knew for a fact that he wouldn’t be talking about his wife or his life.
But today, just like last year, was the one day that he let himself go.
He had two days he did this on.
His daughter’s birthday and his anniversary.
He didn’t know that he was a chatty Cathy when he was this drunk, or I was sure he’d choose to get drunk in solitude rather than in front of the club members like he’d done for the last six years, according to a few of the men.
I’d only been here for three of those instances—twice now, for the anniversary, and once for the birthday of his daughter—but it was enough to know that the man was seriously hurting.
“Because my parents are sick motherfuckers,” Ghost took another shot. “Both alive and kicking, ready to do one bad deed after another. Can’t do a goddamned thing about it, either. If I could, I’d get her back. Get my kid back. But if I didn’t, they’d just force me to leave them again like they did the last time.”
I looked at Big Papa, who shook his head.
He didn’t know any more than I did. Any more than anyone of the men did.
Ghost was seriously that secretive.
It was also why when he spoke about his past, people shut
up and listened.
Nobody was crazy enough to out and out ask him about his life, though. Apparently, Imogen hadn’t gotten that memo, though.
“Seems you took that choice right out of her hands, though,” Imogen spoke as if she were talking from experience. “Isn’t that her choice if she wants to spend her life in danger?”
“We have a kid. She needs to stay alive for her,” Ghost countered.
“Yeah?” Imogen asked. “But, what if, after all this time, your parents hadn’t kept their word? What if she’s in just as much danger now as she was when you were there? Have you thought about that?”
Ghost looked thoughtful for a moment.
“I concede that you have a point, but I’ve already pulled that trigger.” He touched his scarred face. “Can’t unpull it.”
Imogen watched him thoughtfully as he let his fingers drift over the scar on his face.
He looked a lot like me—though his was worse.
My burns covered only half of my body. His took over every available space from his neck down. There was literally not a single part of his body that wasn’t riddled with scars.
I’d felt a certain camaraderie with him since I’d become a member of the club. He knew all the pain that those kind of scars wrought. He knew the feeling of self-hatred that poured through me every day when I looked in the mirror.
“You could just go see her…see what’s going on with her life,” Imogen tried. “I know that if Aaron had decided to leave me for my greater good, I’d want him back.”
My chest tightened as her words sunk in.
She’d choose having her life constantly in danger just to be with me? That was fucking crazy.
But I found that I liked the thought. She’d never be Lynn. She’d never choose herself over me and that was exactly what I needed to hear.
“I see her every month,” he told her. “I drive home to make sure she is safe, despite getting reassurances from my old president that she’s fine.”
Imogen sighed, “I think you should try to make contact.”
Ghost’s mouth twisted in an ugly smile. “She thinks I’m dead. How do I make contact with her—open that can of worms—and close it again if she’s not all right with me putting her in danger?”
Imogen pouted.
“I don’t know.”
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