“I'll see you later this afternoon,” I said and grinned back at Mandy. “Oh, and if you see or smell Grace anywhere around the house, call the cops. I'm done playing with her. If she shows up, make sure you have her arrested.”
Mandy nodded, though I could tell she was a little reluctant to send a woman so down on her luck to jail. Even though it would be the best thing for Grace. She hadn't hit rock bottom yet and really needed to. And soon. If not, she was likely going to end up dead.
I rushed over and planted a kiss on the crown of my son's head. “Be good, baby boy. Do everything Mandy tells you to do, okay?”
He giggled at me and smiled. Giving Mandy one last grateful look, I turned and walked out of the house, desperate to avoid being late for my shift – again.
Chapter Three
Damian
“Yeah, they're not here yet,” I said.
I sat in the parking lot of the old, abandoned warehouse I was told to be at, talking to Donovan Mills, the MC's president, on the phone. I was waiting for Ray Mendoza and his crew to show up. Mendoza was the leader of the Fantasmas – another MC out of Bakersfield.
We didn't deal with them all that often, but every once in a while, interests aligned and we did a little business with them. We'd just run security on a big shipment of weed up to Eureka, and I was meeting with Mendoza to get our cut of the proceeds.
“Just make sure it's all there,” Mills said. “All twenty grand of it. I don't trust those spics to not short us.”
I cringed at his use of the slur. I was a lot of things, but a bigot wasn't one of them. I'd served with guys of every race and considered them all my brothers. To me, it was the content of a man's character, not the color of their skin or the God they prayed to. But to somebody like Mills, a guy who'd grown up in a backwoods town and had never served in a combat area, those racial lines never seemed to dull. He wasn't a hood wearing, white power kinda asshole. He just didn't like people of color.
It made serving as the MC's vice president tough, simply because I had to eat a lot of shit and not say anything about the garbage that came out of his mouth. Presenting a strong, unified front for the club was important – something my dad had taught me.
My dad had served a lot of years in the chair I now occupied. He'd had his shot to move up to the big chair, but he always declined. He'd always told me that he was able to bring about the most change and influence the direction of the club the greatest by sitting in that chair.
“The prez,” he said, “took the slings and arrows, while the VP got to move behind the scenes and chart the MC's course.”
I didn't yet see how that was possible. Granted, I'd only been in the chair for six months, but with somebody like Mills running the show, it was hard to get a word in edgewise – let alone an agenda. To be honest, in the brief time I'd been in the MC's leadership, I didn't like the direction I saw him taking us. He was getting us deeper into running drugs, and he'd talked about running some guns as well. The way I saw it, he was taking us down a path that was inevitably going to lead to violence and bloodshed.
Personally, I didn't like the fact that we taxed the local businesses. But we had to earn. And I convinced myself that we were doing a community service because we did, in fact, keep the streets of Fernwood safe – we'd run more than one dope pusher or gang banger out of town on a rail. Yeah, we ran drugs, but we never, ever, dealt in our town – and we kept any punk with designs on doing that out of our area.
But until I was in a position to do something about it, all I could do was bite my tongue and wait. Bide my time.
“Don't worry, Mills,” I said. “I got it handled.”
“Good man.”
I disconnected the call and dropped the phone in my pocket. I sat back on my bike and shook a cigarette out of the pack and popped it into my mouth. I lit it and took a deep drag, looking at the stars overhead. The sky was black, and the stars I could see were like bits of chipped ice. Though I could see more stars there than I would be able to see in a place like San Francisco – the nearest big city – it was a fraction of what I saw over in Afghanistan.
I remember sitting outside of our tent at the base and looking up at the sky on a lot of nights. I saw more stars than I'd ever seen before and I remember thinking that it was amazing. I hated the fact that it took me being in the middle of a goddamn war to get to see something so beautiful, but what could I do? It was what it was. At least I'd gotten to see it. That was something, I supposed.
The rumbling of motorcycle engines drew my attention. Coming down a service road that was overgrown with weeds, was Mendoza and a few of his guys. I wasn't too keen on meeting these guys out here all by myself – I didn't like being outnumbered – but Crank had been busy, and I hadn't had time to round anybody else up.
So, it was just me meeting up with Mendoza and three of his Fantasmas.
I didn't really expect trouble, but I unlatched the holster on the piece on my hip. My sidearm had gotten me through some serious shit back in Afghanistan, and I considered it my lucky nine millimeter.
Mendoza and his guys stopped a few feet from me and shut off their bikes. The three guys remained sitting astride their bikes and took off their helmets. As Mendoza climbed off his bike, he took off his helmet and hung it on the handlebar. He wasn't a big man – five foot nine or so – with dusty colored skin and eyes blacker than the sky above. He wasn't thin, but he wasn't fat, either. He was just sort of… average. The only real distinctive thing about him was his slicked back black hair that hung in a ponytail all the way down to the small of his back. Not that it was all that distinctive, really.
He stopped and stared at me. And I could tell by the way he was standing there that something was wrong. He looked pissed. It sent a spike of adrenaline through me, but I managed to stay cool. I took another drag on my smoke and acted like I hadn't noticed that he was pissed off.
“What's up, Ray?” I asked casually.
“Your boys fucked up,” he said.
“How do you figure?”
He shifted his feet and took his gloves off, stuffing them into the pocket of his kutte. I thought he pulled his kutte back intentionally, to give me a view of the 44 caliber Desert Eagle in his shoulder holster. Talk about overcompensation.
“Nice piece,” I commented to let him know I'd seen it.
“That shipment you were running security on got jacked, man,” he said.
The knot in my stomach constricted painfully. I hadn't heard that the shipment had been lost – I wasn't sure that Mills even knew yet. I flicked my cigarette to the asphalt beneath my boot and crushed it out as I sat up a little straighter. Maybe I'd been a little too optimistic about not expecting trouble.
“Jacked how?” I asked. “By who?”
Mendoza looked back at his guys for a moment before turning back to me. He lit a cigarette of his own and blew the thick cloud of smoke in my direction.
“I was hoping you could tell me that, carnal.”
“How the fuck should I know?” I asked. “This is the first time I've heard of this. Are my guys okay?”
“Not my problem,” he replied, taking another long drag off his smoke. “But what is my problem is that my truck got jacked and now I'm out over a million dollars – which makes it your problem too.”
A million bucks? The load we were running security for was for some weed. Granted, it was a pretty big chunk of weed, but there was no way in hell it would have totaled a million.
“A million? What in the hell was in the shipment, Mendoza? We agreed to protect your weed run. There is no way in hell you were running a million buck’s worth of bud.”
He shrugged. “Plans changed at the last minute, carnal,” he said. “My buyer needed a chunk of H to go along with the weed. And the customer's always right, holmes.”
“You didn't clear that with Mills,” I said. “And because you didn't, that's not our problem.”
Anger – dark and dangerous – flashed on his face. “You were runn
ing security for us, puto,” he snapped. “Doesn't matter what the fuck is in the truck. You were supposed to keep it safe.”
The situation was escalating, and the anticipation of violence hung thick and heavy in the air. I needed to defuse the situation and figure this out before somebody did something stupid. And if I had to bet, it would be one of Mendoza's three flunkies back there on their bikes – they all just looked anxious to shoot something.
“Okay hold up,” I said. “Where was the truck jacked?”
“Few miles south of the Oregon border.”
I looked at him with my mouth agape. “Dude, you contracted us to run an escort to Eureka,” I said. “Not all the way to Oregon.”
He shrugged. “Like I said, plans changed at the last minute.”
I shook my head. “This ain't our fault, man. We did what we said we'd do – escort your truck to Eureka. The fact that you were not only running H but took it all the way up to Oregon – and didn't clear it with Mills first – isn't our problem. That's on you.”
“Huh,” he said and dropped his smoke, crushing it beneath his boot. “On me, huh?”
“Yeah. On you. We held up our end of the bargain. We did what you hired us to do. Now pay us what you owe us, and we'll call it a night.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I got your payment right here.”
I should have known. I should have been ready for it. But when he reached for his gun, I stood there like a fucking idiot. I never even got my piece out of the holster before he opened up. It sounded like a cannon shot, and when the first bullet hit me, it felt like I'd been hit by a truck. The force of the shot threw me off my bike and sent me sprawling backward.
I hit the pavement with a grunt and pain radiated through every nerve ending in my body. I checked myself before I screamed and started to sit up. I never even heard him fire again, but I felt his bullets punching into my body.
I lay back on the pavement and stared up at the stars. I felt blood, warm and sticky, running down my skin and pooling in my t-shirt. As I stared at the sky, darkness crept in at the edges of my vision, and I mused over the fact that I'd made it through hell in Afghanistan, only to die on the pavement of a shitty, run-down, abandoned warehouse.
With an arm that was quickly weakening, I took my cell phone out of my pocket and managed to hold it up to my face. I punched the button for Mills and heard it connect just as the darkness overwhelmed me and pulled me down into its depths.
Chapter Four
Cara
I finished my rounds and, surprisingly, had a few free moments. Even in a small town like Fernwood, the ER could be a busy place. Granted, it wasn't usually like the big city ERs – we didn't have quite that volume of patients, but it got hectic from time to time.
But for the moment, I was going to revel in the downtime.
Grabbing a soda from the vending machine, I strolled over to the admittance desk where my friend Julia was working. I leaned against the counter and watched her punching some information into the computer. I saw her cheeks color and knew that she was intentionally avoiding my gaze.
“So,” I said. “How was your date with Dr. Morganson?”
The color in her cheeks deepened, and she cleared her throat – and still hadn't met my eyes. Which, of course, told me all I needed to know.
“Dinner turned into breakfast, I see.” I laughed. “You're such a whore.”
She looked at me quickly, trying to suppress a smile and a laugh. Julia looked around as if to make sure nobody could hear us. There wasn't anybody within a hundred yards of us. As I looked around the waiting rooms and hallways, it struck me just how odd it was – it was like a ghost town in the ER.
“I don't know how it happened,” Julia said in a hushed tone.
“Oh, I do. I know exactly how it happened. You looked into those dreamy blue eyes of his and your panties just magically disappeared. Tell me this though – did he at least take you home? Or was it all fumbling and grabbing in the back seat of his car?”
She threw a pencil at me and laughed. “It wasn't like that. But he does have a very nice car.”
“Oh, I'll just bet he does.”
Dr. Eric Morganson was our newest surgeon. And probably the youngest. He was a good-looking man, I had to admit. He and Julia seemed to hit it off right after he'd come to the hospital. It was obvious from the start that he had a thing for Jules and that it was reciprocated. They both fumbled with their words and seemed entirely fuzzy brained and flustered whenever they were around each other. It was actually kind of cute. Thankfully, though, after several months of intense flirting, he'd worked up the nerve to ask her out.
And my best friend, despite her insistence that she wouldn't, gave it up on the first date.
Julia laughed again. “We had a nice evening. He took me into San Francisco for dinner at this amazing little sushi place and then to see a play. It was just… perfect. The whole night was perfect.”
“I'm happy for you, Jules,” I said. “You deserve a little happiness – and a whole lot of nookie.”
She giggled and shook her head. She was one of the strongest, most assertive women I knew. And yet, when it came to matters of the heart, she was as bashful as a schoolgirl. It was utterly adorable. That she’d found somebody who seemed like her match made me genuinely happy for her. It also highlighted the void in my life.
But, as I told myself a million times over, I had a little boy and a career to focus on. Both brought me tremendous amounts of happiness, satisfaction, and joy. I wouldn't trade either for anything in the world. My mantra was: I didn't need or want a relationship. I didn't have time for it, and I didn't need the drama. I told myself that again and again. I just hoped that one day, I would believe it.
The truth of the matter was, the loneliness could be overwhelming at times. Sure, Austin filled up my heart. He made me happy and brought me so much enjoyment in my life. But there were times when I craved the companionship of another adult. Somebody to talk to. Somebody to share with and confide in. I sometimes longed to be held, hugged, and kissed. There were times I craved something – more. Yeah, I learned how to satisfy myself, of course. But it was never a replacement for the real thing. It was like an itch that I couldn't quite reach to scratch – and sometimes, it drove me crazy.
“You know,” Jules said, “he's got plenty of eligible friends. I'm sure he could—”
I held up my hand and shook my head. “I'm okay, hon,” I said. “Promise. I'm not really in the market for a boyfriend right now anyway.”
“I just hate seeing you alone, Cara.”
I shrugged. “I prefer it that way,” I lied. “Besides, I've got Austin, and he's more than enough for me.”
She looked at me and gave me a soft, sad smile. Julia was always looking out for me – always looking out for my happiness. And I had no doubt her new beau had plenty of friends he could set me up with. But if I were being honest with myself, it was mostly fear keeping me from taking her up on the offer. Fear of getting hurt. Fear of Austin getting hurt. I wasn't exactly the best judge of character when it came to picking a boyfriend, and while I could eventually get over and heal from a broken heart, I feared what effect my choices would have on Austin. And I didn't want to put him through that. Not until I was sure. Absolutely, positively sure.
“Well, you just let me know if you change your mind, okay?” Jules pressed.
I smiled. “Scout's honor.”
The phone on Julia's desk rang, and she grabbed it. “Emergency room.”
She listened for a moment, nodding along and then hung up. She turned to me and shrugged.
“Guess break time is over,” she said. “We've got a bus coming in. Male vic, early to mid-thirties, multiple GSW's.”
“Sounds like a party,” I said.
Gunshot wounds weren't exceedingly common, but we got them from time to time. The majority of them were from hunting accidents. Given that Fernwood backed onto wide open forest around Yosemite, we got a lot of hunters w
ho had a few too many and mistook their hunting buddy for a ten-point buck. It happened. Multiple gunshot wounds were less common, though.
“Guess I better get ready for the guest of honor,” I said.
“See you in a little while.”
I trotted off down the hall to the triage area where the EMTs would be bringing the victim in. I prepped a table with everything I was going to need to clean wounds and hopefully stabilize the patient. It wasn't long before I heard the doors slam open and the EMTs wheeling the gurney down the hall, their voices echoing off the nearly empty walls of the ER.
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