I'm Only Here for the Beard

by Lani Lynn Vale

  I made it into the hallway and looked down the hall at the waiting room.

  Ellen was crying softly with her arms wrapped around her upraised knees, but I couldn’t find it in me to apologize for the awful words that I’d said to her when she came up to me and tried to apologize.

  Jessie was sitting on Ellen’s right, jaw clenched and just as pissed off now as he had been when I arrived at the hospital and started spewing my mouth at the woman we all knew he loved but wasn’t acting on it.

  The moment he saw me emerge, he got up, patted Ellen awkwardly on the head, and headed toward us.

  Ellen shot daggers at his back, her eyes shooting invisible death rays at his retreating form as he made his way toward us.

  “Blood trail leads down the street,” Jessie recounted, breaking into the silence. “I followed it. Leads to an empty house, a house that it looks like it’s been squatted in for a while. He cleaned himself up in the bathroom with an emergency first aid kit that was still out on the counter. We got DNA. Sent it to the lab.”

  “They expedite it for me like I asked?” Dad asked.

  Jessie nodded. “Yeah. I also have a grainy photo that some woman took while she was walking her dog. It’s not much, but it’s something.”

  Jessie showed me the photo, and I cursed. We couldn’t do anything with that.

  “Hold on,” I said. “Can you forward that to an email?”

  Jessie nodded.

  I rattled off the email and then placed a call.

  Though it was late at night, Jack answered, and he didn’t even sound pissed.

  “Yo,” he sounded like he was awake.

  “Jack, I sent you an email of a picture. I know you’re not as good with the photos, but I was hoping you could talk your wife into taking a look at it,” I swallowed. “My woman was attacked by this man tonight, and I need to know who it is so I can look for him.”

  Jack said something that wasn’t to me, and suddenly I heard his wife say, “I got it. Give me five.”

  Jack relayed the message, even though I heard what she said.

  “Thanks.”

  I hung up.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  My hands clenched and unclenched while the men around me spoke. They all offered ideas on where to look, offered to search the surrounding hospitals and clinics in the area, but I knew it wouldn’t be enough.

  I needed more.

  And Jack’s wife didn’t disappoint.

  My phone rang five minutes and thirty-seven seconds later. I pulled it out of my pocket and answered it with barely disguised anguish.

  “Pulled the pic. Ran it through the database. Man’s name is Walton Whitley. Goes by the name 2W. Forty-seven. Member of a motorcycle club that is based out of Corpus Christi, Texas,” Jack said without preamble. “I pulled up a photo of the man from a news article, and he was standing next to a biker who wrecked a few months ago. I’m sending you everything I have on him. He also used his credit card at an ATM on the outskirts of Mooresville about thirty minutes ago.”

  The minute those words were said, I knew exactly who it was without seeing the photo. Things started to fit into place as I finally solved the puzzle. Too late, but I’d solved it.

  “Thanks, man,” I grated out. “I’ll owe that wife of yours a hug.”

  Jack snorted. “No. I’ll give her the hug and say it’s from you.”

  I laughed darkly and hung up, then turned to the men of my club who were waiting for the news right along with me.

  They’d be scouring the street if I thought it’d help, but they were waiting for direction on my end before they started.

  “Walton Whitley or 2W. Ring any bells?”

  My father was the one to answer.

  “No.” He shook his head. “But the fact that you’re so calm right now tells me that you do.”

  He was right.

  When things got confusing or complicated, I centered myself.

  I never, ever went off half-cocked. I thought everything through before I did it, and prided myself on the fact.

  Right now, though, the need to tear this man apart with my bare hands for what he did to my woman was almost overwhelming me, and it took a lot for me to try to calm myself enough to fill my club brothers in on what I’d learned.

  The only reason I wasn’t was because we were in the hospital hallway right outside Naomi’s room.

  “You remember that guy that I nearly got into a fight with at the smokehouse a few months back?” I asked. “The one that was looking at Naomi? Touching her?”

  The moment I mentioned that, their confusion clouded.

  “It does look like him,” Jessie voiced. “I can definitely see it now.”

  “The ambulance that was in the accident was caused by a motorcycle.”

  I looked up to find my father, staring at me, understanding dawning in his eyes. I knew it, I knew in my gut that it was him. He’d orchestrated all of this. He’d known we’d left. He knew, because he’d been watching her for weeks. Maybe even longer. Likely since he’d seen her at the smokehouse all those weeks ago.

  “It was him,” I reported, knowing it was the truth without even having it confirmed. “He did it so she would go.”

  My father nodded his head in understanding.

  “They said he was last seen at the ATM on Center Street about thirty minutes ago. Knowing Jack, he’s already emailed out the make and model of the bike. Though, in this town, it’ll be easy to find him.”

  A foreign bike in the Rejects territory would stick out like a sore thumb.

  This area was the Dixie Wardens’ territory, and we didn’t tolerate any other bikers causing disruptions in our town.

  And that’s what this man had done. He’d taken that safe place away from Naomi, and I wouldn’t tolerate it.

  Pulling my phone out, I forwarded the email to all of the men, and then looked at Jessie.

  “You think you can stay with them?”

  He seemed to draw a deep breath, thankful that I still trusted him with my woman’s life.

  It wasn’t his fault that this had happened, and I knew that.

  Rationally, anyway.

  In my heart, I was still pissed off at him.

  “I’ll stay with them.”

  ‘Them’ being Ellen, Imogen, Tally and Verity who were all holed up in the waiting room hoping to visit with Naomi once we’d gone.

  I looked up to find Ghost.

  My heart kicked at seeing him.

  We’d left him in Benton, staring at the house where his woman had been not a few weeks before.

  “Thanks, man.”

  Ghost’s eyes were dead.

  “When this is done, you’re next.”

  Ghost blinked, shuddered, and then nodded once.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s time.”

  It was. It was time for all of us to be happy, and once I found the stupid son of a bitch who’d hurt Naomi, I would set Jack on finding his woman and kid, too.

  ***

  We all rode out, except Ghost, each of us taking a different direction as we headed further away from the property.

  “Got a BOLO on him.”

  My father’s words as we left did nothing to alleviate my fears. Visions of Naomi’s face and thoughts of the tiny little life that I hadn’t even known about that was nearly taken from me were enough to make my entire body vibrate with barely concealed fury.

  The BOLO—or be on the lookout—wasn’t going to be enough. I wasn’t sure that having the three cops who were on duty at the time on the lookout for a motorcycle was really going to help. Not at this point.

  The man was probably hiding away somewhere, trying to recover.

  None of the hospitals or clinics we’d checked had seen him, which meant either he wasn’t getting treated for his injuries—injuries I knew he had thanks to Naomi waking up and telling me what little
she was able to tell me before she fell back to sleep—or he was getting treated privately.

  Luckily, the local news stations were running the story about the countywide manhunt for the piece of shit, so we weren’t the only eyes on the road that night.

  But as minutes turned to hours and those hours multiplied, I knew it was time for more drastic measures.

  I’d just decided to call Jack back to see what else he could come up with, when the shine off of some chrome caught my eyes in the darkened alley next to the old emergency animal hospital.

  Since the animal hospital had closed down over a year and a half ago, I knew that nothing should be over there, let alone something so shiny. So, whatever it was probably wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Thinking I was chasing a crazy trail of hope, I pulled my bike over a block away and walked toward the alley.

  The moment I breached the alley’s entrance, I realized that my imagination hadn’t been messing with me. The flash of something shiny that I’d seen out of the corner of my eye had actually been the spokes of a motorcycle. One that I’d seen twice. Once when I’d pulled into the parking lot of the smokehouse, and another time when we all pulled over to check on the motorcyclist who had gone down and had died.

  It was distinctive. The rim of the tire was fuckin’ huge, and had to be uncomfortable to ride on with the sheer magnitude of the wheel and the tire itself.

  I found my phone without any conscious thought and was already calling my father back as I made my way further into the alley.

  There were four doors, two leading into the vacant former animal hospital, and two leading into an old furniture store that I was surprised hadn’t closed down right along with the animal hospital.

  “You found something?” my father asked into my ear.

  “At the old animal hospital on Tuttle,” I murmured quietly into my phone. “The doors to the hospital are open, as are the ones to the furniture place.”

  “Give us five, and we’ll check out both together.”

  I didn’t wait.

  I walked straight into the old hospital, and flipped the tactical light on at the end of my H&K forty-five.

  The gun felt comfortable in my hand, and somehow, I was able to maneuver throughout the building without my heart racing.

  I wanted this guy to know pain, I wanted him to feel some at my hands. I wanted him to suffer, day in and day out, for the rest of his natural born life. I wanted his experience in prison to be hell on earth and for some big guy to violate him in the shower. I wanted his parole denied each and every time it came up, dashing his hopes and leaving him a broken man.

  I wanted him to be a shell of a man, but I wanted him to live. I wanted him to have a front row seat to the shithole his life was going to be once I got finished with him.

  And I was confident that I would be able to make all of that happen for him.

  I knew a lot of people. Some good and some bad. And each and every one of them would help me with what I wanted to accomplish when it came to this guy’s quality of life for the rest of his years on this planet.

  I didn’t care how many favors I had to pull. I’d pull every last one of those mother fuckers until I had nothing left to pull.

  A sound at my back had me freezing, and just when I was about to aim my gun behind me, Tommy Tom, still in his goddamn scrubs, came up behind me. He had a gun similar to my own in his hand, and he was an altogether different man than the one I’d seen in the hospital telling me I was going to be a father.

  This one was lethal. He was scary. He was my brother, and I was glad to have him at my back.

  “Your father and Truth are in the furniture store checking it out. If I had to guess, this is the one I’d say he was in.”

  That was my guess, too.

  Maybe they left something behind, and…I froze, staring at the body lying on the floor.

  “Surely, it can’t be that easy,” Tommy Tom rumbled from behind me. At my six.

  “You took the words right out of my goddamn mouth,” I murmured. “Cover me.”

  Tommy Tom shifted, covering our backs, as he watched me approach the body.

  It took less than thirty seconds to confirm that this man was the Walton character I’d seen at the smokehouse. The same one who we were ninety-nine percent positive was the man responsible for assaulting Naomi.

  “He’s out,” I said, categorizing the shit laying around him in a heartbeat. Drugs, painkillers in particular, littered the floor. Saline. Gauze. Betadine. Alcohol. Syringes.

  I lifted my foot and kicked the man’s shoulder, causing him to moan and roll onto his back. His face was just as fucked up as the body parts I could see.

  And that’s when I had my suspicions confirmed. “Dog bites on his face. Arms. Chest. Likely some on his legs, too, but it doesn’t look like he got that far before he passed out.”

  Tommy Tom relayed the message to my father and the men that had followed him, and it wasn’t two minutes later that they all arrived.

  Each of us surrounded the man.

  “Seems anti-climactic.”

  That was said by Aaron, and Truth snorted.

  “We don’t always have to have shoot outs and car wrecks,” Aaron laughed under his breath. “This is actually damn nice. No getting shot at…”

  A gunshot rang out, and that was when I realized that he must have pulled a gun, because he was trying with all his might to raise it up and aim for me.

  He only succeeded in getting it up about an inch off the floor before it fell again.

  “You were saying?” I drawled, taking a step forward and placing my booted foot over the man’s wrist and then pressing down with the majority of my weight.

  We ignored his whimpering cries, and I twisted my foot viciously, extremely satisfied with the way his wrist snapped.

  “Dog bites are funny things,” Tommy Tom said, bending down to examine the cuts. “It’s crazy how infected they can get.”

  He picked up a pipe, rusted and covered in something that I couldn’t make out, and dragged it across the man’s wounds on his arms, ensuring that he would get an infection.

  The lacerations were seeping with blood, and I had to force myself not to pick the pipe up and whack the man across the head with it.

  He deserved it, but the wounds needed to coincide with the dog bites. If I added any more to them that didn’t fit, others might grow suspicious, and there was no way in hell I was implicating myself in this.

  I wasn’t stooping down to that level.

  I had really good intentions, too.

  I was going to walk away. I was going to give the man over to my father, the police chief. I was going to go back to that hospital. Force myself to stay away from him until he was in the care of the Mooresville Jail System.

  That all flew out the window when the man grinned at me.

  “Was gonna enjoy taking your woman.”

  My eyes dropped to the man on the floor.

  He was laying on the floor, broken and bleeding, and yet he still had a fuckin’ mouth on him.

  He was surrounded by six men who would like nothing better than to separate his face from his body, yet he still had the balls to say words that he knew would piss them off.

  I smiled.

  Then I kicked him in the face, ensuring he wouldn’t be talking any time soon.

  Mainly because he had a broken jaw, and likely he would need reconstructive surgery to put it back together again.

  “That’s enough,” my father said. “If you fuck him up anymore, I’ll have to do reports, and you know how much I hate paperwork.”

  I walked off without another word, and went to the hospital where my woman waited.

  ***

  “I don’t want him next to my woman,” I growled at the doctor. “I don’t care how critical he is. You either get him gone off this fuckin’ floor, or I’m taking my woman somewhere she’ll feel safe.”

  “S
ean,” my father started.

  I turned and gave my father a look that he couldn’t misconstrue.

  “No,” I seethed. “She’s not going to continue to feel scared. She deserves to be somewhere that’s going to give her that sense of calm she needs to heal.”

  My father held up a hand. “What about moving him to the room I saw closest to the nurses’ station? That way he still has the medical attention he needs, but he’s not so close to her as to cause her any worry.” He hesitated. “You want the man healthy, don’t you, Son?”

  Something about the way my father said that had me smiling.

  “Of course, I want him healthy,” I said with a straight face. “That’ll be perfectly acceptable.”

  “But, Sir,” the nurse in charge said. “That room is occupied…”

  I turned my head so my eyes could take her in. She was definitely nervous, but I could tell she didn’t want the extra hassle of having to deal with this.

  “Then un-occupy it,” I snapped.

  Her mouth slammed shut.

  I walked away and didn’t stop until I was outside of Naomi’s room where she was still asleep.

  My father stopped next to me, and I crossed my arms and stared at her from the doorway.

  She looked so tiny in that large hospital bed.

  “After calling around on the labels and packaging surrounding him, it looks like he got some antibiotics from the feed store for his ‘goat,’” my dad said. “Injected himself, and then passed out from a fever.”

  Dog and cat bites were notorious for that. Although it’d been only fourteen hours since Butterfinger had protected Naomi, it was enough for the bites she’d inflicted on him to become infected. There were different types of bacteria in a dog’s mouth that just didn’t work with the human body.

  “He got enough penicillin in him to knock out a horse,” Jessie put in his two cents. “What the fuck would possess him to think that he knew that this was the right amount that he needed? The man weighs two hundred pounds, at most. There’s no fuckin’ way in the world that he should’ve ever gotten enough for a five-hundred-pound goat. And who the fuck thinks that a goat weighs five hundred pounds? That should’ve set off their radar right there.”

  “I’ve done that before,” Fender interjected, breaking into the conversation. “I was having some problems with some…areas. So, I went to the store, told them I had a calf that was sickly. Got fucked up on some fence. Then shot that shit into my junk once I got home. I was out for like six hours as I tried to recover from the pain.”