Welcome to Sugartown

by Carmen Jenner

  “And I spent three years in prison for you, now we’re even.”

  “What are you gonna do, Moose? Shoot me?”

  “I’d rather not, but I don’t see another way around it.”

  “I won’t breathe a word, brother, I swear it.”

  “Don’t know if I’m willing to take that risk, Kick.”

  “Come on, man, I just killed our fucking VP—”

  “Your VP. I never made patch on account of me being behind bars.”

  “You really think I’m gonna rat you out? If it gets out that I killed a brother me and everyone I’ve ever met is as good as fucking dead.”

  “You gonna run instead?”

  “You gonna let me?”

  I shake my head. “You run and they’re gonna know you had something to do with it. The way I see it, you got only one option. Bandidos have a chapter in Byron Bay. Fake an ambush.”

  “There’ll be retaliation.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “You’ll have to knock me around a little, otherwise they’d never believe it.”

  “Oh, I’ll knock you around, alright. It’d be my pleasure.”

  After checking on Ana—who is still shaken enough to let me help her get dressed and hold her in my arms for a moment before shrugging out of my grip and falling to her hands and knees to throw up—Kick and I work quickly to make the scene look like a set-up.

  When it comes time to rough him up, I can feel Ana watching me like a hawk. I hate the fact that she’s seen what she has tonight. I hate that I completely lost control around her and gunned down a man not three feet from her side. But, most of all, I hate that she’s seen this side of me—the side that proves my degeneracy. I also hate that another man has had his fingers inside my woman, and that if I hadn’t acted quickly it could have been so, so much worse.

  I turn toward her. She’s studying me like I’m someone she doesn’t know, which I guess is partly true, but still, her eyes volley back and forth between Kick and I like she’s waiting for another fight to break out. I know that isn’t the case. Kick is dead unless we do this, and he knows it, too. “Baby girl, look away.”

  I slam my fist into the side of Kick’s face while his attention is still on her. He rocks back on his heels, but I don’t allow him time to recover. I beat him again and again until he lies motionless on the ground. I’m pretty sure I’ve broken his nose, fractured his cheekbone and cracked a few of his ribs, and while I may have relished that first punch as if it would give me back the three years I spent inside after taking the rap for him, I didn’t revel in any of the rest of it.

  At one time, Kick had been my only real friend. A part of me missed him. A part of me resented him, but no part of me wanted to do him grievous bodily harm. He had, after all, killed a brother for me, and if the club ever found out what had really gone down here, they’d make him an example. And let me tell you, you don’t ever wanna be the example. You’d pray for the devil himself to take you before the Angels had their way with you.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ana

  The nurse gives me an uneasy smile as she leaves the room with a promise to return with more bandages. All our other wounds have been tended to. My fractured forearm would be in a cast for another six weeks, and the cuts on both our foreheads had only been superficial, but the gravel rash on my arm was bleeding like crazy. My jacket had to be cut away because blood had dried and fused my skin to the leather, and I wore a paper hospital gown while the nurse pried the remaining bits of gravel and debris from my skin.

  Elijah grabs my hand and squeezes as he mutters for the millionth time since getting off the bike in front of the hospital “I’m so sorry, baby.”

  I squeeze his hand back, lifelessly—on account of the painkillers, or the fact that something has broken inside me tonight, I’m not sure. I don’t say anything in return. I don’t want to, and I don’t have time, because the nurse comes back wielding bandages, and begins sluicing more fluid over the wound, and extracting more pieces of road from my arm.

  Elijah—no, Ethan, because despite the insanity of what happened on that road, I hadn’t missed the fact that they’d called him that, several times—rises from his seat beside me and says, “I’m just gonna go make a phone call, tell your folks we’re okay.”

  He was calling my dad? Was he completely freaking nuts? I give him a horrified look, at least I think it was horrified. The Endone the nurse had given me probably makes me look like a schizophrenic koala bear. Elijah/Ethan/Moose shoots me a meaningful look, smiles at the nurse and clasps my face in his hands. I don’t have time to react, but I think I probably would have pulled away if it weren’t for the drugs clouding my brain. “You must have hit your head harder than you thought, baby girl.”

  I think he’s angry I’m putting a chink in the armour of his precious ruse. When we’d hobbled into the emergency room he’d sprung into this story of how we’d been out for a carefree night ride and hit a pothole and come off the bike. He’d made no mention of being run off the road by a group of vicious biker fucks who’d tried to rape me and torture him. He made no mention of the fact that he’d blown a man’s head off and beat another within an inch of his life. The way the lies had rolled off his tongue had made me sick because he was so damn good at it. He’d been lying a long time, it seemed.

  As he stares at me, waiting for his words to sink in, I suddenly remember the phone call. How stupid of me to forget. He’s not calling my dad; he’s just calling “the club” with an anonymous tip that one of their boys is broken and bloody and tied to a motorcycle in the middle of nowhere. I smile and nod and play along because I know there’s something off about him right now, as if that isn’t the fudging understatement of the century, and I’m worried that he might not step outside and make that phone call after all and right now I really, really need to be away from him.

  “Be right back,” he says to the nurse and shuts the door to my room behind him.

  Once I’m certain he’s gone I reach out with a shaking hand and grab the nurse’s hand. I look at her name badge and her friendly, sweet face. “Jane, does that door have a lock on it?”

  “No, but I can alert security if you need me to?”

  I shake my head. If Elijah can’t get to me through security he’ll likely freak out and start thinking with his fists and, as far as I want to be from him right now, I don’t want him going back to jail. “Do you think we could shift rooms?”

  “Are you in danger, Miss Belle?”

  I ignore her question and rummage through my bag for my phone. “No. I’d just really rather not see him right now.”

  “Do you have someone else to come and pick you up?”

  I nod and Jane places a wide sticky bandage over my arm and gently pats it into place. “You’re all set here.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll switch off the lights and tell him you’ve gone in for a CT scan. That’s the most I can do without calling security.”

  “Thanks.”

  I hit the call button on my phone and after three rings she picks up, sounding breathless. “You had better be calling me with details or the next time I see you I’m going to club you over the head with my battery-operated friend here.”

  “Holly, I need you to come pick me up.”

  We pull out from the parking lot and head toward the town’s exit. The same road I travelled on with Elijah just a few hours ago. Funny how so much can change in such a short amount of time. After all my paperwork was signed and I was given the hospital’s okay to leave, Jane had snuck both Holly and I out of the service entrance. We’d climbed into Holly’s Peugeot and hightailed it out of there without being seen. Or, at least, I thought we’d gone unnoticed, but if I was correct, the headlight tailing us belonged to Elijah.

  “Okay, I don’t want to alarm you but I think we’re being followed,” Holly said glancing between her rear-view and my stoic face.

  “I know.”

  “Should I pull over? M
ake him grovel on his knees?”

  “Just drive.”

  “What the hell happened? Two hours ago you were pledging your love and preparing to hand over your virginity with a big red bow and now you’re avoiding him?”

  “We didn’t have an accident.”

  “Yeah, I got that much. What’s with the super secret squirrel act?”

  “Elijah used to belong to the Hell’s Angels.”

  For a moment I think she’s hasn’t heard me properly but then her screech of, “GET THE FUCK OUT!” fills the car and I want to cry, but I think the Endone’s numbed my brain cells, too. Suddenly, all I want to do is sleep away this nightmare and wake up healed and as far as possible from the shit storm Elijah’s dragged me into.

  “We were chased and sideswiped, held at gunpoint. One of them tried to rape me.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? Are you alright?”

  “I wish,” I whisper, and feel tears finally prick my eyes until I’m sobbing again like I was on the side of that road.

  “Ana, what should I do?” Holly asks and I almost laugh, because in the fourteen years we’ve known one another I’ve never heard her sound so serious and afraid.

  “Just keep driving.”

  “You wanna go home?”

  “No. Dad will flip if he sees Elijah and I fighting on the front lawn with me looking like this. Take me to your place, please?”

  “Of course.” She looks at my shirt, the one Elijah had taken off once my jacket had been cut away and insisted I wear home. I can almost hear the wheels turning in her head. “You said tried? They didn’t, did they?”

  “No. Elijah stopped them.”

  “Of course he did,” she mutters and then clearly, after she’s thought some more about it she asks, “How?”

  I turn and give her a look that pretty much says, “Don’t ask” and she doesn’t.

  Elijah follows us all the way to Sugartown. He never once tries to overtake, or to force us to pull over by cutting us off. He drives straight past his motel and follows us down Holly’s street all the way to her driveway where he disappears as the automatic roller door slides down behind Holly’s Peugeot, separating us from the rest of the world.

  “You head on up to my room.” Holly gives me a fragile smile. “I’ll sort him out.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and wipe at my tears before opening the car door and standing on shaky legs.

  Holly’s house is newer than mine and built in a much nicer neighbourhood. It also has a garage adjoining the house and, as I climb the stairs, I’m thankful I don’t have to walk outside and right past him. I’m not sure I’m strong enough to keep running from him tonight. I don’t know what that says about me, but it’s the god’s honest truth. I’m afraid I’d melt into a puddle the minute he placed his hands on me, so I hurry up the stairs and duck into Holly’s bedroom where I gently slide the window overlooking the front lawn open.

  Thankfully, Elijah had the sense to wait for one of us to come to him and hasn’t tried banging down the front door to get to me, but he’s certainly not quiet when he says, “Where the hell is she, Holly?”

  “You can’t be here.”

  “I’m not leaving until I see she’s okay.”

  “What the hell makes you think she’d be okay after something like that?”

  “She told you?”

  “Yeah, dumb-arse, she told me. She tells me everything. Including the fact that she was about to cash in her V-card tonight for your sorry arse.”

  He sighs and squats down on the driveway, lacing his hands behind his head. “I gotta see her. You gotta let me talk to her.”

  “No. You’re lucky I’m not calling Bob, you shithead.” She sighs and grasps the collar of his jacket, yanking his face back to hers. “You have to go home and let her deal with everything she’s seen tonight. If she wants to talk to you after she’s had time to absorb it all, then Ana will come to you. Until then, you back the fuck off and leave her the hell alone.”

  “Yeah, okay,” he mutters, but I wonder whether he’s really absorbing anything she just said. He runs a hand over his face, hangs his head and stares at the pebbled drive. He looks so lost standing there, like a little boy. I lean forward in the darkness and, for a minute, I swear he sees me because he stiffens and then lets his head fall back with a shaky exhalation.

  “Holly,” he says as she’s walking away, “how’s her head?”

  “Her head is fine, Elijah. It’s probably feeling clearer than it has in weeks.” She backs up towards the house and says, “It’s her heart that’s been broken into itty bitty little pieces.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Elijah

  For an entire week Ana has avoided me. She’s disappeared every time I set foot inside the diner, so every time I’d be left with her very scary, tiny best friend breathing down my neck until I walked right back out that door. She hasn’t answered any of my calls or texts, though I’ve been blowing up her phone for days. I’m convinced she isn’t going to talk to me, ever again.

  When I’d set foot inside the garage Monday after the accident, Bob had bailed me up against the wall and hit me square in the face for driving like a fool. Apparently, Ana had given him the same version of the story as I’d given the nurses at the hospital. I don’t know why she was protecting me but I knew if Bob ever found out what had really happened on that back road, I’d be a dead man.

  Bob had lived the life; he’d escaped with his balls and his family intact. Unlike Ana, he’d known about my affiliation when I first came to work for him. He knew why I’d been sent to prison, he knew about the events that led to my release, and he also knew I was running as fast and as far away from that life as possible. If he knew I’d let that shit come within a foot of his daughter, of his family, he’d waste no time handing me over to the Angels, and I wouldn’t blame him.

  After it became apparent Ana wouldn’t see me, Bob had pulled me aside to pump me for more info regarding our wild Saturday night. I’d fed him some bullshit about being a stupid insensitive male and he’d laughed it off, and said if I didn’t try to pull his daughter out of the bitch-fit mood she’d been in since she dumped my sorry arse he’d dock my pay. I’m not fucking kidding. The bastard would do it, too.

  That’s how I wound up here at ten am on a Saturday, watching Sammy’s Little Rugby League team dominate their competition. I would have been barracking from the sidelines but his sister doesn’t know I’m here yet, and I don’t want to frighten her off before I get the chance to speak to her.

  When I sidle up beside her I cup my hands over my mouth and shout out to my little mate anyway. “GO SAMMY!”

  Several parents give me dirty looks and I feel like flipping them off, but I know that won’t help my case with Ana so I ignore them and wave at the awkward six-year-old who’s waving madly at me from the middle of the field.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Ana mutters. “He’ll be distracted now that you’re here.”

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Come on, baby girl, you gonna shut me out forever?”

  “Maybe.” She looks at me with so much hatred that my heart hurts. Then she drops her voice to a whisper, “It depends how long it takes me to get rid of the image of you slaughtering a man inches from my face.”

  I glance around. No one was close enough to hear that, they’re all focused on the game, but I’m not taking any more chances out here in the open. I grab her elbow and cart her off to the brick building housing the public toilets. Even from the outside they smell like shit, and there’s graffiti everywhere and a couple of condom wrappers littering the ground. I press her against the wall. “What the fuck is going on with you, Ana?”

  “What’s going on with me? I had a gun held to my head last week. I had a guy trying to rape me because I was caught in the wrong place with the wrong person, and you wanna know what the fuck is wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with you, Elijah
? Or should I say Ethan?”

  I feel myself frown at the mention of the name. I hate the sound of it on her tongue, like it belongs to another man. In a very real way, it does.

  “Oh, you didn’t think I heard that part, did you?”

  “Ethan Carr is my birth name, I changed it when I got out to help me disappear. It’s awfully fucking hard to pretend you don’t exist when you’re still carting around ID with your family name on it.”

  “I don’t understand why you’d have to disappear in the first place? Why were you sent to prison? And why did those men think you were a rat?”

  “You wanna know what got me sent away?”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind knowing the reason why I was almost killed last week.”

  “Before Kick and I could patch in we had to make it through our initiation. Some DA had information that the club needed. We had to go and rough her up for the info—”

  She narrows her eyes. “Rough her up?”

  “Assault, Ana.”

  “You beat a woman because your club told you to?”

  “We were supposed to. None of it sat right with me, or Kick, but we had people waiting outside to make sure we’d go through with it. Once we entered the house we were supposed to tie her up and make her talk, then the boys would come in and take care of the rest. But we tripped some kind of alarm. She was sleeping with a cop who drew on us. I bought Kick some time to get away.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what the brothers do for one another. He had three priors, I had one. He was my best friend. Stupidly, at the time, I thought it made more sense to protect him than to protect myself. So I got three years in a cell for breaking and entering and battering a police officer and Kick walked free.

  “While I was on the inside, the club came to see me. They said once I got out, I’d be patched in. They asked me to do things to some of the other prisoners, small acts of retaliation. I never got caught, was never even suspected, then one day a riot broke out because I made the wrong hit.”