Authors: Lauren Gilley
“Now, go, baby. Out the window. Go now, please. Go get your Uncle Wynn.”
He started to argue, but she shook her head. She was crying now. There was a loud splintering sound, as the door began to give.
“I won’t let him hurt you. If you love me, all you can do is run, Michael.”
And so he ran. He shoved up the window, rolled out onto the slanted porch roof, his eyes filling with hot tears. The cold night air stung his face, caught in his lungs. On all fours, he scrambled to the corner of the roof, to the gutter and the drain pipe. He’d always been a good climber, and though his fingers were fast going numb in this frigid February air, he took a firm handhold and shimmied down the pipe, thumping down onto the crunchy grass.
He heard Mama yell, up in his bedroom.
Oh, God, Mama…
Uncle Wynn. He had to get to Uncle Wynn.
Warm golden panels of light fell from the house windows onto the frosted lawn. Michael took off at a sprint toward the main house, sucking in huge lungfuls of the bitter chill. Fast, faster, the fastest he’d ever run, gasping, reaching, heart ready to burst.
He tripped going up the porch steps, fell against the door.
“Uncle Wynn!” He beat with both fists against the wooden panel. “Uncle Wynn, help!”
There was a thundering of feet beyond the door, and then the panel swung wide, and there was Uncle Wynn, framed by lamplight, the hulking brute Caesar at his side.
“What’s the matter, boy?”
“Mama!” Michael gasped. “The men…” He couldn’t catch his breath enough to speak. “They’re hurting her–”
Uncle Wynn scowled ferociously and reached to the side, toward the umbrella stand just inside the door, drawing back with a shotgun clenched in one big square hand.
Caesar stepped through the door onto the porch, licked Michael’s face and hands with his giant pink tongue.
“It’s your daddy, isn’t it?” Uncle Wynn said. “It’s John, isn’t it?”
“Him and somebody else.”
Uncle Wynn pulled the door shut, and laid a hand briefly on top of Michael’s head. “You stay right here, little man. You stand right here, and you hold onto Caesar’s collar, like this.” He moved Michael’s hand, placed it on the leather strap around the Dane’s thick neck. “Don’t you step away from him for a second.”
To the dog, he said, “Caesar, stay. Watch.” And then he leapt down off the porch and took off at a dead run for the guest cabin, shotgun swinging as he moved. He was amazingly swift for a man who wore overalls and saggy jeans all the time. He flew across the grass, and his white t-shirt floated up the steps of the other cabin, disappearing through the door like a ghost.
Michael curled his fingers tight around Caesar’s collar, but the dog never moved, just made a high whimpering sound. Michael leaned into his sleek, warm side, feeling like he might faint, breath pluming in the cold night air. He rested his head against the great beast’s face, felt the slickness of the short black coat on his skin.
And then he heard the shotgun go off, ripping explosions of sound that shattered the night.
Michael woke and knew that he’d been dreaming. His eyes snapped open and with a jolt, he felt himself returning from his very worst nightmare – the one that had actually taken place. He lay in his own bed, in his grown man’s body, and the ceiling was dark and grainy above him. He felt the familiar softness of his sheets against his naked skin. Smelled the familiar tang of lemon Pine-Sol.
He hadn’t dreamed of his mother in a long time; it had been years since he’d returned to that awful night in his sleep, reliving the horror in aching detail. Why had he tonight?
He knew the answer, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge it. There was no sense comparing tiny frightened Holly to his long-dead, tiny frightened mother when he didn’t know the whole story there, and wasn’t likely to get it.
Extending an arm through the dark, he found his smokes and lighter on the nightstand, where he always left them. Lit one by feel, the momentary spark of the lighter illuminating the cigarette and his deeply callused hands as he cupped them around the flame. Then it was dark again, and the nicotine was going down into his lungs. It was a nasty habit, smoking, one he hadn’t picked up until he’d joined the MC. There’d been a tremor in his hands, at first, because it hadn’t mattered that he was willing to do certain things; his body betrayed some sort of untouchable inner nerves. He’d turned to cigarettes, and they’d become habit, though the tremors had long since faded into nothingness.
He smoked in the dark, eyes tracing his bedroom from memory. Through the shadows, he knew just where the mirror stood in its floor-length frame, where the lamp was on the desk, the angle of the chair at the desk, the one where he draped his cut every night. He knew both nightstands, one on either side, and the old plate he used as an ash tray – he reached for it now. The shadows were deeper in the places where the en suite bath and closet doors stood open. All the old furniture from the house his parents had shared, the first nine years of his life. The bed where he’d been conceived, not out of love, but out of animal need and marital obligation.
He couldn’t see much sense in buying a whole house full of new furniture when this stuff had been sitting in storage for years, waiting for him to grow up. And so it didn’t matter where he lived; the ghost of his parents awful, wrong life together was a spirit he couldn’t exorcise.
The alarm went off with a screech. Six. Time to start the day. He set the burning cigarette on the edge of the makeshift ashtray and sat up. Maybe if he found out what was bothering Holly, dreams of his mother would stop bothering him.
**
The blinds were open in the chapel at nine a.m., and fresh stripes of sunlight lay like bright ribs across the ornate table, lighting everyone’s face from beneath in a way that made them all look younger. Ghost held a lot of morning church meetings like this, unlike his predecessor, James, who’d preferred late afternoon and evening. Ghost didn’t dick around; he got stuff done.
“Alright,” the Lean Dogs president said, once he’d taken a deep drag off his cigarette, “I’m going to see Collier today. They’re finally letting him have visitors, and there’s things I need to know from him, so we can lay this whole rat thing to rest in a permanent way.”
Across the table from Michael, in the VP chair, Walsh said, “The PD dragged the river,” his light eyes glittering faintly in the sunlight, his features inscrutable as always. The Englishman played his cards tight to the vest, and Michael approved of that. He’d voted “yea” a couple of weeks ago, when it came time to choose a new VP.
“Yeah, well…” Ghost gestured to the air and smiled wryly, an expression reflected by some of the others.
They all knew what the cops had found when they’d dragged the river: nothing. Mason Stephens and Ronnie Archer’s bodies weren’t there, not even in little pieces, because Collier hadn’t been the one to kill them and dump them.
“They haven’t been knocking around here anymore,” Ghost continued, “and that’s a good thing.” He cast a look down the table. “Ratchet, what else have we got?”
The secretary flipped through his notes, tapping a handwritten line with a finger. The sun was blinding where it struck the shiny lotioned sides of his shaved head. “A dealer reached out a couple days ago, called in on the hotline” – the prepaid cellphone Ratchet kept to manage all their drug business – “and wants to move the area. He heard he’d have to set that up with us, so this was just a reaching out. Wants to meet, sometime soon. Thought I’d handle the initial before I bring him to sit down with you,” he offered, helpfully.
Ghost nodded. “That’s fine. When you doing it?”
“Today. This afternoon at two.”
Another nod. “Take Merc for backup.”
At the foot of the table, Ghost’s son-in-law gave a little salute of acknowledgement.
Michael felt his stomach sour just at the sight of the guy. Mercy Lécuyer was a big man, and rather than compensate for that by serving his president with grace and dignity, he allowed himself to become the center of attention. He put his own wants and needs above those of the club – his specific want being Ghost’s twenty-two-year-old daughter. Mercy had stirred up too much drama. He was too cocky. Twice he’d caused his president grief of a variety that Michael would have died before bringing to the club table. He had no discretion, that’s what it was. Mercy liked what he did – the torturing; it was fun for him. He was loud and Cajun and long-haired and just…annoying.
“Anything else?” Ghost asked, and Ratchet shook his head.
“Just the usual maintenance stuff.”
“Okay, then. I’m all about keeping the burden light for right now. The longer we can lay low, the faster the shit will blow over. I don’t want to start anything or stir shit up. Nice and quiet, for the time being. Everybody good with that?”
There were choruses of “yes.”
Ghost nodded, smacking a hand down on the tabletop before he pushed his chair back. “Good. I’ll let everyone know what Collier says.”
As the rest of the Dogs got to their feet, small conversations broke out, mundane little inquiries and bits of gossip. Ghost’s son, Aidan, and his best friend, Tango, dove right back into their pre-church discussion about what to do with a difficult bike they had over at the shop. RJ called something to Mercy that made him laugh. Rottie helped the aging Hound up from his chair with a quick, deft touch under the arm that everyone else probably missed.
The club had gone back to normal. With the war with the Carpathians at a rest, the rats in the ground, and Collier in jail and trying, willingly, to take the fall for four murders to keep the heat off the club, the Dogs were returning to a calmer routine, the energy at a sustainable, everyday level.
And just like normal, there wasn’t any chitchat aimed Michael’s way as church broke up. What did he need any of that for? If he wanted to chew the fat, he’d make a trip out to see Uncle Wynn. It wasn’t in his nature to be talkative. People never really cared what he had to say; so why try? He’d spent too many years learning how to be so perfectly silent, that he wasn’t sure he even knew how to have a conversation anymore.
He left the chapel silently, and went down the hall to the sprawling bar and lounge atmosphere of the common room, catching Ghost alone as he dug a soda from the cooler at the bar. Michael drew up before him and waited, because that was what polite sergeants did, for his president to acknowledge him.
Ghost didn’t startle, but there was a moment when his face blanked over, and Michael knew that a lesser man would have jumped.
“Oh, hey,” Ghost said, popping the tab on his Coke, shaking little droplets off his thumb. “You took care of it?”
He nodded. “Yes. But there was something else.” Quickly, with sparse detail, Michael relayed the murder of Carly the Bell Bar waitress.
“I saw that on the news,” Ghost said, frowning. “Shit, you were there? Why the hell didn’t you bring that up in there?” Gesture toward the chapel.
For the first time since patching into this chapter, Michael felt a shred of doubt. Why
hadn’t
he brought it up? He wasn’t mute, after all. “It just didn’t seem like club business,” he said with a shrug.
Ghost kept frowning. “Yeah. Probably it’s not.” He made a little face that Michael took to mean
that was no excuse, bring that sort of thing up next time
. “I’ll talk to Ratchet about it, see if he can find anything out. What were you doing there that late?”
When you were dumping bodies and shit
, his gaze added.
“I was on my way home, and I saw the ambulance.”
“And the squad cars?” Ghost said. “Damn. Please tell me you’d already gotten rid of the girl.”
“Of course.” But the question stung, worse than he would have expected. Ghost had always relied on him, and never had to second guess anything he’d ever done for the club. To be doubted…when he’d stopped at the bar for personal reasons, no less…that was like getting rapped across the knuckles.
Ghost was staring at him, eyes narrowing, expression contemplative. “You alright? You look tired.”
“I’m fine.”
But Ghost wasn’t buying it. “Things have been crazy around here the last couple of months. If you wanna take some time off, stay home a few days, maybe you ought to.”
Another insult, this one worse than the first. “I don’t need any time off.”
Ghost made a face like he disagreed. “Everybody needs some time off. Take it if you want it. All this killing will kill you.”