The Road Back (The Unknowns Motorcycle Club Book 3) (7 page)

CHAPTER 11

Amanda’s face felt like it was being nibbled on by fire ants. The open-handed slap Marco had delivered that caused the chair to topple over had been vicious. She’d seen stars for a moment and then she had fallen over and struck the floor. She’d tightened up her shoulder to save her head from hitting the floor, and that was the only thing that had kept her from getting knocked out.

But now she was motionless on the floor, still tied to the chair and helpless to do anything but look at Alex as Marco counted down by tens from thirty. Alex looked like he’d been through hell. The lower half of his white tee shirt was nothing more than a crimson stain, and there was a pool of blood forming around his right leg. Still, despite all of that, the look of determination on his face was stronger than anything she had felt since Marco had stepped through her front door dressed as the mailman.

She wanted to at least be able to reach out to him, to extend her hand to let him know that she wanted to be in his arms—that it meant the world to her that he had come for her. But she couldn’t even do that because her hands were tied behind her back and—

Only, something was different now.

When Marco and his two goons had brought her here, Marco had immediately tied her to one of the two wooden chairs that had been in the place. There was nothing else in the old building except a few empty boxes and a few decrepit car parts. She’d been tied to the chair with rope Marco had taken out of the car.

The chair was made of wood, the back consisting of decorative spindles. The rope had been threaded through the spindles and around her wrists. The knots had been tight, and she’d started to feel a pins and needles sensation in both hands as the blood circulation had been slightly cut off.

But that was different now. She could move her hands freely, although they were still bound together. Her heart felt a spark of hope when she realized that the rope was no longer restricted by the wooden spindles of the chair. The entire back of the chair had broken down the center when the chair had toppled over. The spindles hung loosely from the frame of the chair, allowing her to move her arms.

“Twenty seconds,” Marco said.

Amanda tested her shoulders by behind, her hands awkwardly trying to push herself as much as she could from the floor. She bent her legs and tried to use those, too. She did all of this slowly, barely moving at all as she locked eyes with Alex. He looked sad, and she wished she could tell him that she wished she hadn’t have asked him to leave. Of course, she
could
tell him that, but what good would it do now?

As she tested the rope and the limits of her body, she saw one of the guns that Alex had dropped. It sat four feet from her, almost directly between her and Marco. With his back to her, he didn’t see it, nor did he care about it. He was far too concerned with taunting Alex.

“Ten seconds,” Marco said.

As quietly as she could, Amanda brought her legs up to her chest. She stretched her arms down, her shoulders straining from the effort, until they were under her butt. She then brought her arms forward, under her feet in a very tight fetal sort of position. When her arms were free of her feet and in front of her, she relaxed her legs.

Alex was watching her the entire time. She saw that he realized what she intended to do and was terrified.

With her arms in front of her, she was no longer bound to the chair. Slowly, she got to her knees. When her left knee popped, she was sure that Marco had heard it and the he would turn around to see her freed from the chair. But he stared hard at Alex, waiting for that last ten seconds to expire.

Amanda walked on her knees, taking two small steps forward. As she leaned forward, she nearly shrieked when Marco spoke.

“Time’s up,” he said. Last chance, Alex.” He then reached behind his back for the gun. When he did, Amanda froze, certain that his head would turn just enough to see her. But his head remained locked forward, his eyes on Alex.

Alex said nothing and had even made an effort to not look at Amanda, not wanting to give her away.

Amanda’s hand fell on the gun just as Marco freed his own. Marco was quicker, as his hands weren’t tied together at the wrist. But still, Amanda was able to bring the gun up. She leveled it as best she could, her arms trembling.

She gathered her nerve and took aim just as Marco placed his gun to Alex’s left knee.

The building was filled with a gun blast.

Amanda screamed. The gun kicked in her hands, and for a terrifying moment, she was sure that it had bucked just enough to throw her shot off.

But the hole that she had placed between Marco’s shoulder blades said otherwise. And because she had pure adrenaline racing through her veins and had lived in utter terror for the last six hours of her life, she pulled the trigger again… and again.

The blasts were deafening in the small space. She watched almost amazed as another hole appeared in the base of Marco’s neck and then another near the top of his head. His body finally canted forward and toppled to the ground.

When he hit, his head was less than a foot away from Alex’s injured knee.

Amanda screamed again as she got to her feet and raced over to Alex.

“Are you okay?” she asked, her voice shredded with tears and panicked gasps of breath.

“Yes,” he said. “I can’t believe…can’t believe you did that.”

She sat by him in the floor and kissed him on the forehead. He reached out to her with his good hand and stroked her hand.

“Okay,” he said. “So…I might not be okay. I’m losing a lot of blood. My sight is getting swimmy. You need to call someone…”

“An ambulance,” she said. “There’s two cell phones in the car they brought. I can use that to call the amb—,”

“No ambulance,” he said. “That will be too official. Not yet. I need you to call a woman named Karla. It’s Jameson’s wife and she… she can help.”

Amanda nodded, understanding full well what could potentially happen to Alex if cops got involved. She assumed Alex had helped orchestrate scenarios to avoid the cops before. Maybe this Karla woman and Jameson could help them without the aid of cops—or, at the very least, come up with a concrete story as to what had happened here that would keep Alex away from suspicion.

“Okay,” she said. “I can do that.” She stood up and headed for the door, not able to take her eyes off of him. “God, Alex…please don’t die. Stay here… stay with me.”

He smiled sleepily. “I’m not going anywhere.”

But as she walked out of the door and he succumbed to the pain and the vague darkness that was beginning to tug at his vision, he wondered if he had maybe just lied to her.

CHAPTER 12

Amanda was sitting in a waiting room chair half asleep with a magazine in her lap when the doctor approached her. Realizing that he was likely bringing her the update she had been waiting for over the last three hours, she sat up and wiped away the tiredness with one sweep of her hand across her face.

“How is he?” She asked.

“He lost a lot of blood, but he’s going to be okay. He’s understandably very weak, but other than that, he’s out of the woods.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

“We’re going to be taking him into surgery in a few hours to try to repair his knee. We’ve taken the bullet out, but there’s considerable damage.”

“How is he right now?” Amanda asked.

“You can go see him, if you like. He’s medicated, but I think he should be able to talk for a while.”

“Thank you,” she said again.

She followed the doctor out of the waiting room and down the adjoining hallway, through double doors. “Room 237,” the doctor said, gesturing her down the hallway.

Amanda headed that way, and when she walked into the room, she prepared herself for the worst. Yet when she walked to Alex’s bedside, it wasn’t as bad as she thought. He had an IV running into his left arm, and his right leg was elevated and heavily bandaged. He wore a hospital gown which was perhaps the most shocking thing of all. That, combined with the faded look in his eyes when he looked to her, was more shocking than anything else.

“Hey,” he said in a groggy voice.

“Hey yourself,” Amanda said, kneeling by the right side of the bed and taking his hand. “How are you feeling?”

“Better than I should, I think. I know my knee is hurting like crazy, but I can’t feel it. They’re giving me some good drugs.”

“I can see that,” she said.

“How did everything work out?” He asked. “Have you talked to Karla or Jameson?”

“I have,” she said. “Everything is okay.”

She then told him about everything that had happened after he blacked out. He hadn’t lasted very long after he had asked her to call Karla. He had passed out, coming to here and there in flashes of consciousness, but had no sense of what had been happening.

Amanda had run out to Marco’s car and retrieved one of the cell phones. When Alex had realized that he didn’t know Karla’s number, he asked Amanda to then run up the road to where the motorcycles were parked. She brought back Alex’s phone twenty minutes later only to find that he had gone under for the first time.

Terrified that he might die from blood loss, she had found Karla’s number of Alex’s phone. Karla had still been at the hotel, waiting on whatever ride Jameson had decided to send her. After Amanda had filled her in, Karla had called Jameson and the hour that passed between the end of that call and when Karla showed up had been the longest hour of Amanda’s life. Alex had come in and out of consciousness while the puddle of blood beneath him grew larger and his skin became paler.

When Karla arrived, she was driving a clunker of a car, an old Buick that sounded like a fighter plane under the hood. She and Amanda had carefully moved Alex into the back seat which had already been covered in a plastic sheet to keep the blood out of the seat. “Not for saving the interior,” Karla said, “but for easy disposal if this whole thing goes to hell and the cops end up checking out this car.”

But it had not gone to hell. Now, nearly four hours after Karla had arrived, everything seemed to have worked out. In the end, someone would eventually discover the bodies of Slim, Marco, and Marco’s two thugs down by the state storage building. Karla had drove Jameson’s bike to the hospital, following Amanda in the car and thus removing any link between Jameson or the Unknowns to the crime scene. There was, of course, the matter of the ample amount of Alex’s blood at the scene. Jameson had asked for direction to the building and said that he would have it taken care of. Amanda had asked how, but Jameson wouldn’t share the details. But she thought he knew what it meant. She thought there would be a few bikers involved, along with some gasoline and a book of matches. Sure, it sounded like something out of a bad TV show, but she wouldn’t put such a thing past Jameson. She had only spoken to him on the phone briefly, but it was enough to let her know that he was a dangerous man that knew how to handle his business.

She went on to tell him that they had also taken the pistol that Amanda had shot Marco with, removing her from the scene, too. Karla had placed it into one of her suitcases and had ensured her that the next person to see it would be Jameson.

As Amanda waited for an update on Alex, Jameson had called her. He had spoken calmly and smoothly, and Amanda got the idea that he had to make these sorts of calls all of the time.

“Even if the cops do smell something funny about the scene at that building,” he had told her, “I don’t think they’ll do much looking. Slim has a record, and Marco has a nasty reputation everywhere. A few background checks will show that. I bet you anything the local PD will see it as some gang thing that got out of hand and call it a day. You and Alex should be safe.”

She relayed all of this to Alex as she held his hand at his bedside. He nodded on occasion, but seemed far too tired to actually speak.

“There’s one other thing,” Amanda said.

“What’s that?”

“He said you’re free of any obligations to him. He wishes you the best.” She paused here and then gave him a hesitant smile. “Actually, he wished
us
the best.”

“Us,” Alex said with a lopsided smile. “Sounds nice.”

“That’s an entirely different conversation,” she said. “You rest now. You have a surgery to get through.”

He nodded and gave her a playful thumbs-up gesture.

She stood up and kissed him softly on the corner of his mouth. “Can I sit here with you until they take you to surgery?”

“Please do,” he said.

She smiled at him and sat in the guest chair by the bed. By the time she had gotten comfortable, Alex was asleep.