Bones' Bandit (Thunder Bastards MC - Seattle #3)

Chapter 1

BANDIT

Ishouldn't be here. I really shouldn't — past midnight, in the nurses' office — but they make it so easy. They never lock the door, and the system password is on a note taped inside the first desk drawer.

I log in and type the name they tell us to use for my favorite patient. Megan Wick. Nothing comes up. I pause, then try the name she always swore was really hers. Darling. Bingo. Darling Wick is in the system.

And now I'm confused. Why did the doctor insist we call her by a name that isn't even on her file? The poor woman was messed up enough without us adding to it.

Except she didn't seem messed up at all when they checked her in. Feisty and mad as hell, sure — but as far as I could tell, she was playing with a full deck.

Things were different by the time she was shipped out to another facility.

By then she only surfaced in short lucid bursts.

She was so far under the meds when I helped load her into the ambulance that her words came out soft at the edges, like wet paper.

And still she found the strength to lock her fingers around my wrist and beg.

God, her grip. She held on like I was the last solid thing in her world.

You have to tell my boys they took me.

I know they'll come get me out. But someone has to tell the bastards where I am.

Her eyes were full of tears she wouldn't let fall.

Please. Promise me, Riley.

I promised. What else do you do but promise a frightened old woman what she needs to hear? That's the job. It's supposed to come with kindness.

I'm pretty sure she was confused. And yet here I am, hunting for her sons, keeping a stupid promise to a woman who probably doesn't even remember asking me to make it.

The file loads. I lean in.

Wick, Darling J. I scroll. Widowed. Okay — no husband, but a widow can still have kids, grandkids, somebody who sends a get-well card or calls on a Sunday.

I look for next of kin. The field is empty.

Emergency contact. Empty.

Authorized visitors. Empty.

I go back to the top and read it slower, like the words will rearrange themselves into a name, a number, anything I can do something with.

Nothing. There isn't one person on this earth Brightmoor could have called if she'd died in that bed.

I sit back.

Here's the thing I hate about myself. The first thing I feel isn't sad. It's foolish.

Because of course, of course. There are no boys.

There was never anyone to tell. A confused woman grabbed the nearest warm body and made it promise her something out of a dream — and I, exhausted, broke, twenty-one and apparently starving to matter to somebody, I let her crawl into my head and live there four days.

I risked my job. My spot in the program I'm bleeding myself dry to pay for.

All of it. For a sentence with nothing behind it.

Tell my boys. It doesn't look like she ever had a single one.

I'm reaching for the mouse, already drafting the lecture I'll give myself on the bus home, when I hear them.

Voices. In the hall. Coming this way.

I don't think. I move. The chair rolls; I catch it before it can clatter, and I'm into the supply room off the back of the office with the door pulled behind me before the voices turn into people.

It isn't even a room. It's a closet — shelves of saline, rubbing alcohol, ink, printer paper.

I fold myself into the gap between a stack of bins and the wall and make myself a small, stupid, breathing thing in the dark.

The office light flicks on. There's a gap under the door I didn't pull all the way shut. A thread of yellow lands across my shoe.

"…don't care, my feet are done." Marta. She's worked nights here longer than I've been alive. "I'm sitting five minutes, and the call bells can fight me for it."

A second voice, younger. A chair creaks under someone.

"You do the thing with the Wick chart yet?"

I stop breathing.

"The archive thing." Marta lets out a long breath. "Half of it. It's stupid."

"Right? They sent me the same email. Pull her off the active files — fine, she transferred, whatever. But then it's, like, remove the chart references. Scrub her out of the med logs. Archive to cold storage and clear the local copy."

A pause. The crinkle of a wrapper.

"Since when do we cold-storage somebody three days after they roll out the door? My grandmother's been dead six years and I'm pretty sure she's still in the system."

The younger one laughs, but it's thin. "It's weird, though. Tell me it's weird."

"Hey." Marta's voice goes flat, like she wants to close the door on the whole subject.

"Whatever it is. Whatever they're doing with it.

It's not the kind of thing you ask about.

" A beat. "I need this job. I've got my boy's tuition, and I am not making a federal case out of one old lady's paperwork. "

"Yeah." The younger one again. "No. You're right."

"Finish it before you clock out. Both copies."

"Yeah. Okay."

A wrapper, a sigh, the scrape of a chair pushing back. "Right. My feet have had their five minutes."

The light snaps off. The office door opens and shuts. Their voices slide down the hall and fold into the building's hum until there's nothing left but the AC and my own pulse, loud as a drum in my ears.

I count to thirty and push out of the closet on legs that have forgotten how to be legs.

The office is dark again. The monitor's gone to sleep. I touch the mouse, and it wakes — and Darling's file is gone.

They didn't even wait. Scrub the chart. Clear the local copy.

This doesn't make sense. Why would anyone go to the trouble of erasing a woman who has nobody? There's no point in it. Nobody's coming to look. Nobody's coming to ask where she went.

I know they'll come get me. But someone has to tell the bastards where I am.

A few minutes ago I had it all decided. She was confused. There was no one looking for her, no truth, nothing. I was just a tired girl who wanted to be needed and built a whole story out of a sedated old woman's hand on my wrist.

Now I'm staring at an empty screen, stuck on one question.

What if she wasn't confused at all?

I don't understand any of it. But there's one way to find out.

I can go see her myself — if I can figure out where they sent her.