Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
C hainsaw…
We’d talked a little bit more, and I’d told her gently to take her cat and to go to bed. She told me to make myself at home, help myself to the fridge, and showed me where the bathroom was.
It was a cute little place – modern build, but made to look old and fit the charm of the original neighborhood.
There was something like a second bedroom to it, but it was more like maybe an office space.
She had turned it into a cozy little library and reading nook.
It had a comfy chair in a corner, and the shelves against all four walls were nice and matched, a rich dark wood and floor to ceiling.
There wasn’t anything cheap about the place, and while there was still a lot of room on several of the shelves, the rest were mostly filled.
There were a lot of medical texts and journals, old-school looking copies of things like the illustrated Grey’s Anatomy .
I was pleasantly surprised to see some large illustrated tomes for some old-school classics.
Things like Milton’s Paradise Lost , Dante’s Inferno , and the collected works of Poe.
I slipped Milton off the shelf and smiled in appreciation. The illustrations were the Gustave Doré woodcuts, and they were absolutely divine. The black-and-white prints as timeless as the text they depicted.
She had good taste.
I opened the epic poem to a random spot and let my eyes travel the lines…
We can create, and in what place so e'er
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain,
Through labor and endurance…
Yeah, that definitely was a sign for me.
Wasn’t that just what we were trying to do?
The club, I mean. We were trying to create something from nothing with the distillery.
Go legit and back off from the rough shit and secure a future.
Yeah, we’d probably always operate under the shadows and evil – we couldn’t entirely escape that. But in this day and age? Who could?
Shit, even the good doctor was finding that shit out the hard way.
Who knew stopping a bona fide fuckin’ serial killer would come with such a brutal punishment?
Cops and the hospital were more interested in the optics. They didn’t want to look unfavorable in the public eye – and so they’d rather keep it under wraps than anything.
It was a tale as old as time, and one you saw more often than not on the fringe. She was right to call me. I was glad she’d called me.
I shut the large tome and slid it back onto the shelf.
I was used to not getting any sleep, and even though I was tired, I was also too jazzed to try and crash right now.
Instead, I quietly moved through her home and took stock of her life.
Seemed that she’d sacrificed friends and her social life on the altar of success in the medical field.
I knew something about that. Shit, if it wasn’t for the club, I wouldn’t have anything even close to resembling friends.
It was strange moving through her space, but nice. Learning about her through the pictures on the shelves, the knick-knacks, and the titles she owned.
She liked mysteries and thrillers aside from classic poetry.
I didn’t find any romances, probably because she was entirely too logical or pragmatic for those things.
She knew the life, dealt with the aftermath of it at her job on the regular. Hard to be romantic after so much blood and the heartbreak of long prison terms.
The fact that she’d remained so compassionate even through it all spoke to a quiet and admirable strength.
I fully admit, I’d wondered about her from the moment those seafoam green eyes of hers had met mine above the blue hospital mask she’d had on as she’d worked on keeping my ass alive all those years ago.
She didn’t know how grateful I was. How I felt that she’d reached down, down, down, and down, with me sitting at rock bottom – shot to shit by my own club, and how she’d grasped my hand and lifted me up.
Making me believe there was still some good in the world the way she’d gone to bat for me with her colleagues to make sure I was right proper taken care of.
My turn.
I was like a kid in a candy store, learning about her, wandering through her small house for hours, and yeah, pretty sure if she knew, she’d be creeped – but I just couldn’t help myself.
I’d dreamed of this a countless number of times, and I had to say, the reality of it far outdid any fantasy my mind could come up with.
The birds were out there chirping by the time I pushed off her bedroom doorway, just watching her sleep, and went back into the living room to the couch to lie down.
It was several hours later when I woke to the soft sounds of her moving around the kitchen.
She was trying to be quiet, but I slept on a hair trigger.
Part of that was a fucked-up childhood with a drunk stepdad with a whole lotta issues.
Some of it was the life I led now, especially with the crazy peckerwoods up our asses by way of the Bayou Bitches.
That led me to think, her serial killer stalker piece of shit couldn’t have honestly picked a more inopportune time for me when it came to this fuckery surrounding the doc.
Then again, when did the bad guys ever choose the perfect opportunity to be bad guys in which another bad guy like me could black knight to the rescue?
I didn’t have any illusions about what I was to the rest of society, and honestly, it didn’t look like the good doctor, Genesis Bordelon, did either.
But whereas most of society saw us rollin’ and clutched their pearls or got that shine in their eye about wanting to do something with or to us to satisfy their fetish of doin’ it with someone dangerous… she didn’t look at us sideways.
She saw us, and now I knew it was due to her upbringing.
She knew the life.
There was something infinitely more appealing to me about that than picking up someone outside of it.
She’d left me curious, and that curiosity had only grown in the few years since our first encounter when I was barely just a slab of busted-up and tenderized meat on a cart to the other doctors and nurses in her hospital.
She’d held a fire of compassion, even for a clear bastard like me, and that’d held me transfixed. It was one of the biggest mysteries that life had held for me, and now it was mostly solved…
That was something, wasn’t it?
She turned around, jumped, and let out a nervous little laugh before saying, “Good morning. Coffee?”
I smiled and said, “Yeah, if you don’t mind. Black, two sugars.”
“You got it.” She turned and opened a cupboard over her head and brought down another mug. She stored hers upside down, which a lot of poorer people like myself did. Even though her digs were nice and clearly roach-free, some habits did die hard.
I sat up more completely and put my feet on the floor, giving her room to sit if she wanted to.
My leg was a little stiff first thing upon waking up, but no more than it usually was.
It protested some at moving into a sitting position from prone, but thankfully, this morning, it wasn’t very loud about it.
She came over, a mug in each hand, and sat down on the couch next to me, holding out my coffee to me.
I took it, intentionally brushing my fingers against hers in a light, but seemingly innocent touch – but there wasn’t anything innocent about it.
I’d been dreaming of her green eyes for the better part of the last few years.
What should have been nightmares about that night, getting shot to hell and gone, turned into something else because of her. She was my angel in more ways than one. I knew it bone deep. Hell, maybe even deeper than that, maybe something like soul deep.
I was glad she’d called, but with everything going on, I wasn’t sure where to begin when it came to tracking down her little problem. But I damn sure knew that I wasn’t about to leave her side until he dared to show up and I could take care of him once and for all.
Dude had no idea, the hunter had become the hunted. And that in and of itself was the ideal.
“So, fill me in,” she said, taking a light sip of her too-light coffee. She’d loaded hers with creamer, if not sugar.
“On the plan overall, or just for today?” I asked.
She smiled behind the rim of her coffee mug, her green eyes sparkling, and said, “Today. You made the plan pretty clear for overall last night. You’re essentially my shadow until he’s either caught by law enforcement or you.”
I snorted at her mention of the LEOs, and her smile went from just that to a cheeky grin.
She knew as well as I did that the cops didn’t give a fuck and weren’t looking.
Who cared about a bunch of dead people who were dying anyhow?
If it wasn’t in the news and making headlines, they couldn’t be bothered.
Between the hospital and the cops, it behooved them both to keep this kind of shit as quiet as possible.
“The club’s sort of in the middle of a… thing, right now.” I groped for the right words that wouldn’t let on precisely what was going on. Her eyebrows went up.
“An inter-club with outsiders’ kind of a thing, or the kind of thing that landed you in my ER like back then?”
“How do you know what landed me in the ER back then was with my own club?” I asked, arching one brow.
She rolled her eyes.
“News travels fast in the underground,” she reminded me. “My dad’s club heard all about how your boys had a schism in the club and were tearing yourselves apart. He told me to be careful and to stay off the streets at night down here.”
“Shit, I guess you’re right.”
“So, it looks like things, uh, worked themselves out.” She intentionally eyed my cut.
I nodded. “Yeah, they did,” I said coolly. We were starting to walk a razor-thin line on what was and wasn’t acceptable for me to be jawing about.
“I’m glad it worked out for you,” she said softly, and she quickly took another drink of her coffee.
Good girl, I thought to myself. She knew when to quit and change the subject.
“Word says this time it’s another club,” she murmured, and she looked me straight in the eyes. “I only bring it up, so I know who to watch for and potentially avoid if we’re going to be seen together out there.”
I nodded slowly. “Bayou Brethren,” I told her simply. “You shouldn’t see any inside New Orleans city limits, but if you do, and I’m not there for some reason, you better call me.”
She nodded. “One caveat,” she said. “The hospital is Switzerland. Period. What happens in the hospital, who I treat, all of that remains as private as the club business I’m not supposed to know about.
I don’t know, I don’t want to know, and when it comes to my job, it’s the same for you.
I don’t care who it is in my emergency room.
They’re going to get the same standard of care across the board. Capice?”
I chuckled and nodded. It was an easy ask.
“Slow down there, Godfather – it’s all good. I can do that for you if you can do it for me.”
“Deal,” she said judiciously.
She held out her hand to shake, and it took something to suppress my smile as I took her soft hand in mine and shook. I wasn’t trying to come across as disingenuous in my amusement.
“Not going to lie,” she said a few moments later, when a silence had pooled between us. “This is honestly the most comfortable I’ve been since moving here in med school. This,” she motioned back and forth between me and her, “is the most familiar I’ve felt. Is that weird?”
I shook my head after thinking about it for a moment.
“No. You grow up a certain way, even if it’s not considered the healthiest, or whatever… You leave home, it’s only natural you seek out things that feel like home at first, you know?”
“That sounds a lot like the explanation the hospital social workers give to women who come into the ER from domestic violence… especially the ones who grew up in a volatile environment. ‘It’s not your fault, honey. When you escape a violent home, it’s only in our nature to find a love that feels like home at first. That’s how these cycles continue to perpetuate themselves.
’” She mimicked a kind and conciliatory tone, and I let my gaze rove her lovely face.
“Was your home violent?”
She shook her head. “No, not really. It wasn’t normal by any means, with Dad being in the club and spending stretches of our childhood in prison.
He never hit us or our mother out of anger.
I mean, there was discipline, but never abuse or anything.
The club was all pretty much our uncles… you know?”
I smiled and briefly wondered if I felt like one of her uncles, rather than anything else.
I sure as hell hoped not. Besides, we were too fuckin’ close in age for an uncle/niece kind of a thing.
Hopefully, she didn’t feel like I was a brother, because I certainly didn’t feel that at all, looking at her.
“What?” she asked when she realized I was perhaps staring just a little too long.
“I’m not one of your uncles,” I said gently, and she smiled and shook her head.
“No, it’s not like that,” she said and hid behind another drink of her coffee. I took a drink of my own. I was burning up with curiosity, the question on the tip of my tongue… then what is it like?
I didn’t want to spook her, though, so I let her change the subject quickly when she said, “So you’ve dodged the question long enough. What’s the plan for today?”
I smiled and took a long, deep draught of my cooling coffee and said, “Dress for the slide and not for the ride. We got places to go and people to see.”
She smiled then, a little excitement lighting her eyes, and I asked, already knowing the answer. “You do know how to ride, right?”
“I do. I have a helmet and everything. It’s just it’s been too long.”
“Good deal,” I said. “Do what you gotta do.” I checked my watch. “You got about an hour to do it in.”
“Alright,” she said, and she seemed almost giddy. I liked that. It turned me on that much more.