Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
G enesis…
I’d slept better than I had in an age last night. I found it funny how, even though I didn’t know Chainsaw, it felt like I did because I knew and understood the code he lived by.
I knew he was inherently dangerous, but he wasn’t any sort of danger to me .
At least, not yet. I knew that could change at the drop of a hat, but right now?
He felt like he owed me, and I knew what that meant in these circles.
The debt would be satisfied when he deemed it so, and right now?
For me? It was far better the devil I knew than the one I didn’t.
Again, while I didn’t know Chainsaw personally , I’d grown up around many men like him, and after talking with him last night. After looking him in the eye and finally feeling heard after so long, I knew I had made the right decision by calling him.
I also knew that if my dad or any of my “uncles” back home had heard I’d called on a Voodoo Bastard, they’d have a conniption fit of the highest order.
Honestly, though, I didn’t know how much of that would be because I’d skipped on calling them in first.
Of course, Dad and them would have just tried to convince me to come home so they could handle it there, but my life wasn’t back in the Podunk town far north at the top of the boot anymore. It was here, in the Crescent City.
I’d managed the impossible to get here, and I wouldn’t be so easily chased away.
I showered and thought about the man in the other room, who was at once a stranger, and yet also so familiar to me that it made me long for a part of my childhood.
I wasn’t that small girl anymore, though.
I was a grown woman with a whole alphabet soup of credentials, certifications, and degree letters behind my name – the most important of which was MD.
Still, apparently, you could take the life out of the girl, but there was no taking the girl out of the life . And that meant some form of street justice for Lucas Levi Belmar, serial killer at large.
I knew he fancied himself some kind of mercy killer. A real Angel of Death, but we didn’t get to make those decisions – the patients did. As long as they were in the fight, then so were we. That was how that worked.
I let the shower water run over my hair, rinsing the suds from it as I thought about things. All I could picture were those poor innocent cats along my ironwork fence out front.
God, I was glad it wasn’t my Charlie boy kitty – but still, my heart broke for mama cat and her kittens. That was just sick and cruel to the nth degree.
I sighed and finished up showering, stepping out and wrapping my hair in a towel before drying the rest of me off.
My reflection was blurred by the steam fogging the mirror face, but that was alright.
I didn’t need to look at myself for the time being.
I dried and shrugged into my robe, which was hanging on the back of the door.
When I finished tying it off, I stepped out to find Chainsaw where I’d left him, seated on the couch, paying attention to Charlie, who was rolling like he’d found catnip in the big biker’s lap.
He wasn’t the man I’d patched in my ER anymore. That man had been heavy set, his clothes dirty from what looked like some kind of hard construction work. At least what I’d seen of it under all the blood.
This man was significantly fitter. Musclebound. I probably wouldn’t have recognized him at all had it not been for the liberal streak of white in his almost ginger beard.
He had a matching one in his short hair, which was spiked at the front some. He looked back over the couch at me and threw me some chin as a way to tell me I still had time, but also to hurry up – I was betting he was bored.
I would be, waiting around on somebody else.
I tried to get dressed quickly, but I had to dig through the back of my closet to find the appropriate attire for riding.
It felt strange but good, shrugging into my deep oxblood leather jacket. She was a bit tighter than I remembered, but still zipped. I pulled on my black riding boots and put on my boot-cut jeans, then pulled down the shiny black carapace of a beetle half-helmet from my closet shelf.
I paused in front of the floor-length mirror on the inside of my closet door and took stock. Black boots, deep denim, white ribbed tank that fit like a second skin over the biker-bitch belt I’d had since I was sixteen, that I’d also had to let out a notch since the last time I’d worn it.
I looked good, hair pulled tight back and protected by the snap sheath around it to keep it from tangling in the wind.
I swiped on a layer of lip balm and rubbed my lips together, snatching up my gold-framed aviators with brown lenses to protect my light eyes from the bright sun.
I was met with a low, appreciative whistle as I slipped out into the living room and had to laugh.
“You look every bit an Ol’ Lady,” he said, and I shook my head.
“I’m certainly not that to anyone, but I’m no free tail, either,” I warned.
“I’ll make sure the boys know you’re with me and that you’re off the menu. Don’t you worry.”
I nodded. “Appreciate it.”
“Let’s go,” he said simply, and he got up from the couch and took his mug to the sink in my kitchen, rinsing it and opening up the dishwasher as I had done for mine before taking my shower. He slid it into the mostly empty top rack next to mine and closed things back up.
I was duly impressed. If it’d been one of my father’s brothers, he would have just left it in the sink for my mom.
“Thanks,” I said softly.
“You bet,” he said.
We went out the back door, and it took some effort to keep Charlie boy in the house. I knew he wanted to do his free roaming, but that wasn’t about to happen for a while. I felt bad for him, but I wanted to keep him safe.
“Thanks for entertaining me on this,” he said, like he’d asked for something more than to scope out the back and walk the alley length around to his bike out front.
“Seriously, it’s no problem,” I said with a laugh. “I get what you’re doing.”
We reached the end of the alley, and a car approached from our left. He threw out an arm and tucked me behind him as it passed, but it was just a woman looking up and out of her windshield, starry-eyed at the splendor of the Garden District. A tourist, judging by her Tennessee plates.
When he judged the coast to be clear, he captured my fingers with his and towed me along.
“C’mon,” he said, and we walked down half a block or so, and turned right to go back up my street in the front. His bike was parked against the curb in front of my little cottage, and I felt a frisson of excitement.
I missed riding.
The nostalgia was real and almost instantaneous as the pipes roared to life beneath us.
That familiar thrum zinged my tailbone only to reverberate up my spine, tickling out along my central nervous system in a rush to my very fingertips.
I loved the feel of old leather and patches beneath them as I held on to the man in front of me, and I had to remind myself – this life was nothing to play with, romanticize, or have feelings about.
The reality was often brutal, and held a deep well of pain when it came to separation and estrangement – whether that be from lengthy prison sentences, or worse, the grave.
This was a hard life that was lived on the ragged edge, and these men were dangerous.
Dangerous to a point where I’d fought hard and won my place outside of the danger and the constant knot of dread in the pit of my stomach every time my dad had gone out the front door, or my favorite “uncle” in their faded leather and denim cuts with their dirty patches to do something else potentially hazardous or stupid.
I wanted normalcy, so I’d thought, and I’d achieved it – but it’d been at a price.
Were my dad and all of my uncles proud of me?
Oh, most definitely. They’d cheered and whistled louder than anyone when I’d crossed that stage to pick up my diploma.
They’d whistled, and a few of my uncles had even cried.
Big, burly men that I’d never seen shed a tear once in my entire life sopped the moisture off their faces with their deep blue bandannas even as they hollered their pride across the convention center’s floor.
I felt a clashing sense of joy and deep sadness in my chest as the cracked and warped streets passed beneath the wheels of Chainsaw’s Harley.
While it was wonderful to have my knees in the breeze once more, with the familiar snug weight of the brain bucket on my head, I longed for the past I hadn’t been able to wait to escape fifteen years or so ago.
An echo of what one of the social workers would tell our domestic abuse survivors in the ER came to mind – when you find yourself out on your own and all you’ve known is a type of violence for the home you grew up in, it’s only natural to land in a place or a dynamic that feels the same and to want that.
When you find yourself out on your own, your heart tends to seek a love that feels like home…
I could feel my heart longing for that. For home.
It was my job, as someone who grew up in the same dynamic, to recognize that and to caution my adult self against it.
There were reasons I’d wanted to leave that life behind – and good ones at that.
Thus, as much as I let myself enjoy this one little part of things and feel free in the singular moment that was the ride to wherever we were going, I knew I needed to keep it in the moment, you know?
In the moment, it seemed to include a ride down into the French Quarter and a stop near Café du Monde. He pulled up against the curb as it was early enough yet that parking wasn’t entirely impossible to find, though it was getting close.
“Breakfast,” Chainsaw called out as I stood by and worked the strap on my helmet free to take it off.
“Sorry, if I’d known, I would have fixed something back at the house,” I said. “I’m just a cup of coffee in the morning type of girl.”