Chapter 15 Lines Dissecting Love
Lines Dissecting Love
JAI WAS the biggest and the tallest in almost any situation—it wasn’t often he was ignored.
But after Ace and Sonny made their spectacular entrance—and exit—and after Brady and Burton had exterminated one large cockroach, Jai was surprised to realize that nobody out there even registered his presence.
While the police force slowly emerged from their vehicles and checked their radiators and front tires (Good work, cop, he thought with satisfaction), or their crunched bumpers and squashed quarter panels, Jai was able to walk to the side of the road and hop in the SUV where Eric lay, slumped and exhausted, against the seat.
“You are still alive?” he asked.
“Da,” Eric replied, and Jai’s mouth twisted, because the man had done a fair impression of Jai himself.
“Good. Let us go see where Ace and Sonny are, yes?”
Eric grunted. “I can’t be sure,” he said, “but I think I saw them go off the road about a half-mile down. It didn’t look like Ace could control the vehicle anymore.”
“Shit,” Jai said, his heart thumping in his chest. After that jump—that spectacular jump that landed—Jai had assumed (silly man!) that Ace and Sonny would be all right.
They were always all right. Ace’s ability to be all right after crashing a car doing crazy shit was the entire reason Jai’s old mob boss had given him to Ace and Sonny!
Ace had promptly told Jai he had no obligation, but by the time Ace was well enough to figure shit out and tell him that, Jai hadn’t wanted to leave.
Ace was a boss who treated him good and who wasn’t afraid of the things Jai had grown to be very good at.
And while he was no longer in love with the volatile, terrifying little man who loved Ace with his whole heart, Jai still loved him, loved them both, as friends and brothers, the family he’d never known he could have.
He knew this stretch of road and knew the shoulder was solid hardpan—no rocks, no growth, just compressed dust in the wake of the terrible, impossible storm that had almost killed them in January.
Now it served as blacktop, and he did not love this car. He stood on the accelerator, ignoring the few police officers and deputies who turned to study him as he drove through the desert.
When he finally saw the dust path of the Forester and tracked it down to its inevitable end, his heart almost stopped.
Sonny’s door had been clear and undented, while the rest of the Forester looked like a sock full of rocks.
But the door’s pristine state was the only reason Sonny could have gotten out, and he was now pushing against the back of the Forester with all his might, for all that it would do him no good.
The driver’s side of the car was smashed up against a boulder, and whatever had happened inside the vehicle, Ace was obviously unable to get out.
Jai fishtailed to a stop, and Sonny turned toward him, face streaked with tears.
“They got off a shot,” he mewled. “It got him in the shoulder, and he was driving through it but… but he passed out and spun into the desert. And I can’t get him out. Jai, I can’t get him out—”
Jai hated to loom over smaller people. His great size was a blessing when he was trying to scare somebody, but he knew Sonny already had so many reasons to be afraid.
But now Sonny was losing it, spinning out, and Jai had been there the last time this had happened, and the results… . God, the results….
Jai put a hand on each of Sonny’s shoulders and shook him gently.
“Stop,” he ordered, trying not to scream in the smaller man’s face.
“Sonny, you must stop this. Stop this. You have a quiet place somewhere in your rabbit brain—we all do. Ace’s is on the road, yours is under a car, mine is in the middle of nowhere, walking under the sky.
Go there. Dream of fixing a new race car.
Go there. Stay there. I can get him out—I swear to God I can, but you…
you can’t do this. You need to be in your place or I will be too afraid to turn my back on you. ”
Sonny blinked once, twice, and the hurt that crossed his features almost sawed open Jai’s heart. “Too afraid, Jai? Of me?”
Jai felt the hot brine of tears, of a wound in his soul that hadn’t had time to heal. “I was there, Sonny,” he said, his voice clogged. “When that stain appeared on your rug. Remember?”
Sonny recoiled like Jai had slapped him.
“Quiet place,” he said, his voice a whisper. “I’ll go to a quiet place.”
Jai set him gently down on the side step of his SUV and turned toward the Forester.
With a quick look in the passenger side, he saw that Ace had skidded into a boulder at some point, and the driver’s compartment was too impacted to pull Ace out without opening up the compartment.
If he was a fireman, he’d have the jaws of life, but he wasn’t.
The only tool he had was a big car he didn’t love and a desire to save a brother whom he did.
Ace was blessedly, blessedly unconscious, but his breathing was strong.
Jai suspected he might have hit his head when the car struck the rock, but he didn’t want to borrow trouble.
What would happen next would be traumatic enough.
He squeezed Ace’s shoulder and murmured, “I will get you out, my brother. You need to hear the story of your glorious flight from someone not in the car.”
And with that he strode to the Tahoe, barking, “Sonny, get in,” relieved when Sonny, eyes glazed, stood up, got in the front seat, and belted himself in.
“You all ready?” Jai asked, backing the Tahoe up with a little room for some momentum. “This will not be pleasant.”
GEORGE GOT the call right after Ernie had driven off into the desert in the police cruiser, his eyes bruised with exhaustion, his psyche obviously bleeding from too much, too much, too much, everywhere around them.
“George?” Sonny said, sounding young and lost. “You there?”
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“I’m driving the Tahoe on the back desert roads, heading for the garage. Jai says all the guys in the cop cars are going to the hospital in Baker. Is he right?”
George had already called, trying to get a sense of where the casualties of this day would be going. The ones not being buried in an unmarked pit, that is.
“Where’s Jai?” George asked, suddenly terrified.
“He’s got a broke arm,” Sonny said matter-of-factly.
“He… he had to drive the Tahoe into the Forester to get it off a rock so we could get Ace out. Ace isn’t…
he’s still out. He needs blood, and his head is bruised.
Eric’s passed out—Jai says blood loss. But I need to know if I can come get you so you can do shit to people while I get us to the hospital. Can I do that? Is that okay?”
Oh shit. Oh hell. How bad a day could it be if Sonny was the one in charge? In the background, he heard Jai say, “Give me phone.”
And then his voice—that rumbly, impressive, frightening voice.
George was in the middle or running around the boarded-up cashier’s cubicle, grabbing the first aid kit, grabbing one of their many flats of water, grabbing a gun to shove in the back of his pants, grabbing the keys so he could lock the place up and let Dimitri go into the house to tend to the dog.
“Jai?” he asked, knowing his voice was as wobbly as Sonny’s.
“I am okay,” Jai said. “Broken bones make me vomit is all. Do not panic. Do not cry. We need you.” He paused. “Is Ernie there?”
“Ernie’s, uhm, getting rid of our own little adventure,” George said, keeping his voice steady for Jai’s sake.
“Ah. I am sorry, Little George. This is not the life of peace I promised you.”
“But it’s the life of meaning I wanted,” George retorted, his throat thick. “If you all live, you’ve kept all the promises, Jai. Don’t worry.”
“I do worry,” Jai said, sounding dreamy, like somebody in shock. “I worry, Little George. You are so… so sweet.”
“I’m strong too,” George said, wiping his eyes on his shoulder. “I have to be or I’m not worth the good man I’m with. Now give the phone back to Sonny and let me prep.”
“I’m about twenty minutes out,” Sonny said, and then his voice cracked just like George’s voice was cracking. “If I drive like Ace.”
“Drive faster,” George whispered and ended the call. “I’ll be ready when you get here.” He was rooting through the first aid kit then, staring at the unusual supplies. What was… oh, wait. Seriously? Wait—this was Ace’s handwriting. What was—oh… oh wow.
Out of nowhere, he laughed.
Then he called out, “Dimitri, run into the house and put on pots of water to boil. Now, Dimitri—now.”
“Da,” Dimitri said. “It is time to let the dog out. May I do that while water is boiling?”
“Sure,” George said, his mind racing. He pulled out the Garage Closed sign, figuring that at this point the roads would be too blocked for anybody to get in, and set it in front of the particle board they’d mounted to cover the shot-out window.
And then he got to work.
ERNIE STILL walked the desert at night. Sometimes, when Crullers was out on a mission, or sometimes even when he was there, in their bed, sleeping peacefully because he was so happy to have a bed, and the cats, and the night over his eyes.
The desert gave Ernie peace.
It also gave him this place he’d found once, back when he’d been living with Sonny and Ace, and Crullers had been so confused in his own heart that he hadn’t known how to claim Ernie’s.
It was a good ten-mile hike from Ace and Sonny’s, but as he’d discovered, it was only about half a mile from the road that led out to the military base where Lee and Jason and their covert group of monster hunters, as they named themselves, made their home.
The pit—about fifty meters wide and maybe twenty deep—looked like somebody had tried to quarry for rock there, but the granite deposit had run out quickly.
There were a number of wrecked vehicles at the bottom of it, many of them burned out, many of them half covered in rock and gravel from the piles of it up on the ledge.