Chapter 4
BONES
My first problem is that she's gone, out the door, out to her bus stop, and I wanna run after her like a man with no discipline at all.
I came here to work a girl for information, and what did I do? I just kissed her against a water cooler like a man who's never run an op in his life.
Something's wrong with the water up here. Has to be.
Two weeks ago, it was Smoke. Smoke, who I've watched do crazy, stupid shit without changing his breathing, gone soft-eyed and stupid over a girl named Birdie who weighs ninety pounds and has him wrapped around her little finger.
Last week it was Cash. Cash got married. Stood up in front of a judge and put a ring on a girl he's known a handful of days. Officially it's to keep her stepfather's hands off her land. Officially. But not one of us bought it, Cash least of all.
I told myself I was one of the brothers with some sort of sense left, but here I am, crazy about this chick I barely know.
The whole chapter's lost its mind, and I just caught the same thing off a water cooler.
Then I remember why I walked in here in the first place. Darling.
That's the job. Riley Bennett worked the hall where they kept Darling before Darling went dark. Darling may not have another week in her, and I don't have another one in me. Not for the case. Not for my Bandit.
I'm out the door before I've finished the thought.
I find her on the bus stop bench with her bag in her lap, watching the wrong end of the street. Hair half out of its elastic. She looks up when I stop in front of her.
"Lunch," I say.
She blinks. "What?"
"You and me. Now."
"That wasn't a question."
"Good. Saves time."
A laugh gets away from her before she can lock it down, and there's the tell I needed. She stands, hugs the bag to her chest. "I was waiting for my bus."
I tip my head toward the parking lot. "Come on, Bandit. We'll eat, and then I'll give you a ride."
She follows me around the side of the building and stops in her tracks the second she gets a look at the last vehicle on the lot.
Not a truck. Not the sensible little hatchback a volunteer doctor's supposed to keep.
It's a bike, big and black.
"That's yours?"
"It is." I pull my helmet and the spare off the back and hold the spare out to her. She doesn't take it right away.
"I think I'm gonna stick with the bus." She makes no move to take it.
"Not today." I push the helmet into her hands. "You hold on to me. You lean when I lean. That's the whole skill."
She gets on behind me, sets her hands at my sides like the leather might bite, so I reach back and pull her arms the rest of the way around me until she's flush against my spine and the breath leaves her against my back.
Across the street the bus finally pulls up, too late. It goes without her.
I kick the bike alive. Her hold loosens, and the fingers of one hand move over the leather at my back, tracing the shape stitched into it.
THUNDER BASTARDS.
"Hold on," I say, and take us out of the lot before the question pressing against my shoulder blade can find its way to her mouth.
A few minutes later we're at the counter place off Lake City. It does great burgers, acceptable coffee, and minds its business. The cook lifts his chin when we walk in. A guy I know from the VA looks up from a booth, nods, goes back to his fries.
"Bones," the cook says. "Usual?"
"Two."
I steer her into a booth with a hand at the small of her back. She waits until we're sitting.
"Bones."
"That's me."
"People call you Bones."
"They do."
She studies me, mouth losing a fight with a smile. "Is that a doctor thing, like you're an orthopedist, or a scary thing?"
"Depends on the day."
She laughs, and I could get stupid about that laugh without much trouble at all. When the plate lands she steals a fry off it before it's settled, easy, like she's done it her whole life.
We talk. It's easy the way nothing's been easy for me in years. She's quick, she's got opinions about everything, she argues me to a standstill over whether a hot dog counts as a sandwich and wins on a technicality. I let her win. I'd let her win most things. Fuck, I'm going soft.
Then she comes back around to my back.
"So what's a Thunder Bastard?"
Everybody asks it in exactly that voice. I almost smile.
"Club. Brothers. A bunch of men who decided family's something you pick instead of something you're handed." I shrug. "We look after our own. People with nobody, mostly. We make sure they've got somebody."
She turns that over, soft at the eyes, and I hate myself a little for what comes next, because it's the job, and the job is the reason I'm in this booth.
"You still working at Brightmoor?"
Her face changes. Not scared. Careful.
"Yeah." She gives her coffee cup a quarter turn. "Why?"
"Wondering what a place like that's like from the inside."
She's quiet a beat. Then it comes up out of her like she's been carrying it up a long flight of stairs and is glad to set it down.
"I'm not sure anymore."
She tells me about an old man who came in sharp as a tack and degraded in a week. I'm pretty sure I know who that is, but I don't say a word. I let her continue.
Then she mentions an old woman. Mean and funny, checked in swinging. How the woman lost most of her marbles on the meds they gave her inside of days, surfacing in little windows, more there every time than the file would admit.
Tears come to her eyes when she tells me how they loaded the woman into an ambulance one night to ship her somewhere else, and how the woman begged her to do something for her.
She shakes her head and takes a big breath before she spills the rest.
How three days after that, the nurses archived the file to cold storage and wiped the local copy.
"Nobody bothers erasing a woman who has nobody," she says. "There's no point. Unless she had somebody."
"What did she beg you to do?" I ask.
Riley looks at me a long moment. Then she decides.
"She kept talking about her boys." Her voice drops. "She grabbed my wrist. She said somebody had taken her. She said her boys would come get her." A breath. "What was really weird is she called them the bastards."
And then my Bandit looks up from her hands to my face, and she gets it before I can pick how much to give her.
Her eyes drop to my chest, to the cut hanging open over a plain gray shirt. Climb back to my face. Drop again.
"Oh," she says.
I don't help her.
"Oh." Different this time.
Then, barely aloud: "The Bastards."
"Her name's Darling." My voice comes out rough. "Darling Wick. She's ours. She's our old Prez's widow. She played mother to half the men I'd put my body between a bullet and."
Riley's hand has come up over her mouth.
"She's been gone weeks, and we've torn this city down to the studs looking for her."
She sits back like the bench shifted under her.
"She wasn't confused, Bandit. She has boys. And one of them is sitting across this table from you."
"She was trying to reach you," she says. "All of you. Through me."
"Yeah."
And then sadness comes into her eyes, and I'm guessing she's thinking that me getting close to her was just a means to an end.
She couldn't be more wrong.
Somewhere between the first Monday and right now she stopped being a girl I came to use. Fuck, I lost the line where the job ends and she starts the second I saw her.
And I'm falling hard for this stubborn nurse with a weakness for gray hair, who kept a promise no one else alive would have bothered to keep. She got Darling's message out to us.