Chapter Three
THREE WORDS. FIRST ones she'd said in four years, and she'd given them to me.
I didn't move. Didn't say shit. Just sat there with her fingers locked in my sleeve and those three words going off in my chest like a round in a closed room, and I kept my face flat because the worst thing I could've done right then was let her see what it did to me.
She was watching me. Waiting. Scared I wasn't gonna answer, I think, or scared I would.
Her eyes were wide and wet and so goddamn blue, and there was a person in there.
Not the ghost everybody else saw. Her. Bee.
Looking out at me from behind all of it and asking me for the one thing I knew how to give.
"Okay," I said. Low. Just for her. "Okay. I got you."
Her grip didn't let up, but something in her face cracked open a half inch, and she nodded, barely, and turned back to the window like she'd spent everything she had and didn't have a drop left over.
She probably hadn't. Four years of nothing and she'd burned it all down on three words for me.
Throttle came back in stuffing his phone in his cut, easy, not knowing. "Julia says hi. Garrick's into the damn cabinets now, she—" He stopped. Read the room the way he always could. His eyes went from me to Bee and back, and his voice dropped. "What."
I shook my head once. Not here. Not in front of the soft-shoe crowd and the cameras in the corners and whatever the hell else was watching in that place.
"We're done for today," I said, and stood up slow so I didn't spook her, and it about killed me to peel her fingers off my sleeve one at a time and set her hand back in her lap. "We'll see you soon, Bee. You hear me? Soon."
She didn't look at me again. But her hand stayed curled where I'd left it, holding the shape of my cuff like it was still there.
I held it together through the hall and the front desk and Reed trying to catch us on the way out, let's find a time to talk through the transition, I really do think it's best, and Throttle saying yeah, sure, we'll call, in a voice that didn't mean a word of it, and we kept walking, out the doors and into the white light and across that too-clean lot to the bikes, where nobody was close enough to hear.
"Talk," Throttle said.
"She spoke."
He went still. Real still.
"What."
"In there. While you were on the phone." I dragged a hand down my face. "She grabbed my sleeve and she said get me out. Said it clear. Three words."
For a second he didn't do anything. Just stood there with his helmet hanging off his fist and his jaw working like he was chewing glass.
Then he turned and put both hands on the seat of his bike and leaned into it, head down, breathing hard through his nose, and I let him. Wasn't a thing I could say that'd help.
When he straightened up his eyes were red. He wiped them with the back of his hand and didn't pretend he hadn't.
"To you," he said. "She talked to you. Four years, and the first thing out of her—" His jaw clamped.
For one second it was all over his face, raw as an open wound, and then I watched him shove it down, the way he shoves everything down, because there was no room for it.
He slammed his helmet down. "Doesn't matter.
Don't matter who she said it to." He swung a leg over the bike.
"She wants out, she gets out. We go back in there right now, today, I carry her out myself, and let them try and stop—"
"Throttle." I put a hand flat on his chest. "Stop."
"Get your hand off me, Maul."
"She told me 'cause you were down the hall on the phone with Julia.
That's the who of it, brother. That's all it is.
You stepped out, I was the one still in the chair.
" I kept the hand where it was, and I leaned on it.
"And maybe she told me and not you 'cause some part of that girl knew exactly what you'd do with it.
Knew you'd walk up to that front desk and try to carry her out the door in front of every nurse on shift, and they'd have security on you in ninety seconds and you face-down on that pretty clean asphalt, and she'd be in a van to Flagstaff by sundown with your name in a file and a lock on every door between you and her.
" I let it sit. "She didn't pick me over you.
She picked the one of us who'd stop and think before he got her moved faster. "
He stared at me, chest going hard under my hand, and I watched it land, watched the sense of it burn through the heat and leave just the tired and the scared underneath.
"Why now?" he asked. Quiet now.
"She broke four years of a quiet for a reason. It has to be about moving her."
He looked off across the lot, at that pale ugly building sitting there in the sun like it had every right to. When he spoke again the heat was gone, and something colder and steadier had moved in where it'd been.
"I never planned on letting them move her." He pulled the helmet strap tight.
"We have to be smart about this," I said.
"Then we do it your way," he said. "Smart. But we do it. I'm not leaving her in there."
"We're not leaving her in there," I said. "We're gonna take her out so clean they don't even know to chase us."
***
WANTING A THING and doing it right are two different beasts, though, and a thing this size you don't do without the table. We rode the ninety minutes back without a word between us and I put it in front of Warden with the door shut.
He heard us out, hands folded, not a word the whole time, the transfer, three hours out, four days; the evaluation, some specialist named Sutter whose name was on the order smooth as oil; Bee grabbing my sleeve; get me out.
When we were done he sat quiet a long beat, turning it over the way he turns everything over, looking at it from the angles the rest of us couldn't see.
"She say why?" he asked.
"She said three words," I said. "That's what she had."
"But you took it as the move." Warden's eyes came up to mine. "Not something else."
"What the hell else would it be." Throttle's voice was tight. "You know what those places do to people. They got her so doped she stares at a wall. Now some specialist nobody's ever laid eyes on signs a piece of paper and they're shipping her three hours off to somewhere worse.”
Warden nodded slow. Didn't argue. But he didn't quite agree either, and I clocked it, and I let it go, 'cause I didn't have a better read than Throttle's and neither did anybody.
"Here's where we are," Warden said. "She's committed. Court signs off on it every so often, and they sign off 'cause the doctors tell 'em to. You're her brother, Throttle, but you’re not the one who decides. That clipboard prick is, near enough."
"When it all happened, I only wanted what was best for her… she was so broken," Throttle said. "So, we get a lawyer and move the guardianship to me. Get her discharged."
"We will," Warden said. "And it'll take months. They'll drag it. That's what they do." He leaned back. "And you got four days before they put her in a van and drive her someplace you can't drop in on whenever you feel like it."
Nobody said anything for a second.
I'd been quiet most of it, elbows on my knees in the chair by the wall, letting them work it. But I could feel the thing coming, the only thing it was ever gonna be, and I was already on the far side of it before either of them got there.
"Then we don't wait on paper," I said. "Lawyer starts today, fine.
But she's not in that van in four days. We take her out ourselves, before it comes, and figure the how between now and then.
" I looked at Throttle, then back at Warden.
"She asked me to get her out. I told her okay.
I don't break that. Not for paper, not for cops, not for nothing. "
"That's a committed patient walking out against orders," Warden said. Not arguing. Just saying it out loud so we all heard it. "They'll call it an abduction. Cops. Reports. Reed gets to stand up there and play the poor concerned doctor whose sick girl got grabbed by bikers."
"Let him," I said. "Let him stand wherever he wants and talk to a form all day. He don't get to keep her in a box 'cause a judge rubber-stamped his say-so."
The room sat quiet. Warden looked at Throttle. Throttle looked at the floor, then at me, and something settled in his face, hard and certain, the same look he'd had the night we went into those woods.
"First we try it clean," Warden said. "Then we do the alternative. No heat that lands on us. No marks on anybody can lead back here. You get her out, you put her behind the gate, the lawyer cleans up the rest after." He pointed his chin at me. “We can’t fuck this up.”
"I got this," I said.
"Then we're good."
We weren't good. Wasn't a thing about any of it that was good. But it was moving now, and moving was better than sitting in a plastic chair watching that place eat her an inch at a time.
Four days, Reed had said.
He wasn't getting four days.