Chapter 38 Stormy
The tray of dirty dishes is heavy.
I balance the tray on my left palm and push through the door with my hip. I'm thinking about the coleslaw order and whether we have enough slaw mix for tomorrow and whether—
A hand grabs my arm.
Not a tap. Not a touch. A nasty grab that has fingers and intention and ownership in it. The kind that wraps around the bicep and digs in and jerks. My body knows this grip before my brain catches up. Years of memory stored deep in my bones.
I'm spun around. The tray goes flying. Dirty plates hit the new hardwood floor—the floor I polished on my hands and knees—and pieces of rib bones and coleslaw scatter across the wood in a crash.
Ron Jackson is standing directly in front of me.
He's too close. The same distance he always kept. The distance that meant there was nowhere to lean back, no air between his body and mine that didn't belong to him. His hand is on my arm and his face is inches from mine.
I can smell the whiskey on his breath, cheap bourbon, the same brand he drank in Alabama. Underneath it is the cologne I used to smell in the dark when the bedroom door opened. The smell brings bile up into the back of my throat.
His eyes are not the eyes Tex saw in the parking lot. Not the smile eyes. Not the deacon eyes. These are the eyes I know best. The one-in-the-morning eyes. The eyes that came with a punch to the ribs.
"Take that fucking shirt off," he snarls. His voice is shaking with a rage that has been building for hours, for days, for the entire time his property has been missing. "We're going home."
The old me would have muttered yes sir. Because yes sir is what kept me alive and staying alive was the only thing that mattered.
But the old Stormy didn't have a man who loved him.
I turn and look Ron Jackson straight in the eyes. At the face that smiled while it destroyed me. The face that told a church congregation he was a good man and came home and proved he wasn't.
I look at that face and something shifts in me.
Not rage. Something quieter than rage. Something underneath it, something load-bearing, something that has been building in me since a man pulled me out of the rain and gave me a name and a stool and a plate of food and never once asked for anything in return.
I open my mouth and the voice that comes out doesn't belong to Matthew.
"Go home???" I yell at him. Then louder, so the whole damn world can hear it. "I AM home! And you're in my house now, bitch!"
My voice doesn't shake. For the first time in my life, my voice doesn't shake.
Ron's face goes blank. The expression of a man who pressed a button that has worked for four years and nothing happened.
The machine he built just looked him in the eye and said no.
For two seconds, Ron Jackson looks lost, and in those two seconds I see him clearly for the first time.
Not the monster, not the shadow, not the nightmare that fills doorways.
Just a man. An ordinary, broken man who only knows how to control things that are afraid of him.
I'm not afraid of him.
He draws back with his other hand but doesn't get a chance to act.
Tex hits him from the side.
I don't see where Tex came from. I don't know if he was behind the bar or at the entrance or materializing like the force of nature he is. All I see is Ron's head snap sideways and his hand release my arm.
His body staggers and Tex is there. His fist is still following through from a right hook that caught Ron on the jaw and sent him stumbling into the bar stools.
Ron goes to one knee. He catches himself on a stool. He's dazed. The punch was a sledgehammer, delivered by a man with arms like bridge cables who has been waiting weeks for this exact moment, but he's not out.
Ron is tough. Ron has been in fights before. Ron is the kind of man who survives things because the cruelty in him has a survival instinct of its own.
He starts to rise.
Tex doesn't let him. He moves behind Ron with a speed that shouldn't be possible for a man his size.
His arm goes across Ron's throat and his other arm pins Ron's arms to his sides.
He locks his hands together and squeezes.
Ron is trapped. Restrained. Held in place the way he held me in place for four years—unable to move, unable to fight, unable to do anything except take what someone else decides to give.
The irony is not lost on me.
Tex's eyes cut to me, sharp and quick. "This fucker's got a gun tucked in the back of his pants. Don't hit anywhere near it."
A gun.
He came here with a gun. What would have happened if Tex hadn't been here?
If Ron had gotten me outside, into his truck, with a gun in his waistband and nobody watching.
The scenario plays out in my head in half a second and then it's gone.
Because Tex is here. Ron is not getting me outside.
And the gun is pinned against Tex's chest where it can't reach anyone.
"You piece of shit," Ron spits at Tex. His voice is strangled against Tex's forearm but the words come through, ragged and wet.
"You don't know what he is. He's nothing.
He's a fucking street rat I picked up out of the gutter.
I made him. I fed him. I put clothes on his back and a roof over his head and he stole from me and ran like the ungrateful little—"
Tex tightens his arm. The words choke off. Then Tex loosens just enough to let Ron breathe, because Tex doesn't want him unconscious. Tex wants him awake. Tex wants him to see what's coming.
And then Tex looks at me and grins.
The big, wide, wild grin of a man who is having the best time of his life.
The grin of a man who loves chaos when the chaos is righteous and tonight the chaos is the most fucking righteous it's ever been.
"I've got him," Tex says. "Come here, baby, and take what is yours to take."
Take what is yours.
Suddenly I realize the real plan. This isn't Tex's revenge. It was never Tex's revenge. Every phone call, every plan, every piece on the board tonight—the bikers, Denny, the pink shirt, the sweatpants, all of it—was never about Tex beating Ron.
It was about this moment.
Tex holding Ron still so I could get my revenge.
So, I could be the one. So, the boy who never fought back could fight back.
My eyes burn. My throat closes. And then both of those things break open into rage. Pure, clean, fifteen years of rage that has been living in my body like a second skeleton, holding me up and weighing me down at the same time, and tonight the weight becomes fuel.
Behind me, I hear Sheila's massive purse hit the bar top and the clasp open.
"Hey, Stormy. Catch."
Something heavy and metal arcs through the air and I catch it one-handed without looking because my body is operating on a frequency that is beyond thought. My hand closes around it. Brass knuckles. Cold and heavy. The weight of them settles across my fingers like they were made for my hand.
"Make Mama Sheila proud, sugar," she says.
Then I hear her phone. The beep of a call connecting to 911. And Sheila's voice changes—higher, faster, panicked—the voice of a woman who is terrified and not performing. Except she is performing. She's performing the role of her life.
"Please, you have to send someone, a man just came into the bar and he's attacking my employee—he grabbed him, he has a gun, please hurry, Big Tex's Roadhouse on Front Beach Road—I've got to go, please just send someone!"
She hangs up. The call lasted eight seconds. The address is on record. The words attacking and gun are on record. That's all dispatch needs. That's all Mickey needs. The clock is ticking now. Twelve minutes. Maybe less. I've got to make every minute count.
I slide the brass knuckles onto my right hand and close my fist. The metal is cold against my knuckles, heavy. My fingers wrap the grip and my hand becomes something new. Not a fist. A weapon.
Ron is watching me. His eyes are above Tex's forearm, bloodshot, wild, the whiskey and the rage and the disbelief all churning together.
He can't believe what he's seeing. He can't process that the boy he broke is standing in front of him with brass knuckles on his hand and fury in his eyes in a hot pink shirt.
This does not compute. This is not how the story goes.
The story is Ron takes. The boy says, yes sir. The boy does not hit back.
This time the scared boy hits back.
I step forward. Ron sees it coming and tries to jerk away but Tex holds him like a vise. Tex is grinning, that big beautiful wild grin, and the grin says, do it, baby. The grin says, I'm holding this man so you can become the person you were always supposed to be.
At the edge of my vision, I see the bikers at the open front of the bar.
They've formed a wall. Shoulder to shoulder, backs to the inside, facing the parking lot.
Not watching. Blocking. The music outside surges louder.
Someone cranked AC/DC "Thunderstruck" to full volume, a wall of rock that swallows every sound inside the bar.
Nobody outside can see in. Nobody outside can hear in.
The bar has become a sealed room, a private court. The jury is a line of leather-clad backs, and the judge is a woman with a purse full of brass knuckles. The executioner is a five-foot-eight guy wearing hot pink.
I step forward and hit his mouth first.
The mouth. The smile. The thing that convinced a church that he was holy.
The thing that told a homeless kid at a gas station that everything was going to be okay.
The thing that said, I rode that bike every day, couldn't get enough, felt so good, so perfect.
The thing that opened in the dark above me every night for four years and breathed instructions into my ear that I can still hear in my nightmares.