6. Protection
PROTECTION
GHOST
Las Vegas at almost half past eight in the morning was half awake and half still drunk.
I ran the Harley through the outer ring of the Strip at seventy, threading between a delivery truck and a sedan whose driver hit the horn and got nothing back from me but distance.
The sun sat flat and bright off the glass towers, throwing glare across the asphalt.
I squinted behind the visor and leaned through a gap in traffic that wasn't quite wide enough and made it wider with the throttle.
Three engines held the pace behind me. Reaper tight on my left. Tank's Harley filled the lane on my right, big enough that cars drifted away from him without knowing why. Irish somewhere behind him, probably already building the version of this he'd tell Declan and Nolan tonight.
My head was doing its thing. Timelines, distances, scenarios, all of it running at once.
Caleb left the compound who knows when. Sometime before dawn, maybe?
Thirteen miles on foot, hurt, barefoot, no phone.
Two and a half hours if he jogged, three if the injuries slowed him.
He'd have reached UMC around half past seven. Earlier if he ran through the pain.
An hour ago. An hour in which anything could have happened.
I took the last turn too fast and the tires barked in protest, the back end sliding an inch before the tread bit. The UMC complex rose ahead, the main building flat and wide against the sky, the parking structure hunched to the south.
Please be here. Please be in one piece.
I pulled into the front lot and killed the engine.
Reaper rolled in beside me. Tank swung into a spot near the entrance, facing out, engine off but staying on the bike.
The shotgun across his back sat under his cut, and you'd only catch the outline of it if you knew to look.
He'd put himself where he could see the lot entrance and the hospital doors both.
I pulled my helmet off. "Tank's staying out here?"
"Tank's staying." Reaper freed his own helmet and ran a hand over his buzz cut. "A man with a shotgun walking into a hospital lobby is a conversation nobody needs to have."
Irish appeared at my shoulder, visor up, helmet swinging from one hand. "So the plan's what? Walk in and ask nicely?"
"The plan is I go in, find Caleb, and make sure he's breathing."
"And if they don't let you in?" Reaper's eyebrow went up a hair.
"Then I'll be very polite about not taking no for an answer." I started for the doors. "Try to look friendly."
"I always look friendly!" Irish's hand went to his chest, a comical wounded look on his face.
"You look like you're about to rob someone."
"That's my friendly face!"
The sliding doors opened into a lobby that smelled like floor cleaner and recycled air and the thin sweetness of vending-machine coffee.
Fluorescents, beige walls, a row of plastic chairs half-filled with people who looked like they'd been there all night.
A reception desk against the far wall, a woman in blue scrubs behind it, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead and a pen tucked behind one ear.
When she looked up at me, her face gave away nothing at all. She'd watched every kind of trouble come through those doors, and it had taught her to keep her expression flat until she'd decided what you were.
"Morning." I gave her my best try at a normal smile. "Here to see a patient. Liam, up in the ICU. I'm a friend."
She looked at me. Then past me. I watched her eyes travel over my shoulder and widen a fraction, taking in whatever Reaper and Irish looked like from the far side of a reception desk.
I glanced back. Reaper stood six feet behind me, arms crossed, leather cut over a dark shirt, his silver-gray eyes moving across the lobby and marking the exits and the chairs and the people in them without seeming to think about it.
Irish beside him, helmet still in hand, grinning, his red undercut catching the light.
Together they looked like the cover of an album you'd buy to upset your parents.
"They're also friends." I tried the smile again.
Her eyebrow climbed a quarter inch. "ICU visitation is immediate family only. I can't let friends up, no matter how many of you turn up." She pulled the glasses down onto her nose and looked at her screen. "And Liam already has a visitor. Family member checked in before seven."
My pulse jumped. Before seven. A family member.
Caleb was here.
"That's actually why I came." I stepped in closer and dropped my voice.
Half a performance, at most. "That family member, Caleb.
Liam's brother. I saw him last night and he was hurt, pretty bad, and he took off before anybody could patch him up right.
I think he came straight here. I just need to know he's okay. "
Something shifted in her face. The professional flat softened at the edges, and she took the glasses off again.
"That boy. Caleb. I've seen him come visit before.
I let him up without ID because I know he's the brother.
" She shook her head, slow. "Came in this morning looking like somebody had dragged him across a parking lot.
Barefoot. Bleeding. I tried to sit him down and look at those cuts and he wouldn't hear it.
Went straight up without stopping." She held my eyes a beat.
"Whatever he's tangled up in, he won't say.
Just sits in that chair by his brother."
"I know. That's why I'm here. I'll take care of him."
She studied me. I could feel the weighing behind it, the wondering of whether I was a man who'd help another or who'd make it worse.
I kept my hands where she could see them and my face open and did my level best not to look like someone who'd put a man's head through a concrete floor ten hours ago.
"Five minutes." She aimed the pen at me. "I'm coming up in five, and whoever isn't family is coming back down with me. Room two seventeen."
"That's all I need."
"Just you. Your friends wait here."
"Understood."
The nurse's eyes were now down, back at the paperwork in front of her. "Second floor. Follow the signs."
I turned. Irish's grin had spread through the whole exchange, and even six feet back I could feel it on the nape of my neck like a heat lamp.
"Not a word," I muttered as I passed them.
"I didn't say anything." Irish's grin didn't move an inch.
"Your face is saying plenty."
The elevator opened onto a corridor that smelled of antiseptic and carried that heavy padded hospital hush. My shoes squeaked on the linoleum. Numbered doors ran down both sides, some open, some shut, the muffled beep of monitors and the sigh of ventilators leaking through the gaps.
Room 217 sat at the end of the hall, door closed. I knocked, two knuckles, light.
No answer. I pushed it open and stepped through.
The ventilator was the first thing I heard. Hiss-click. Hiss-click. It filled the little white room like a second heartbeat, steady and mechanical, the rhythm of a machine holding a body on this side of the line.
The room was bare. White walls, a single window with the blinds half down, morning light laid across the linoleum in bars. A bedside table with a plastic pitcher and a paper cup. Monitors on a rolling cart, green numbers blinking. An IV stand, a tangle of clear tubing and a clip on a finger.
And the bed.
Liam was smaller than I'd braced for. A long stretch in a hospital bed shrinks anyone, so that shouldn't have caught me, but he was young, early twenties, and the brown curls on the pillow and the soft line of his jaw made him look younger still.
Eyes closed. The tube ran from the base of his throat to the machine, taped flat against his collarbone.
His hands lay at his sides on the white sheet, palms up, so still that my eyes went to the sheet over his chest and held there until I saw it rise.
Caleb sat in the chair beside the bed.
He looked up, and his dark eyes met mine, and the room went small.
He was in worse shape than when I'd left him.
The swelling under his left eye had gone deep purple.
The split in his lip had opened again, a thin line of dried blood down his chin.
Bruises stacked across his bare torso, old and new, the yellow-green from last week's fights bleeding into the fresh purple from the ring and the corridor, his taped knuckles smudged with something that could've been blood or grit or both.
His feet were flat on the floor, bare, and I could only imagine the raw torn skin on the soles where thirteen miles of asphalt and gravel had taken their cut.
His hands rested on the sheet beside his brother's.
Close. An inch of white cotton between his fingers and Liam's.
Not touching. I looked at his knuckles, the dried blood and the desert still crusted into the tape, and I understood.
He wouldn't put that on Liam's skin. Wouldn't let a single thing he'd walked through land on his brother's clean hands.
That hit me harder than anything I'd seen in the pit.
"Hey." My voice came out quieter than I'd meant.
Caleb looked at me and said nothing. His jaw was set and his eyes were flat and dark and his whole body sat coiled in that chair, coiled tight enough that I could read it from the door. He was holding something in that was hunting for a way out.
I opened my mouth to keep going, because that was what I did when the quiet got heavy, I filled it. "I'm glad I found you. With everything happening, you being out here alone isn't safe. If you'd told me you wanted to come I'd have brought you mys?—"
"What the fuck is going on?!"
His voice was steady. Almost. A crack ran under it that hadn't split open yet, a fault line in glass, and I could hear the pressure stacking up behind it.