Chapter 16
Sixteen
Sorry I forgot to text you back. I also forgot to eat today if that helps.
—Text from Calli to Jasper
JASPER
I was fucking dead.
There was no part of me that wasn’t screaming in agony.
I’d finished…but barely.
If I didn’t have rhabdo tomorrow, it would be a miracle.
“Where’s Calli?” I asked Searcy, seeing her at my place with a huge smile on her face. “She has my phone.”
Searcy frowned. “Calli left over two and a half hours ago.”
Fuck.
“I have it!” Cutter’s wife, Milena, called out. She was all fuckin’ smiles, and I sort of hated how she was smiling so happily when she’d just ran as far as I had.
“How’d you get it?” I asked.
“Calli left it on your front porch with like six bottles of water. I think. Then Nastya picked it up because some delivery driver was looking at it like he wanted to steal it,” she said. “Nastya gave it to me when I got finished.”
“Thanks,” I said as I pocketed it. “Where’d Calli go anyway?”
“I didn’t think to ask. I was surprised to even hear that she’d watched,” Searcy answered.
I wanted to fall into my shower, rinse off for an hour, then crawl into my bed.
I’d finished…but barely.
Honestly, the only thing that’d kept me going at all was the fact that I was still in front of Cutter.
It was the only encouragement I needed.
Which led me to walking home the three blocks, not bothering to wait for him at the finish line.
I’d made it home and had taken a seat on the porch steps where I’d found the waters and drank half of them before the rest of the crew had shown up with Cutter…in a wheelchair.
“Where’d you get the wheelchair, anyway?” I asked.
“They had EMS at the finish line.” Cutter winced. “I think I fractured my foot.”
“Maybe next time you’ll actually train,” I suggested.
They all teased Cutter relentlessly, but I couldn’t stand outside a moment longer.
I had to get out of my disgusting clothes.
Not only were they sweaty, but there was dried salt all over my body and the parts that were normal were starting to itch.
Plus, I wasn’t super confident standing outside without a shirt, allowing everyone a clear view of my scars.
None of my club family would say a word—they were used to my body—but that didn’t make my confidence any better.
It was hard to be abnormal. People couldn’t help but stare.
“Y’all have a good one. I need to go get the dried sweat off my balls,” I said.
Milena snorted as she grabbed ahold of her husband’s wheelchair and started pushing it down the length of the walk.
She and Cutter had parked outside my house this morning so we could all walk to the race together.
I was unsure why Searcy was there sans kids, but I imagined it had a lot to do with her sister living next door to me.
The shower I took was quick and efficient, mostly because if I had to stand for any longer, I might very well die.
I’d just gotten out and started to dry myself off when I heard my phone buzzing on the counter.
I ignored it, instead focusing on getting dry and putting some clean clothes on.
Once I was fully dressed, I started to walk toward my bed when my phone’s buzzing could be heard a second time.
I picked it up and shoved it into my pocket, my plan to answer once I got another bottle of water in me. However, that plan didn’t work out seeing as it started to immediately buzz again, signaling another call.
I pulled it out of my pocket and saw Harlow’s name flash across the screen.
I seriously contemplated not answering it, not having the energy to deal with Harlow’s upbeat personality right then.
However, based on the number of missed calls on my screen, it must be important.
Harlow didn’t call ten times without needing something.
Though, the last time it was because her car was broken down halfway between Dallas and Paris, and she needed a lift home.
Her boyfriend, the joke of a man that he was, had no vehicle knowledge. Oh, and he had zero male tendencies that wanted to protect and serve.
He’d rather let someone else take care of his girl than take care of her himself.
Groaning inwardly, I answered on the second to last ring and said, “Hello?”
I likely sounded as tired as I felt.
“Um, Jazz?” Harlow’s voice sounded hesitant. “I think we need you to get here as fast as you can.”
“What?” I asked, thinking nothing sounded worse than going to Paris where she lived after just running—and walking—twenty-six point two miles. “Why?”
I expected her to say a lot of things, mostly about her dumbass of a boyfriend.
What I did not expect were the next words out of her mouth.
“Because Calli’s been arrested, and it’s all my fault!”
It took me two hours to get there. By the time that I pulled up to the police station at the little po-dunk hole in the wall right off Main Street, my nerves were frazzled and my anger was on point.
I just knew, somehow, this was Calli’s fault, and yet again I was having to clean up her mess.
“You will pry this watch off my cold, dead hands!” I heard screamed the moment I breached the doors of the small office.
“I’ll take that watch and throw it in the garbage if you don’t give it to me!”
“I won’t take it off, you fuckin’ nut job.
It’s a twenty-nine-thousand-dollar watch, and it doesn’t even belong to me.
It belongs to my neighbor. If you lose it, I’ll never be able to pay it back off.
It has sentimental value. Which I’ve already told you.
So either you can let me keep it, or you can let me go! ”
I heard some officers muttering, but I couldn’t help but smile at her words.
That was why I’d had Haggard’s good buddy, Taos, drop it off to Calli.
I knew that she would look out for it while I was running.
I still couldn’t believe that Haggard and Sophia had Dad’s watch—something he’d found in the goddamn gutter and worn until the day he died—restored for me.
At the time of my dad’s passing, he’d been wearing it on his wrist.
The coroner was able to retrieve it from my dad’s body, but like most metal, it heated up.
And, because I knew what happened when hot metal heated up against skin, I knew that there were pieces of him still embedded in the watch even after they’d gotten it off of him.
Needless to say, Sophia had been hesitant to do anything with the watch.
I hadn’t blamed her, and honestly hadn’t asked about the watch until a few years ago when we’d been laughing at a story and remembering Dad’s pride when he’d shown off that watch.
Sophia had still had the watch in an evidence bag in her bedroom closet.
We’d both looked at that watch, still caked with blood and other things, and put it back.
But apparently Haggard had decided that the time was now.
He’d had the watch restored and cleaned, and he’d sent it to me via his best friend that was visiting family in Dallas.
Since I’d been forced into running, I’d had him deliver it to Calliope until I was done running.
I just hadn’t expected her to put it on or to leave her house. Or to be running off to Paris, Texas, to visit Harlow.
Though, visiting Harlow might not have been what actually happened if Harlow’s words had been true.
“It’s all my fault” weren’t usually words that came out of Harlow’s mouth.
I liked my friend a lot, but she was a stubborn bitch, and never admitted when she was wrong.
I had a feeling that was why she couldn’t keep a good man.
She had no problem keeping the shitty ones, however.
Even worse, the shitty ones stuck like those burrs you get out in the middle of a grassy field on fuzzy clothing that just won’t come off.
Cedrick, her newest douchebag, had to be the worst of the lot.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the one that’d arrested Calliope.
He never did like it when a woman smarted off to him, and Calliope was the queen of smarting off.
I followed the sound of the raised voices and then stopped when I was at the counter that barred me from entering the back.
The police station was set up like one large room with a couple of jail cells in the back right corner and desks all around the cells. The left side looked to house bathrooms and a small shower stall—all covered—and the front was separated by a long, large desk that ran about belly height.
“I’ll take it,” I called out.
Calli, who was being blocked from view by two large, burly officers that looked like they couldn’t pass a physical either in mind or body, finally came into view.
What I saw made my stomach ache.
She looked angry as hell, ready to fight anyone that came close to her, and damn the consequences.
The door opened behind me just as Calli said, “You can give the watch to him. It’s his.”
“How do we know that you didn’t steal it?” he asked. “This looks like too fancy of a watch to belong to either one of you.”
“If you touch that watch, I’ll have this entire police station housing brand new cops because y’all will be…”
A new male’s voice finished for me before I could say what I really wanted to say. “…finding new jobs.”
I looked over my shoulder to see an older man, who was very fit and had the sharpest, shrewdest eyes I’d ever seen, cross his arms and stop in the middle of the police station. His feet were braced apart, as if he fully expected them to fight him on his words.
Lynn.
I’d met him a few times at a couple of parties that I’d been invited to thanks to Harlow.
Lynn was the unofficial president of the Souls Chapel Revenants MC. They were a bunch of ex-cons that Lynn had sprung from prison using means that I tried not to dig into too far.
I wondered if he and Apollo needed to hook up.
Though, Apollo was doing his breaking from prison thing illegally.
His plan was to spring his brother-in-law as well as six other men and give them new identities for them to go find new lives somewhere else.
Hopefully never to be caught again.
Though, there was never a guarantee.
“Now, you’ll have to back out of this, Lynn. We have a real problem on our end. This gal assaulted a cop.”
“I didn’t assault a cop,” Calli hissed. “I assaulted a man who deserved it.”