by Grey, Blair
I put a hand on his arm, but he had already said the words that Lex needed to goad him into fighting.
There were no more words for now. And there was no time to come up with anything resembling any sort of strategy. The goons leaped forward, fists flying. They outnumbered us, but the great thing about it, the one thing saving our asses right now, was that they were cocky because of that. They thought they had us beat even before the first punch was landed. It was time for us to show them differently.
I had never fought alongside Grant and Braxton before. I hadn’t really fought all that much, ever since I had joined the club. That just wasn’t where my strengths were. But right now, I had adrenaline to help me. I couldn’t let anything happen to Sam. That was the thought that just kept running through my mind. I couldn’t let anything happen to Sam.
Grant and Braxton could handle the goons. I needed to take Lex out. To make sure that he never had anything to do with either Tara or Sam again. That he couldn’t put any other plans into action, and that all of this stopped here, today. Now.
I shouldered one of the Unknowns aside, knocking him into the man who Braxton was grappling with and sending those two guys sprawling. Braxton could deal with them like that. These guys might be big, but Braxton and Grant were both more muscular than them.
I focused my attention on Lex, not wanting him to get away. If he could get to the school, there was a possibility that he would still be able to get Sam out of there. I needed to keep his attention on me. So I lunged at him, launching myself toward him and knocking him to the ground. We rolled on the pavement, and I came up on top of him. I got in a couple good punches before he got us flipped so that he was on top of me. Instead of coming at me with his fists, though, he pulled out a gun, pistol-whipping me across the face.
I spat out blood but managed to get away before he could hit me with the gun again.
“Don’t come near me,” Lex warned, pointing the gun right at my chest. At this point-blank range, he would kill me if he got a shot off. But I couldn’t dwell on that right now. The only thing that mattered was keeping his attention on me and off of Sam and Tara.
The sounds of Grant and Braxton fighting the other four Unknowns faded away. All I was focused on was Lex and that gun in his hands. “You never meant for there to be another agreement with Red Eyes, did you?” I asked.
Lex laughed. “There was never really an agreement to begin with,” he said. “Ray would never have gone after me because that’s just the kind of guy that he was. But if I had wanted to go after Red Eyes, I would have. I was just biding my time. Building up my own club again.”
“And now?” I asked him. “Why go after Sam or Tara?”
“Because I can tell how much you hate it,” Lex said, as though that answered everything.
“But I’m not the leader of the club,” I snapped.
“You’d rather that I went after Grant’s Holly?” Lex asked. “She’s pregnant, you know.”
I felt a chill go through me. I knew, but I didn’t know how he knew. Tara clearly wasn’t the only one that he was stalking.
“You know, there are plenty of people in Red Eyes who want changes too,” Lex said. “I didn’t expect it to be so easy to plant one of my own guys as one of your new recruits. You never even suspected it, did you? But then again, you also didn’t suspect that Holly was working for the cops.”
“How do you know all of this?” I asked, shaking my head.
Lex grinned and shrugged. “Keeping track of what’s going on with my rivals is a skill that Ray taught me once upon a time,” he said. “It’s too bad that Red Eyes doesn’t do a better job of that now. You’ve grown complacent.”
It made me even surer than ever that we couldn’t let Lex live. He would just keep coming back, over and over again. Even if we managed to put him behind bars, he would be back the second that he was free, or else he would find a way to break out and come after us, or else he would find someone else to do his dirty work while he was still in jail. He was never going to let it go.
We couldn’t let him live.
I bent down and picked up a heavy rock, chucking it toward the gun in his hand. He jumped back, but I’d surprised him: he’d been so sure that he won that he wasn’t expecting me to keep fighting back. The rock hit his wrist. His arm flew back, a shot firing. Somewhere, I heard a window break. But there were no screams.
Yet.
I wished that I could look over at Tara, to see how she was handling all of this. But I didn’t dare take my attention off of Lex, not even for a split second. I just hoped that she was safely out of the way. And that Braxton and Grant were handling their guys with no trouble.
God, I wished that she wasn’t there. I understood why she felt like she had to be, because like she had said, Sam was her kid. She was worried about him. She wanted to make sure that nothing would happen to him. I understood why she couldn’t wait there by the phone for me to give her news.
If our positions had been reversed, I would have been right there as well. But at the same time, I was afraid that Lex, with the gun in his hands, was going to do something to hurt her. I wouldn’t put anything past him.
I kept my focus on Lex as I hefted another rock, this time aiming it toward his leg. He jumped faster this time, but he wasn’t expecting the second rock that I threw at him. Maybe I wasn’t fighting fair; maybe Ray wouldn’t have approved. But it was hard to convince myself to fight fair when Lex had pulled out a gun during a fistfight. And when there was so much at stake.
The second rock slammed into his knee with a sickening crunch, and Lex shouted in pain as he went down. Another errant bullet.
The police would be on us soon, I was sure, but I was intent on finishing the job before they got here. I needed to make sure that whatever else happened, Lex was never going to be a problem for us again.
I launched myself at him, wrestling the gun away from him and throwing it to the side before proceeding to punch him over and over again until he was out cold. But I glanced over my shoulder at Tara before I had killed the man. For threatening Sam, he probably deserved to die. But that wasn’t how I wanted Tara to see me for the rest of my life. I didn’t want her to think of me as a stone-cold killer.
That just wasn’t who I was. I wasn’t like the rest of the biker dudes. I didn’t fit the stereotype.
She nodded slowly at me, and I nodded back at her, getting to my feet.
It was weirdly silent now, not that there had been much noise during the fighting either. I was sure that part of my deafness had to do with being so close to that gun when it went off. Twice.
That gun. I grabbed it quickly. I had wrestled it away from Lex, and it had to have my fingerprints on it. But we wanted to get out of here without leaving behind a huge trail of evidence that would lead them back to Red Eyes.
Grant and Braxton were both eyeing me warily, clearly wondering if there was more to the plan. The four guys that they had fought were on the ground as well, sprawled untidily and not looking like they were going to move anytime soon. But as with Lex, they were still alive. Just mangled.
“I’ve planted drugs on them,” Braxton said quietly. “When the police get here, it’ll look like a drug deal gone wrong.”
“Good,” I said. “Get out of here, both of you.”
Grant and Braxton both nodded and scrambled to get out of there before the police arrived. Even now, I could hear sirens off in the distance, no doubt responding to the gunshots.
“Get Sam out of school,” I told Tara. “Just for the rest of the day. I’m guessing that these guys are all the backup that Lex had, but I don’t know for sure, and I don’t want someone else to show up and try to cause any trouble.”
Tara nodded wordlessly at me and then spun and walked briskly toward the school, clearly trying her hardest to act unruffled by the incident. She was a brave woman, that much was for sure.
There was more that I wanted to say to her, apologies that I wanted to make for both yesterday
and today. And I wanted to pull her close to me as well, to tell her that she didn’t need to always act so strong. That it was okay to lean on someone else sometimes.
But now wasn’t the time or the place for a conversation like that. The police were on their way, and I needed to get out of here. And besides, I had interfered in her life enough already. It was time for me to get out of there, to let things get back to normal.
To never bother her again.
As much as I hated the idea of never seeing her again, I had said from the start that if she didn’t want me around, I wasn’t going to force her. I had made my bed a long time ago. It wouldn’t be fair to pressure her to be comfortable with someone like this.
I took one final look at Lex. His knee was mangled, and his face wasn’t looking so good either. Tara had watched me do that to the man. She wouldn’t want someone like me around her son. I couldn’t blame her. No, it was better that I leave all those apologies unsaid, that I leave my feelings for her unvoiced, and that I let her go back to her life.
I needed to focus on the club, to make sure that Lex hadn’t had anything else planned. That no one else was trying to move in on our territory. As much as the loneliness choked me, I had to let Tara go.
38
Tara
I was shaking as I walked toward the school, but I tried to hold it together and do exactly what Cameron had told me. Get Sam, take him out of school for the rest of the day. Just to make sure that he was safe. But I didn’t think that Lex and his gang were going to be bothering us again. I wasn’t sure that Lex would still be alive to bother us again.
I tried to examine how I felt about that. But to be honest, as horrible as it sounded, I didn’t really care if Lex was dead. In fact, it served him right. I couldn’t believe that he had the balls to show up at Sam’s school, and to threaten to kidnap him. If he hadn’t been such a cocky asshole, he might not even have called Cameron about it. Red Eyes might not have known.
What would it have felt like, showing up at the school that afternoon to pick up my son, only to find out that someone else already had, that Sam was gone, that he had been kidnapped? It would have crushed me. The panic would have choked me.
It was hard to say that I owed Cameron something since if it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t have been in this mess in the first place. But at the same time, I had to hand it to him: he had come to Sam’s aid. He had been there for my son. Even when Lex had pulled a gun on him. He hadn’t stopped or thought about his own life. He had made Sam the center of his universe, and he had fought for him.
Sam wasn’t his kid, but Cameron refused to let anything happen to him.
Still, this all just illustrated what Maddie had been telling me all along. That I couldn’t get involved with someone in Red Eyes. That it was just too dangerous. I felt stupid for having been more worried about a broken heart than I was about kidnapping or other very real dangers that came with getting involved with Cameron.
“Sam Blalock?” I asked at the front desk. “I’m his mom, and I need to take him home for the day. He has a dentist appointment that I forgot about.” I hoped she didn’t hear the slight hesitation before I lied about the dentist appointment or the slightly frantic tone of my voice.
“Sure thing,” she said. “I’ll go get him from his classroom; if you could just fill out this paperwork for me.” She turned a clipboard toward me, and I hurriedly filled it out.
As I waited for her to come back with Sam, I wondered what was going to happen now. Cameron and the other guys had cleared out of there before the police showed up, and I heard one of them say something about planting drugs on the guys so that it would look like a drug deal gone wrong. That was smart; I had to admit.
Did I want Cameron and the Red Eyes guys to get caught for beating up Lex and his guys? Honestly, no. They had been trying to protect Sam. But I knew that the police weren’t going to listen to that. They were going to be convinced that Cameron and the guys were trouble and that they needed to go behind bars. So it was probably a good thing that they had gotten out of there before the police showed up.
And what about me? Did that mean that I had witnessed a crime and was covering up evidence? I supposed it did. But I didn’t feel bad about covering things up for Cameron.
I wondered if this was the kind of quasi-legal activity that Red Eyes normally got involved in. I didn’t like the fact that at least one of them had drugs on him, but I also didn’t think for a second that Cameron was involved in drugs or that he did drugs himself. He just wasn’t that type of guy. Just their treasurer, like he had said. And if this was the kind of activity that they did, protecting the innocent and beating up the bad guys, I wasn’t sure that I could complain. It was vigilante justice at its finest, maybe, but with all the corruption in the police force these days, the stuff that you read about in the news, maybe vigilante justice was necessary.
Sam and the secretary came back into the office just then, and I immediately got down on my knees, giving Sam the biggest hug. It was just then that I realized how nervous I’d still been. Not that I’d thought that something else might have happened to him, but before I could see him with my own two eyes, I guess it just hadn’t sunk in that he really was okay.
It had felt like I had lost him. From the time that Cameron called me until the time that I saw him there in the office, it felt as though I had lost my son. That I had failed, that I had screwed up, that I had gotten us in over our heads, and I was going to have to pay the ultimate price because of it.
But Sam was okay. We were both okay. And I didn’t think Lex was ever going to bother us again.
“Mommy, you’re smooshing me,” Sam complained, and I laughed and let him go, embarrassed to have to wipe tears from my eyes. I wondered what the secretary was making of all of this and knew that she had to suspect there was something more to this than a forgotten dentist appointment. But who the hell cared? It wasn’t like she was going to talk to the police about something she knew nothing about.
“You all ready to go?” I asked Sam.
“I guess.” He sighed. “I don’t want to see Dr. Brown, though.”
I laughed. “But you like going to the dentist,” I reminded him. “Remember, if you’re really brave you get a sticker. And he had those awesome dinosaur ones last time.” I lifted him up as we walked to the parking lot. “Actually, though, you don’t have a dentist appointment.”
“Then why are you taking me away from school?” Sam asked. “Are you having a sad day like I did yesterday? Does that mean we get to get ice cream again?”
I laughed. “We can get ice cream on the way to my work,” I agreed, even though I knew I was spoiling him. Right then, I wanted to spoil him absolutely rotten, though. I was just so glad that he was okay. “I just wanted to spend some time with you. And you measured your plant first thing this morning, didn’t you?”
That did just the trick to distract him from why I was taking him out of school. “Yeah, my plant’s the biggest in the class!” Sam said excitedly. He frowned as we got outside. “What’s the policemen doing over there?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I lied. As much as I hated lying to my son, there was no way that I could tell him what they were really doing here. That his beloved “motorcycle man” had gotten into a fight with a guy threatening to take Sam away from me. That there had been shots fired and blood and a whole host of horrors.
Sam was okay. And Cameron’s face had been bruised and bloodied, but I had to assume that he was going to be okay as well. He at least hadn’t gotten shot. And for right now, that was enough.
They were loading Lex and his goons into ambulances now. I paused for just a moment. As much as I didn’t really want Sam to witness any of this, even though the fighting was over and the bodies were mostly covered up, their wounds hidden, I had to know what was going on. Would they know that Red Eyes had been involved?
“This guy’s never going to walk again,” one of the EMTs grunted, wheeling by with a stre
tcher. Lex was the guy that he was talking about, and I felt a vicious sense of glee to hear that. Did that make me a terrible person? With Sam nestled there in my arms, I had to think that Lex deserved it. If he was going to threaten someone entirely innocent, a child, then he had to pay the price.
“Who do you think did it?” one of the other EMTs asked.
The first guy shrugged. “Honestly, the police say they found drugs on all of them. And we know that there were gunshots but that none of them has a weapon. I’d say that likelihood is, they’re part of some gang here in Las Cruces, and they got themselves in trouble.”
“Red Eyes?” one of the guys asked.
The first guy snorted. “Doesn’t have to be,” he said. “We’re close enough to the border. There’s plenty that could have happened.” He lowered his voice a little, but I could still hear him. “Honestly, I doubt the police are even going to look into this. They have no reason to. These guys were clearly up to no good to begin with, and good riddance for getting them off the streets. The drugs on school property are more than enough to book them on.”
I nodded to myself and walked off, with Sam still in my arms. We stopped for ice cream on the way back to the funeral home, and I grabbed an extra half pint for Maddie.
“I’m so glad to see that you’re okay!” she said, throwing her arms around me.
I was glad that Sam was trailing behind me, still licking at his ice cream. “I didn’t tell him that anything was going on,” I said, even though that probably went without saying. I held out the ice cream. “We went for ice cream, and I told him that I just wanted to spend some time with him this afternoon.”
Maddie nodded and mimed locking her lips shut and throwing away the key. “I want to hear all about it later, though.”
I nodded. Sam caught that sentence, though: “It was so cool!” he exclaimed. “We came out of the school, and there were polices and ambulances everywhere, and there were all these guys, and they were all bloody, and they weren’t moving.” He frowned. “Mommy, are you going to have to touch their dead bodies?”
