“So what? We got a third gang trying to get us to eliminate each other? Some crazy vigilante playing games? Help me out here, boss?”
“We have some fucked up shit going on here, and we need to move,” Spike corrected, standing back up.
Before Derek could even ask where the Hell Ron was, the lights flood on in the whole building. There was no sign of his friend, just the other crew member that he’d beaten up a few yards over, still gurgling but basically unconscious, and the freshly eliminated yet trussed up Death’s Head vice president.
“That can’t be good,” Spike said, starting to run back to the other side of the factory and where they’d parked their bikes.
“Nope,” he agreed.
As they rushed out, heads down and pace quickening, there was the sound of boots clomping into the catty-cornered end of the warehouse. Derek had been in raids long enough to know the sound of S.W.A.T. team boots, and he also knew that looking back would only serve to both slow him down and risk the chance the cops would spy his face. They had a good portion of the cops in the county on payroll, at least for what usual club standards were, but they could only look the other way so much. Part of that meant that having half the local Boone force walk in on a murder victim was going to be too much for them to throw money at.
Instead, he and Spike kept running, even as it tore into Derek to leave Ron behind. They’d been inseparable since he’d joined the Blacktop Sinners ten years ago, fresh out of juvie. Now? God, if the Death’s Head crew had him…if they touched a hair on his head…fuck it, Derek would burn their clubhouse down and piss on the ashes. No one touched his brothers and lived.
No one.
The cops were rushing faster now, and they just made it out of the warehouse. He flung his leg over his bike and throttled up, all while his eyes were kept on the door. Shoving his sunglasses on, he struggled for anything to help hide his face. It was a crazy move this late at night, but he couldn’t afford to be made. Beside him, Spike had repurposed the bandana around his forehead into a bandit mask of his own, one that covered everything below his eyes.
“Here!” He called, shoving the now closed switch blade to him. “We split up, and we hide the evidence. Meet back at the clubhouse, and we plan what we can. Do you hear me?”
“Ron---”
“We’ll make the Death’s Head pay, but we can’t behind bars. Now go. That’s an order.”
He nodded and peeled out even as four S.W.A.T. members burst through the doors and started shooting at their wheels. It was far from safe so-called police etiquette, but he’d learned long ago that police shot first and asked questions and faked paper trails later. The wind roared in his ears and he fled out of the alley like a deer racing from a forest fire, like as a kid he’d run from his foster father’s wrath. The scenery whizzed by him as he poured on the throttle. Even as he raced against the pavement, he heard the sirens whirring behind him. It was good they hadn’t settled on Spike.
He was the enforcer.
Let him take the heat off of his leader.
The cops were drawing closer, so he risked darting across four lanes of traffic and almost being slammed by an eighteen wheeler. It allowed him enough of an edge to take an exit off to a smaller country path and a more winding mountain road. It was a long way around to the clubhouse, but he could manage. The trees were close on this road, hadn’t been pruned back, and he could still hear the sirens. They were growing apart in distance, but he was still terrified they’d catch him. He already had a couple strikes for dealing and battery. If he were caught now, that would be his third strike and his free trip up the river.
Digging into the speed, he took the upcoming curve too fast. His rear wheel flew out from under him, and he rolled several times before hitting a rock off the side of the path. The last thing he remembered was the blood dripping from his temple into his eyes. The last thought going through his mind was a prayer that the switchblade was hidden well enough.
Chapter Three
Her throat was dry.
That was the first thing that Tess noticed as they wheeled the gurney into her bay. The second was that her palms were so slick that she would have trouble holding the instruments. The man before her was huge, well over six feet, and his legs hung off the edge of the gurney. He was in leathers, and they were badly shredded but seemed to have taken the brunt of whatever crash he’d had. While they were torn, his arms and legs underneath showed barely any signs of road rash. But his head, dear God, he clearly hadn’t been wearing a helmet at impact, and there was a deep gash on his left temple and blood coating his face and the hair of his beard.
Tess bit back her nausea and forced the lightheadedness swirling around her from throwing her to her knees. No, she was beyond this now. Trauma wasn’t an excuse for being unable to do her job. There would always be motorcycle accidents. It was a fact of life in any emergency room, and it certainly was something they saw when their town bordered so many narrow mountain paths.
Dr. Malek trailed efficiently behind the paramedics and started barking orders for all of them. A new graduate of UNC’s medical school, she was a sharp edition to the staff, even if she could be hard to work with and a stickler for perfection. If Tess had even considered backing off this case for emotional reasons, Malek would have her written up.
Tough but fair.
Gritting her teeth, Tess reached for the gloves and slipped them on. “What’s first?”
“I need you to cut everything off, even the jacket. The lacerations on the skin look superficial, but we want to make sure we haven’t missed anything. Alacron, start getting him hooked up to the heart monitors!”
Tess and her friend split up, and she did as she was asked, sheering through his chaps and denim easily. His legs were scraped a bit, but there was nothing deep and nothing that needed debridement. That was a relief, the leather had kept his skin from being torn off, and that was lowering any chance of severe infection. She hesitated at the jacket. It wasn’t that it was beautiful by any means. This rough and tumble victim was a man’s man; that was for sure. Burly as a bear almost, but the leather was well-worn. He’d probably had this jacket for years and worn it every day of that time.
She sighed and cut into it, shoving it into the plastic bag they’d put in storage for him anyway. It might be something he was fond of, but his life was on the line, and he’d have to deal with it, assuming he survived.
Next came his boots and, despite her years in the E.R., Tess’s eyes went wide when she pulled off his right boot. Inside of it was a switch blade. That was something she saw often in emergency, sometimes still embedded in victims or confiscated off people until they were released. There was no reason to think it had been anything more than something he’d stowed, possibly even as a resource for a mountain retreat. He’d been found on a dirt road by private cabins after all. Shrugging, she threw that into the bag as well.
The final strokes of her shears were used to cut off the t-shirt on his torso.
Despite her years of nurse’s training, Tess lost her professional eye just a bit. His chest was amazing. Not a scratch was on it---thank God---but it was lean and well-defined. It even led to an eight pack of abs that trailed tantalizingly to his boxers.
“Everhart! I need the gown on him now!” Malek called out.
Shaking herself out of her revelry, Tess obliged. She and an orderly shoved his gown on. Beside her, Lizzy had finished setting up the monitor, and his heartbeat was strong.
“BP is one-thirty over sixty, pulse holding steady at eighty. O2 saturation looks average,” Malek said. “Everhart, I need you to do the basic neuro with him. Ask him the questions while I get a look at his foot; left one looks crunched. Alacron, you need to clean the blood off his face, don’t want it crusting in his beard.”
Tess nodded and turned on her pen light, flashing it in the patient’s open eyes. To her relief, they both dilated normally, neither bigger than the other nor fixed. That was a positive sign; with his crash and p
ossible head trauma, they’d be sending him for an MRI soon. However, knowing that his eyes were acting normally did argue against the odds that he’d had a stroke or another cerebral event.
“Sir, can you hear me?”
“Where’s Spike?” He asked.
She blinked, confused by his question. “I don’t understand. You need a spike? What for?”
He shook his head, and she stepped back as blood flecks splashed from his still dripping forehead. “No my pre…friend. He was riding with me too. Did he crash?”
“Sir---”
“It’s Derek, Derek Allanson.”
“Good, at least you know your name.”
He groaned but continued to focus perfectly on her, following her face smoothly with his eyes. “Of course I know my name.”
“Good, so what day is it?”
“June 11, 2015.”
“And who is president.”
“Obama.”
“And how many fingers am I holding up?” She said, striking the peace sign pose for him with her right hand.
“Two, but I’m serious. Where’s Spike?”
“You’re the only motorcycle rider we’ve had come in tonight. Sir---”
“Derek,” he gritted out. “You don’t have to be formal.”
She blushed, despite herself. God, she wasn’t going to become some Florence Nightingale cliché. After all, Tess had never fallen for a patient before; she was damned if she were going to start now, even if he were the hottest man she’d ever seen in her life. “Fine, Mr…I mean, Derek, can you tell me how you got here?”
“I was with Spike at this, uh, meeting.” He closed his eyes then and his brow furrowed with wrinkles as seemed to be struggling to remember more. Soon, Derek’s eye shot open and he frowned. “I don’t know. We were together and then I was here. I don’t understand.”
“You’ve had a motorcycle accident. You crashed.”
“My bike?”
“It’s mostly unscathed. I think it was taken to an impound lot,” Dr. Malek added from the foot of the gurney. “That can be sorted out with your possessions soon enough. You have a few broken toes, and we can set a splint for the bigger ones.”
“Great, so where’s Spike?” He asked, his eyes blinking back at both of them confused.
Tess bit her lip. “You just asked that.”
“No, I didn’t. Wait, did I?”
Malek shook her head and turned to the resident who’d joined her. “We’ll work on setting the toes later; get him into the MRI. He may have hurt his head worse than we realized.”
Chapter Four
“You’ve been here three hours after your shift ended,” Dr. Malek said, as Tess double-checked the heart monitor and made notes on the clipboard for Derek Allanson. “You can go.”
She nodded and played with the St. Christopher medal around her neck. The patron saint of travelers. It had been Jason’s and then hers after the fallout. “I just wanted to hear that the radiologist agreed with your reading of the MRI. I’m glad it looks like only a concussion.”
“Still, we’re keeping him here overnight for observation, so he’ll be here when your shift officially starts in nine hours, Tess. It’s going to be fine.”
She frowned back at her boss. Dr. Malek had never called her by her first name before. “I just freaking hate motorcycles. They’re death machines, good for nothing at all. He’s lucky, absurdly lucky.”
“God willing,” the doctor finished. “He should be someone we can let go in the next twenty-four hours. I understand you’re worried, but frankly, Everhart, he’s not your brother. It’s not going to go like that at all.”
Her spine stiffened at the casual reference to Jason. She hadn’t realized that Malek knew. Hell, being a transplant from three hours away, Malek had always been someone that Tess assumed didn’t know. She certainly didn’t think she’d caught the doctor’s attention enough to have her asking questions. Yes, at first, she’d been leery and panicked when motorcycle accidents came into the E.R., but that had been years ago. She thought that with the few she’d seen since Dr. Malek had come to Boone General, she’d been professional and as good a nurse as ever.
Maybe not.
Not if Malek had seen through her ruse or, well, her trying so hard.
“How long have you known? Did Lizzy say something?”
“No, but I was curious about some reservations I noticed with an otherwise stellar nurse. Google wasn’t hard to use. Everhart, you’re a good nurse because you care, but don’t get too involved. Mr. Allanson is going to pull through just fine, and we’ll have twelve hours of patients to deal with tomorrow. Get rest, and I’m sorry for your loss.”
She sighed and slipped the medal back under her scrub top. “So am I.”
***
She’s laughing with Lizzy at the registration desk when the gurney rushes in. At first, she can’t process what she’s seeing. It doesn’t even look like Jason. His right leg is crushed and already swelling, maybe even compartment syndrome setting up in his lower calf. His chest looks just wrong, and he gurgles out blood when he breathes. She can’t tell from her vantage point and without tests if the ribs are crunched, but she’d still bet at least several are, but it’s his face that scares her most.
It’s swelling fast and it’s covered in blood. If he weren’t wearing the jacket she bought him last Christmas, she might not even be able to tell it was him.
It’s too much.
She pole vaults practically over the desk and rushes with the other staff toward the nearest emergency operating theater. Tess rushes with them, calling her brother’s name, but he stops even gurgling and starts to convulse on the bed. She tries to grab him, but Lizzy wraps her arms around her waist and pulls her back.
“Stop, you have to let them work.”
She screams and pulls against her friend, but she can’t budge. Instead, Tess crumples to her knees and cries, trying to ignore the loud beeping of a failing heart monitor from the operating room behind the swinging doors.
Chapter Five
The pounding in his head rivaled some of his greatest hangovers. He’d turned twenty-one at the clubhouse and celebrated by doing twenty-one shots of Jagermeister. That was the only time he could remember that his head felt this poorly, like a huge battering ram was beating from the inside against his skull. Blinking awake, he tried to recall what happened. There’d been the warehouse set up and trying to get Spike out to safety after he stabbed the vice president of the Death’s Head club, the VP who’d been oddly restrained to begin with. Ron was missing, probably taken captive by the rival gang or, worse, found by the cops in the raid. Then he’d grabbed the knife and gotten on his bike and the rest?
The rest was a damn blur.
Sitting up, he realized he was in a hospital bed. There were the dull lights of the faded overheads above him. He couldn’t tell what time it was because his watch had been cut off, and there were no clocks in the room. Groaning, he noticed that he was in a gown as well and that he needed to find his gear, call the clubhouse, and get back to figuring out how the Death’s Head club had set them up so easily.
First, though?
He had to tear the leads off of him.
The beeping came fast and loud when he tore off the stickers adhering the heart monitors to his skin. He hissed a bit as they came off and cursed whoever invented the adhesive. Working faster, he reached down and pulled out the IV dripping into his arm and then used a few paper towels at the sink next to his bed to stop up the bleeding in the vein there. By then, a nurse was rushing into his room.
He frowned at the short yet curvy blonde beauty striding into the room. She had the most alluring hazel eyes he’d ever seen, flecked liberally with cold, a heart-shaped face, and thick lashes that he felt were real and not drug store fake. Her scrubs were wrinkled and her eyeliner smeared, and he wondered if she were nearing the end of her shift. Even if she were scowling back at him with what seemed like righteous fury, it was hard to take her seri
ously when she looked like she'd just rolled out of bed.
“What exactly do you think you’re doing, Derek?”
He blinked. Was he supposed to know her? Shit, his head felt like the Kentucky derby was being held inside of it. He wasn’t sure he could remember anything, at least not after he’d headed out of the warehouse district as fast as if the hounds of Hell were after him. Not that Derek would mind remembering such a gorgeous woman; he just couldn’t.
“Who are you?”
She reeled back just a little, disappointment creeping into her features before she started to explain. “I’m Nurse Everhart.”
He snickered. “Really?”
“Yes, and I was the one who did your neurological exam yesterday. You don’t remember that.”
Corrupted: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Blacktop Sinners MC) Page 2
