by Zoey Parker
“Hi, Uncle Leon,” she managed when her breath wheezed back into her lungs. Despite everything she found herself smiling at him. “How are you?”
He plunked her down and bent just enough that his six-foot-four frame could peer at the wound on her neck. His lips, half hidden by the beard, formed into a paternally disapproving line. “Here I was, ’bout to ask you the same thing. But I got eyes, don’t I? And I can see for myself you’re shaken.” He waited a beat. “And you’re too skinny.”
There was a chorus of masculine laughter and a few well-meaning jokes at her expense. Of all her father’s biker-buddies, Uncle Leon was her favorite. He was tall as an oak and thin as the neck of the beer bottle he held. He had always been there when her father couldn’t, which had been pretty often.
“I’ll be all right.” She patted a hand against his fuzzy cheek.
His frown rearranged itself into a grin. There was a lot less hair on his head than there used to be. She could see dark spots on his brow line that hadn’t been there before. How long had she been gone?
“Damn right you will be.” He wrapped one arm around her and hauled her to his skinny chest.
For a moment she was wrapped up in a safe scent and a familiar friend. Tears, hot and unwanted, rolled down her cheeks. She didn’t hug him back, but her hands stopped making fists. He wrapped his other arm around her and she started to shake. “I don’t know who he was.”
He nodded and stepped back, taking her shoulders in his strong hands. “Hey, we are gonna find out.”
“Hell yes, we are.”
Her father’s voice was as gruff as it had always been, but she heard an unexpected weariness. She hated that. She didn’t want him weary; she wanted him to be the same gruff, no-nonsense, distant man he’d always been. The one she’d fought with a hundred times.
“Why are people attacking me if—”
The angry words got stuck in her throat when she whirled around. Emma had to look down to see her father, which may very well have been a first. The wheelchair that held him squeaked as he maneuvered in front of her. After a moment of shock passed she managed to see the oxygen tank hanging from a storage bag attached to the handles in back.
“Oh my god,” she whispered. “What happened?”
He looked like a shriveled version of himself. His hair was gone. The skin was too tight over his forehead, and not tight enough near his mouth. A breathing tube wound its way over his body, which used to sport a hefty belly, but not anymore. His vest, leather so comfortably worn it hung like silk, sported a thumb-sized patch that read simply President, and beneath that was another that read First 7.
“How did this semester go?” Mac Ketchum asked it like any father might ask his daughter about her college studies. Which would have been fine if they were just any father and daughter. He settled his elbows on the armrests, straightened as much as his body would let him. Pain tightened his hazel eyes. If anyone else saw it, they didn’t say anything.
She didn’t need to hear him say the word cancer, it was written all over him. Two years ago a desperate family brought an old basset hound into Dr. Oswald’s place. The sour scent of chemotherapy was something a body never forgot. Her father reeked of it. His head and face were bald and shinning, and his jowls were sagging loosely to his chin.
“Answer me,” she demanded anyway. Emma crossed her arms over her chest, but it did nothing to ease the angry and cold ache that had suddenly swelled up there. This couldn’t be her father. Emma’s father was as big as life and twice as strong. He wasn’t this old man. “What happened?”
“Cancer,” Kellan called from the far side of the room. He shoved a hand through his dark hair and shook his head as Rocco thumped through the room, stopping to sniff at everyone. “Lung cancer.”
“All those cigarettes finally did me in.” Mac Ketchum tried to laugh, but it ended in a sickly cough. The ache in her chest became a pain.
After a moment Kellan sauntered across the room like a big leather and denim cat, and plopped himself down into her father’s old leather Lay-Z-Boy. He lounged against the worn brown leather with the ease and comfort of someone who sat there a lot. Rocco jumped up after him, finding a way to lie across Kellan’ long body. Both of them settled their eyes on her.
That struck her as odd. Her father had always been particular about who sat in his chair. She heard the squeak of the wheelchair and thought maybe he had a new chair now. Emma felt sick to her stomach and her feelings took on a complicated edge. “How long have you known?” she demanded.
Her father didn’t quite meet her eyes. “A while.”
She didn’t want to ask the next question that came to mind. She wanted to be angry with him, to snap at him, to demand answers to all of the fear she’d been dealing with the past few hours, but her mouth betrayed her. “How…how long?”
He didn’t answer for a while. “Emma, I will answer all of that, but we have other things to discuss.”
She wanted to argue. She wanted to scream that there was nothing more important than knowing about his health, but she couldn’t quite bring the words to her lips. She sank onto the couch, taking the place Leon had sprung from. The worn fabric sagged beneath her. She looked around the all too familiar living room and felt more loss than she had ever known. She glanced at her father, sitting in a wheelchair, his audible breathing the loudest sound in the room.
“Emma-girl.” Uncle Leon’s voice was as gentle as she had ever heard it. “Why don’t you go ahead and tell us what happened.”
He tucked a cold can of soda into her hand. She didn’t drink it, but holding it helped. She told them everything she could remember. How she was on her way home from the vet clinic. From the run-in with Marco, to the attack, to stopping at a diner to call her father. Emma had assumed she would cry when she talked about it, or at least get a little loud. She didn’t. She spilled it all with the emotionless distance of a shock victim.
“So?” she demanded at the end of it. “What’s going on?”
“Most of it’s club business,” her father started.
Anger swelled up inside of her, burning away the cold and empty feeling. Her head was beginning to ache with all the different emotions experienced in such a short amount of time. “Are you kidding me?”
“Emma, don’t make this harder than it has to be. We gotta know.”
Emma wasn’t sure which of her father’s men spoke, she didn’t care. This entire day had been too much and she certainly wasn’t going to listen to some guy’s crap about how hard she was making things. “I didn’t make anything hard.” She got to her feet. Her hands became fists so tight that she felt the ends of her short nails bite into her own palms. “I was doing just fine, thank you very much. I was going to college, stressing out over classes and planning for my future. Normal stuff. I was just minding my own business and daydreaming about lasagna when someone attacked me!” She hated that her voice was growing shriller with every word that was coming out.
“Emma,” he father’s voice was as gentle as she had ever heard it, “I’m sorry.”
She was stunned into momentary silence. It was then that Emma knew something was very wrong. Mac Ketchum did not apologize, not to anyone or for anything. He was the leader of The Beasts and as such his word was law, or at least whatever passed for law in a motorcycle club. He hadn’t apologized when he missed her first science fair, or when their dog died, or even when her mother left. How bad had things gotten?
“What’s going on?”
“For your own safety, I can’t tell you everything.” Her father held up one hand when Emma opened her mouth to argue with him. The skin on his palm was so thin and sickly she could see his veins. “But I can tell you I never expected you to be hurt. If I had thought for one moment you would be, I would have called or something.”
“Or something?”
“Hell, Emma, I don’t know. You made it pretty clear when you left here that you didn’t wanna be a part of my life. I thought I was, you know,
respecting that.”
It was true and everyone knew it. Emma had already been packed the day she graduated, boxes piled into her crappy four-door even as she pulled on her cap and gown. With her acceptance letter in one hand and what little money she had managed to scrounge together from part-time jobs in the other, she had driven off into the sunset while everyone else had been celebrating finishing high school.
“Fine,” she said. “All right, fine, but you should have told me when this happened. When you were…diagnosed.”
He laughed, but it was a humorless sound. “Yeah, sure, and what would you have done? Rushed home to help the dad who was never there for you? Dropped all your studies for the jerk who couldn’t be bothered to show up for you? Yeah, I don’t think so. You were staying away and making something of yourself. I sure as hell wasn’t going to interrupt.”
“That wasn’t your choice to make.”
“The hell it wasn’t,” Kellan put in. He swung his legs down, disrupting the dog in his lap. “We all made that choice. You were gone and you were doing the best thing you could do.”
Emma shook her head again, but she chose not to say anything. What was there to say to that? They were right. She had left. She had severed ties with them, this whole town and all of the people in it. At the time it had seemed like the best idea. What had been here for her? Nothing, that’s what. Maybe she had been wrong.
“Yeah,” she said slowly, “I guess so. I just…I don’t like that I didn’t know anything. I mean, I still don’t know much. What’s going on? Why me?”
Kellan and Mac exchanged a look. A long conversation was held in that single exchange and Emma felt like an intruder. She had always felt like an outsider where the two of them were concerned. Then again, how could she compete with the son her dad had always wanted?
“Emma, how much do you know about the club?” Mac asked.
Emma blew out a breath. It was an odd question, but she felt a need to answer it. “Not much…too much. I don’t know. I mean, I know other parents were terrified of letting any of my friends come over. Boys who wouldn’t date me because of my ‘badass’ dad.” She rolled her eyes.
Kellan chuckled. “You dated pussies.”
“At least they weren’t criminals,” she shot back.
He leveled a smile at her. “Maybe you needed a little more criminal in your life.”
She rolled her eyes, wondering how she could have ever thought he was going to kiss her. Had that really only been twenty minutes ago? “I had quite enough of that in my life, thank you very much.”
Mac broke in. “Yeah, I know it wasn’t easy for you. I didn’t mean to make life hard, you know.”
“I know, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard.” She tugged her legs to her chest and sighed.
“I wish I could say that it was gonna get easier.” Her father hung his head in an act of shame that she had never seen him display.
How bad was this going to be? Apologies? Shame? Understanding? These were traits she had never known her father to display. What had happened in the past few years to make him so unlike the gruff and distant man she remembered? She glanced at the chair and the tubes of oxygen going to his nose.
“What’s happened?” she finally asked.
Leon cleared his throat and sat forward, speaking for the first time since she started her story. “We are pretty sure the guy who attacked you was one of Gabriel’s men.”
“Gabriel?” she asked. She searched her memories for the mention of the name, she couldn’t recall it. “Who is Gabriel?”
“Drug cartel sicario with dreams of being a lieutenant,” Kellan offered. “Second generation Cuban American, claims he’s got family up in the big leagues. Was well on his way to being taken seriously before—”
“Shut your mouth,” Mac snapped. “She doesn’t need to know everything.”
A sicario was a lieutenant in the cartel’s chain of command. Emma racked her brain to remember what little she knew about loosely organized crime. Sicarios usually lorded over a particular area, and had some men beneath them to carry out orders and get their hands dirty. It was like a chapter president, making him toe-to-toe with her dad.
Emma flopped against the back of the couch hard enough to make it shudder. It was a petulant move, and she knew it. But it was two in the morning and her world was upside down, she had earned the right to a little petulance. “Yeah, because keeping me in the dark helped a lot.”
“Girl’s got a point,” another of the group responded. She didn’t look up, but she was pretty sure it was big grumpy Vinny.
There was a silent council meeting to which Emma was excluded. She let them have it. It gave her enough time to pull her brain back together. A glance at her cell phone told her she had no calls and it was a little after three. While she’d spent plenty of nights seeing the sun come up during finals, she was beginning to sag.
“Emma?” Uncle Leon’s voice called her back. “You need to go lie down, sweetie?”
“No,” she said, “not yet. Not until everything is said and done.”
“Vinny over here was asking you if you could describe your attacker.” Kellan prompted. He was watching her closely, with a small amount of concern.
For a moment she was a teenage girl again and her belly was doing flip-flops. She shook it off. She needed sleep. Her brain wouldn’t be feeding her all these alternating feelings if she got a good eight hours of sleep. “I dunno. I guess.” She sat up in her seat. She must have dozed off since everyone had moved around. “I really don’t know. I remember he was tall, he smelled like cheap liquor and cheaper cigarettes. Wait…he had tattoos.”
She could almost feel the attention sharpen. It was like being caught in a spotlight. Eyes in every available hue turned in her direction and focused. She squirmed. Right now she did not want that attention.
“Better than fingerprints,” Kellan snorted. “What of?”
“Catholic symbolism stuff. Angels and the Virgin Mary.” She shrugged. Her ponytail suddenly felt too tight. With a careless gesture she tugged it free and let her hair tumble down. Her nails scratched listlessly over her scalp. The ache in her head was slowly turning into a migraine. She was so tired. “Pretty similar to what a lot of pious gangsters have.”
“The Virgin, was she done in black and white, or colors?” Mac asked. He navigated his chair forward, stopping right in front of her.
“Black and white,” she explained. Her hand swept over her drooping eyes. “All his tattoos were grayscale.”
“Michael,” the men chorused.
“Michael? Like Gabriel and Michael? Biblical? Really?” Emma rolled her eyes, feeling a fresh wave of weary frustration. “That’s…wow. That’s so not awesome.”
“Pretty sure some of his men have tattoos, but I don’t think he’d trust this kind of attack to one of his lesser guys. It was personal.” Leon offered.
“No shit,” Mac snorted. “He went after my fucking daughter. It’s personal. It’s—” His words were swallowed up in a coughing fit. It wasn’t the dry cough of someone who was getting over an illness, but the wet, hacking of a body trying to rid itself of something horrible. His shoulders shook, and the chair squeaked with every jerk of his body. “Gentlemen,” he croaked out, “I appreciate you coming over, but I’d like to speak with my daughter now.”
It was an order, no matter how weakly stated, and everyone knew it. As a unit they got up and tossed their beers into the recycling bin. The clatter of glass on plastic echoed hollowly.
One by one her father’s friends said their goodbyes. There were hugs, and kisses, and promises to keep her safe. She responded, but she didn’t really hear them. The effort to get through the evening had sunk well into her bones and taken away what little energy she had left.
“You take extra good care of yourself, Emma-girl.”
“I’ll try, Uncle Leon.”
“Kellan,” Mac said, “I’d like you to stick around.”
Kellan, who, like a good
solider, was following all the others out the garage door, stopped in his tracks. He glanced over his shoulder, looking concerned. Suddenly she saw that the patch on his vest read Vice President. She frowned. That was what Leon’s used to say. When had that switch happened? What had she missed?
“Rocco and I could crash at Leon’s, no big,” Kellan offered. “Or even go back to our own place; it’s been a while since I actually slept in my own bed.”
“This is your home, at least for now,” Mac said, shaking his bald head. “And I gotta lot to say, some of it concerns you.”
“I didn’t move back in permanently, Mac. Just helping out.” Kellan hesitated by the door to the garage. The light from outside cased a long shadow across the floor.
It should have been a surprise that he was living here, but it wasn’t. Her father hadn’t called her when he got sick; he had turned to Kellan. Why wouldn’t he? Kellan was the son Mac Ketchum had always wanted. A dutiful son to follow in his boot steps. She had never been willing to be the kind of daughter he wanted. They were both stubborn.
