Not Even A Mouse

by MariaLisa deMora

  “The paper said there was a raid. On a motorcycle gang’s clubhouse. When you aren’t here, you always say you’re at the clubhouse. Tell me that the police weren’t knocking on their door this morning. Tell me, and I’ll believe you. I know you’d never hurt Talya. But your friends?” Myron’s words had cut deep, and Andy struggled against showing the emotion. Myron’s head shook back and forth slowly and his stubborn refusal to explain made Andy angry, and he snapped, “Jesus, she’s my daughter. Don’t you think I deserve at least that? To know if she’s safe? To understand who you invited into Roger’s house?” Myron’s eyes widened, and Andy covered his mouth. I shouldn’t have said those words. Fighting tears, he croaked, “You asked me for honesty the other night. Wanted to know what happened with Roger. I told you, Myron. Told you everything. Didn’t I tell you how Roger left me, left me and Talya to fend for ourselves? How he died overseas? I wasn’t even Talya’s guardian. It was a near thing, with the social workers all talking like foster care would be preferable to the gay man living in her father’s house. But somehow, between Mother Danfort and my grandmother, I found the help I needed so I could keep her. Keep her in her home. A home her father made for her. For us.” He pulled in a breath intended to calm, but Myron’s mouth insistently staying shut made him reckless. “You tell me my daughter is safe. Tell me I’m safe.”

  “You think…you think for a moment I’d let anything happen to Talya? To you?” Looking staggered, Myron asked for clarification. “You don’t trust me to keep you safe?”

  “No, I don’t.” It wasn’t true, but he’d lost control and was lashing out. Angry and hurt, because Myron hadn’t explained anything, and the news reports were very clear the kind of things the gang was into: rape, drugs, and even murder. “You’re going to have to do better than that.” Myron stepped forwards and stopped when Andy took a matching step backwards. “Don’t. You don’t get to come in here and decide what I need to know. Not when my questions are valid. Jesus, Myron. She’s my daughter. So don’t try to soothe me like what I’m asking doesn’t matter. Not until I can understand. Not until you tell me what’s going on.”

  “I can’t, Andy. They aren’t just my friends, that’s…the Rebels are my family.” Andy shook his head. “I pulled your story out of you hand over fist, you fighting me the whole way, because I cared enough to want to know. I understand things have been going fast, and you’ve had a lot on your mind, but did you ever once…just one time…did you think to ask about my life and what I might have going on? So, what? My brothers are good enough to spend money at the bar, but now you’re worried about them helping keep Talya safe? Those are the best men I fucking know. They saved my life. Saved a lot of people.” That last was a roar and Andy jerked backwards, stumbling over his own feet. “And you’re going to stand there are tell me you’re afraid of them? Of me?”

  “I’m just saying that we need to talk about this—” He gestured towards the table, pointing towards what still felt like damning evidence. “—and it should be sooner rather than later.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. After I’ve spent the time with you becoming invested in you, I guess it’s about time you started asking about me and my life. There I was, feelin’ all proud of myself for landing you, when you clearly don’t give a shit. You’re the one backing away from me like you’re afraid of me. Me.” Myron breathed in through his nose, blowing it out slowly, his face settling into strained lines that made him look unfamiliar. “Fuck, Andy. You ambushed me, calling me over with barely a clue, looking like I should have understood before you opened the door that we were done.” He gestured to where the paper lay. “You even hear yourself just now? Roger’s neighbor and Roger’s house. The only thing you got right in all of that was calling Talya your daughter.”

  “Myron, can’t we talk? Are you even hearing me? I want to talk.”

  “Oh, I heard you. I heard everything. Too much, Andy.” He laughed, the sound ragged with pain. “Christ. Looks like I made a fuck of a mistake today.”

  “What mistake? What did you do?”

  “Came out to my boss. My brother. Risked everything for you.” Andy’s feet moved, taking him towards Myron, and this time it was Myron who held up his hand, palm out, stopping him. He did that for me. “Found out I’ve been stupid there, too. All my life, I’ve been afraid of losing things that mattered to me. And now—” He swept out a hand as he pulled in a sharp breath, but Andy couldn’t tell what he was indicating. “—I got nothing.” Myron turned and stomped to the door, yanking it open with a vicious pull. “Nothing here for me.”

  “Myron,” he cried, but the darkness outside the door swallowed up his voice. Then anything else he could have said was drowned by the sound of the motorcycle engine revving. The headlight swung wildly as the bike’s back wheel spun dangerously. Then the rubber found traction and Myron was gone.

  Soup with sass

  Myron

  “I don’t know what the fuck you want from me.” Myron tossed the controller to the table. “Clearly I’m not living up to whatever you need, so why don’t you just do it yourself.” He turned on his heel and stalked to the door, stopped there by the quiet voice of his friend.

  “Brother, stop.” Bones’ voice held too much of too many things. Compassion, affection, tolerance, and a tiny blade of anger. Myron decided to grab onto that.

  “I’m serious. You think it’s so easy to do this?” He gestured towards the screen, ignoring the wide-eyed stares from the men seated around the table. “That goddamned drone is in Florida, and I’m here. We don’t know what I’m looking for, only that I’m looking for”—he used his fingers to make air quotes—“something out of the ordinary. Well, I’m here to tell you, clue the fuck in, because from where I stand, everything looks out of the ordinary in Florida.”

  “I think the drone is still flying, and you are the only one of us who can bring it safely back to where it needs to be.” Bones stared at him. “It’s not like you to quit on us.”

  “I’m not quitting.” As Bones no doubt knew it would, the words goaded Myron into returning to the table and picking up the controller. “And it would go home as soon as the battery got too low.” He shook his head sharply. “I’m just frustrated.” He yawed the bird, turning it in a circle then pitched it forward to begin flying again.

  “As you should be. This is not enough information to warrant a full excursion, and not one of us expects you to find something actionable on a first pass.”

  “Hold up.” Myron spotted something odd on the screen and touched a toggle on the controller, bringing up a secondary instrument window on the screen. “I think…” He flipped to infrared, and a small spot on the display glowed brightly. “That’s a hot spot, and that’s in the middle of a field of some kind. What do they grow in Florida?”

  “I dunno,” one of the men said with a laugh. “But, it was a lot of green before you swapped. Are those trees?”

  “Christmas trees,” Bones agreed, and Myron directed the drone towards the hot spot. He brought it closer, maintaining the current height, then dropped it lower. The spot didn’t move, so he dropped it lower yet. The trees could be seen now, ranging thirty feet below in rows off into the distance. Still the spot didn’t move. He changed the view back to the camera and heard someone in the room suck in a breath. The person’s clothing was stark white against the brown and greens of the dirt and trees, but the red was brilliant and bright. “That is not old blood.” Bones shook his head. “I would say that this”—he gestured towards the screen—“is proof that even when you don’t know what you’re looking for, you seem to find the oddest things.”

  Myron slipped into that place in his head where he sorted things. Where all things made sense if you only looked at them the right way. Over the next five minutes, he asked questions aloud and waited for responses, then assigned men to different duties such as calling the Jailbreakers MC, their main contacts in the area. Bones called Mason’s sister and delicately deduced Justine’s safety without fl
ipping her straight into FBI mode, while Myron ran an online search to scour the local PD websites looking for missing persons reports.

  Myron fixed the drone at the same height, even though he knew the body lying on the ground in a distant Florida field was dead. From the size, it was a small woman, or a…he just hoped it was a small woman. After a few minutes, Myron had an errant thought and flipped back to infrared, so he could study the screen. “Bones,” he called softly, and waited until the man stepped close. “Does it look like the body’s cooled in this short time? I thought the heat would be keeping it constant.”

  “It looks less bright on the screen, yes.” Bones nodded.

  “If the body is still cooling, then this just happened.” The drone shot up at his command and he began flying it in larger, concentric circles using the body as a pivot point.

  “What is the range on this device?”

  “Seven klicks, but I don’t trust it. I reset the geofence when I launched, but it could still head home.” Myron consulted the clock on the screen. “I’ve got about twenty minutes left before I have to get it back to the shed.” There were drone “sheds” all across the states and Myron was tapped into their network, thanks to Mason shelling out a pretty penny for his access. If there was need and prep time, he could even have a swarm delivered near any specific location, giving him up to ten drones to use.

  “What was that?” Bones question corresponded to Myron’s movements of the drone, angling towards a grouping of hot spots. “Where are we?”

  “About two miles east from the body. There are three men.” These bodies were much larger, and their heat wasn’t not waning, because they were very much alive. “They’re bushwhacking out to the road.”

  “Fly ahead, see where they are aiming their feet.”

  Myron ranged out and found a road, then found the little pull-off that was on a straight route back to where he’d seen the men walking. Waiting at that pull-off was another man, and five bikes. “Tell Shades we have a different target for the Jailbreakers. Can you get them this info?” He rattled off the highway information and added, “Tell them they’ve got less than five minutes and these guys will be wind.” He checked the clock again. “Shit, I have about the same before I have to lock GPS so the bird can fly home. Lemme do something.” He flipped the drone into hover and moved to the computer. The screen split and within moments, a second view appeared, showing the dim inside of a building. A few seconds passed while his fingers flew across the keyboard, and then the new drone lifted off, turning and yawing for a moment before it oriented on an open door in the ceiling. He watched the screen for a couple of beats, then returned to the controller. “I launched a second, paired it to the original. It’ll be onsite in a couple of minutes. That should give us enough time.”

  “Technology is a strange and marvelous thing.”

  “It was cool to have Ester video chatting with me the other day.” Myron smiled as he backed the drone away, angling to capture the moving images of the men returning to the lone man next to the bikes. “We should see if she’d be open to doing that again.”

  “Yes, it was cool. What was not cool was you upsetting her for no reason.” Myron glanced at Bones, seeing tension in his face. “That was not cool at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Bones scoffed and shuffled his feet, taking up a stance that looked aggressive, thumbs hooked over the chainlink belt he always wore. “Threatening her with your absence, when you clearly had no such intent. That was not just not cool,” Bones’ head whipped to the side, his angry gaze slicing through Myron, “that was cruel, and not something I expected from you.”

  “I’m.” Myron paused and licked his lips. “I see how it might look that way. I had something happen and decided it would be better to absent myself from the Fort for a few days.” He shook his head. “But I am moving. House should be ready to move in by the end of the week. Things are just not…what I had hoped for right now.”

  He stared at the screen, seeing Andy’s face again just before he’d slammed the door, his expression awash with hurt and uncertainty, confusion. Over the past week, Myron had ignored all calls and texts, holding firm through the days and hours until the attempted contacts had dwindled down to nothing. What if I got it wrong? The questions plagued him. It felt so right. Everything did.

  He missed Talya. Missed the little girl with an ever-present ache in his chest. The week he’d spent with them after her release from the hospital had been perfect, like living in a dream. When he thought about Andy, that ache turned to pain. Crushing, grinding him to nothing, the anguish burned in his body all the time. Even here, days later and miles away, standing surrounded by friends and brothers, his throat was tight with the remembered moments spent living…free. Not just out of the closet, but alongside someone who mattered. Someone I could love.

  “I can’t…it’s hard to know what to do right now, Bones.” He sucked in a hard breath, forcing the wet from his eyes. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. She’s my sister, man. I love her.” She’d love Talya. “I just…things are hard right now.”

  “She will appreciate seeing you tonight for dinner, then. I was uncertain I would extend the invitation, given my anger, but it sounds as if you need family around you.” Compassion and understanding blurred the edges of Bones voice, and Myron didn’t dare look at him.

  Fortunately, he didn’t have to, because on the screen, views now synchronized since the second drone had made the trip, they saw a group of bikes approaching on the highway. “Looks like Jailbreakers are headed in. Things are gonna get interesting.”

  ***

  “Soup is too sassy.” Ester’s irritation showed in her tone as she refuted a statement from Bones. Myron had to admire the man’s willingness to rile her up, but as easy as she made it, clearly the affectionate teasing wasn’t something that bothered her.

  “How can soup be sassy, Ester? It is merely soup. A meal to be eaten when one needs sustenance.” Bones didn’t look up, kept his gaze pinned on his bowl where he was casually stirring the steaming liquid with precise movements of his spoon.

  “Sass is in the making when you take water and demand it become the more it is in the pot now.”

  Myron looked down at his own bowl, seeing the noodles and spices floating in the translucent liquid. A wide hunk of homemade bread rested on the edge of a plate nearby, covered in a broad swath of butter.

  “Sass is in the air when you breathe it inside, letting the goodness become you.” She huffed out a breath in what he understood now was a mock frustration. “That means you have to let the sass out, so the soup is sassy in the end.” Not yet done, Ester thudded the butt of her spoon on the table. Myron glanced at her, then at Bones just in time to see the tender look that passed between them. Adoration highlighted the beauty of her features and Ester’s face softened as Bones’ did the same. Shared jokes, shared lives…shared love.

  His gut twisted painfully as any hunger fled. Just that one single look between the two of them that meant everything was something he’d lived his whole life knowing would never be his. Knowing and accepting, telling himself that what he had was good enough. That the brotherhood filled him up in ways that were sufficient, if not satisfactory. It had never been enough, but he’d only known that in the abstract. Now, he knew in his soul how it felt to share a look like that with someone you loved.

  I was okay with it once. Myron stared into the soup again, throat tight. I’ll get past this. He lifted his spoon, and a torrent of drops fell, disturbing the surface of the soup, little ripples racing across the liquid. They slowed and faded, the soup absorbing the energy created by the disturbance. A final droplet clung stubbornly to the edge of the spoon, growing larger as it collected miniscule amounts of soup spread thinly across the metal surface. It clung and clung, resisting the pull of gravity, even though Myron knew it would lose the fight in the end. Can I really stay away? Don’t I deserve to have what Ester and Bones have? Finally, the droplet fell, and th
e ending was anticlimactic, ripples ending far sooner than he would have predicted. Droplet and soup reunited at last. Myron snorted at his thoughts, dipped the spoon in and lifted it to his mouth.

  “Yes, eat, my Ronnie. You deserve some sassy in your life.”

  I deserved Andy.

  ***

  “You should simply tell me what is wrong, Myron. If you would let it out of your mouth, then someone can help you sort things to the best outcome.”

  Bones’ voice came from behind him. Myron didn’t turn, just stared out into the dark garden beyond the kitchen windows. He shook his head and lifted the beer in his hand, drained the bottle and placed it on the table alongside the other three already occupying the space.

  “Are you asking me to guess, then? Apply my deducing skills to determine the issue?”

  Myron shook his head again. “Couldn’t sleep. Found your beer.”

  Bones laughed. “I am not concerned for the beer.” A pause, filled by the scuff of bare foot soles on the floor. “I am concerned for my friend.”

  “How’d you do it? Convince Ester you were worth the chance? She was so afraid all the time, and then shit happened right outside her bedroom door. Yet, she’s still here.” Myron shrugged, still staring at the glass but now watching Bones’ reflection instead of the dim view of the yard. “How?”

  “Is that the crux of the matter for you? Your bartender got a taste of the club and didn’t like it?”

  “See—” He stood and turned, reseating himself on the chair, arms crossed on the back. “—that’s the thing. I don’t think he even got a ‘taste’ as you put it. He read a goddamned article in the paper. It wasn’t even about the RWMC, just another club. But he lumped us all in the same boat, and—” He chuckled, the dark sounds ripping his throat raw. “—set fire to that damned thing.”

  “He cut you loose? No explanation beyond pointing to the newspaper as the bearer of unwelcome tidings?”

  “He called me over to talk.” Myron scoffed. “Like he wanted to talk. He’d already made up his mind, just needed permission to pull the trigger on breaking what we had.” He shook his head. “He never wanted to talk. Just wanted to throw accusations around.”