by Jessie Cooke
Evan’s cold stare never wavered from her face, and Sally never looked away. She’d known that stare since he invented it, and it didn’t frighten her the way it did most grown men. Seconds passed like hours before Evan finally turned and looked at Le Singe and said, “Get him in the Jeep and take him to the ER...and don’t leave him alone.” Before the men even started moving, Sally got busy taping up the wound in the hopes that the boy wouldn’t lose any more of his blood before they got him to town. By the time Le Singe and Booger carried Gabriel out, she was already busy working on the flesh wound in Le Pirate’s shoulder and she had a few of the club girls working on patching up the cuts and scratches some of the other men had sustained. She avoided eye contact with Evan until she’d finished with all of that and then finally, taking her gloves off again and heading for the bathroom to wash her hands for the dozenth time since she got there, she said:
“Hang up the phone and sit down, Blackheart, you’re next.”
5
Blackheart was pissed. He’d been pissed from the second the first shot was fired down at the docks. Once again, someone was attacking his club, and he still didn’t know who the fuck it was, or why. They hadn’t taken anything, or even tried. They’d simply been trying to do damage, but why? Blackheart had been on the phone since the Jokers got back, trying to find out what the hell was going on, but no one knew anything, or at least that’s what they were telling him. Things had been going smoothly for months, right up until the night he killed Christoff...and now everything was falling apart and he couldn’t imagine what anyone would get out of trying to destroy his club. His head was already pounding, but it was worse as soon as Sally came in, barking orders like she owned the place. The thing about Sally was, though, that she was usually right, and sometimes that pissed him off too. He didn’t want to take Gabriel to the hospital because so far the cops hadn’t shown up. The second they took him through those hospital doors, the police would descend on them like locusts, and that always brought its own set of headaches.
Sally was right about Gabriel, though. Blackheart had hoped for a miracle, that Sally could somehow patch him up there at the club. But Blackheart had seen more than one man die in his life, and he’d watched as the life ebbed out of young Gabe’s eyes from the moment he was hit. He couldn’t let the boy die. He’d known Gabriel since the day he was born. His parents had been friends of his, not involved in the club, or anything shady...just decent, hardworking people who deserved better than what they got. They’d been in a head-on collision with a drunk driver when Gabriel was sixteen. The boy had gone to live with his grandparents then, but his mother’s parents had practically been destroyed by the loss of their only daughter and poor Gabriel had been more or less pushed into the background of their sad lives. He started spending a lot of time at the clubhouse, just looking for a place where he belonged. Blackheart let him, on the condition that he’d finish school and stay away from the alcohol that flowed freely and the drugs that often made their way through as well. When he graduated high school, Blackheart let him prospect and on his nineteenth birthday, only two months prior to his getting shot, he’d patched him in and because of the boy’s natural skills with any firearm they gave him, he’d made him one of his enforcers. It was why Gabriel was there at the docks and Blackheart couldn’t help but mentally kick his own ass now because of it. Then Sally came in, saying all the things he already knew and he’d redirected his anger onto her, fair or not.
“Sit down, Evan,” Sally told him for about the fifth time in the past hour. He’d been pacing and continuing to make phone calls that were getting him nowhere and his anger was only intensifying. Sally didn’t care who was around when she barked her orders at him, but the fact that she was calling him Evan suddenly made him realize they were finally alone. He’d heard her send the girls off to tend to the rest of the men out front. Those few that had wounds other than Gabriel and Le Pirate had been injured in the scurry to get on their bikes and get the shipment they assumed was the target of the attack out of there while dodging bullets.
“I’m fine,” he barked at her. “I’ve got too much shit to do to sit down. The cops will be here any fucking minute, do you get that? Now that Gabriel is at the hospital, it’s only a matter of time before they’re here, warrants in hand to search every part of this place...” He stopped when he realized she was pulling a chair up behind him. “I just told you...”
“Either you sit and let me tend to that cut, or I use this chair to climb up there and tend to it. You’re the one that had me pulled out of my quiet little evening at home and got me involved in your pile of shit, so the least you can do is make my job here a little bit fucking easier.” Blackheart grumbled out loud, but he sat. His head felt like it was going to explode, and he felt dizzy, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. He had to be on his game when the cops got there, though, so letting her patch up his own wound would probably be a good idea.
Once he was seated, Sally used her gloved fingers to move his hair out of her way and he tried not to wince when she pushed back pieces of it that were already dried to his skin with blood that felt like glue. Once she had his hair out of the way, she poured something onto a bandage and pressed that into the wound. It burned like she’d set it on fire and his body jerked as he let out a loud curse in French. “Merde! Y a-t-il de l’alcool là-dessus?”
Undaunted, and maybe even slightly amused at her torture of him, Sally continued to dab at it. “It’s not alcohol, you big Cajun baby! It’s water.” He frowned and doubted it, but didn’t argue. She seemed to take forever cleaning it, and around it, and then said, “I need to irrigate it. It’s deep and it’s going to need stitches. What did you get hit with?”
“Just patch it up,” he grumbled. He didn’t know what “irrigate” the wound meant but he just wanted her to finish with him so he could get back to what needed to be done.
Sally smirked and then he watched as she took a giant syringe out of her bag and dipped it into the bottle of what she said was water. She filled the syringe and said, “Close your eyes.” He grumbled again but did as she told him. Once his eyes were closed he felt her squirt the water into his wound and he had to suck in a breath through his teeth to keep from crying out. When she finally finished and dabbed at his face with a dry towel, he opened his eyes in time to see her taking a needle that looked like a fishing hook out of a package and then threading it with what looked like dental floss. He’d had plenty of stitches in his lifetime, and many times it was Sally who had stitched him up...but he hated every fucking minute of it. At least proving she wasn’t completely enamored with his pain she said, “You want a drink or something?”
He did. He wanted a whole fucking bottle, but he was stubborn enough to not want her to know that. “No,” he said. “Just do it.” He sucked in a deep breath as Sally began to sew his skin back together, and he held it. He felt tears accumulate in his eyes but willed them not to fall. Sally seemed to be taking her time again and by the time she finished he felt like he’d been hit with an iron pipe again. “You done?” he asked her.
“Yep, for now.”
He stood up while she was still on the floor, cleaning up her mess, and said, “Good. Call the girls in here to get this place cleaned up.”
Sally continued what she was doing, completely ignoring his directive to call the girls. Blackheart wasn’t sure why he even tried with her; she was never going to jump at one of his orders the way everyone else did. But, if the truth be told, that was one of the reasons he loved her so much. He loved her spirit and the way no one, not even him, had ever been able to tame it. He went over and opened the office door, calling out to two of the girls to come in and get the office cleaned up, and then he went into the bathroom and used the mirror to wash up his face and arrange his long hair so that the stitches on his forehead couldn’t be seen. He wasn’t sure what he’d been hit with. It had felt like a lead pipe, but he suspected it had been a baseball bat because he’d heard the wood crack when
it made contact with his skull. He pressed his palms into the sink and fought another wave of dizziness as he wondered again how the fuck things had gone so wrong.
They’d gone to do a simple pick-up. The boat was docked and the captain and his crew helped them unload the crates that were theirs into the refrigerated truck with the logo of one of the restaurants in the Quarter painted across the side. It was a routine operation, one they’d done dozens of times before without any problems. Normally once that was all done, they’d take everything back to the club and arrange a meet-up with the street gang out of Slidell who bought the guns from them. He had already talked to the leader of that gang and he was sure they had nothing to do with the assault. Whoever it was hadn’t even tried to take the truck, so what would the gang have had to gain if it had been them? Whoever it was had been alone, and the shooting had stopped just as quickly as it started. It was as if they’d been shooting back at the invisible man. Blackheart still had men out searching the docks for any sign of him, but the motherfucker had disappeared like a puff of smoke into the darkness. Not one of the dozen men there that night saw anything, including Blackheart, and by the time they got back to the clubhouse, some of the more superstitious ones were already talking about spirits and apparitions. But Blackheart knew that apparitions didn’t carry guns...but the motherfucker who did would be found, and sooner rather than later, he’d be that spirit they all thought he was.
“Boss, they’re here.” Blackheart pulled his head up from the desk to see Booger standing in the doorway. He didn’t have to ask who “they” were. He wanted nothing more than to just sleep. He’d never had such a bad headache and no amount of painkiller or alcohol was helping it. But he’d gotten the call from Le Singe two hours before that the cops had shown up. Gabriel was in surgery and Le Singe hadn’t wanted to talk to them until he knew what Blackheart wanted him to tell them. Blackheart had told him to tell them the truth, or at least most of it. His legitimate business sometimes served as the alibi they needed for things, and this would be one of those “things.” In the meantime, he’d had his men and the girls cleaning everything out of the club that they didn’t want found. They had a little spot out in the swamp where they stored things that could get them into trouble. He had them take anything and everything out there that the cops might be looking for if they walked in with a warrant. Sometime during that two hours, Sally had disappeared. While he was resting his conscience had started to bother him about how badly he’d treated her. He tried to treat Sally with the respect he knew she deserved most of the time...but sometimes he was just a big, stupid, Cajun asshole, and thankfully she’d always forgiven him...so far. Once he’d gotten everything at the club, he’d go see her, and apologize. He could use a night in her bed, in her arms. Sally was the only one who could calm him down when he got like this and suddenly he was craving her, especially five minutes later when Petit and his little bulldog walked in with two uniformed sheriff’s officers, waving a search warrant in his face.
6
Sally left the clubhouse while Evan was caught up in the process of barking out orders. They knew the cops were on the way and she knew Evan and the rest of the Jokers would be busy for the rest of the night, defending their territory. It was something she’d been present for in the past, and she wasn’t interested in being present for it that night. She also wasn’t interested in the visit she knew she’d probably get from Evan in the early hours of dawn. She knew him well enough to know that once things died down, he’d feel guilty for the way he’d treated her and show up with an “apology” and a hard-on. She wasn’t in the mood for his apology, and as far as she was concerned, he could get one of his little club girls to take care of his hard-on. She stopped by her house and packed a few clothes, some wine, and enough food to get through the weekend. She was annoyed with Evan, as usual, but she didn’t want to scare him. So, she left a little note on the counter, just telling him she was going out of town for the weekend, and then she got back on her bike and headed out toward Atchafalaya, and the cabin her Paw Paw had left her.
The drive was over an hour and a half, but when she was feeling the way she was that night, the wind in her face was as good as any therapy. She’d been riding motorcycles since she was thirteen years old, and Evan had taught her. She knew that some of the people she worked with made fun of her behind her back for riding the big Harley, and some of them even thought she only rode because she still “pined” for Evan, but she didn’t care. She knew the truth and it was that she rode because she loved it, and as much as she loved Evan, she’d never “pined” for him. She’d accepted decades before that her dreams of him, her, and the baby they were supposed to have would never be a family, and lately she’d been coming around to accepting that maybe it was time to finally give him up once and for all.
The cabin sat on twenty private acres of swampland. It had been standing there for over fifty years and somehow it had made it through every major hurricane with minimal damage. Sally thought it was because of the way the big cypress trees stood around it like giant guardians, blocking the wind and the rain. Her Paw Paw thought the land was “charmed.” Either way, she was glad to have it because sometimes she simply needed an escape...from everything. She paid one of the locals to look after it for her, to report any damage the weather or animals might have caused and to occasionally dust, sweep, and air it out. It had been a few months since she’d been there, but she’d spoken to the caretaker recently so she knew it would at least be clean, and everything would be in working order.
She drove up to the dark cabin and parked near the front porch. Taking the flashlight out of her saddlebag, she unloaded the things she’d brought and started up toward the front door. She loved her little house in the city, but sometimes she craved the sights, sounds, and smells of the bayou that she’d grown up with. The music of the many crystal wind chimes her Paw Paw had hung from the porch harmonized with the natural music of the frogs and other wildlife in the swamp all around, and she smiled when she shone the light up onto the house and saw that everything looked exactly the same as it always had. It wasn’t fancy by anyone’s standards, but that was just one more thing she loved about it. Wooden planks ran vertically to form the walls and there were cracks that had developed over time, covered by wood battens. The windows had thick, dark shutters that doubled as protection for the glass from the weather and when they were closed like they were now, they looked like two big, dark brown eyes, watchfully looking out into the swamp. The door was painted bright red and the mirror that hung beside it was cracked and worn. She smiled at that too. Her Paw Paw had taken every precaution. The red door to ward off evil spirits, and the mirror to keep out the vampires, and the devil, who was said to be so vain he’d get caught up in looking at his reflection and forget to go inside.
Sally stepped onto the first step of the porch before the smile fell from her face. There was an odor, one that she recognized as death, and it waged an all-out assault on her senses. It was so bad that her eyes watered and her stomach turned. Dropping her bags onto the porch, she once again shone the light across the front of the house and the muddy little “yard” around it. When she didn’t see anything, she held her breath and walked around to the side of the house in the direction the wind was blowing. Even with her lungs full she could still tell that she was getting closer to whatever it was, and she was glad she hadn’t eaten dinner because it would probably be all over the mud at her feet by then. She stopped at the side of the house and ran the flashlight around again, still seeing nothing, until she turned about 180 degrees, and there in one of the limbs of one of the protective trees hung the mostly skeletal remains of a nutria. Nutrias are the rats of the swamp, and Sally had always hated them. But this one was at least dead, which, aside from the horrible odor and the maggots that covered it, was a good thing. Wondering if she’d ever get any rest that day, she went back to the front of the house and picked up the old broom off the porch and spent fifteen minutes at least, fishing the
disgusting creature out of the tree and tossing it out into the water. The stench still hung in the air, but she knew that it wouldn’t take long for the other smells of the swamp to take over. At last she picked up her things and using the key that the caretaker always left along the top of the door frame, she let herself into the cabin.
The cabin didn’t have electricity but there were a few lights, a small refrigerator, and one electrical outlet that were all hooked to a generator. Sally flipped on the switch that would turn them all on, and once the tiny cabin was flooded with light she did a quick inspection of the three small rooms and the bathroom. She wasn’t the spooky sort, but she didn’t want to share the night with any live nutrias or any of the other many critters of the Atchafalaya Swamp. Once she had cleared every room she went back into the living room/kitchen and unpacked the food she’d brought with her, made herself a sandwich, poured a glass of wine, and finally took her boots back off and sat down on the couch where she could put her feet up on the coffee table her Paw Paw had built and carved by hand when she was just about five years old. He’d carved a picture of her into it and every time she looked at it, she smiled. He’d been so excited to show it to her when he finished, and Sally had almost moved it to her little house after he died. But it suited the cabin better, and it was where she felt the closest to her Paw Paw anyway, so she’d left it there.
She fished out her phone, which wouldn’t get service up there, and pulled up her music selections. Setting it to shuffle, she took another long sip of her wine and then closed her eyes and listened to Bruce Springsteen sing about being born in the USA. Life wasn’t perfect, but sitting there like that, in the cabin her grandfather had built for her, listening to a song about the country she loved, it felt pretty damned good. A weekend away was just what the doctor ordered. Evan could handle his own problems without her for a change, and maybe by Monday when she got back to New Orleans, she’d be ready to have the talk with him that she’d been putting off for way too long.
