And then she was crying, sobbing, and she couldn’t stop. “I miss you so much. Everybody’s bein’ great. They all love us, and they’d do anythin’ for us, I know. But you’re it for me, Hooj. Without you with me, my world is nothin’.” Giving in utterly to the emotion, she dropped her head on his shoulder. When he put his arms stiffly around her, her sobs became wails. “Please, Hooj. Please. Please. Please. I don’t know what else to do but beg. Please come back. Please come back. I love you so much. I love you. I love you.”
Her cheek lay on his chest, her forehead on his throat, and she felt it before she heard it—a tensing of his muscles. She was drowning in a flood of sorrow, but still something registered about that tension against her face. Then she felt his jaw move, and she heard him grunt.
Tears still staining her cheeks and leaking from her eyes, Bibi sat up and looked her man in the face. His cheeks were flushed and dampened by his own tears, but his expression was one of intent concentration.
“Hooj?” she whispered. “Hooj?”
He opened his mouth and then closed it again—but in a different way. He’d pursed his lips, almost as if he intended to kiss her.
“Buh,” he breathed.
Was that a word? “Oh God, Hooj, please. You can do it. You’re the toughest son of a bitch in five counties. You can do it. Please. Oh, please. I’m here, baby. Talk to me. I love you.”
“Buh…etter. Luh-ove…y-you…bet-ter.”
DARE
TEN
When Hoosier forced the words out, Bibi’s sobs redoubled, and she dropped her head to his chest, her hands digging into his shoulders. He tried to hold her, to comfort her, but his efforts, he knew, were insufficient. Making his body do what he wanted it to do took exhausting concentration.
For more time than he could fathom, for endless, infinite time, he’d been trapped in a body that didn’t understand him, and that he didn’t understand.
Hoosier’s memory and comprehension wavered, and had for as long as he could think. People would come to him, and his knowledge of them would sometimes be acute—like Bibi, always Bibi, he’d never not known his Cheeks—but at other times, with other people, they would seem to wink in and out of his consciousness, flickering before him like images on a badly-tuned-in television. He would know, and then he wouldn’t, and then he would again. And sometimes, he would only know that he should know.
The most maddening part of his unstable understanding was how very keenly and stably he understood what he’d lost, that there was a life full of people and things that he had once known.
He knew. He knew the things he should be able to do. He knew that the people who came to see him, who filled his room, were his people. Even when he couldn’t reach his memory of them, he knew it was there. And it had been driving him mad.
That had been improving, however—and, lately, it had been improving steadily. His life had been filling in its colors and its details. Bibi had spent weeks—maybe longer; time was a thing Hoosier had difficulty tracking—sitting with him, talking to him, and as she’d reminisced, he’d reached into the dark space in his head and pulled out memories. Even in the black nights when he was alone, he could reach back and pull new memories, connections to the things she’d recalled for him.
It was surreal, to relive one’s own life in this passive, helpless state, and to do it alone, even when surrounded by people, even holding the hand of the only woman he’d ever loved.
He’d been alone because his mind and body wouldn’t let him get close. He couldn’t make words. He couldn’t even understand what he’d need to do to make words.
He understood the words that were said to him. But the circuit in his head that connected a thought to the words that were the signifier for that thought and to the physical functions of uttering that signifier—that circuit was broken. He did not understand how to make words.
But he knew he should, and his frustration and desperation were so keen that he felt it as a physical pain.
Physical pain was something he’d grown used to. His lungs didn’t work right; he knew that. There was a constant weight and a tightness in his chest, and he always wore the plastic tube with the prongs in his nose—and when he was without it, he felt the need of it immediately. He knew he was scarred—there had been a fire, he’d been told; those were burn scars—and the damaged skin felt stiff and tight. Sometimes the ache was deep.
And there had been a time, he didn’t know how long or how long ago, that was dim in even his new memory, a time that was only red, pulsing pain.
But the physical pain was nothing compared to the psychic pain of frustration and loss, this distance from Bibi he hadn’t been able to traverse. He needed her, and she needed him, but he couldn’t get to her, and he hadn’t been able to understand how he could.
He’d had to learn to walk again; he was still learning to walk again. He’d had to learn to do everything again, as if he’d been born anew after whatever had happened—people talked about ‘the fire,’ but he had no memory or understanding of that. All of it was infuriating, because even when the people around him had all seemed nothing more than familiar strangers, he’d known he was an old man who had lived a full life, and he had no business starting over again.
All of those frustrations and humiliations paled against the furious desperation he’d felt to simply tell his wife he loved her. She needed him. Every day he saw how much she needed him. He saw her dwindling at his side, he could see the hope flickering away, and he knew he could ease her with a word. But what were words? Where did they come from? How were they made? Why could he understand the words of others but not understand how to make his own?
For days, weeks, months, centuries, for as long as he could remember, he’d sat in this bed and wanted one thing, to say one sentence.
And finally, now, with their worst shared memory, their deepest pain, churning afresh around them, he’d finally found the way to say it.
So he tightened his hold around his wife, his angel and his salvation, and he said it again: “I…l-love…you bet-ter.”
“Hooj!” she wailed and rained kisses over his face and neck. “Oh, baby! I love you!”
He found her lips and kissed her, and then he held her and let her cry.
She had not let him give her such comfort in those days before. He remembered that clearly. Every day, every second, he remembered.
Three days. For three days, she’d been lost to him, at the mercy of enemies.
And for so much longer after that.
~oOo~
Hoosier unbuckled Connor from his booster seat, but before he released the dervish that was his son, he held out his hand. “Why don’t you give that to me, and I’ll keep it safe for you.”
Connor shook his head and clutched his new treasure to his chest. He’d found a pen on the desk in the garage office, and he’d been captivated by its magic. There was a picture of a girl inside, and when you tipped the pen one way or the other, her clothes came on and off. Hoosier shuddered to think of the shit Bibi would give him if she saw it in their son’s chubby hands.
“Connor. It came from work. You need that to help me work, right?”
Eyeing him suspiciously, Connor gave him a slow nod.
“So I should keep it with my tools, then. So you can find it when we work.”
He considered that, and then, reluctantly, handed over the pen. Hoosier secreted it away in his jeans pocket and then lifted his son from the truck. Setting him down on the empty space on the driveway where Bibi parked her van, he said, “Looks like Mama’s not home. Let’s go in and get cleaned up, so we’re lookin’ good for her when she gets back.”
Connor gasped, and his eyes widened with recollection. “RAINBOW CUPCAKES! RAINBOW CUPCAKES!” He ran to the front door, his father and the magic pen forgotten.
Laughing, Hoosier grabbed his kutte off the truck seat and then followed after his son.
Once inside, though, he knew something was wrong. Without thinking, he re
ached down and grabbed Connor before he could run more deeply into the house. At his son’s shout of protest at being restrained, Hoosier hissed, “Hush, boy. Hush.” And Connor was silenced.
Hoosier picked him up and then reached up to the top of the grandfather clock and got hold of the loaded Sig he kept there. Connor gasped and reached, and Hoosier hissed him quiet again, holding him down with one arm as tightly as he could.
Standing in their front hall, Hoosier opened his mind wide, taking in everything he could. From here, he could see very little. A doorway into the living room, where nothing he could see was out of place.
Down the hall that ran front-to-back the length of the house. Bibi had wanted this house because it had distinct rooms, when so many California ranch homes had ‘open floor plans.’ She thought that openness was cold. But it was also bright, while all these walls made the spaces between them dim. So he couldn’t see much down the hallway, either.
Smell. He was smelling something wrong. Still holding Connor firmly, he closed his eyes and breathed deeply.
Blood. He was smelling blood. Jesus.
For a moment, Hoosier was paralyzed by opposing impulses, both of them violently strong: to get his son out of this house, right now—and to run deeper into the house, right now, and find his wife. His wife.
His wife. He had to find Bibi. Just as he took a step inward, though, he thought: no van. Maybe she wasn’t here. Maybe it was somebody else’s blood.
Maybe they were in the house yet, standing as still as he and Connor were, waiting.
His heart thumping with nauseating weight in his chest, Hoosier turned and took his son out of the house. As calmly as he could, he tucked his gun against his lower back and walked next door. Their neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, was an elderly widow. Connor was generally too much for her to handle, but she doted on the boy, and Hoosier knew she’d be happy to watch him for a minute.
Forcing calm, praying to any god who might listen that his wife wasn’t in that house hurting or worse, that she was just out for the day with Margot or something, that she had no idea anything was wrong, Hoosier rang Mrs. Johnson’s bell.
The old woman opened the door and smiled brightly when she saw them. She wiped her hands on a calico apron. “Hoosier and Connor! Well, hello!”
“Hey, Mrs. J.” Hoosier kept his voice normal. “I hate to ask, but could I leave Connor with you for a few minutes? I just need to take care of something quick.”
“Of course! Come on in, little mister. I’m making lemon blueberry muffins for my bridge club. Want to help?”
Connor gave his father a wary look, as if he knew something wasn’t right. Hoosier smiled and set him on his feet. “Go on, tiger. It’s your day to be a helper.”
At that, the boy smiled and took Mrs. Johnson’s hand.
“Thanks,” Hoosier made himself smile. “I’ll be quick.”
“Take your time, take your time,” his neighbor waved him off and closed the door.
And Hoosier went back to his house, reaching back to take his gun in his hand again.
~oOo~
“Hoosier, you need to sit the fuck down. We’ll figure this out, but not with you flying apart like this.” At Chuck’s warning, Blue pushed Hoosier firmly back, so that he landed hard in a chair. As a sweetbutt came up to clear the mess Hoosier had made in the barroom outside, Chuck closed the door, sealing the three of them into the chapel.
“They have her. There was blood all over my goddamn house. They have her. If you think I’m gonna sit here—”
Chuck, his President, cut him off. “I think you’re gonna sit where I fuckin’ tell you to sit, and you’re gonna help us work this problem. I know you want your woman. But this is bigger than her.”
“You son of a bitch. You knew this could happen. You knew what you were askin’. You knew what it was, but you didn’t fuckin’ tell me.”
“I thought it was better if you didn’t know.”
“WELL YOU WERE FUCKING WRONG!” Hoosier jumped up, and, again, Blue caught him before he could get to their President. “You let me put it in my house!”
He took a breath and tried to force calm into his roiling blood. They were right about one thing: if he didn’t get control of himself, he was no use to anyone. But God.
When he’d gone back into the house, what he’d found had driven him to his knees. Blood had painted the walls and floor of the hallway. So much blood. Their meat cleaver, coated in blood, had been buried in the wood floor. Had they cut her? Had she fought? He didn’t know. He could only see what they’d left behind.
And that blood had been clotting, setting. His wife was gone, and had been gone long enough for the blood her abductors had left behind to set.
Searching the house in a deadened fugue, Hoosier had found his office, their bedroom, and Connor’s room torn up. Whoever had Bibi had been looking for something.
Most of the money he’d stashed was gone, but Hoosier knew they hadn’t been looking for that. They hadn’t found what they’d been looking for: the thing that Chuck had asked him to conceal. A locked box, handed from Simon McCall to Vulture, the local President of the club the Blades supported. Vulture had handed the box down to Chuck, and Chuck had asked Hoosier, his VP, to put it somewhere safe, as a favor to both Vulture and McCall. A lucrative favor.
When Hoosier had asked why, Chuck had said he didn’t know, and it wasn’t their business to know.
And like an idiot, Hoosier had put that goddamn thing in his house. With his wife and child.
What was in that box, he now knew, was information that could change the landscape of the drug trade. And McCall had stolen it. That was all Chuck had said, and it was all Hoosier needed to know. The rest was irrelevant; all that mattered now was who had his wife and how he’d get her back.
“This is the Leandros, then.” It had to be. They were McCall’s chief competitor, and the victims of his theft.
Chuck shook his head. “We don’t know that.”
“Sure we do. Who else would it be?”
His President only sighed, conceding that point.
But Hoosier had another important question. “How did they know I had it? They haven’t been tearing apart all our locations. They knew to go to my house. How did they know that?” The whole point of the Blades taking that box on was that they were sufficiently removed from the players. They were just grunts.
Blue looked like that thought hadn’t yet occurred to him, but Chuck obviously had considered it. “I hate to think it, but I’d say we have a rat.”
Hoosier slammed his fists on the table, and Chuck held up his hands in a signal for calm. “We don’t know much yet. That’s why we’ve got to stay cool. They didn’t kill your woman and leave her. They took her. They wanted a hostage. Only reason for that is leverage. So they’re not gonna kill her, and they are gonna contact us. Let’s be ready.”
Chuck made sense, Hoosier knew that. But how could he sit and wait? Maybe they wouldn’t kill her, but he knew these drug lord types. They weren’t bringing her bonbons and hot tea.
He couldn’t let himself think about what they were doing to her. “If you’re right, they’re gonna want an exchange. I don’t care what that box is worth. We make the exchange.”
“We’ll cross that bridge, Hooj.”
Before he could contest his President’s reserve, there was a knock on the chapel door, and Fred, another patch, opened the door and leaned in. “Sorry, boss, but uh, we got a package. Messenger service.”
Chuck stood, and Hoosier shook Blue’s hands off of him. Fred brought in a box, medium-size and oblong. The only marking on the cardboard was the club name and address.
Popping his blade open, Chuck sliced through the tape and folded open the flaps. The box was lined with black plastic. He pulled it away.
His heart in his mouth, Hoosier looked in but could make no sense of what he was seeing. A bloody rag? Disturbing, upsetting, yes. But how was it a message?
Then Blue picked up the rag. No, it
wasn’t a rag. It was too big for that. When Blue held up the contents of the box, Hoosier again dropped to his knees.
Bibi’s white jeans. Soaked everywhere in blood. They’d been cut off; the jagged, tattered edge of the cut started at the fly and then dragged down each thigh, as if someone had shoved a knife into the open fly and ripped downward, then done it again.
Overcome with rage and grief, with worry and guilt, Hoosier let his head fall back, and he bellowed.
~oOo~
Dream & Dare Page 12
