“My client wishes legal counsel,” I said. “Do you happen to have the time to show me to him?”
The redhead stepped forward, and that’s when I saw that he wasn’t actually an officer after all. He was one of the transporters for the county jail. He took prisoners from all over and brought them to the county jail. A prison guard, I guess.
“He’s in this room right here,” the redhead jerked his head toward the room, grabbing his crotch with one hand and readjusting while he did it.
But it wasn’t his actions with his hand that had me freezing. It was the words that had come out of his mouth.
And not the actual words, but the voice.
A very familiar voice that I’d already heard once today.
“Thank you,” I managed to say. “I need to make a quick phone call. However, would you mind finding me a room for privacy for a small moment? It won’t take long.”
“You can use the break room,” the older Latino man said. “Just close the door.”
I looked to my right where he’d indicated and saw a break room with coffee and a couple of Danish boxes on the counter.
“Thank you.” I smiled at them, aiming a sincere one at three, and a not-so-sincere one at the redhead.
“Damn,” I heard as I made my way toward the door.
That’s when I realized that I should’ve worn something more conservative.
My black leggings and long-sleeved black t-shirt had been inspired by Trick’s ensemble, and it was a little tight now that I thought about it.
Gritting my teeth at the way they were looking at me, I slipped into the break room and closed the door, and immediately called Trick.
I was honestly a bit stunned when he didn’t answer and looked at the phone that was playing a standard voicemail message with surprise.
The beep sounded, and I placed it back to my ear. “So you know that voice I heard earlier? I found the person that belongs to it.”
Then I hung up and hoped that he called me back quickly.
When I was done with the call, I shoved my phone into the front of my shirt, tucking it into the waistband of my pants, and then walked back out.
The only person left was the elderly Latino guy.
“I can show you the way.” He gestured toward the door at the end of the hall. “Now that you’re here, I can question him.”
I didn’t say anything to that and followed him into the room.
Two hours later, my client was now free to go, and I had a pounding headache.
The stupid, stupid kid.
He was a kid, too. All of seventeen.
He was also protecting his big brother who, might I add, didn’t deserve to be protected. The big brother deserved to have his ass beat for putting his little brother into that situation in the first place.
According to the kid, the night had led them to a party on the outskirts of town. The little brother had been tagging along with his older brother and had gotten separated. When the cops had hit the scene at a noise complaint, the little brother had been running along with the rest of the group to leave when out of the corner of his eye, he’d seen his brother punch an officer in the face and run when the officer had tried to grab him and his bag that he was carrying.
The kid had obviously gone over to his brother and had helped him with the bag, and they’d run together into the woods. At one point, the officer had found them and trailed them, and the big brother had knocked the little brother down and taken off after saying, “Tell him it was you. If I don’t take this bag to where it needs to go, I’m going to die.”
Which was exactly what the kid had done.
Stupidly.
But it’d taken hours to get that information out of the kid, and now I had a headache for my troubles.
I was blaming that headache on the dumbest decision I’d ever made.
Going out into the night on my own instead of waiting on someone to help walk me out.
I’d been so caught up in how good the cooler night air felt on my face that at first, I hadn’t paid much attention to who was out there with me.
Instead, I tried to call Trick again, once again reaching his voicemail.
Son of a bitch.
“Trick,” I said softly. “That guy was here. The one on the message. He was here.”
I hadn’t realized that there was a figure in the shadows.
The same figure that I’d been calling Trick about.
Not until I’d stepped more fully toward my car did I hear it coming.
A scrape of gravel was my only indication that something was wrong.
Whirling around, I realized I wasn’t alone right along the same time that a fist came aimed straight at my face.
And for the second time in my life, I was almost beaten to death.
This time, though, it wasn’t Trick that saved me.
It was an officer that heard the commotion and came to investigate the crying sobs that he’d heard all the way from inside the building.
CHAPTER 21
If having sex for money makes you a ho, does having sex for free make you a non-profit whoreganization?
-Text from Swayze to Trick
TRICK
“You got ‘em?” I asked carefully.
Zach gave me a thumbs up. “Got ‘em.”
“Good,” I said as he transported the obviously drugged off their asses teenagers to a local hospital where he would drop them off in the emergency room.
“Fuckin’ nightmare,” Sin said as he shoved the black tee’s sleeves up to rest right under his elbow. “I can’t believe that we found them.”
“Me neither,” Lynn said. “This is a huge break. We need to find out which party they were at and…”
His phone started going crazy.
So did mine.
As did Sin’s and Laric’s.
Lynn was the first to pull his out.
“I have ten text messages from Six,” Lynn said, shaking his head as if he was laughing about the amount she sent him, and wasn’t really all that surprised.
“We probably don’t have any signal out here,” Sin said as he stared at his text messages.
I looked at my phone and saw I had two phone calls from Swayze, as well as two voicemails. One call from Hunt.
I was just placing my phone to my ear to listen to the voicemail when Lynn’s phone rang.
I listened to her voicemail and felt my stomach sink to my toes.
Just as I was about to head straight the fuck out of there, Lynn’s voice stopped me cold.
“Which hospital?” he asked, his body shuffling in place, a move that I rarely ever saw or heard Lynn do. He was just a calm, cool and collected kind of guy. He did not fidget. Not ever.
I turned and looked at him, somehow knowing that the ‘which hospital’ comment was made for my benefit.
Something happened to Swayze. It was a sick, gut wrenching feeling that I felt in the depth of my soul.
“We’ll be there,” he said softly.
“What’s going on?” I asked, feeling my heart rate accelerating by the second.
“Hunt just called,” Lynn said. “He’d been monitoring the police scanners when he heard that a lawyer was beat up at the police station.”
My stomach sank.
There was only one lawyer that I knew of at the police station tonight.
And that would be my lawyer.
“Which hospital?” I asked, seemingly calm on the outside, but on the inside, I was seething.
“The one in town,” Lynn said softly. “They tried moving her, but she has an obviously open fracture in her leg. They’re going to get her stable, and then life flight her out of here.”
I felt my stomach sink.
All the way down to the bottom of my toes.
I nodded once and began walking to my bike. That walk became a run the closer I got.
The drive through the quiet abandoned streets felt nothing like it would’ve normally felt.
There was a s
ense of urgency in my veins that was making me push faster and faster until I was damn near flying.
At one point I passed a cop. Hell, I was halfway down the road and around the bend when I saw the lights go on.
I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he wouldn’t catch me.
Not with me on my bike, and not with me hell bent on getting where I was going.
The moment that I arrived at the small hospital in town, I knew that it was bad based on the sheer amount of ambulances and police officers milling around outside the hospital’s entrance.
I rode my bike up to the back of the wide-open ambulance and blanched when I saw the amount of blood inside of it.
I swallowed past the bile that was threatening to creep up the back of my throat and got off the bike, pulling off the helmet I hadn’t been aware of putting on.
The cops didn’t move or shift on their feet at the sight of me.
My eyes traveled around them all until my gaze fell on a shorter Latino man that looked like he wasn’t going to let me in that door unless I fought him.
“You the one in charge?” I asked, my hands fucking shaking.
He shrugged. “For now.”
“My girl,” I said. “We heard that she was attacked at the police station tonight. I need to…”
The man gestured with his head toward the side of the building, away from the door I might add.
I didn’t know what to think of that, and I wasn’t sure if he wanted me out of there, or he wanted to explain something to me—like my girl had died due to her injuries.
Either way, I wasn’t sure that this was going to be a good explanation.
He opened his mouth to say whatever it was he’d pulled me over there to say, but I stopped him by blurting, “Is she alive?”
The man nodded. “She’s alive.”
I felt like a two-ton truck had been lifted off my chest.
“Is she gonna keep staying alive?” I wondered next.
The man nodded. “She’s got some bad injuries. I’m not going to lie. They don’t look good at all. She had a compound fracture in her leg when I found her. I have to admit, I thought it was a weapon used against her at first and it was dark, so I reached out to pick it up and…”
I wanted to vomit.
The man had touched Swayze’s goddamn bone.
Son of a bitch.
“We brought her here to get her stabilized for transfer, but it’s looking like we’re going to have to ground and pound her,” he explained. “The life flights in the area are all out of commission due to a massive wreck on the interstate.”
“Take her to the life flight facility,” Lynn said, coming up behind me. “We have a pilot on site. We also have a doctor that can supervise her flight to town.”
I calculated the time it would take for us to get to the nearest trauma center—an hour and fifteen minutes.
The time it would take us to get to the life flight facility was about ten minutes.
I had no clue how long the flight would be…
“Works for me,” the officer said. “As soon as she’s stable, we’ll get her rolling. How are you, Mr. Mayor?”
“Lynn,” Lynn held out his hand to the man. “And I’m doing well. How are your children, Miguel? I hear that they’re graduating this year.”
The officer, Miguel, smiled. “If they don’t get their heads out of their asses, they’re going to have a hell of a time getting there. They’ve decided to fuck off the last six months and…”
I couldn’t do the small talk.
Slipping away, I made my way toward the door.
Another officer, a baby one this time, was blocking the door.
I walked past him, and though he said something that was along the lines of ‘get back here,’ I ignored him and kept walking.
I found her in the first small room on the right, and what I saw made my flesh crawl.
The last time that I’d seen her this messed up had been twelve years ago, and I’d beaten the man responsible to death.
A moan left my throat that I hadn’t even been aware of, because when the sound emitted, the woman on the table turned toward me.
Her face was… bad.
Her eyes were swollen shut, and the only thing that I could see of her beautiful blue-green eyes were tiny little slits.
By morning, she wouldn’t even have that.
I placed my hand on my chest, right over my heart, as if that would help the severe beating that it was taking.
Her hand flexed on the bed, and she started to inch it out toward me, slow, painful millimeters at a time.
It took until she had one pinky hanging over the edge of the bed for me to realize what she wanted.
The moment I did realize, though?
I was all the way across the room, shouldering a large woman out of the way and taking her spot.
Her indignant, “Hey!” was cut off just as fast as it started.
The moment our hands touched, the frantic beating of her monitor went from through the roof to ‘almost under control.’
God, she had to be in a lot of pain.
They were doing something to her leg.
Something that made me want to vomit.
I turned my entire body so that I was no longer in the line of sight of that leg, and found myself blinking at seeing a very large redheaded man standing with his back against the wall.
“Who’re you?” I found myself asking.
He had blood on his shirt, his hands tucked behind his back, and he was wearing a blank expression.
“That’s one of the men that found your girlfriend on the ground outside the police station,” Miguel’s voice sounded from across the room.
I peeled my eyes away from the redheaded man to look at Miguel who hadn’t breached the door.
My eyes flicked back to the man.
“Bryan Sadler,” Miguel continued. “He was leaving, heading to take a prisoner to his new home for the next six months, when he heard a commotion in the parking lot. He put the prisoner in his van, and then went to investigate. Found her like that. Called for me when I was heading out to check out the same thing.”
Suspicion formed in my gut.
I’d spent twelve years honing skills that would tell me whether I needed to watch out for myself because I was in danger—whether it be by another prisoner or a prison guard—and my senses were screaming when it came to this man.
Beware.
Luckily, I was saved from having to say anything by a rather large doctor that finished whatever he was doing at the base of the bed, near Swayze’s leg.
“I think,” the doctor said, “we have her where we need her. Her leg’s as stable as I can make it. All bleeding is temporarily stopped. It’s time for her to go.”
Good, because I didn’t want her anywhere near that man anymore.
Something was off, and I needed to know what.
But for now, there were other, more important things that I needed to do. Those important things being making sure that the woman that I loved was okay.
The big nurse that I’d shoved out of the way earlier shoved me back. “Move. We need to get her to the ambulance.”
I backed up, moving slightly, but the hand holding mine refused to let me go.
I looked down at Swayze again to find her still looking at me.
The look that passed between us was clear.
She didn’t want me to let her go.
And, if I was being truthful, I didn’t want to let her go, either.
Couldn’t.
The idea of letting her go made faint shivers of panic spark to life inside of me.
“I’ll stay out of the way,” I said, moving toward the front but keeping hold of her hand.
The nurse rolled her eyes at me but chose not to say anything.
Which was good because she’d be wasting her breath.
When we arrived outside, it was to see all but one ambulance gone, the crowd smaller, and my entire MC there waiting.
>
Lynn was now once again talking to Miguel.
After a careful inspection, the only one missing was Trouper, who would be the one flying us where we needed to go.
When we arrived outside, I could almost pretend that Swayze wasn’t as hurt as she was due to the lack of light.
Sadly, when we got into the back of the ambulance, it was to be reminded once again how bad she was.
There wasn’t a single spot on her that didn’t look bad.
Zach climbed into the bus on my side and shoved me until I was all the way in the corner. “Let go of her hand. I’m pretty sure that it’s broken. You can touch her face, though.”
I let go of her hand like it was on fire.
She whimpered, and I immediately felt badly.
“I’m sorry, baby,” I apologized, gut wrenching. “I didn’t know that it was hurt.”
That’s when she started crying, and I wanted to pull her into my arms and hug her to me, but I wasn’t sure where exactly to touch on her that would be acceptable.
In the end, I bent over and rested my head on the gurney next to hers and talked to her quietly.
The doors banged closed, and a paramedic that looked like he belonged on the ambulance looked at Zach tightly. As if he didn’t want him there.
I noticed the look but chose to ignore it.
Something had happened to my girl, and honestly, I wasn’t sure that she wasn’t still in danger. Not only was Zach here because he could help if shit hit the fan when it came to Swayze’s life, but also, he would be able to help if someone tried to kill her again.
Leaving the two to figure out their differences on their own, I told Swayze about what had happened earlier that night, about saving the two girls who’d been left stranded on the side of an old country road.
I made sure to keep my voice quiet so that only she could hear, and little by little she settled down until she was no longer crying.
She was on the verge of going to sleep, or at least appearing to be asleep, when we arrived at the hangar where the helicopter that would be taking her to the trauma center was located.
When we’d arrived, it was already booted up and running with Trouper standing in a flight suit next to it with a helmet in his hand.
Things moved quickly after that, and once again we moved, this time into a much smaller, much more cramped space.
Jailbait Page 15
