Instead of tailing her, he slid her business card into his pocket and swung his rental car out of its parking spot and onto the road. Traffic was nonexistent here, but what vehicles he saw were mostly trucks, dusty and old. And everyone went slow. Man, he couldn’t imagine a life where you didn’t run around all the time, where nobody was in a hurry, and—
From somewhere close by came the low thrum of a motorcycle, and every hair on Clay’s body pricked up in response. Oh, Christ, they’d found him—the MC members that had gotten away. How could they have found him when he hadn’t even known where he was headed?
A shitty Tempo pulled out in front of him, yanking him from his rising panic before cutting him off. He turned the wheel and came to a grinding halt on the side of the road as the asshole drove away in a loud, aggressive burst of exhaust. With an effort, he battled the urge to take off after them. Not his problem, not his business. And also not the best way to handle the stress of these…episodes or whatever they were. Because that’s what this was, right? Just him getting lost in his head again.
He sucked in a long, painful breath and waited just to be sure. No Harley. No sound of bikes at all. Just the ridiculous grind of the Tempo’s engine, still audible in an otherwise quiet country night.
It was nice to know there were tweakers everywhere, even in this perfectly sleepy town. Felt right at home.
Now he just needed to find a place to crash—preferably far from everyone else, because he didn’t think he could stand too many more wakeful nights waiting for another bike to rumble toward him.
Even before he’d left Baltimore, he’d had this urge to disappear, alone—like some fucking hermit—into the wild. Not, he thought looking around, to a painfully quaint, lost town like this, but to someplace more savage.
Yeah, well, Alaska was a bit far, so the wilds of Virginia would have to do.
Crisscrossing the small downtown area, he thought about the other option he’d been given—WITSEC—and the trapped feeling he’d had ever since he’d awakened to find himself heavy and unmoving in that hospital bed.
Three shots, one to the leg and two to the back, the doctors had told him when he’d been lucid enough to understand. Lucky to be alive, they’d said over and over and over. Tyler had said the same thing when he’d come to visit. Then Hecker, that lawyer, and the special agent in charge, McGovern, had woven in and out of his spotty memory. Tyler had brought his wife, Jayda, with their kids, lugging huge bouquets of flowers. Even McGovern had brought him flowers, which was weird, getting flowers from your boss. Fucking flowers and goddamned teddy bears, every time he’d pulled himself out of the drug-induced stupor, as if all that crap was supposed to cheer him up. He’d lain there, incapacitated, as the Sultans were indicted, one by one—almost two dozen in all.
But more were out there—guys like Jam and monsters like Ape, who’d fallen off the map before the Feds could catch up with them.
Driving around the deserted town, Clay thought of all the other places he could have gone. Places like Richmond or DC. But he couldn’t go anywhere he’d worked. At this point, there was hardly a place in the eastern United States where he could disappear.
Jesus, where were the goddamned motels?
Just his luck to have landed in a tiny nothing of a town with a library the size of Tyler Olson’s three-car garage, a skin clinic, and possibly no motel? Anxiety tightened his chest as he wondered what the hell he’d do without a place to stay. Sleep outdoors, under the stars. No walls, no bed. No protection.
It wasn’t until he turned off the main drag, with its antique shops, frilly B&Bs, and fancy coffee places, into a shittier area, that Clay started to breathe again. There, a sputtering neon motel sign advertised vacancies, its blue jarring against the lush green backdrop of the sleepy mountain town.
In his room, there was almost nothing to unpack, since his belongings had been destroyed in yesterday’s fire. Not that he’d acquired much in the manner of personal junk over the past few years. Just his bike, which the Sultans had also destroyed in a big, final fuck you. Bastards knew how he felt about his bike.
Just one more lesson in letting go, wasn’t it? Now, his entire existence was pared down to the wad of cash he’d withdrawn before leaving Baltimore, toiletries, underwear, and a bottle or two to help him get through the night. That and the rental car he’d have to return at some point. And, of course, the thick sheaf of papers he’d grabbed at the office before leaving town. A bunch of legal shit he’d need to look at before heading to court.
Twisting open the first bottle of vodka, he went to the window, pulled back the curtain, and looked out at the blue-washed parking lot. He should eat, but he wasn’t hungry. He glanced back at the papers and thought about going through them.
Fuck that. He took in a painful slug of vodka and thought about the day he’d first walked into the Sultans’ watering hole, sporting his freshly inked prison tats—the clock and spider web. They’d ignored him at first, had treated him like nothing, until he’d brought them some valuable intel on a rival club’s drug shipment. They’d accepted him after that, had taken him on as a prospect, treated him like one of their own.
Just one big happy family, he thought, missing them and hating them and wondering how the hell he’d pass as regular Joe Citizen down here in Rednecksville, Virginia.
He took another swig and threw another glance at the stupid legal brief.
Get your goddamned story straight, that lawyer, Hecker, had said, which almost made Clay laugh, because every single thing that had happened since the first day he’d ridden his Harley into Naglestown, Maryland, was imprinted on his brain, as indelibly as their club emblem was emblazoned on his back.
Not that indelible, he realized with a jolt of surprise. The perfectly pristine Dr. Hadley would be removing all traces of the Sultans from Clay’s back and face and hands. Despite the pain involved, it was good to have something to look forward to. With his third pull of booze, he squinted out at the parking lot and let his vision blur, trying to get back that image he’d conjured of the woman wearing next to nothing. Instead, his weird-ass mind fixated on the lab coat, the horn-rimmed glasses, and the way those green eyes had looked past all the ink to the person beneath. He remembered the feel of her hand on his skin, so careful, as if he were fragile, and he felt something other than empty. Something other than the pain in his back and the tweak of his thigh and the burn of his eyes and knuckles.
He felt alive, unexpectedly, after all these months—even years—of surviving. And it was almost too much to bear.
4
Independence Day dawned hot and humid, like every other day in recent memory. And like every other morning, George rose, showered, and went down to the kitchen, where Leonard tried his best to herd her toward the food bowl. She doled out a quarter cup of pellets with a metallic rattle, set a pan of water to boil, slid her feet into her rubber boots, and tromped straight out back to the henhouse. Feathers flew at her arrival—her ladies just as excited to see her as the cat had been. Feed and caresses dispensed in a flurry of clucking, she returned to the house just in time to drop two fresh eggs into the water and slice a miniature battalion of perfectly straight soldiers to dip into the yolks in the three minutes it took to soft boil them.
These rituals were the bones of George’s life. No, perhaps not the bones, but the ligaments, holding the bones of work and sleep together.
Today, sparks of something else peppered what would otherwise have been a normal morning. A heaviness in her belly, a shortness of breath. It felt like excitement, but she couldn’t pinpoint its origin.
Since it was Saturday, she packed up a basket with eggs, veggies from her garden, and quiches she’d baked earlier in the week. After a quick stop at the gas station, George made her way to her parents-in-law’s home—a brick rancher in one of Blackwood’s older, leafier neighborhoods.
The door opened before she’d made
it to the stoop.
“Georgette, darling!” Bonnie Hadley was not her mother, strictly speaking, but the closest she still had to one. As usual, the woman hugged her hard, and George soaked it up.
“How are you, Bonnie?”
“Good, good!”
“And Jim?”
“Oh, you know, he’s the same.”
“But not worse?”
“No, darling, not worse. He’s in the back, weeding.”
“Uh-oh.”
“We’re doing okay today. I managed to stop him from pulling out most of my hostas.”
“Phew. Lucky.” George walked straight to the kitchen—eyes avoiding the school portraits and family pictures on the walls. What was essentially a shrine to their son—her wedding photo at the center of it. “I made a bunch of quiches to freeze this week and thought you might like some,” she said, forcing her voice to be breezy and light.
“Oh, you didn’t have to do that.”
“They’re left over from a dinner party,” she lied. George hadn’t seen the inside of a dinner party in a decade. “And the trout’s from the fish man at the market. Here, I’ll put this stuff away.”
“Nonsense,” said Bonnie. “Leave that. I can do that anytime. Come out back and say hello to Jim. He’ll be so glad to see you.” That, George knew, probably wasn’t true. The last few Saturdays, he hadn’t known who she was. George gulped back a wave of sadness and pushed her way back out into the blinding sunlight, wishing herself somewhere else.
“Jim,” said Bonnie, her voice loud and artificially bright. “It’s Georgette, here to visit!”
“Mmm?” came her father-in-law’s voice from somewhere beyond the edge of the blue-painted deck. The women exchanged a look and descended the stairs to find the tall man digging a hole in the dirt, up against the house. His white button-down shirt was filthy, as was his face, and George had to swallow hard to keep the melancholy at bay. Tears, she knew from experience, served no purpose but to sow more tears. If she started now, she’d never stop. Best to just get things done here and head back home. Or to work. Work would be perfect.
“Hello, Jim!”
He paused, glanced at his wife for confirmation, and then rose, his smile unsure.
“Oh, oh. Hello, hello,” he said. “Hello, hello.”
After an awkward moment where no one spoke, George said, “I’ll just…get the gas from my car and mow the lawn now, Jim. If that’s okay with you.”
He gave a vague sort of nod, so she gassed up the mower, got it going on the third try, and started cutting the grass.
A couple rows in, the hum of the motor dulled her conscious thoughts, and George let her mind wander. Flashes of memory—bronze skin, black lines, burn marks, vestiges of pain scattered across a body so beautiful she could cry. An unexpected shiver of excitement, another flash of sharply pebbled nipples, her own hardening sympathetically, warmth in her abdomen a pleasant weight and then… Oh crap. She was wet. Actually wet, thinking about the stranger—her patient, for God’s sake.
George stilled, lifted her shirt, and mopped her brow, shutting her eyes hard and pulling in a ragged breath. Stop it. He needs help, not…whatever the hell this is.
For the next hour, she battled her stubborn subconscious, shutting it down every time it fed her another drop of him, another memory, a smell, a shiver.
An hour later, sweaty and grass-covered in the frigid living room, George accepted the usual lemonade and sat beside her mother-in-law on the sofa, feeling caught and guilty in the worst possible way.
“You sure you don’t want me to fire up the grill?” George said. “It’s the Fourth of July, after all. We should celebra—”
“No, no. It’s too much for Jim. Besides, didn’t you say you’d been invited to a party this afternoon?”
Oh, right. A party. A fresh wave of dread rolled up, and George wondered, not for the first time, how upset Uma would be if she canceled. “You’re right,” she said, voice small.
“So, how are…things?” the older woman asked, keeping it vague, but her eyes so bright and excited, she could only be referring to one thing.
George swallowed. None of this was normal. It wasn’t normal to be a widow at her age. It wasn’t normal to be caretaker for your in-laws—though she’d never begrudge them that responsibility—and it most certainly wasn’t normal to use your dead husband’s sperm to try to get pregnant. “Good. Good. The hormones seem to have…kicked in.”
“Yes?”
“I’m feeling…something.”
“So, you’ll be…” Ovulating was the word Bonnie wouldn’t say. And neither would George—not with her mother-in-law. She glanced at the door. How soon could she get out of here?
“Soon, I think, Bonnie. Soon.”
“That’s… It’s wonderful, George. You truly deserve this. You’ve wanted a baby for so long and—”
“Yes. Yes, I have. Thank you, Bonnie. Thank you for supporting me.”
“Of course, dear. Of course.” Bonnie’s eyes filled with tears.
Though George wanted to look away, she forced herself to reach out and put her hand over the other woman’s frail, knobby one, the papery skin dry to the touch. How many times had she held this hand? Certainly more often than she’d held her husband’s. “Have you been using the cream I brought you last week? You really should—”
“Oh, do you know, I forgot about it? I’ll have to go find where I’ve put it. I don’t want you to think that I—”
“It’s okay, Bonnie. It’s okay,” George said, clasping the woman’s hand more tightly and wondering how soon she could escape.
* * *
Clay’s eyes flew open, but he couldn’t move. Fear choked him. No air. Arms like lead. They’d found him. Ape’s needle to his eyeball, his ax cleaving his head. Oh, fuck, he was bleeding out.
His mouth opened, gaped like a fish out of water, and finally, finally, found air. With it came the flood of memories. The pain, scorching, fire, Breadthwaite—Bread—pulling him out. The rest of the team getting inside late—too fucking late. White bed, voices, fuzzy, heavy pain, blinding flashes, muddled memories. His sister, Carly, too. Clean, fresh Carly, not the bruised, battered body he’d identified in the morgue. No, wait. Not Carly. Carly was gone. Other faces. Questions, pain, always the pain.
His moan was the sound that brought him back, his eyes slitted to see a cracked ceiling, a landscape on the wall, faded and blue.
Mountains.
Virginia. Blackwood, Virginia. Where the skin doctor was.
The motel. He was in the motel. White-and-peach bedspread on the floor beneath him, blinds closed, curtains pulled, A/C set to frigid. Against his face rested an empty fifth of vodka.
Last night, like every other night since that day, Clay had succumbed, not to sleep, but rather to a self-inflicted, booze-induced near coma, which didn’t qualify as sleep no matter how long his eyes stayed closed. It left him tired and dizzy and nauseous, with a head the size of Maryland, but at least it gave him those few hours of oblivion.
Painfully, he creaked to standing, each joint making itself known in ways it hadn’t before the shooting. He got up, popped the usual six ibuprofen, his hands tight, and moved to the bathroom, blinking at the heaviness of his eyes. It wasn’t until he caught sight of his puffy, red face in the mirror that he remembered why his eyes hurt so bad.
After a shower, he hit the road, crawling through downtown Blackwood, which appeared to be celebrating Independence Day in style, and finally hit the open road.
In his Toyota. Yeah, not the quite the hum of a Harley.
He drove three hours to the coast, where he scoured craigslist and made some phone calls and bought a truck, dented and dusty with a sprinkling of rust. He hoped to God the thing took him back to Blackwood, but it was safer to do this here or in West Virginia, and he figured he’d stand o
ut less at the beach.
After parking in a spot with an ocean view, he powered up his phone and hit Tyler’s name, noticing the holes in the upholstery and the missing radio knobs. Local color.
“Hey,” he said when his friend answered.
“Clay? Where the fuck are you, man?” Tyler asked. “I been calling you like crazy. Jayda’s asking me if you’re coming today, and I don’t even know. What the hell’s going on?”
“I refused protection, Tyler. Left town.”
“Seriously? You can’t do that, man! They found your house! Got your damned bike! You’ve got to—”
“How’d they find me, Ty? No one else will say.”
“I don’t know, man. Weird shit’s been going down.”
“Boss tried to force me into protection, but that’s not happening. Second best choice, she said, is I get the hell outta town until trial. Got a shit-ton of PTO. It’s an extended vacation. Away.”
“So, where you headed?” his best friend asked. The man who’d been his lifeline for two long years undercover. The last man he’d spoken to before getting shot. The only person he trusted his life with—except maybe Bread, who’d gotten him out of the burning clubhouse.
After a long sigh, Clay said, “Can’t say.”
“The fuck?”
“Look, I trust you. It’s the phones and the… Yeah. Not telling anyone.”
“You tell the boss?”
“Not even the boss.”
“She is gonna kill you.”
“Yeah, well, she’ll get over it. She’s the one who told me to disappear.” He let out a pained groan. “This shit is bad. If they know where I live, man, who’s to say they can’t find everyone else who worked on the case? No way I’m putting you and Jayda and the kids in danger, okay? I’d rather listen to the boss—”
“For once,” interrupted Tyler.
“Yeah.” Clay grinned. “For once.”
“So, it’s R & R for you, and what? Catch some waves at the beach or…”
By Her Touch Page 4
