Ryder

by Hope Stone

  I grabbed some toilet paper and blew my nose. How was I going to get out of this?

  Finally I decided that it was time to stop lying to them about stuff. No more covering for Bailey. No more shielding them from the truth about me and my life. I was a grown woman and I didn’t have to be worried that my mommy and daddy would be mad at me.

  “Come on in here, Dad.”

  He followed me to where Mom was sitting. “What I am about to say actually relates to the business idea I had, I just didn’t realize that I was going to have such personal experience with it.”

  My mom looked worried, but sat there quietly.

  “I was attacked in the parking lot of the grocery store tonight.”

  “What?” my dad looked horrified. “What happened?”

  I was about to tell them the story when my mom’s face went pale and she said, “Oh no. Not you, too.”

  Thirty-One

  Ryder

  I’d had enough of driving this car and really wanted to be on my bike. Now that Paige was safely home, my mind was focused on finding Lily and Bailey. I had to force the terrible thoughts from my mind about what could be happening to them. Best case scenario was that the girls had gone off to meet up with Scorpion and they were having some relatively harmless fun.

  Worst case scenario was…well…worse.

  As much as I wanted to drop off the car and get my bike, I needed to have a vehicle that could also fit Bailey if I found them. Lily was used to being on the back of the bike.

  So, instead of going home, I went to the Blue Dog. I wanted to talk to Hawk and see what he knew about the explosion and see if he’d heard anything about the girls.

  When I pulled up to the parking lot of the Blue Dog, I was shocked at the number of bikes there. Pretty much everyone from Outlaw Souls seemed to be here. It was well after last call, so I wondered what was going on.

  I locked the car and went in. The place was filled with smoke and the only folks here were Outlaw Souls and Connie the bartender. She was off-duty and drinking from a bottle of Jack.

  “Hey Ryder,” she said as I walked in.

  “Shut the fuckin’ door,” someone said. “We don’t want no cops seeing we’re here.”

  Like the four hundred bikes parked in front wouldn’t give it away? Frankly, North La Playa police had more on their minds than busting us for drinking after the bar was closed.

  I pushed my way to the back room where Hawk and Chalupa and Swole were.

  “Where have you been, man? We’ve been here for hours.” Swole said.

  “Just as we thought, Las Balas thinks we blew up their warehouse,” Hawk said. “We went and pulled everything out of ours and moved it to a different location.”

  Chalupa laughed. “They will never find it now.”

  “Where did we put it?” I asked. We didn’t have a lot of shit, so it wouldn’t be too hard to find a hiding place for the fifty or so crates of guns, ammo, and drugs we’d been keeping in the Public Storage locker.

  “It ain’t right, man,” Swole said. “Not cool.”

  Now my curiosity was up. “Where is it?”

  Chalupa was still grinning. “At the cemetery.”

  “The cemetery?”

  “Yeah. In one of those mausoleum things.”

  “How the hell did we…” I shook my head. “Nevermind. I have an emergency I’m dealing with and I need your help.”

  “What’s the emergency?”

  “Lily and her friend disappeared from the concert. If they ever made it there in the first place. They weren’t at the meetup place after all the shit went down at the convention center.”

  “Tell me what happened. From the beginning,” Hawk said.

  So, I did. When I got to the end, he shook his head. “It makes no sense. No one is going to create a huge diversion at the convention center just to grab two teenage girls. Even if Las Balas did think we blew up their warehouse, there would be no reason to do that.”

  “Honestly, I’m less concerned with why and more concerned with where the hell they could be.”

  I needed to talk to that shit Scorpion, but couldn’t get close to the warehouse because of all the cops. Where else could he be at this time of night? If he was with Lily, where would they be?

  I had an idea. “I have something I need to do. You put some calls out, okay, Hawk?”

  “You got it.”

  Twenty minutes later, I was parking the VW in a very empty parking structure near the Point. It was a long shot, and it was almost 3:00 am, but it was the only place I could think of that they might be.

  The parking structure was well lit, even for this time of night, and the full moon illuminated the street once I walked out. I could hear seals barking from the ocean, and the normally busy tourist attraction was deserted.

  There was no way they’d be here. Even still, it was worth a look. I ran across the street to the Ferris Wheel. It was next to closed food carts and stores with security gates up. “Lily?” I called. “Lily!”

  My voice was lost in the slight mist coming off the ocean and I could still smell a slight bit of burning rubber from the warehouse fire.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. “Who’s there?”

  It was a slight flash from over near one of the buildings and so I instinctively reached down to touch the gun inside my jacket pocket. “Who’s there?” I asked again, more loudly.

  I got close enough to see that it wasn’t Lily, or any other female for that matter. It was a tall skinny guy wearing dark clothes. He was walking toward me, but his body language wasn’t threatening.

  “It’s me. Scorpion.” He’d been sitting on a bench next to the entrance to the Ferris Wheel.

  “Where’s Lily?” I demanded. “Where the fuck is my sister?”

  “I don’t know! I’ve been sitting here for two hours waiting for her. We were supposed to meet up here at one.”

  I wasn’t even mad that Lily was planning on sneaking out of Paige’s place to meet Scorpion. I was getting legitimately worried about the girls. This was not an instance of a couple of irresponsible teenagers coming home late from a concert.

  “I’ve been texting her all night but they haven’t been going through. I didn’t know what else to do so I’ve just been sitting here.”

  “So you don’t know anything about where they could be?”

  “No! After the fire, the patches had a meeting but since I’m still prospecting I wasn’t included, so I took off and came here.”

  Dammit. He was my one solid lead.

  I turned to head back to the car. “Okay, thanks.”

  “Ryder?” Scorpion’s hands were stuffed into his jeans pocket.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I…” he cleared his throat. “Can I help you find her?”

  This was no business for a Las Balas prospect to be involved in. I started to shake my head no, but he added, “Please? I just can’t… I mean, I need to do something.” He wiped his face with both hands. “I love her. What if…I…”

  “Fine. You can come along with me. But you need to keep your fucking mouth shut with anything you see or hear. Do you understand me?” This was probably a huge mistake, but my instincts were telling me that having him with me was better than leaving him to his own devices.

  “Thank you, Ryder. I won’t be in the way. I promise.”

  I shook my head and headed to the car with a tall, gangly, worried young man in tow.

  We were driving up Berry Avenue and I was prepping Scorpion for what we were doing. “We’re headed to the Blue Dog Saloon in North La Playa. I’d recommend taking off that fucking jacket and keeping your mouth shut. The brothers are not gonna be too happy if they find out who you are.” I reached down and handed him a baseball cap. “Wear this and keep your head down.”

  “Scott,” he said, as we passed by Swole’s gym.

  “What?”

  “That’s my name. Scott. Scorpion was just my nickname in high school.”

>   “Did you graduate?”

  “Yeah. I went to Fillmore. Was gonna go to LPCC but my ma got sick.”

  I didn’t have time to ask more, so I just said, “There it is. Remember. Keep shut and let me do the talking.” The more I thought about it, the more I was regretting bringing him along.

  The place was still pretty packed despite the fact that it was almost 4:00 am. Hawk was gone, and of course Padre wasn’t there. Neither was Yoda, but Chalupa saw us as soon as we walked in.

  “Hey man, did you find…” He stopped dead in his tracks as soon as he saw Scorpion. He looked back and forth between us questioningly and then asked, “Any luck finding them?”

  I shook my head and said “Nope. Where’s Hawk?”

  “I think he went over to Frog Park to talk to some guys. See if they heard anything.”

  I nodded and made my way to the back of the room and Scorpion kept his head down and followed us.

  He did not go unnoticed, but no one bothered him because it was clear he was with me. I motioned for him to take the seat next to me, with our backs against the wall.

  “So, Scott,” I started. “Now would be a good time to tell me anything you know that might help me find my sister.”

  “Well. The only thing I know is that there was some talk about finding out who torched the warehouse and getting even.”

  “Okay. No surprise there. What else?”

  “Not much. A couple of guys were running out to Baker to make a delivery for El Diablo tonight.”

  “What kind of delivery?”

  He shook his head. “They don’t tell me that kind of stuff.”

  My mind started to tickle with an idea, but it wasn’t formed well enough to understand it yet. Before I got a chance to ask more, Hawk walked in and made a beeline for my table. “Ryder. I found out something that might help us find Lily.”

  Thirty-Two

  Paige

  As soon as she said, “Oh no, not you,” my mom got up off the couch and ran into the bathroom and locked the door.

  “What the hell?” I said, totally shocked. “What did she mean ‘Not you too?’”

  He shook his head and said, “First, what happened to you? Did you see a doctor?”

  “No, it didn’t get that far.” I then told my dad the whole story. “It was terrifying.”

  He gave me a hug and said, “I know.”

  I looked at the bathroom door and said, “What’s wrong with Mom?”

  Dad just stood up and went to the bathroom door and knocked on it softly. “Rosemary? Honey?”

  There was silence on the other side of the door as I sat there thinking this might be the weirdest night of my whole life. I half expected to wake up and discover that it had all been one really bizarre dream.

  “Rosemary. I think it’s time you told Paige what happened.”

  At first I didn’t get it, but then it dawned on me like a kick in the gut. “Oh no, not you too.” My mother had been attacked.

  After what felt like an eternity, I heard the bathroom door unlock and the door opened. My mom came out and her eyes and nose were red from crying. I couldn’t ever remember seeing my mother cry—not even when her own mother died.

  “I think I will have that glass of wine.”

  I got up and poured her some of the wine into a plastic Starbucks cup. Her hands were shaking as she took it. “Thank you.”

  “Let me just say that I never wanted to tell you this. I’m not even sure I should be doing it now. But with your sister missing and… what happened to you… I don’t know. It just seems like the right thing to do.”

  I didn’t say a thing, but I waited.

  “About seventeen years ago, your father was at the clinic and you were at school. The doorbell rang. I never answered the door, not even back then, but I could see a bouquet of flowers and I thought it might be from your dad. He and I…we were…well. I just thought he might be apologizing for something.”

  The affair, probably.

  “As soon as I opened the door, the man pushed his way in and, well.” She looked away.

  “He raped you?” I asked, totally numb.

  “We called the police and they got the guy based on DNA evidence,” my dad said.

  “The whole thing was humiliating and degrading,” my mom said. “There was a trial and I had to testify and everything.”

  “Where was I?” My mind was scanning back to when I was about 8 years old.

  “You spent a lot of time with your Aunt Linda that summer. Remember?”

  Oh my god, I remembered.

  “Then, if that weren’t bad enough, about six weeks later I found out I was pregnant.”

  “What? You got pregnant from the rape?” How awful! I had no idea my mother had gone through any of this. “What happened to the bab…”

  Then it clicked. The timing of everything. “Bailey. Bailey is that baby.”

  They both nodded. “We never wanted to tell her. But, god forbid, something should happen to her tonight, you should know. There have been too many secrets in this family.” She put her face in her hands and started crying.

  For the first time in my life, I saw my mother as a woman. Not as an authority figure or someone to judge me, but as a person.

  I finally understood where I got the calling to help women came from. Even though I wasn’t consciously aware of it, somehow I’d known that this issue was close to home.

  The text message sound came from inside my purse, on my bed. I almost didn’t hear it, but my mom looked at me and said, “Is that your phone?”

  “Yeah. It could be Bailey,” I said, walking to the bedroom door. Or Ryder. It was Ryder.

  How’s it going?

  Weird. This has been a really strange night. Any word on the girls?

  No. They were supposed to meet up with someone at the Point but never showed.

  I had an instant flash of anger. They were supposed to meet someone at the Point? No, they were supposed to meet Ryder at Starbucks. It got me wondering about Lily and what kind of person she really was. No offense to Ryder, but Bailey didn’t do shit like this.

  Then again, how could I be sure? She snuck out of the house and got drunk at a party. Lord only knows what else she’d done that I didn’t know about.

  Hell, I didn’t even know who her real father was until about ten minutes ago.

  So we still don’t know where they are?

  No, but I’ll keep you updated. Try and get some rest?

  I don’t think I’d be able to sleep. Besides, my parents are still here.

  Go back home with them? I promise to let you know as soon as there’s news.

  I’ll think about it. Thank you, Ryder. I appreciate everything you’re doing.

  YW

  I wasn’t surprised he just responded with “You’re welcome.” It was true, though. I really did appreciate the fact that he was out there looking for them. I had other things to deal with, namely my parents.

  Putting the phone back in the charger, I grabbed the box of tissues I’d set by my bed when I’d fantasized about having sex with Ryder earlier. Was it really just earlier tonight?

  I walked into the living room and saw my mom sitting on the couch with her head in her hands. “Hey. Here are some tissues.”

  She looked up and I saw mascara stains running down her cheeks as she took the box from me. “Thank you.”

  I sat down next to her, not really sure what to say.

  “Dad says that you weren’t hurt in the attack tonight. Physically, anyway.”

  “No, it was just some drunk asshole.”

  “I’m glad.”

  A moment passed and we both said, “I’m sorry” at the same time.

  “You? Why are you sorry?” my mom asked.

  “Because of what happened to you. I had no idea, Mom. None. You have been carrying this secret around for seventeen years.” As I looked at her, so many things made sense. Her overprotectiveness. Her trying so hard to keep Bailey and me from making mista
kes.

  “I guess I should have told you, but the time never seemed right. And, Bailey…I didn’t want to upset her. Being conceived from rape is a pretty awful thing.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” my dad added, “Bailey is my daughter. She is. I was there during the whole pregnancy and I was the one to cut the cord when she was born. I’ve been to every daddy daughter dance, and…” his voice caught. “We need to find her, Paige. What time does the police station open? We can’t just be sitting around here doing nothing.”

  Now it was my turn to be truthful. “Actually, I have some friends who are helping look for her.”

  “Friends? What kind of friends?” my mom asked.

  “Well…the girl that Bailey went to the concert with… she is missing too. It’s her older brother.”

  “What kind of help can another teenager do?” my dad asked. “This is a job for law enforcement.”

  “Her brother is the vice president of a motorcycle club and they were doing security for the concert.”

  “A motorcycle gang?” my mother said, a horrified expression on her face.

  “Not a gang. A club. And, anyway, he is trying to track down what happened to his sister Lily and Bailey. They are well connected in La Playa and if there’s information to find, I trust him to find it.”

  “How did you meet this man? Are you in the motorcycle club, too?” My mom was so clueless sometimes.

  “I met him at work. As a customer.”

  “I don’t understand how Bailey met him and his sister?”

  “It’s kind of a long story. Why don’t we head back home and get some rest and I’ll tell you in the car?”

  “I thought we were going to the police?” my mom asked.

  “Why don’t we let Ryder work on things a bit longer. It’s still been less than 12 hours. What if we say that if we don’t have news by noon, we file a missing persons report then. Okay? We can feed Betty White and let her out and wait for news there.”