A Brother At My Back

by A. J. Downey

  “Like I’ve been plowed into by a truck.”

  He nodded, “I’ve put my man Zeb onto your protective detail until we know if this guy is going to be a problem.” He raised an eyebrow and I could hear the question loud and clear, are you going to be a problem?

  “No; yeah, uh, we’ve met. He seems… nice,” I finished lamely. I mean, he did seem nice, problem was that Silas had seemed nice in the beginning, too and trust wasn’t something that came naturally or easily, at least not anymore. I did trust Dragon, though. I mean, wasn’t that why I was here?

  “Give him a chance, kid’s got a warrior’s spirit. The way I know it, he’s descended from a long line of ‘em. He’s good people and, I think, the right kind of fit for this particular situation.”

  “You don’t need to convince me,” I said softly, downing the pills and draining half the water in three long swallows. “I came to you for help.” He eyed me critically and nodded once or twice, deciding I was telling the truth about the whole ‘convincing me’ part.

  “I’m grateful,” I said, a bit breathless from my hydration binge. “I can’t tell you how many times the cops either didn’t believe me or didn’t care.” I dropped my gaze to the plastic bottle in my hands and sighed, the clack of the plastic sharp and loud in the little silence between us as my fingers massaged the bottle nervously. Opening up in any way was hard to do but I felt I sort of owed it to him at this point.

  “Yeah, well, we aren’t law enforcement, Sugar. We know better.” I nodded faintly and finished the water in three or four slightly less greedy gulps. He held out his hands and I gave him the empty bottle and cap. He crushed it down into a round coin with his massive fists and screwed the lid on to keep it from bouncing back. He turned to go and stopped, reached into his back pocket and held out a sheaf of bills. I met his solemn dark eyes and plucked the cash from his fingers.

  “Been a pleasure, Sweetheart,” he murmured and then he was gone. The way he’d said it, well, it held the distinct flavor of goodbye. Not as in I would never see him again, but definitely that… the professional relationship was done. I looked down at the cool grand between my hands, leafing through the bills, counting it three or four times to make sure I was really seeing it right. By the time I stuffed it into my purse I was definitely sure that it was my severance package and I couldn’t say I wasn’t a little sad about that.

  Dragon, by far and most certainly, had been my best client. Respectful, and gentle for the most part, just an all-around nice guy. I couldn’t say I blamed him for wanting the distance, though. My situation was complicated and messy, and by coming to him for help had definitely blurred the set lines we had both abided by up to this point, unspoken as they may have been.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on my socks and boots, getting dressed mechanically as I pondered where things were going to go from here. It was the worst sort of feeling, knowing something bad was on the horizon but not knowing what shape it would take. This wasn’t like a storm you could prepare for. There was no telling what kind of crazy Silas was capable of at this point. He’d had three years to think about all sorts of inventive things to do by way of revenge for having him locked up. I had thought I had about five to finish paying for things and to get away from him.

  I should have known better. The system had only ever been good at one thing where I was concerned and that one thing had been to fail me. I stood up with a harsh, angry sigh and tried to shake the emotion off. It hadn’t done me any good before and being angry would just turn me into the same damn thing I was running from. Silas was always angry.

  Silas is just a dick. I thought bitterly and yeah, he was that too. A dick with a less than impressive one at that.

  I let myself out into the hall and looked around. It was a bit of a ghost town and I was okay with that. Somehow me slinking out of Dragon’s room felt like it should be a walk of shame, but fuck that. I wasn’t ashamed of getting what I had honestly come here for in the first place. I was used to the judgment that came along with the job and that was when people only thought I was a stripper. If they knew I was an actual whore? I didn’t want to think about that so much. Not here in the Bible Belt of good ol’ Kentucky. Hell, the bible-thumpers would have my ass branded a harlot in nothing flat.

  People here just didn’t know how to mind their own business; it was like it was impossible for them to stay in their own goddamn lane. It’s what I liked about Dragon. He never tried to pry, he minded his own business and let me keep mine to myself. I could and did respect that.

  I found his man in the barroom, sitting at a table with a cup of coffee in front of him that was mostly empty. He looked up and stood up as I came into the room and said, “Cuppa?”

  I think he was asking if I wanted a cup of coffee myself but it was a weird way of doing it. Probably from where he was originally from. I shook my head and said, “No, thanks, I can make fresh when I get home; which I would really like to do.”

  “Ah, yeah, this way, then.”

  He led me out into the sunshine and I winced as it sent a railroad spike through my eye and up into my brain. I fished a pair of large, bug-eyed sunglasses out of my purse and shoved them onto my face the same time he slid a pair of wraparounds of his own out of the inside pocket of his cut. He walked up to a battered old Harley in the line of bikes and I blinked, waiting for him to say ‘just kidding’ and move to one of the other bikes.

  Instead, he dropped onto the seat and gave a twist to the bars, kicking up the stand it had been leaning heavily on and thumbing the switch.

  “You’re joking, right?” I asked and I immediately winced and apologized. “Sorry, didn’t mean for that to come out so bitchy.”

  “Hangover’s got you good, eh?”

  “Something like that,” I agreed. Really, it was starting to hit me that I’d lost my best damn client and I was starting to worry about cash flow some. Not to mention I was really starting to realize that it sort of hurt that Dragon had taken a walk on me. I hadn’t expected that, like at all. I mean it made all sorts of sense, and I didn’t know how I had convinced myself that nothing was going to change. I mean… really. Still, I felt myself going into an almost mourning phase. Like you do after a breakup, which was just goddamn ridiculous.

  “Go on, then,” he said, in that rich accent.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Get it out of your system, eh,” he said affably, sort-of smiling and I couldn’t help but smile a little myself, though I tried not to.

  I mean, I was serious when I asked, “Does it even run?”

  He grinned and fired it up and oh god, I wished he hadn’t. The angry, protesting growl the bike let out thrummed through my whole abused, aching body that I had so thoroughly poisoned with that fine tequila and punishing fuck-fest last night and my body was letting me know All. About. It.

  My head throbbed, my face felt as if it was going to slide off and I swear every joint creaked like his leather jacket had inside the closed space of Dragon’s room. My teeth were set on edge, and I gritted them and waited for some nausea to pass before I put one hand on his offered arm and swung a protesting leg over the seat behind him.

  Good gracious, that hurt. Dragon had done a great job of getting between my legs the night before, and given my ‘day job,’ you would think I would be limber enough that I wouldn’t hurt where my legs met my body, but nope. I’d overdone everything to excess, apparently, and my body was pissed and just letting me know about it at every turn.

  “You good?” he asked, over the loud chugging of the beast beneath us.

  “As I’ll ever be!”

  “Right, where you live then?”

  “Oh! Shit, sorry…” I gave him the address and he thrust a helmet back at me. I put it on, even as he shook out his shaggy hair and wrapped a bandana around his head, tight to his skull.

  He dropped another half-helmet-looking thing onto his own head and without even bothering with the straps, said to me, “Hang on, then!”
<
br />   I did, because honestly, I expected the bike to fall apart beneath us at any moment; it looked that bad. To be honest, it rode even worse – the vibrations were terrible. I don’t know that I could entirely chalk that up to the miserable hangover, either.

  4

  Zeb…

  She was miserable for the ride and I wanted to feel bad for her and I guess I did, even though I knew she’d done it to herself. That tequila she’d drunk was wicked stuff, and I’d been at its mercy a time or two. I could sympathize, or was it empathize? I reckon it could even be a cross between the two.

  She lived out the other side of town. The flat she was in wasn’t the best. She was on the second floor of a double-decker building. One of those open-air sorts of deals leading up to the door. Only one stairwell up, no back exit or escape route. Her flat was the last one in the row of four on the end of the building, furthest from the car park and backed up to nature. Woods out the windows on the side and the river a short drop down past the back porch, if it had a back porch; I hadn’t seen yet. There wasn’t really a front where she was at, all that long walk from the stairs at the other end. The fire escape was a rusted, spindly ladder by her front door that didn’t look like it’d hold a five-year-old, let alone a grown woman like her.

  It wasn’t a good defensible position and it wasn’t grand for an escape, either. The door, at least, was a solid wood one, painted a peeling forest-green. There were a lot of locks, so she had that going for her.

  A gray-and-dark striped tabby cat leaped up and put its paws against the door frame, letting out a howl of protest. It reminded me of my mum back home, when I came home late after bein’ up to no good.

  “Hey, you,” the beauty declared and she picked the cat up and said to me, “This is Mad Max.”

  “Cute fella,” I remarked, and she smiled a genuine one that made me smile too.

  “Max is short for Maxine, she’s a girl.”

  “Ah, yeah, never woulda guessed that.” I sniffed and reached out to pet the cat’s head and she immediately flattened her ears and hissed, swiping at my hand with her claws. I jerked back and Tiffany laughed.

  “And now you know why she’s called Mad Max.” She set her down and, keys chiming softly, started unlocking her door. I shook my head at the fifth lock.

  “First off, only lock one or two when you’re gone. It’s taking you too long to get inside. Your things are just that, things. You’re irreplaceable, so you should be the focus. Only lock all of them when you’re inside.”

  She paused and listened to me and finally gave a nod, pushing open the door. I looked at the jamb and already saw some improvements I could make. It was straight wood she had the locks going into; I could anchor a strip of metal to it, make it take more than one or two swift kicks to knock it in. Buy her some time for another improvement I had in mind.

  “You got a taser or a gun?”

  “No, I don’t know how to shoot.”

  “I reckon we’ll fix that.”

  “Al - all right…”

  The front door opened right into her kitchen and inside was gloomy. She had thick drapes over the insides of the windows which was good for keeping a man on the outside from lookin’ in on her. She stood aside and let me through and I quickly assessed. No back porch, no bedroom either; Americans called it a studio flat. Just the kitchen and bathroom with her bed set up in the main area out here.

  “Nice place,” I said, and compared to my regular flat, it was. Of course, I hadn’t really even tried with mine. I’d been such a fuck-up I hadn’t put down too many roots. Not yet. While I’d felt more permanence here than anywhere else since comin’ to the States, I wasn’t to that point of commitment yet, I reckon.

  She snorted as if she didn’t believe I’d meant the compliment and I let it go. No sense in arguing the point. She tossed her keys on the cracked kitchen bench and they clacked loud in the small room, sliding slightly before coming to rest with a metal-on-metal click against the edge of the tired, old, gas stove.

  “It’s cheap, which I like, and they didn’t ask a whole lot of questions when I moved in, which I liked even better.”

  “Heh, fair enough.”

  “Can I fix you some coffee or breakfast or something for the ride home?”

  “Ah, nah, yeah,” I said, not thinking, and a silence stretched between us some.

  She just stood there halfway in her kitchen and looked at me, waiting. Finally, giving me a long slow blink she asked, “So, um, which is it?”

  I cracked a grin and sheepishly said, “That’d be great.”

  “All I have are eggs and toast,” she said quietly, moving further into the aisle of the kitchen, going to the fridge.

  “Sweet as.”

  She paused, closed her eyes and gave a deep sigh, her shoulders lifting and dropping. She turned around and said squarely, “I’m going to need you to finish the sentence,” she said. “Clear communication is important to me.”

  “Sorry, eh. I don’t mean it. I’m just tired-like and my words are gettin’ away from me.”

  She nodded and pursed her lips, “It’s fine, just don’t get mad at me when I keep asking you what you just said or telling you I don’t know what that means because I don’t know what that means… at least not the way you just said it. Are you unhappy with toast and eggs, or is it okay? I mean, this is typically how I managed to get my ass beat. Non-committal grunts or incomplete sentences that I would have to interpret with a fifty-fifty shot of getting it right or wrong. I don’t want to live like that again.”

  “My bad, eh. ‘Sweet as’ means, uh, like cool, in American. Eggs and toast are ‘sweet as’ or ‘cool’ with me.”

  She nodded and rolled her lips together indecisively. She was thinking awful hard and finally said, “Thank you. I’m sorry for snapping.”

  “No worries.”

  I dropped into a seat at the little two-person table scattered with papers and school books and folded my hands on the top. I could watch her move in the small space and she was even more lithe and gorgeous when she moved. She had a way about her, you know?

  I diverted my attention, let my eyes wander over her learning materials and gathered it was for some kind of social work.

  “So what you want to do when you graduate, eh?” I asked and she looked up from the stove, where she’d cracked some eggs into a skillet.

  “I don’t know yet; I thought about working with abused women and kids but it might be too hard. I’m trying hard not to think about it too much until I get to the point where I have to make a decision. Too many things are going on at once, you know?”

  “Yeah, I reckon.” I scratched an itch on my forehead and took my eyes off her for a minute. I didn’t want to come across an awkward bloke that couldn’t keep his eyes to himself.

  “What about this?” she asked. “I mean, how is this all supposed to work?”

  “What, your ex-man? A piece of piss.”

  “I don’t disagree with that,” she said and stirred the hissing eggs in the pan.

  I smiled, “Nah, well, he’s that too, really, but in Kiwi, that means he’s easy. Or the problem with him is, anyhow.”

  “Nothing with Silas is easy,” she said and I almost barely heard her over the popping and sizzling in the pan in front of her.

  “We’ll start now to get into a routine. I’ll pick you up tonight and take you into work; you got security there, yeah?”

  “Yeah, we do.”

  “Good deal. I’ll pick you up at three and drive you home, check and make sure all is good here, have you lock me out, and then I’ll be just a phone call away if you need me.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” she said carefully.

  “No worries, girl. Everything is gonna be good as gold, now. You come to the right place for help.”

  She stared at me for a long minute, one dark eye glittering through the long chestnut fall of her hair. She did that, hid behind her hair to cover the ugly mark he left on her face. She didn’t see she was
a warrior to survive a thing like that. I hesitated, had a thought, and planted it so it had some time to grow. I wouldn’t bring it up now. Not yet, the girl was still too raw, too afraid. Made me afraid she’d just dismiss it.

  “I really hope that’s true,” she murmured, then plated some eggs just as the toast popped from the toaster.

  I smiled, “It’s true, and it looks like you’ve done this a time or two.” She set the plate in front of me and handed me some flatware.

  “Maybe,” she murmured with a wry smile.

  She drifted back and forth between the table and the kitchen getting other things, like salt and pepper, hot sauce, butter, and jam. She finally took a seat across from me and sighed.

  “You eat, you’ll feel better,” I said around a mouthful of my own.

  “I know, but it’s tough when the mere thought of food makes you queasy.”

  I knew that was right. I also knew the stress wasn’t helping. We would see what we could do about that.

  5

  Tiffany…

  I wasn’t resistant to any of the suggestions he made about changing how I did things for my safety. The schedule was an easy enough fix, and so were the regular texts and calls checking in.

  That morning, he’d eaten, said his thanks, and told me he’d be back later after some sleep. We’d traded numbers and he’d gone. I’d locked the door behind him, done the dishes, taken a long, hot shower, and had, by some miracle, gotten some more sleep of my own.

  I woke up to a knock at my door and a quick look out the peephole had revealed his frightening tattooed face. I felt muscles I hadn’t realized I’d tensed loosen at the sight of him and I wondered at that for a moment, hesitating before I opened the door. His melodic voice floated through the wood asking, “You all right, Girl?”

  No, but it would be a waste of breath explaining it, so I went with the polite little lie. “Yeah, I’m okay,” I said after opening the portal to the outside world. He gave me a one-sided grin, a dimple creasing on the cheek unadorned by the deep blue whorls of ink and I sort of just knew that he knew exactly what I’d been feeling.