Unravel

by Tara Lynn

  “Evidence.” Why would anyone keep that...and then it hit. “They're blackmailing you into staying?”

  “They planned it from the start. They sent me there to shoot that man. I've been told that incriminating evidence might just show up if I decide to abandon my loyalties.”

  “That's insane. You said they had a code, that they looked out for each other.”

  “And you said that their code was bullshit. One of us was right.”

  My hand lay uselessly on his shoulder. Convincing him was supposed to be the fight. That, I could help him with.

  But fighting the MC? With all my so called achievements, I had nothing, no knowledge, no ability to help him with that. I might hate them, but they knew the dark parts of the world much better that I ever would.

  “I suppose it's fair in a way,” Rett said. “I should have done my time. Now, I will, and it’ll be easier than time in prison.”

  “It’ll be your whole life,” I said. “Don't say that. They’re the bad ones.”

  Rett chuckled and strung a hand around my waist. “Well, when you put it like that, it sounds pretty expected. They're a gang. Of course they’re in the wrong.”

  “So what, you're going to let them make you stay? You gave up.”

  “No.” He stalked away running a hand through his head. “But they have his body somewhere. They probably have the gun I used. It's more than enough to get me tried as an adult in our state. I checked that too.”

  “Oh, Rett.” I went over and lay my head on him by the window. We stood silent for a while, gazing out at the dinky houses on our street and the grand mesas somewhere in the reddening sky beyond.

  “We'll get you out,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Rett said, like dying exhaust.

  A strange steel filled my voice and I said it again. “I'll get you out of there.”

  “Hmph.” Rett's vast arm curled around my shoulder. “Maybe you will. But there's no time, baby. I lose that offer soon, and then there's nothing for me to go to anyway. I’ll just lie on your couch drinking. You won’t want me.”

  “I know who you are, and it’s not that.” I hugged him fiercely around the waist. “You'll always have me.”

  He kissed me on the forehead, with a smile on his lips. “That's all I really want anyway,” he murmured.

  They were better words than he’d dared to say even a week ago. But I wanted to give him more.

  I wanted to set him free. I just needed to figure out how.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Everett

  I never hated classes, but only rare moods made me attend one. The nearer graduation drew, though, the more urge I had to show up. I sat at the back of the physics class, watching the teacher scrawl equations on the board. That detail I didn’t need. Getting As wouldn’t rescue me from my destiny with the MC, but at least I would know the forces at work on my life.

  Something must have shown on my face, cause our teacher actually peered over everyone else and pointed at me.

  “Mr. Tull, you want to field this one?”

  “Field what?”

  Our physics teacher sighed, and tapped the black board with a ruler, far up at the front of the class.

  “Third law of physics, Mr. Tull. How about you tell us what it is?”

  Third law, I knew it. Not as well as I understood the first law: An object doesn't change its path without an outside force butting in. It’d taken Liza to send me careening off a course I'd consigned myself to for years – hell, one I'd relished.

  And the second law said that the size of a change depended on the size of the object needing to be changed. And my situation was beyond changing. The murder sat at the center of a dozen other deeds I’d done, bound together like spokes like a chopper wheel, rolling too fast for Liza or me to have any say in what happened to it.

  And third law, that just said any action had an equal and opposite reaction. I'd tried to leave the MC, and the MC had fought back. Technically, I should have had a reaction to that, too. But they had me on the scene of a murder with a gun. What could match that?

  What could I have on them?

  “Mr. Tull, if you're thinking something, I want to hear it.”

  I looked up at the teacher, his face dripping with irritation, every tired wrinkle on it clear from where I was sitting. The whole room felt carved out of crystal, the grains of chalk on the board, the slumped forms of my classmates. This clarity came to me at times, usually on the field, when the play lined up perfectly in my head.

  “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” I said.

  “Not bad,” the teacher said. He started scrawling an equation on the board.

  I didn't need that to know what to do though.

  If the MC was going to frame me for murder, then I could get them right back. I didn’t need to find my body. I just needed something on them.

  I strode out to my bike the second the class ended. The day was far from over, but my future didn't depend on knocking my Bs up half a letter. I needed freedom, the good old fashioned kind.

  But I had barely strode out the front doors into the wide parking lot when footsteps scraped out behind me.

  “Rett,” a voice called out.

  My anger blew out. Shit.

  Marlo strode up next to me. He zipped up his cut and gave me a light nod.

  “Where we off to?” he said. His buzz cut face shone in the sun, tight but calm.

  I fucking hated the calm appraisal. No reaction there – he didn’t know my actions. Marlo had been my brother for three years. We had done bad things, but he'd had my back and I had his, just like on the field.

  It wasn't going to keep me from getting out, but it sure as hell made me feel like shit for doing what I was set out to do. I only wanted a bargaining chip, but if it ever got played, Marlo would be the one doing time. And here he was willing to ride with me to do it. He would know where bodies were, but I wasn’t going to trick him, not in the way the MC had done to me.

  “I'm just taking a ride,” I said. “Nothing special.”

  “Well, fuck. I'll ride with you then.” He stepped off into the lot.

  “Nah, man. I need some time alone to think.”

  Wrong words.

  “Think about what?” Marlo looked in at my face.

  “Just about life, you know. Just feeling antsy. Need to get it out of my system.”

  “Shit, I get that all the time man. We don't gotta talk. We'll just ride it out side by side. Might help.”

  Maybe I should just tell him the truth. Would he view it as betrayal or would he stick by me as always?

  Marlo clasped me on the shoulder. “Hey, this thinking ain't about MC business is it?”

  He had on a stern look, the sort you'd see from a paramedic. “A little,” I said.

  “Hey man, don't even worry about a thing. Anything you can't handle I'll have your back on. That's how it's been. It's how it's gonna be, alright?”

  He clapped me hard on the back. I couldn't tell him. This was worse than a club betrayal. It would be betraying him personally

  “It's not really about the MC.” I stepped out of his grip. “It's about graduation.”

  “Graduation? What does that matter? Your grades are fucking awesome anyway.”

  “Thinking about leaving has me all sentimental maybe.”

  The heat was starting to cut through my jacket, plump me with sweat. It was time to be moving.

  “Well, think about the future then,” Marlo said. “Think about everything we're gonna do.”

  “I am,” I said, walking away. “Alone.”

  Whatever was in my voice, it was enough to keep him from following. I hopped onto my chopper, revved it to life and tore out of the school lot.

  I had my shades on, but the desert burned red even through it. The heat was cruel in the noon, but I couldn't afford to wait. The old meth lab was hours out. I didn’t know what I’d find there that would speak worse on the MC than it did on me, but I had no
other place to start. I stopped after the first hour riding and pulled into a small strip mall with a decent sized outdoor goods store. I had to ask the owner, but they had what I needed.

  A few minutes later, I headed back out with a metal detector under one arm and a shovel on the other. I strapped it to the side of my chopper, grabbed a drink from a nearby fast food place and roared on forward.

  The place was down a creek of a state road and then a dirt road, dozens of miles from a shred of civilization. It hadn't shifted much in years, never mind the few days since I'd been here last. I rode all the way up and saw nothing more than a charred foundation, black dust and blackened boards sticking out like a skeleton. They had cleaned the scene up good.

  Well, metal didn’t burn.

  According to the box, the metal detector was rated for just under two feet when it came to finding coins. What I needed to find was something smaller yet – shards from the bullet that I had fired into that man.

  It was a long shot. It counted on the body being near, on it being shallow on the bullets being the right make. But it was the only play I had, and I'd been in the MC deep enough to see how sloppy they could get. There was a decent chance.

  I unpacked the detector and fired it up. It rang out a steady tone when I set it against my bike. Good.

  I set it to the dirt and barely started walking before it started chirping. I tested the spot again against others nearby. It was live.

  They couldn't have been this lazy, could they? I switched the detector out for a shovel and started at it. A few shovelfuls and the heat had me blooming with sweat. For all that, I got to a two foot looking hole and saw nothing but red soil. I put the detector down in the hole. It was quiet as death itself.

  I turned it on the soil I'd just shoveled out and it beeped. It took me all of two minutes to sift through and find the cause: a solitary needle.

  Sometimes knowing the play wasn't even a fraction of the battle. I took a deep draw from my lukewarm canteen and set to work.

  Four hours. Four hours I scanned and dug and filtered. I went in a spiral out from the burned out shack and managed to assemble enough lids, pipes and foil to nearly assemble the thing from scratch.

  What I didn't find was a body. Maybe the bullet had passed right through when they buried it. Maybe they had taken it with them.

  The sun was just starting to set when I crumpled in a heap by the shade of my bike. My throat felt like sand. My body ached in places I didn't know it could. I was beat, and the land was pockmarked by my sweat and exertion, but for it all I had nothing.

  I shouldn't have had time to pin much hope on this wayward effort. It was a crapshoot from the start, and yet I had allowed myself to expand with belief.

  I roared up at the sky, breaking what was left of my voice.

  The sun slowly set and my despair seemed to dim with it. What was this, one day? There'd be others. I'd think of a better strategy and come back.

  The ride home was cool and sober. I got back with a grumbling stomach and rushed off to the shower after dropping the gear outside.

  When I stepped out, Liza was in my room, peering out the window.

  “What's that stuff out there?” she said, turning to me.

  Her lovely eyes traced my bare chest as I came in, but instead of appreciating the gaze, I wanted nothing more than to shrink away.

  “Just a project I'm working on.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I'll tell you later.”

  I put on my shirt and went down to grab leftovers. Liza would help me if I let out a whiff of what was occupying me. She would throw herself into it. But as much as she may have told me to forgive myself, I didn't want her helping me find the proof. I had seen the difference between her knowing what I did and seeing it in action.

  So I shut her out that night, telling her I was exhausted and needed the rest. It helped that it happened to be true. I lay with the moon shining down in the bare room, imagining myself that body, lying under than earth. Where would it be and what would it see?

  I wasn't one for superstition, but that night I dreamed of a low sand hill overlooking the burnt out shack, and the next day when I headed back I found it exactly as I had seen it, though I had never once ventured there.

  But the dream proved to be just that. All afternoon, I searched and I found nothing. And when I went home exhausted and Liza asked, I had to cover again. This time, she believed me less.

  That night, I thought about just telling her. If she ran away at the sight of what I'd done, then maybe it was better. She had given me too much of a pass for what I had done. The only good thing that my time in the club had accomplished was getting rid of her father, and I'd hardly had a role in that except maybe triggering it.

  Her father.

  I sat up from my sheets, my moonlit room ultra-clear.

  I had not known what happened to her father. Not until Clutch spat out his fate when I'd tried to leave.

  “We took care of that mess you came to us with.”

  He was dead.

  And I knew the last place he had run to before he was dead. The club had asked him to meet by a mile marker in the desert.

  I'd heard those mile markers mentioned more than once in the club. Nothing was out there but sand. But maybe things lay beyond that uneven surface.

  The next day was a Friday. I rose early, my body creaking from being used and spent in ways it had never been the past couple days. I rode out with the sun towards the last known place Liza’s stepfather had visited.

  I ended up in an entirely unremarkable patch of highway. Scattered brushes and low cacti dotted orange-red land. Cars blew past now and then, but the road felt pretty desolate. A thin flattened trail led off into the desert, and I followed it until it vanished amongst the sand about a mile in. I parked and looked around.

  Nothing stuck out as unusual, so I did what I'd done the last few days. I grabbed my detector, set it to the ground and started scanning.

  I went about a foot before it started beeping. I sighed and picked up my shovel, but after one scoop, something glinted in the earth. I plucked it out.

  It was a bullet.

  My heart sped up as I picked up the detector again. The thing went off a half dozen times in ten yards. I stamped out the spots but kept going. Suddenly, the chime went off in a high pitch. Strong signal.

  I got the shovel and started digging. There was no bullet in the first pile. Another few strokes passed and all I pulled up was dirt and worms.

  Then I struck something hard. I scooped out more dirt and saw a flash of white before dirt crumbled on.

  I took out another couple shovels and it became clear what it was. Bone.

  In five minutes I had a whole damn skeleton excavated. The jaw flapped wide open as if embarrassed at being caught. The guy was still in tattered jeans and a cut – one from a rival MC that had been stomped out of the area years ago. The skull had clear entry wounds from multiple bullets.

  It was a body. Not the one I cared about, but one all the same.

  I grabbed the detector and kept going. Every hundred yards, the thing went wild and when I dug, I struck shards of metal entombed in bone.

  By noon, I had dug five holes and found five bodies. I stopped when I found one which had not yet been reduced to nothing.

  I hadn't found my guy.

  But I had found a whole goddamn graveyard.

  I had my play.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Eliza

  “It's ok, Eliza. Give it to me straight. I want to know how off I am.”

  Jasper sat on the other side of my desk in the newspaper editor's office, looking up in his over sized polo with his puppy dog eyes. Maria had already left, so the only person left for him to endless question was me. What in the world was I supposed to say to that face? I folded the newspaper he had edited and set it down.

  “It's not so bad,” I said. “Yeah, there are mistakes, but nothing I wouldn't make.”

  “Yeah r
ight,” Jasper said. “Like you make mistakes.”

  “Of course, I do.”

  “Sure, whatever. Just tell me how to get better.”

  “Get better?” I said. “That's easy. It's just practice. Practice like it’s the only thing in the world that matters.”