“Butcher?” Lexi feebly asked, as my eyes met with hers. “Is that really you?”
“Lexi,” I whimpered. “Thank God, you’re awake!” I threw my body at the bed and hovered over her body, hugging her and surrounding her like a human dome. “You’re in the hospital,” I said, sobbing. “You were stabbed.”
“I know,” Lexi replied, struggling to move her weak arms and touch me.
“Do you remember what happened?” I asked, trying to collect myself and pull away. I wanted more than anything to hold Lexi, but I had to keep in mind what Stacey had said about the police. Now that Lexi was awake, I only had so much time before someone called them in to talk to her, and I needed to get as much information from her as I could before they did.
“Yes,” Lexi answered. “I remember.”
“Well?” I asked, pressing for more details.
“I found her,” Lexi replied.
“Huh?” I inquired. “Found who?”
“D,” she said, shifting in her bed. “I found D.”
Chapter 29
~ Lexi ~
“You what?” Butcher asked me.
My body felt numb and heavy, but I could still feel tremendous pain in a few places, and I could barely move.
“Her name is Deidre Flynn,” I answered, trying to sit up in bed. My efforts were futile, however. I got nowhere. My limbs were too weak to provide leverage, and I was surrounded by tubes and cords that I didn’t want to tangle.
“She was arrested for prostitution about eight months ago and did some time in county,” I went on. “But that’s all I could find out before this happened.”
Butcher’s jaw was hanging low from his face, and his eyebrows were furrowed. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How…? What…?”
“After you told me about Sonja, I felt horrible about everything,” I replied. “And I wanted to do something to help, so the next day, I went to the office to do some research after hours. The Crier has some pretty amazing databases and programs—the kind of stuff you see on TV—and I knew I’d be able to find something useful.
“I took what I knew and ran with it. First, I pulled up all the birth records for L.A. County from three years ago. Then, I added some filters to narrow the results. I searched for Caucasian females born to Caucasian mothers, and then restricted the search to mothers’ whose first or last names began with the letter D.
“There were still over a hundred hits, so I tried searching for some obvious things—like your name, or Sonja’s. When that didn’t work, I filtered the results to include only those records that didn’t list a father, or listed the father as ‘unknown.’
“After that, I was left with twenty-six names. I remembered how you’d said D had mentioned ‘using again’ in her note, and on a hunch, I decided to check out rehab records. I ran the twenty-six names I’d found through our database, and two hits came back.”
My head was pounding, and as much as I wanted to keep talking until I’d said all I had to say, I took a break to take a breather. Butcher looked at me kindly—perhaps adoringly—and simply waited for me to regain the strength to continue.
About a minute later, I took a deep breath, steadied my thoughts and picked up where I’d left off.
“I took my search to the internet then,” I said. “I Googled the first name, and almost immediately knew that she wasn’t the right woman. Her name was ‘Daisy Daniels,’ and she had a huge online presence, including social media accounts where she had recently posted dozens of selfies of her and her 3-year-old daughter.
“I moved on to the next name—Deidre Flynn—and Googled her. Most of the stuff that came back wasn’t even relevant, or pertained to something or someone else. But I did find one link that looked promising—a newspaper story, from eight months ago, that reported that a ‘Deidre Flynn’ was arrested, along with three other women, for prostitution.
“It was a pretty big bust, I guess, and the newspaper ran a photo along with the story. It was of Deidre and another girl, named ‘Joyce Wednesday,’ being taken away in handcuffs in front of a few onlookers.
“Since I hadn’t found anything else on Deidre, I decided to look into this Joyce Wednesday character. She had a huge online presence, too, and I was easily able to match her selfies with the newspaper photo.
“I continued to snoop around Joyce’s profile, and I noticed that she was actually online at the time. In fact, she’d just updated her status and said she was going to get her ‘drink on’ at Heritage Cove. I recognized the name of that bar. It was only a few blocks away from Crier headquarters…so I figured, what the hell, and decided to go get my drink on, too.
“I printed out a few copies of the newspaper photo I’d found, shoved them in my purse, and headed out for Heritage Cove. It was about ten thirty that night when I got there, and I had a couple drinks while I waited for Joyce to show up.
“An hour went by, and I still hadn’t seen her. I was about to give up hope and head home, but then some douchebag at the bar started hitting on me. He asked me if I was there alone, and I told him I was waiting for a friend. When he asked whom, I told him, ‘A girl named Joyce,’ and he responded by asking, ‘Miss Wednesday?’
“We were obviously talking about the same person, so I stuck around and heard him out. He said that Joyce hadn’t been into the Cove, but that he knew where she probably was and would take me there if I wanted.”
Again I felt the need to rest for just a moment. I closed my eyes and rolled my head against the flat, warm pillow. It was so uncomfortable and not at all supportive, and I longed for the memory foam pillows I had at home.
“Do you need something?” Butcher asked. He put his hand on my arm in a loving manner.
“Got a pillow?” I asked with a laugh. It wasn’t a “real” question, but nonetheless, Butcher answered.
“No,” he said. “Sorry. I can ask the nurse for one though—but not yet.”
Butcher leaned down closer to me, brought his face to mine, and whispered, “The police want to talk to you about what happened,” he said. “They told the nurses to call them as soon as you woke up…but I want to hear what happened first. So we can’t let them know you’re up until I’ve heard it.”
I nodded my head, rubbing it against the flimsy pillow, and went on with my account with a newfound sense of purpose, urgency, and resolve.
“I knew better than to go anywhere with the douchebag from the bar,” I said. “But I managed to finagle the address out of him, and long story short, within a half-hour or so, I was at a party house just outside of the city.
“There were only a few people there, and Joyce Wednesday was one of them. I approached her, showed her the picture I had with me, and asked her if she could tell me anything about the other woman in it.
“She seemed a little hesitant to talk to me at first. But when I took a hit of the joint she offered me, she loosened up a little and admitted to knowing Deidre. She said she knew her from working the streets and that she’d served some time with her in County after they both were arrested eight months ago. But, that was all she knew—or so she said—and that’s all the information she gave me.
“I decided to leave the party house. As I said, there were only a few people there, and they were all up to no good, so I figured I’d be better off at home, in front of my computer, instead of there, dealing with them.
“I was about a block away from the house when I heard a woman’s voice call out to me from behind. I turned and saw a big white woman with an afro coming my way. ‘I heard you’re lookin’ for someone,’ she’d said. I nodded and waited for her to catch up with me.
“‘Who you tryin’ to find, baby?’ she asked as soon as she got to me. I reached into my purse pulled out the photo and showed her. She gave it long, hard look, then looked at me. ‘Who you workin’ for?’ she asked. I told her that I wasn’t working for anyone, but that I had a friend who was looking for the missing woman in the photo.
“Next thing I knew, the woman sta
rted yelling at me, telling me to mind my own business and keep my ‘Wolf ass’ off of her turf. She grabbed my purse from me and started rifling through it—and when I went to grab it back, she threw it into the street.
“Just as I turned to go get it, I felt a horrible, sharp pain in my side. Then I felt wetness, and warmth. ‘Don’t come back ‘round here again,’ the woman had said, laughing. She raised her hand in the air, revealing the knife she was holding, and she licked the blood—my blood—off of the blade.
“I was in such horrible pain, and I was in both mental and physical shock—so I literally keeled over and fell to the ground. And as I laid there, bleeding, I watched as the woman who’d stabbed me walked carelessly back to the party house.”
Butcher’s jaw was hanging low from his face again, and he breathed out heavily as he closed it.
“Wow,” he said. “I can’t believe you did all that. I can’t believe you put yourself at risk like that, and nearly lost your life…for me. I’ve never—”
“I didn’t do it for you,” I interrupted, cognizant of our time constraints. “I did it for Sonja.”
Butcher looked at me, and his eyes flooded with tears. “For Sonja?” he asked. His voice cracked, shook, and reverberated with emotion.
“Yeah,” I answered. “For Sonja… As I said, I felt horrible after everything you told me, and I wanted to do something to help. Research is my thing. I’m a reporter. If there was something out there on ‘D,’ I knew I could find it.
“And, once I did find what I was looking for, I had to keep going. I had to take my search away from the computer, out into the real world. I was so close, I couldn’t let Deidre get away—not with an innocent, adorable young child’s life on the line.
“I knew that there were risks involved when I went to a strange bar to meet a hooker, and I knew it was dangerous to go to a party house outside of the city to find her. I knew. I knew, Butcher—but I didn’t care. I wasn’t thinking of me. I was thinking of Sonja.
“And for the first time in my life, I understood what self-sacrifice really was. I understood everything that you’d tried to explain to me at Tellie’s three weeks ago. I understood why you did what you did and put your life on the line for Carrie and Dora, and I was willing—completely willing—to do the same thing for you and your child.”
Now I was crying, too, and it must have caused some type of physiological reaction. One of the machines I was hooked up to started rapidly beeping and chirping—and, not even fifteen seconds later, a kind-eyed, middle-aged female nurse walked into the room.
“My oh my, look who’s up!” she said cheerfully as she entered. Butcher turned his head to the side, sniffled, and wiped his eyes with his shirt.
The nurse walked over to me and started checking the various machines. “How are you feeling?” she asked, adjusting the tubes and cords surrounding my body. “Can I get you anything?”
“I’m okay,” I replied, still crying. “I don’t need anything… But please—please don’t call the police yet, and please don’t make my visitor leave.”
The nurse stepped back and smiled at me. “Honey,” she said softly, “I walked past this room about ten minutes ago and saw that you were up. I didn’t call the police then, and I’m not gonna call them now.
“But that little chirping you heard from your machine a minute ago registered out front at the nurses’ station, which means that, soon enough, someone else is gonna realize you’re awake. And when they come down here to check on you, they are gonna call the police… So I’d say you and your ‘visitor’ over there have about five minutes to wrap up your conversation before that happens.”
“Okay,” I replied, trying to absorb all that the nurse had told me and figure out why she was being so considerate.
The nurse turned and started to leave the room, but I called out and stopped her.
“My purse,” I said plaintively. “Do you know where my purse is? There’s something in it I need.”
The nurse looked back at me. “It’s probably in the safe at the nurses’ station,” she said. “I’ll check and be right back.”
“Your purse?” Butcher asked as soon as the nurse left the room. “Why do you need your purse?”
“When I was laying there on the ground, after the big white woman with the fro stabbed me, I was afraid that I was going to die,” I replied. “But what scared me even more was thinking that I would die without you—or anyone—ever finding out what I’d discovered about D.
“I couldn’t let myself die there on that sidewalk, so even though I was in pain and was delirious—even though I couldn’t stand up or walk and was bleeding all over the place—I decided to do whatever I had to do to stay alive and get that information to you.
“I crawled and dragged my body to the center of the street, where that bitch had tossed my purse, and right before I passed out, I got my phone out, dialed 9-1-1, and told the operator I’d been jumped on my way home from a party.”
Just then, the nurse walked back into the room, carrying my bloodied purse in a large, clear plastic bag. She handed it to me, and as I took it from her, one of my machines started chirping again.
The nurse sighed and started tending to the machines, but they kept chirping—and I had a pretty good idea why. I don’t know if it was my blood pressure, my pulse, or both, but I’m sure that one of my “vitals” was elevated because I was nervous—and I was nervous because I wanted her to leave so that I could finish talking with Butcher before someone called the police.
She was still pressing buttons when another nurse came to the door, peered in, and then scrambled off in the direction whence she came.
“That’s it,” the kind-eyed, middle-aged nurse at my bedside said under her breath. “Trista knows you’re up now, and she’s probably calling to po-po already… So finish this up, now.”
Butcher sat up in his chair, and I looked back and forth between him and the nurse. She seemed cool, and helpful as hell, but I was hesitant to speak freely in front of her.
“It’s okay,” Butcher said, putting a hand on my arm again. He must have sensed my reservations and was assuring me they were unneeded.
“I know her,” he went on, looking toward the nurse. “Her name is Stacey. She’s cool. You can say whatever you want in front of her. No worries.”
I looked at the nurse—Stacey—again, and she smiled at me as she continued to fuss with the equipment.
“Alright,” I said, reluctantly. I reached into the plastic bag, and into my purse, and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
“Here,” I said, holding it out to Butcher. “This is the photo I was telling you about. I don’t know if it will help you much, but I hope everything else I said will.”
Butcher took the paper from my hand, shoved it in his pocket without looking at it, and leaned over to kiss me.
“Thanks, Lexi,” he said. I felt a few stray tears fall on my skin. “You’re amazing. You put your life on the line to help me save my daughter, and you fought the Grim Reaper to get this information to me. I’ll never forget that, and I will always love you for it.”
As Butcher stood up to leave, the other nurse—Trista—reappeared at the door.
“I called the police,” Trista said, sliding past him and walking into the room.
“Good,” Stacey replied. “You saved me the trouble. I was gonna call them as soon as I was done checking on her vitals.”
Stacey winked at me and started removing some of the electrodes that tethered me to the machines. She pulled on one of the sticky conductor patches on my chest, and I winced in pain.
“Get me some rubbing alcohol, will ya, Trista?” she asked.
“Sure,” the younger nurse answered.
Stacey watched as Trista exited the room, then turned to me and resumed what she was doing.
“So you went through all this for Butcher’s daughter?” she asked, treating my body with great care.
“Yeah,” I answered. “She’s three years old,
and she’s really sick. I had to try and help her.”
“Helping her is one thing,” Stacey said. “But you risked your life for her. You could’ve died.”
“I know,” I replied. “But some things are worth it, I guess—and I’d do it all again if I had to.”
“Really?” Stacey asked, inquisitively raising an eyebrow.
“Absolutely,” I answered without pause.
“Well then,” she replied, glancing over her shoulder, “before the cops get here, you and I need to have a little chat.” She walked over to the door, locked it, and returned to my bedside.
The electrodes weren’t attached to my body anymore—but if they had been, at this point, they would’ve been chirping like crazy.
Seven Months Later
Chapter 30
~ Butcher ~
Meet me at Tellie’s at six o’clock sharp, the text read. Don’t be late!
I stared at the message and read it over and over again but still didn’t know what to make of it. I’ve never been a prompt, punctual individual, and Lexi knew that about me, so I couldn’t understand why she’d sent a text like that at this point in our relationship.
Nonetheless, I did as the text instructed—and I showed up at Tellie’s at six o’clock on the nose, not a minute late (or early).
Of course, Lexi was already there when I arrived, and she greeted me with a huge smile as soon as I got to our table.
“What’s up, baby?” I asked, taking a seat. “Why did I have to be here at six exactly?”
“It’s a special occasion,” she answered, melodically. “We’re celebrating tonight.”
“Celebrating?” I asked curiously. Things were going great between Lexi and me, but I couldn’t think of any reason we had to “celebrate.” We’d been dating longer than six months, but less than a year—so it couldn’t be an anniversary, and we’d already celebrated her birthday two months earlier, and mine was a still a month away.
BUTCHER: Wolves MC (Riding With Wolves Book 3) Page 15
