Low Sided

by A. J. Downey

  I’d learned that lesson…

  I sniffed, my dread lock wig swaying against my back as I looked from one side of the street to the other. With a sigh, I lifted my leather plague doctor mask off my face and perched it on top of my head.

  I wish I could say I stood out, but this was Washington. Just outside of Seattle to be exact, and we were right above Georgetown, which was an artsy neighborhood in its own right. The only place I would have been more at home would be Fremont – but I had to avoid Seattle proper now for reasons I didn’t feel like getting into.

  Keep that door closed. Locked. Throw away the key.

  I was staying in White Center for that same reason. The other reason being that rough as the neighborhood was? It was in the King County Sherriff’s jurisdiction, which may or may not afford me some protection. I mean, although I saw Seattle PD cruisers, they stayed on the north side of Roxbury while I most decidedly stayed on the south of it. I mean, I was streetwise enough to know that in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter.

  All cops are bastards. King County wouldn’t hesitate to hand me to Seattle, even if I didn’t have a warrant. Being under investigation was usually enough. What was it cops always liked to say when it came to senseless acts of violence? She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. What I had been through? It hadn’t been senseless. It had been calculated, and the cops weren’t your friend when it was all in the law enforcement family. City, county, or state… it didn’t matter. That thin blue line was a towering blue wall when it came to a girl like me.

  I was just your average girl who needed to keep her mouth shut. I wasn’t just public enemy number one for my protesting and social justice leanings. No, it went deeper than that now, and I was well aware that they could say whatever they wanted about me and the King County Sheriff’s Department would just hand me over, no questions asked. The last place I wanted or needed to be was within Seattle city limits.

  I’d been warned…

  Hell, they were all buddies. I bet they’d hand me over gift wrapped in a big red fucking bow, which was why I did anything and everything to fly under the radar. Getting involved with The Sacred Hearts in any capacity whatsoever was so not the way to do that.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Raven?” I muttered to myself for the thousandth time. Taking in a deep breath, I put my worn-out Doc Marten’s I’d scored at a second-hand store for like two bucks into motion over the equally worn-out cracked sidewalk.

  I licked my lips, swallowed my fear, and stopped below the two guys smoking on the back landing to their clubhouse and looked up.

  “Either of you guys know where I can find Maverick, or Fenris?” I asked.

  One of the two scowled down at me, a super hairy guy that looked like a damn neanderthal.

  “Depends, who’s askin’?” he demanded.

  “Does it matter?” I asked, wiping the sweating palm of my hand that didn’t grasp my staff on my post-apocalyptic olive-green leggings.

  “You’re coming to us, so… yeah. Kinda.” The other man was eyeing me with mistrust, and I let out a shaky breath, my heart hammering the inside of my ribcage.

  “Look, Mace sent me. He was in my bar last night and he got beat up – bad. I helped him, he asked me to—”

  The second man who had spoken, the one with the close-cropped dark hair and shadow of a beard just beginning along his jaw, vaulted the railing and landed right next to me. I shied back, but he seized my arm in a crushing grip. I tried to stay calm, fear spiraling through me, coiling in my chest, the panic ready to strike.

  “Where is he?” he demanded.

  “My apartment.”

  “Take us,” he said.

  “Are you Maverick or Fenris?” I asked and he cursed.

  “No, I’m the VP, little girl, and you’d better take me to him right fucking now.”

  “He said to find Maverick or Fenris,” I said stubbornly.

  “Squatch, get Mav out here pronto.”

  The hairy one went in the back door of the club, yelling out, “Mav!”

  “He dies or something—”

  I snorted. “He’s not going to, I looked after him myself,” I said hotly. That was one thing I wouldn’t have called into question. I was a good medic… or had been. I so didn’t hang out in the same circles anymore.

  “What’s the deal?” a new voice interjected, and we both looked up to the newcomer on the back porch of the heavily graffitied back side of the building.

  I opened my mouth to answer, but the man who had ahold of my arm went ahead of me. “She says Mace is in a real bad way, won’t take us to him.”

  “That’s not what I said!” I snapped. “What I said was, Mace told me to bring Maverick or Fenris!”

  “Well, I’m Maverick,” the man up top on the back porch declared. Vaulting it like the man who was now letting me go, he landed before me and said, “So, lead the way.”

  Heartened that his name patch on his vest said Maverick like Mace’s had said Mace, I nodded.

  “This way.” I jerked my head and started up the sidewalk. Maverick squinted.

  “Where’s your car?”

  “I don’t drive.”

  “Then we ride,” he said.

  “No way.” I shook my head. “This way,” I insisted, and I started up the sidewalk.

  “Squatch, have DT on standby, Glassjaw, you’re with me.” He fell into step beside me and pointed up and back at Squatch and called, “I don’t call in thirty get ahold of Cipher, he knows what to do!”

  “Got it, P!” Squatch was already moving across the street to the front of the motorcycle wrecking yard that was open for business.

  “Step it up, girl,” Glassjaw growled, and I sighed, lowered my plague doctor mask, and marched at a brisk pace toward home.

  It was a good five-to-ten-minute walk, so not bad at all. I’d stabilized Mace myself, so I knew he was okay.

  The two men traded a cautious look when I went up the stairs to the second floor and stuck the key in the lock of my apartment door. Reluctantly, they followed, and I let them into my space, leaning my staff against the wall by the door and hanging my mask on the protruding nail from the yellowing plaster beside it.

  “Mace?” Glassjaw called.

  Mace groaned and called out from the bedroom, the door a straight shot from the front one. “Yeah, Glass, I’m in here.”

  The two men traded a look and moved practically as one for the bedroom. I just shut my front door and locked it.

  “Jesus Christ, what the fuck happened to you, bro?” Glassjaw demanded.

  “Jumped by a bunch of pussy-ass frat boys. Where’s Raven?”

  “Right here,” I said gently and appeared in the doorway. I crossed my arms and leaned a shoulder against it, hugging my stomach, crossing my legs at the shin, toe of one boot against the worn plank hardwoods.

  “You alright?” Mace asked me and I nodded, keeping my expression cool and measured for the other two men who were staring at me.

  “Hold on, buddy. Gonna call in some help,” Maverick declared and raised his phone to his ear.

  “Thanks,” Mace said to me, and I nodded.

  “I’ll put some tea on, you want anything?” I asked him, and Glassjaw looked up at me.

  “Yeah, sounds good… thanks,” he said, and his hard looks had been traded for something softer and definitely more polite while Mav fixed me with a look of gratitude and a nod. I nodded back, but he never stopped speaking into his phone, low and insistent.

  “Yeah, off sixteenth, toward Roxbury. Above the ice cream shop…Excelsior…Yeah. How long, bro? K.”

  I went into the kitchen and put the dented kettle on the tiny, ancient, half-sized stove, straining to hear what was being said as I twisted the knob to start it heating.

  “No, bro… she saved my ass.” I peeked around the kitchen doorway and through my bedroom’s door into my bedroom. Mace was lying on one side of my bed, which was really just a queen-sized mattress on the floor decked i
n mismatched sheets from the second-hand store. Probably the nicest bed I’d ever owned if I was being honest.

  “That skinny thing?” Glassjaw asked. “How’d she do that?”

  “I don’t know, man, I was blackout drunk and beat to shit… gonna have to ask her.”

  “Not really worried about it, more worried about you and getting you checked out by a real professional.”

  Mace grunted in agreement and I sighed to myself. Okay, so I wasn’t like an EMT or certified or anything, but I was a volunteer medic down at Burning Man every year. I’d taken every CPR and First Aid course and taught myself everything I needed to know about triage and first aid. While I hadn’t treated worse than some of the injuries Mace had sustained, I was confident in my ability that I certainly hadn’t made anything worse. He was as stable as an ambulance crew or hospital could make him. I was certain of that fact.

  Maverick made some noises of agreement into his phone and finally said, “Yeah, that’d be great. We’ll see you in a couple three hours.” He paused as he listened to someone on the other end of the line. “Thanks, bro. We’ll owe you one.”

  He hung up and sighed, lifting his head and meeting my eyes where I was watching from around my little galley kitchen’s doorway. His gaze was calculating and decidedly uncomfortable. I ducked back around the corner and away from it, standing in front of the stove waiting for the water in my kettle to come to a boil and hating myself a little bit for it.

  I mean, I had all these burly ass bikers in my tiny-ass apartment and for lack of anything better to do I had relegated myself to literally boiling water.

  Don’t panic, Raven. Don’t panic, I told myself over and over again, silently in my head. No one knows they’re here, and no one’s going to drag you across the city line.

  It was frustrating.

  I never used to be like this, but then…

  “We owe you one.”

  I jumped and Maverick chuckled from my kitchen doorway. He wasn’t a big man, not really. Slender, and not overly tall. Average, really, except for the devastatingly good looks and those deep, dark blue eyes. He peered at me from under his dark hair which was getting in need of a cut and I honestly felt nothing by way of heat or anything else. I mean, he was pretty to look at… so? I’d learned good looks meant nothing in the long run. Most guys that had them just exploited them anyway.

  “Sorry,” he said with a slight smirk that was surprisingly not off-putting, but actually rather charming. Or it would be if I didn’t have my guard up as high as I did.

  “It’s fine,” I said tonelessly, and he looked me over again, curiously this time.

  “We’ll be out of here as soon as possible,” he said. “Got some brothers coming up from the Portland area with medical know-how to check our boy and declare one way or the other what to do.”

  I nodded and said, “You shouldn’t move him. Give him a few days to chill and then he can move. Those ribs need stability and rest.”

  “You got medical training?” he asked.

  “Some,” I said. “No super shiny and professional certifications, I don’t have an MD after my name, but I know what I’m doing.”

  He nodded thoughtfully and said, “We don’t trust easy.”

  “Me either,” I said quietly. And I didn’t. Not anymore.

  “We’ll be out of here as soon as we can.” He pushed off the doorway and turned.

  “You said that already, and you know, it’s no trouble, honestly,” I said at his retreating back. He stopped and turned, coming back to lean in the doorway again. My anxiety spiked a bit at that. There were no windows in this kitchen, only a single doorway in and out of the narrow space.

  He seemed to get that I was uncomfortable because he shifted so there was a way to edge around him if I needed to. The water started making noises, ticking and grumbling as it started to heat. It still had a way to go.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked. “Everything about you seems to indicate otherwise.”

  “Some people helped me once,” I said, rubbing my lips together thoughtfully. I didn’t want to give anything about myself away, but it was true. It was also true that… “Consider this me paying it forward. He just needs a few days of rest and to heal up. I’ll take the couch. I mean, I still have to work, but he can just chill. Have him checked out or whatever and we’ll go from there.”

  “That’s mighty generous of you…” he trailed off and raised his eyebrows, expecting me to fill in the blank.

  “My friends call me Raven,” I said and rubbed my sweating palms against my leggings.

  He nodded slowly.

  “Nice to meet you, Raven. I’m Mav, and the guy over there sitting with Mace is Glassjaw.”

  I nodded. “Anybody else headed this way?” I asked after his firm handshake.

  “A few more of my guys are apt to show up,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Okay.”

  “You know where Mace’s bike is at?”

  “Oh, uh, I hadn’t thought about that, but if I had to guess, it’s probably still parked outside the bar.” I jerked my head in the direction of Shoreman’s a block over and two up.

  “Which bar would that be?” he asked, a slow smile painting his lips which I think was meant to put me at ease but… yeah… “Rat City is lousy with ‘em,” he finished.

  “Shoreman’s,” I said, and didn’t like telling him where I worked, but… hell. In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought to myself. There wasn’t really any going back on this one, and I guess there were worse things than being in good with The Sacred Hearts for a minute. At least I wasn’t on the outs with them like I seemed to be with so many other factions around these parts. Law enforcement in particular.

  “Thanks,” he said, and he woke up his phone in his hand and tapped something out.

  “Mav, what’re you doing?” Glassjaw called.

  “Having the prospect pick up Mace’s bike from where he left it.”

  “Oh, got ‘cha.”

  Maverick wandered back in the direction of my bedroom and I felt some of the tension leave my posture, the water starting to boil behind me. I sighed and brought down my teapot and three cups.

  It was one of my best possessions, the teapot. A stellar find at a second-hand sale at a church. A genuine Brown Betty. I brought down three of my cracked, but still pretty teacups and spooned in some of my vanilla bourbon rooibos tea into my little brown pot. Pouring the water in after the tea, I dropped the lid on with a satisfying little clatter and set my kitchen timer for a three-minute steep time.

  “What’re you doing?” I jumped and turned around, eyeing Glassjaw over my shoulder.

  “Making tea.”

  He gave me a sort of crooked grin and asked, “For bikers?”

  “Only if it doesn’t threaten your fragile masculinity,” I answered flippantly, tempering my words with a smile. His smile grew, and he barked a laugh.

  “Fair, fair,” he said and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Look, about earlier…” He fixed me with a look, and I swallowed hard and stared back. “Took a lot of balls coming up on us cold like that. I appreciate it and I apologize if I scared you.”

  “Tea?” I asked evenly, and he smiled.

  “Not my usual thing, but sure,” he said back with a nod.

  Cool.

  3

  Mace…

  It took a couple of hours for the doc to get to Raven’s. He was retired out of Vancouver, Washington, right there on the border with Portland. His medical license had been revoked by the state for assisting a terminally ill patient to the other side. That shit was legal just across the border, but his wife had been so bad, and you had to be a resident in Oregon for a year or some shit and, well… he couldn’t stand watching her in so much pain. She’d begged him and he’d done his time.

  As soon as he’d gotten out, he’d moved across into Portland and tried to rebuild his life. The club had helped; his cousin had brought him in. Now, he was on tap for emergencie
s like the odd beatdown like mine, or even a non-life-threatening gunshot wound or two.

  He was also one of the reasons we were in the illegal prescription drug trade… he was our contact throughout the south and still had his finger on the pulse of where the drugs needed to go. He was also still in touch with old colleagues who knew how fucked the American healthcare system was. They were as fuckin’ over it as he had been at the point when he’d given his wife the medication that she’d needed to skirt a lingering death from her inoperable brain tumor.

  We filled a much-needed fucking gap, poured some filler in the cracks, and not a goddamn one of us was sorry for it.

  “Shit, buddy. You look rough,” he said, sliding his soft-sided med kit off his leather-clad shoulder and setting it down next to me.

  “Concussion, fractured ribs for sure…” Raven’s voice was soft from the doorway. She stood leaning against the doorframe, her arms crossed over her stomach, putting her ample chest on somewhat of display. She wasn’t lying about the dreads being some wig. She had them off now, her dishwater blonde hair in a sort of sloppy, looping knot at the base of her skull as she turned her head, not looking at anyone. There was a sort of strange reaction as everyone in the room fixed their attention on her.

  “Yeah, well, let’s just have a look at ‘cha here.” Eulogy kneeled down next to me. That was his road name. Although his real name was Jack, a surefire way to get punched in the mouth or get him to hate you would be to call him “Eulogy” to his face.

  That was the thing about road names. You didn’t get to pick ‘em – they were given to you. His was a reminder of the worst time in his life, of the life he took, but when the person you killed was your wife and the act didn’t come from a place of angry passion or malice… well, needless to say, sometimes your brothers were fucking dicks and didn’t quite know when to quit.

  “Tell me what you need me to do, Jack,” I muttered and he chuckled.

  “Right now? Nothing. I need you to lie there and hold still until I can figure out how bad you are. You look like shit, bro.”