Burn Down the Night (3 page)

Days from now, with a gun to my head and my life flashing before my eyes, I would see the truth in a bright-crystal vision and it would break my heart.

I needed Max Daniels. Not for Lagan. Not for my sister.

For me.

I saved his life so he could save mine.

Let me tell you, it was not easy getting that man into my car.

I wrapped my hands in the arm holes of his leather cut and pulled with all the fight-or-flight adrenaline I had coursing through my body. He helped a little, using his good leg to kind of scooch himself along. The seams in the leather creaked and tore in my hands, but I kept pulling and he kept pushing until we got to my car.

I opened the door and stepped over him, straddling his body so I could get my arms under his armpits. He braced himself on the door and the foot well of the car.

“Count of three?” I said and he nodded; I could feel his head against my stomach.

I counted it out and on a heave, we got him in. He was barely holding on, his face white beneath the blood. But he pushed himself all the way back so he was leaning against the other door.

When I shut the door, with his body stretched across the backseat I was shaking. Every muscle worked to its limit. The lights of the fire trucks coming down the highway told me we didn't have much time.

“I'm going to pass out soon,” he said.

“I figured.” I put the car in gear and left the headlights off. The poor Buick was far from an off-roading kind of car, but I headed into the grass on the other side of the parking lot all the same.

“You gotta keep me away from my brother,” he said.

“No shit, they tried to kill you.”

“No. My…keep me away from Dylan. From Pops.”

I skirted the kudzu forest, bouncing through ditches, making Max groan and scream and swear at me.

“Just pass out already!”

“Promise me,” he said. Looking at him in the rearview mirror, I could see he was serious and fighting off unconsciousness with everything he had. This was important enough to defy the needs of his bleeding and battered body. Sheer stupid force of will. “No…family.”

“I promise,” I said.

A second later, I hit another ditch and he was silent in the backseat.

Out like a light. Six feet of bleeding, criminal, badass light. Thank God.

What was I doing? Fleeing the scene of a crime with a dangerous MC president? I mean, I'd done some crazy shit in the last twelve hours, but this seemed…

I stopped myself before I could spiral any harder.

He was my last chance to get my sister. My last chance.

And there was nothing I wouldn't do to save my sister.

And I'd saved Max's life. That was a good thing, right? Not crazy. Noble.

I was quickly rewriting the script so I could stay the hero, I know that.

But I had to keep moving and that was the only way to keep myself from curling into a ball and crying for the next week.

Lights off and driving slowly, I cleared the edge of the woods, hit the last ditch, and was up on the dirt road that led back to the Flowering Manor campground. I had a trailer there, or I used to anyway. No telling if my shit was still there. My first aid kit. I needed that.

I had to pray that my pseudo-friend, Annie, still had it. Or even my fucked-up neighbor, Ben, who happened to be Max's father. I couldn't imagine that old asshole caring about my stuff.

Or maybe they were all gone. Maybe they all got wise and left that place and the trouble that was brewing just up the road at the strip club.

I'd warned Annie. I did. At one point I even told her I was DEA. I had a fake badge and everything. One of my many tricks. I flashed that shit around and told her to get the hell out this place.

And she did.

But then she came back.

Because some women had shit survival skills.

“We gotta make a stop,” I said, looking into the rearview mirror at Max. But he was out cold. Slack and bleeding against the door.

He reminded me of a blade. Even like that. Cold. Lethal.

And I'd lied to him.

I was taking him right back to his family.

I rolled through the front gate to the trailer park. The place was dark. A few people were outside, standing on their little porches or yards looking at the illumination from the blaze visible just over the tree line.

No one paid any attention to my car.

I got to the space between my old trailer and Annie's and I could see Annie was outside looking into the distance with everyone else. Ben, too, and another man, big and wide. Stocky.

That could only be Dylan. Max's estranged brother.

Sorry, Max, I thought. A family reunion was unavoidable. Good thing he'd be passed out for most of it. I had a weird manic shrieking laugh thinking about the nature of this Daniels family reunion.

No potato salad. Only bullets.

Annie turned and saw the car, and Ben and Dylan closed ranks around her. Protecting her.

I didn't begrudge her the protection. She was one of those women, you know? Big eyes, big heart, just oozing compassion and potential heartache. She was a Bambi. A little lost creature, alone in the wide, dangerous world.

I was Maleficent. Horned and vicious, my wings ripped off. Ready for bloody revenge.

C'est la who gives a fuck.

I turned off the car and stepped out with my hands up. Ben might be old, but he was former Skulls with a past so violent it put mine to shame.

“Joan!” Annie cried and fought past her two guards who scowled at me. “She's my friend,” she said to Dylan, but he looked dubious.

Smart man.

He actually looked kind of terrifying, a burn scar covered part of his face, pulling the corner of his lip into a perma-snarl.

“Are you okay?” Annie asked, coming to a stop a few inches from me. I could see her want to hug me, thank God she stopped herself. “Are you hurt?”

“Fine,” I lied. “I am. Really.”

“You were in the fire?”

“Barely got out. Look, I don't have time to talk. I need my bags from my trailer.” Beneath my skin, I was frantic. A manic terror pulsed out of me, and I knew Annie could feel it. They could all feel it.

“Are you in trouble?” Annie asked

“Not if I can outrun it. Please, get my bags.”

“Yeah. They're…they're actually in my trailer. Let me go get them.”

Dylan watched Annie go, but Ben watched me. Cagey bastard.

“You start the fire?” Ben asked me.

“Nope.” I was an excellent liar. It was, in fact, easier to lie than tell the truth.

“You sure seem nervous,” Ben said, and he and Dylan shared a knowing look.

The way I saw it, I had two choices. Come clean about Max in the backseat and take my chances. Or lie and take my chances when they found out anyway and skinned me alive for not telling them about Max.

Right. No question.

“Yeah, well, I got Max in the backseat of my car.”

Dylan stared at me incredulously for exactly one second before he bolted past me and grabbed the passenger door handle, but I got around him, leaning my weight against the door so he couldn't open it without jerking me out of the way.

No way was I going to let Dylan take my only connection to Lagan. I didn't care how rich he was, or dangerous. Max was mine.

“Listen to me,” I said, hands up. I would play this like I was Max's only chance to survive. Which wasn't a total lie. “Rabbit tried to kill him—”

“What?” he cried and the pain on Dylan's face was powerful. Luckily, I was immune to such nonsense.

“He's been shot. Twice, actually. Flesh wounds. I need to take the bullet out of the one in his calf.”

“Get the fuck out of my way!” Dylan jerked me sideways and opened the door. Max's half-conscious body nearly toppled out onto the ground.

“Jesus,” he groaned, catching Max before he landed in the dirt. Ben was beside him, useless and frail, but trying.

“I tried to tell you,” I said.

And I had no time to be sympathetic. Or even pretend to be sympathetic. I had miles to go tonight before I could take a deep breath. I also had a minor surgery to perform in the backseat of this car.

So I looked at Dylan and Ben trying to help Max and I thought—
you fucking suckers.

Annie came back out holding a duffel bag and a half-full black plastic garbage bag. “Oh my God,” she cried when she saw the men, then dropped the stuff and bolted across the dirt to help Dylan and Max.

I rolled my eyes and went over to grab my stuff.

There were some general oh my Gods, and then Annie ran back into her trailer to get some towels while Dylan looked under the bandana I'd tied around Max's leg.

“The bullet is buried in the muscle. No bones,” I said, popping the trunk. “I can get it out and I can stitch it up. I've got materials in my stuff. But we need to get out of here.”

“He needs a hospital,” Annie said, arriving with an armful of towels.

“Hospital won't work,” Ben, the old gangster said. “It's a gunshot. There will be too many questions.”

“And we can't stay here,” I added, shoving the bags in the trunk. “People are going to be looking for Max.”

“You mean they're looking for you,” Dylan said.

“They might be.”

“Who did this?” Ben asked, looking down at his son with a palpable grief that I did everything in my power not to feel anything about.

“Rabbit,” I said.

“He dead?” Ben asked, clearly thinking about revenge.

Max will be thinking about revenge, too, I realized. When he wakes up and gets better. He'll go looking for Rabbit. Which was not at all why I saved his life. I was going to have to come up with a plan to stop that.

“I don't know,” I said. “It's total chaos over there. But Rabbit wasn't alone. He had the whole MC on his side. This wasn't an assassination. It was a coup. You have to believe me. He's not safe here.”

“Where are you going to take him?” Annie asked.

“Someplace safe,” I said. “I swear to God.”

“What about his head wound?” Annie asked. “He's probably got a concussion. It might be serious.”

“I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.” I slammed the trunk down.

Max's legs spasmed and everyone looked back down into the backseat of the car. His eyes were open but unfocused. He looked like a character out of a slasher movie, covered in blood.

He was shaking his head. “D…E…A. Not. DEA.”

Shit, I thought. I did not need to waste time talking about that nonsense. Annie still thought I was undercover DEA.

“What's he saying?” Ben asked.

“ ‘Not DEA,' ” Dylan's eyes raked me. “You taking him in? Gonna make him turn rat? Because he'll be staying here if that's your plan. We can take care of him.”

“I'm not DEA,” I said. “I never was.”

Annie gasped, “But the badge?”

Oh, you trusting idiot. The world is going to make a mess of you.

“Fake. I got about twenty fake badges in that bag. I'm not DEA, I'm not…anything.”

Oh, the truth in those words, they had no idea. Bad Boyfriend #2 had left me holding the bag on some long cons he'd been running (with my help—like I said, chaos is my friend), but he also left me with the fake badges, which had been plenty useful.

“Then what are you doing?” Dylan asked.

“Trying to stay alive,” I said. “And trying to keep your stupid brother alive. Listen to me—we don't have much time. But where I'm taking him, he'll be safe. He'll be away from the club, which,” I licked my lips, and aimed my arrow right at his heart, “you know he wants.” I needed to get moving and Dylan was the key to that.

“How do you know?” Dylan asked. Max wouldn't have walked around broadcasting that fact; it would have gotten him killed even faster.

“Because I do,” I sighed. “Because your brother and I are…friends. Sort of. You have to trust me.”

All of us knew what kind of friends Max had. Liars. Cheats. Killers.

I had already proven to be a liar.

Fuck, this wasn't going to work. They weren't going to let me take him. I needed to come up with a Plan C. Something without Max. Despair gripped me. Hard.

I opened my mouth to tell them forget it. They could keep Max and good fucking luck to them.

“We trust you,” Annie said. She made quick eye contact with Max and Ben, who after long seconds, nodded.

Holy shit. It worked.

Ben looked a million years old. Dylan told me to look after his brother, which frankly was not the whole of my plan. Annie hugged me. Before I could stop her, push her away, she put her skinny arms around me.

I shrank back hard in my body, because that's how I survived. As far away from my skin as I could get.

I don't care about you,
I thought because it made me feel stronger.

Alone made me feel stronger. Hard and cold made me feel stronger.

I got in the car and drove away feeling as hard, cold, and alone as I could.

Because that's how I was going to survive what was coming next.

I made it into Georgia with a bleeding, concussed man in my backseat. Every half hour, I reached behind my seat and jostled him awake, which made him roar and swear at me for three minutes before passing out again.

The adrenaline kept me going for a long time. The second it would ebb, a police car would race by me and my eyes would nearly explode out of my head from the stress.

My God
. I rubbed at my aching eyes.
What have I done?

The news on the radio talked about the explosion and everyone was calling it a drug deal gone bad. One report said there were two casualties. But the next report said there were none. I caught the tail end of an update that claimed three men were in custody and they were looking for the fourth. But the news changed to weather and I didn't hear anything else about it. I turned the dial searching for word on casualties but couldn't get anything. And then, the farther south I went, the stories dried up. And then they just stopped. The news wasn't talking about it anymore.

There were no more cops on the highway.

If it weren't for the biker in my backseat, I could have pretended it never happened.

“Hey, Max,” I said, reaching back to give him a shake. “How you doing? Rise and shine!”

“Fuck off,” he groaned.

“And hello to you, too. Do you know what year it is?”

“Let me sleep.”

“Can't do that. I need you to answer some questions. Do you know what day it is?”

“Wednesday.” Well, Thursday at this point.

“Do you know your name?”

“Max Daniels.”

“My name?”

“Joan-the-crazy-fucking-bitch.”

“Good enough. How are your ribs?”

“Hurts…to breathe.”

I glanced in the rearview and saw him sprawled out back there, breathing shallowly. One hand pressed to his side. Under the blood his face was turning dark with bruises.

Those assholes.

“You kidnapping me?” he asked.

“Only a little.”

I caught his gaze and tried to smile, but it felt all wrong. His eyes slid shut.

“Hey, hey, Max. Stay awake. Let's…let's talk.”

“Talk.” He shifted and grimaced and I grimaced too in sympathy. “You took me to my brother.”

“Actually, I took you to my stuff. Your brother just happened to be there.”

“He could get in trouble…because of…me.”

“I don't know. I think your brother and dad can get in trouble just fine on their own.”

“Annie…”

“Yeah, she's nothing but trouble. Trust me.” I was only half-joking.

“Jealous?”

I looked back in the rearview mirror to see if he was fucking with me.

“No,” I said definitively. But I was…a little. It would be nice to have some dude fall over himself to help me out. I mean, it would be weird. But there were days I could use some help.

“What's with the fake badge?” he asked.

“The DEA thing?”

“Yeah.”

“You know, on second thought, why don't you go back to sleep?” Because I didn't want to talk about Bad Boyfriend #2. I don't want to give the impression that it was all bad boyfriends. There were only two. And there had been one really good one sandwiched between them.

“Why don't you tell me about the fake badge?”

“I had a boyfriend who used them to get out of traffic tickets and get free shit.” There were other crimes, things I didn't like to think about.

“That's stupid.”

“Says the straight up criminal.” I smiled at him in the rearview mirror, but he did not smile back.

“Where's the boyfriend now?”

“He left me about a year ago. Took all my money, but left me the badges. They come in handy every once in a while.”

“You run cons?”

“I do what I have to to survive.”

He grunted but was otherwise silent, and my desire for conversation was gone.

Hours later, outside of Atlanta, there was a truck stop, a neon planet in the dark space of the freeway. I pulled off at the junction of I-285 and I-75 into a raft of lights and concrete, and I drove to the farthest edge of it, where the light battled it out with the dark.

Perfect spot for a little backseat surgery.

I popped the trunk and rifled through my black plastic bag until I found the first aid kit Aunt Fern gave me years ago. The stuff she'd filled it with was long since gone. And I'd replaced what I could by hoarding materials during my brief stint as a nursing student. The rest I picked up here and there because one of the few lessons Aunt Fern taught me that stuck was always keep the first aid kit stocked—and ready.

It never hurt to be prepared.

And the truth was, I liked having this stuff. It made me feel in control of something when there was a lot of my life that was totally out of control.

I got the scalpel. The bandages. The QuikClot. The Rocephin injection. Towels. Lots of towels.

I thought about changing my shirt, but if I had to take out this bullet it was only going to get bloodier. Which was a shame, it was kind of my favorite. Everything about this particular black T-shirt with the sparkly unicorn (half the sparkles worn off, the other half now drenched in blood) made me feel stronger. Tougher.

Looking down at it, It seemed like a lesson in not getting attached to anything. Even sparkly unicorn T-shirts.

I tied back my hair, doused my hands in Purell, and got to work.

“Hey Max.” I opened the door to a total crime scene. A bloodbath. And a huge biker, in bloody leather and denim, passed out hard in the middle of it all.

“Feel free to stay passed out, okay buddy? You just sleep right through this.”

I pulled off his boot. The top part of the white sock he wore was red with blood. The sock gave me pause.

It was one of those athletic socks. He probably had a drawer full of them in whatever cave he came from. He bought them at Walmart or something. Just like a regular human.

And he put it on this morning, sitting on the side of some bed, and he didn't once consider that I would be taking it off of him, thick and wet with blood, in a rest stop parking lot.

You've got no time for this, Joan, I told myself and peeled off the sock, dropping it onto the asphalt beside me. It landed with a wet slap.

His jeans were torn to shreds, so I sliced the denim open up to the knee, hoping I could get a good look at that bullet hole. It was red and inflamed and the entrance wound was filthy from the smoke and the dirt I had dragged him through. There was a good chance the bullet had taken part of the jeans into Max's leg with it.

Which made infection a likely problem.

Hello, antibiotic.

I jabbed him in the thigh with the Rocephin and he opened his eyes. Brilliant blue in a face dark with gore.

“The fuck?” he breathed.

“Antibiotic,” I told him. He lifted an eyebrow just barely.

“I'm a full service kidnapper,” I said.

His lip twitched, and I counted it as a smile.

“You gonna take…out…” He was struggling to stay awake. “Bullet?”

I chewed on my lip until I tasted blood. If I opened him up, there'd be a ton of blood and as good as my field kit was, I didn't have the tools to sterilize the car and I didn't have the time to go digging through his leg for bits of cloth I wasn't sure were in there.

What I'd hoped would be an easy bullet removal, was now a longer procedure and I just didn't have the equipment or the time.

“No,” I decided. Just like that. Total gut instinct, no idea if I was right or not. I tore open the package of QuikClot and wrapped it tightly around the oozing wound. He winced and swore and I ignored him.

The bandages were treated with shit that would stop the bleeding. They might give him cancer, who knew? But for now, he'd stop bleeding.

“Don't die,” I told him. “Please…just don't die.”

“Where are you taking me?” he whispered through dry cracked lips. He needed water. Badly.

“Someplace safe.”

“No place is safe.”

“Ah, spoken like a real badass.”

“You got…a smart mouth.”

Yes. My mouth. The only part of me I could bank on being smart.

“Where are we going?”

Our choices were limited and the bullet in his leg limited them even more.

“To my aunt Fern,” I said, because this was rock bottom and we had nowhere else to go. “She was a combat nurse in the army. She'll patch you up.”

And I could only hope—after seven years of silence—she'd let me in.

I changed my shirt, cleaned myself up as best I could in the parking lot, and went inside to get us some food and water.

“You can't leave,” I told him.

“Where am I going to go?” he whispered.

Good point.

“You want anything?”

“Thirsty.”

I'll bet.
I unfurled my sleeping bag and unzipped it, stretching it out to cover up his body and what I could of the blood.

“Why…why are you doing this?” he asked.

“Covering you up? Because if someone looks in the window, they're going to call the police and have nightmares for the rest of their life.”

“No…why are you doing this?”

Saving him. Why was I saving him?

“I should have just let you die?”

“Lots of people would.”

“Well, I'm not one of those people and I got plans for you, Max. Big plans.”

“That…makes me nervous.”

I liked that he was making jokes. Making jokes made this seem a whole lot less scary. It made me feel a whole lot less alone.

“I'm going to get you a drink. Try not to scare anyone while I'm gone.”

I closed the door, locked it for good measure, and went into the well-lit hell of the truck stop.

I got Max a big bottle of water and Coke, thinking the sugar would be good for him. I grabbed some beef jerky and Skittles. A giant coffee.

Oddly enough, I wasn't the sketchiest person in the truck stop at 2:00 on a Thursday morning. It made me wonder how many of these freak shows had bodies in their cars.

I cleaned up the backseat as best I could with about seven thousand Lysol wipes and practically poured the water down Max's throat. And then the Coke.

His cheeks were looking flushed, and I realized the clock was ticking for infection.

It was seven hours to Indian Shores, Florida.

I had to pray it wasn't too long.