Dream & Dare (18 page)

Chuck made sense, Hoosier knew that. But how could he sit and wait? Maybe they wouldn’t kill her, but he knew these drug lord types. They weren’t bringing her bonbons and hot tea.

He couldn’t let himself think about what they were doing to her. “If you’re right, they’re gonna want an exchange. I don’t care what that box is worth. We make the exchange.”

“We’ll cross that bridge, Hooj.”

Before he could contest his President’s reserve, there was a knock on the chapel door, and Fred, another patch, opened the door and leaned in. “Sorry, boss, but uh, we got a package. Messenger service.”

Chuck stood, and Hoosier shook Blue’s hands off of him. Fred brought in a box, medium-size and oblong. The only marking on the cardboard was the club name and address.

Popping his blade open, Chuck sliced through the tape and folded open the flaps. The box was lined with black plastic. He pulled it away.

His heart in his mouth, Hoosier looked in but could make no sense of what he was seeing. A bloody rag? Disturbing, upsetting, yes. But how was it a message?

Then Blue picked up the rag. No, it wasn’t a rag. It was too big for that. When Blue held up the contents of the box, Hoosier again dropped to his knees.

Bibi’s white jeans. Soaked everywhere in blood. They’d been cut off; the jagged, tattered edge of the cut started at the fly and then dragged down each thigh, as if someone had shoved a knife into the open fly and ripped downward, then done it again.

Overcome with rage and grief, with worry and guilt, Hoosier let his head fall back, and he bellowed.

~oOo~

McCall wouldn’t consider an exchange. He conceded only to play the game for a while and stall for time, and that was the extent of his interest in a problem he considered beneath him. He had his precious box, and thus he didn’t care.

Hoosier was going to kill that rich bastard. But first, he was going to find his wife and kill the men who had her.

Three days. Three endless fucking days before they’d finally gotten a good lead. But now, at last, they’d found her. In a decrepit cabin deep in the woods near Big Bear.

They’d found her; now they needed to get to her, and they were going in guns blazing. Six men had assembled at the end of a dirt road. They were hiking in under night cover; there was no other way to come in undetected. Hoosier had the lead.

They crept as silently as they could, flanking the sagging building, closing off points of egress. Hoosier headed for the front door. He kicked it in and started shooting. Blue came in from the back at the same time.

There were three men in the main room of the cabin. One’s face and arm were thickly bandaged. Though all three were armed, none had the chance to draw before their insides were on their outsides.

When the quick thunder of gunfire had ebbed, Hoosier heard Blue call from the back, “HOOJ! HERE! NOW!” and he ran, jumping over bodies, down a dark hallway to the back of the cabin.

What he found would be etched into his mind for the rest of his life.

Blue was standing over the newly-dead body of a man. The man’s pants were loose, and his bare ass was exposed.

The room reeked of piss, vomit, blood…and sex.

On the rough, bare floor, against a wall, naked and sprawled on her back, her hands bound and over her head, was his wife. She had been savagely beaten, and she was streaked everywhere with blood.

She was awake; her eyes were open and blinking. But she had made no move, had not reacted to Hoosier’s presence—or, apparently, the commotion they’d all just caused—at all.

He handed his rifle to Blue, and then he knelt at his wife’s side. “Bibi? Baby, I’m here. I got you. It’s over.” When he put his hands on the tender, wounded skin of her shoulder, she finally reacted. She moaned—a low, slow, lifeless, hopeless creak of a sound.

She was hot, fiery hot, to the touch.

When he picked her up, cradling her in his arms, she made no move to help or resist, nor did she make any other sound. With her draped over his arms, he turned to Blue, who looked rocked all the way to his soul. It wasn’t easy to move Blue, but witnessing this horror had moved him to tears.

“I need a blanket. Something to cover her.”

Blue looked around, then shrugged off his kutte and laid it over her body.

“Thank you, brother.”

Hoosier carried his wife to the front room, where his brothers were going through the bodies. Chuck stood in the center, and he saw Hoosier coming down the hall.

“She alive?” he asked, not nearly as moved as Blue had been.

“She is. She needs a hospital. Now.”

Chuck shook his head. “Too many questions. We’ll take her to the clubhouse.”

Bibi hated the clubhouse. And she was too damn hurt for their slapdash care. The closest thing they had to a doctor was Edgar, who’d washed out of vet school. They all bore the scars of his shitty suturing work.

“No. She’s got a fever, and she’s in real bad shape. She needs a hospital, and that’s what she’s getting. Fred, go down and get the van—and brother, move your ass.”

“No, Fred, hold.” Chuck glared at Hoosier. “I told you—too many questions. We got meds, we got Edgar. I know she’s too fucking good to grace us with her presence, but we’ll set her up in a room and take care of her. No hospital.”

Blue went to Fred and snatched the keys from his hand.

Chuck’s glare moved to Blue. “You go, you can leave your kutte behind.”

Blue laughed and pointed at his kutte, draped over Bibi. “Already did. I’ll be back in a lick, Hooj.” He took off at a full run out of the cabin and toward the dirt road.

“That’s the club van. I say no.”

“You got to decide right now if you want this to be a life-or-death call, Chuck. It is for Bibi, and it is for me. If you want to draw that line, then draw it, but I’m coming over it, whatever it takes. And you know damn well this is no risk to the club. I can handle any question that gets asked.”

Chuck said nothing more, and the room froze in place until Blue pulled the van all the way to the door. Then Hoosier walked out to the yard. Blue had come around the van, and he was holding a quilted moving blanket. As he came to Hoosier, he gave a pained smile and opened it. “Better for her?”

It had been in the back of the van forever, and had been used for as long, for who knew what, but Hoosier nodded. He could wrap her up in that and hold her close.

“Same for you, Hooj,” Chuck growled. “You can take the van, but you leave your kutte. And your bikes, the both of you. Those bikes have Blades markings. They stay with the club.”

“None of this is a call you make, Chuck. That goes to the table. You’re no king.”

He sneered. “Then call it collateral. Leave it.”

Hoosier had worn a patch since he was twenty-three years old. Closing in on twenty years. Until he’d met Bedelia Beth Ladue, that leather on his shoulders had been everything that mattered about him or his life. After ten years of a life with Bibi, the club was still a load-bearing support. It didn’t mean everything, it didn’t define him completely, but it defined him mostly. He didn’t know what he’d do or who he’d be without it.

But that uncertainty didn’t mean hesitation now.

He handed Bibi carefully to Blue, who wrapped her up and held her as if she were made of spun glass.

Then he shrugged out of his kutte and let it fall to the floor.

~oOo~

Hoosier sat in the ICU room and tried to be quiet as he cried. Bibi was sleeping, a deep, medicated sleep that he’d been assured would be dreamless, and he didn’t want to risk waking her. If she was asleep and away from this reality, then she was safer than he could make her out here. He couldn’t keep her safe from the truth.

He’d promised he’d take care of her, but it was his fault this had happened to her. His life had brought this on her.

And might yet kill her. Among the many diagnoses the doctor had described was Toxic Shock Syndrome. They had her here in the ICU, attached to all kinds of monitors and pumping bag after bag of fluids and antibiotics into her, but she hadn’t yet rebounded.

She had been severely dehydrated, too. It looked as though the Leandros had never even given her a drink of goddamn water. They’d just beaten and fucked her right up to the point of death.

Hoosier remembered their bittersweet talk before getting out of bed on the day she’d been taken. She’d started her period. That hadn’t slowed her tormentors down at all, but it was why she was suffering from an infection so furious it had already ruined her uterus.

As a bonus to all the ways Hoosier’s life had broken her, it had also taken her dream away. There would never be a houseful of children.

Swimming in the brackish truth of his guilt, Hoosier held his head in both hands and wept.

ELEVEN

Hoosier hated the fucking flashcards.

For months, the damn things had been shoved in his face, and for months, frustration had been driving him insane. And shame, too—he knew full well this was the kind of thing that parents used with babies to teach them language. He remembered Connor’s sets.

Sure, these were different. Connor’s had been rendered as colorful, cartoonish drawings and whimsical fonts, and these were photographs, with a businesslike font. But the effect was the same. He was still looking at a fucking picture of a fucking carrot and being asked to say the word ‘carrot.’

And for months, he had been unable to do so. Six months; the fire had happened at the end of October, and he now understood that it was nearing the end of April. Six months since he’d been himself, since he’d been complete. And counting.

He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t known the picture on the card was a carrot, when the image in the photograph hadn’t elicited immediate knowledge, complete with his understanding that he hated the damn things—and even sometimes with memories of the different ways Bibi had tried to prepare them so he’d eat them. He could hear his therapist speak the word ‘carrot’ and know what it meant.

He’d even understood that the letters under the photograph were meant to be the word ‘carrot.’ But he hadn’t been able to understand why that meant ‘carrot,’ or how to create the sounds of the word ‘carrot.’ Or any other word.

To be so close, and to know how he was deficient, what he was missing, had opened in Hoosier a deep, black pool of despair.

But today, maybe that pool could dry up. After his quiet, private moment with Bibi, she’d gotten up from the bed to let everybody know that he’d spoken. Since then, his room had been a bustle of people: nurses, therapists, his brothers and family, and now, his doctor. Dr. Philpott.

Hoosier hated him more than he’d hated almost anybody else in his life. Though he was likely the agent of his survival and possible recovery, in Hoosier’s mind, he was the symbol of his loss and weakness.

And he was the one currently shoving in his face the flashcard with the picture of carrot.

Hoosier had spoken three more words since those he’d said to his wife in private: ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ and ‘son’—the last said when Connor had come in and bent over his bed to hug him.

There had been no miraculous recovery; he was struggling to find words beyond that one sentence he’d so desperately wanted to say for so long. But being able, at last, to tell his wife he loved her had forged a tenuous, gossamer link in his brain between ideas and words, and though the words did not yet want to come easily to his lips, he was finding in himself the path to drag them along.