Force: Blacktop Sinners MC (11 page)

But, except for Sarah about once a year,
no one
went into Jason’s room.

She wasn’t even sure if she could do it, but if it kept the weapon hidden until she figured out how to get it safely to Ricardo, then it was worth it. Tess rubbed her cheek again. There was no way she’d let the likes of Bones and Bullet and all the other biker thugs hurt her family because she got too careless. It was time for her to pay for and work to correct her mistakes.

Rushing to her room and grabbing the switchblade, Tess took a deep breath and hesitated once more at her brother’s room’s threshold.

It’s just a room, the actual ghosts aren’t here anyway.

The first step was the hardest, and it hit her gut like a sledgehammer. She’d broken the sanctum and now it was just a room, one far too quiet and with dust that filtered through the air and clogged her sensitive nose. Heading over to his desk, she let her fingers trail over the fossil kit she’d bought him. The fake bone was only partially exposed. She picked up the kid-approved chisel and, on a lark, shoved it in her pocket. Then she pulled out the switchblade from her other pants pocket and held it in her hands.

Odd, shouldn’t something with so much power to destroy her life and her family weigh more? Shouldn’t it feel heavier?

Sighing, she set it in the cup of pens and pencils that had always sat on Jason’s desk. It would be hidden there, camouflaged and no one would want it.

“Help me hide this, Jas, for a while longer.”

Chapter Seventeen

Derek stumbled like a man who’d had quite a few too many shots of Jack out of Tess’s home. He probably should have been more relieved that none of his gang was still waiting outside for a double cross. Smitty was beyond impatient, and it worried Derek. Someone on their side had to have set the whole original deal up, right? Was Smitty under Trent’s direction and looking to move over into the hierarchy of the Death’s Head crew? Was there a huge motivation for the other man to make sure that Derek never got the blade back?

It sure fucking felt like it.

Still, as bad as being pummeled by two huge enforcers for the Blacktop Sinners and their vice president would have been, that was the least of Derek’s problems. Tess. Dear God, Tess. She’d gotten under his skin in so short a time. No one had really shown him kindness and trust outside of Ron and, at one time, he’d thought the rest of the Sinners. At first, he’d assumed it was just because that was Tess’s nature. She was a nurse after all, and it was her job to care for other people. But the night under the stars it had felt like so much more, like they were connecting soul to soul. She understood the loneliness and isolation of foster care. Hell, if things had turned out better, if he’d been lucky enough to get a good family instead of the shit parade of foster burn outs, maybe he’d have ended up something decent like a doctor or a nurse too.

The way she’d screamed at him.

Damn it, there was no way to make her understand. Yes, asking her out at first had been about getting the blade and getting the info he needed to keep himself alive and his president out of the state pen. It was so much more than that. He’d started to actually fall for his little blondie, and to have her throw him out like so much garbage hurt worse than his broken toes or the nasty head wound he’d gotten crashing his motorcycle.

He needed her to listen, but Derek needed out of her front yard more.

If she called the cops on him, he had zero answers for anyone, and his three strikes were about to be out.

As he passed by her car, his throat clenched at how the door was still left open. After all, Bones and Bullet had dragged her out by her shirt collar. There’d been not time for discretion, apparently, or for shutting the door after they’d done their damage. Something bright and glinting caught his attention then and he got to his hands and knees.

Eureka!

There in the puddle collecting between her front right tire and the curb was the St. Christopher medal she valued so much. Maybe he could rush that back to her. It could be an overture, something that would maybe help calm her long enough to explain everything. He wasn’t a killer in this case. Yes, he’d gone to prison last time for manslaughter in a rumble against the Death’s Head crew, but that was a heat of the moment thing. He wasn’t cold blooded or ruthless like that. It was more than he could say for Trent and whoever else from the Death’s Head crew who had set him, Spike, and Ron up to die in an ambush.

If only he could get her to listen. Grabbing the vaunted silver chain and shoving it in his denim jacket pocket (his leather cut from the Blacktop Sinners had been cut off of him at the hospital and was in pieces), he was about to stand when he felt the cold press of steel against his neck.

“Drop it,” a muffled voice growled.

Derek froze, thinking that perhaps the Death’s Head had stalked them too. Hell, he wouldn’t put it past Smitty to have sent a probie after him, just to fuck with him.

“I have more than a day left. Deadlines and oaths matter for the club. Everyone knows this.”

“Then why are you fucking around your sweetbutt’s house, Deri.”

He breathed a sigh of relief and stood up. Turning around, he slapped his best friend and almost-brother upside the head. “Are you kidding me, Ron?”

His friend shrugged and shoved his nine mil back out of sight in the back of his jeans’ waist band. “Look, I’m making a point. You’re basically Boone’s most wanted between the cops, the Death’s Head
and
our guys. You don’t have time to be playing in puddles, man. It was me this time, but next time? It could be a fuck ton worse.”

He grumbled and started stalking to his truck. “Or you could have taken years off me by sneaking up on me, brother. What the fuck?”

“You’re getting sloppy. Your hot nurse---”

“Tess!” he said, whirling around and grabbing Ron by the lapels. “Her name is Tess, she’s not just some ‘hot nurse,’ and she sure as hell didn’t deserve for Smitty, Bones and Bullet to rough her up.”

Ron’s smirk disappeared instantly. Good, now they were both on the same wavelength and nothing was funny right now. “What?”

“Oh yeah. Did you know about that? Did Spike order that to happen? I didn’t know that was his kink. He’s usually fair and doesn’t make family members or loved ones pay if the debt is square or provisions are in place.”

Ron whistled shrilly and pulled away, his hands held up high. “Man, I’m serious, Spike didn’t order that. You think if he did that I wouldn’t have warned you or been here too to stop the junior varsity?”

“Of course not,” he said, his brow furrowed in confusion. With how many alliances were topsy turvy now, to be honest, Derek wasn’t sure what he believed anymore. “But then that means right now we have a rogue VP who thinks he knows best how to run the Sinners. For him, that includes trying to drag Tess into it.”

“She does know where the blade is or at least where lost and found would be, right?”

“At least where lost and found is,” he said, hedging about the blade. She’d found it and tested it, been more than prepared to call him on any bullshit he’d tried to work through. “Then we need to get to it ourselves. If we just get it and get it to Spike then this nightmare ends,” Derek finished as he opened his truck door.

Ron followed suit and pulled on his seat belt. “Then what are we waiting for, Deri, we get to the hospital, go all
Mission Impossible
, and drag it back out.”

“No more nicknames. God, we’re not eight.”

“No, but we’re about to raise a hell of a lot of trouble. So that’s just like old times,” Ron said, smirking again and Derek just rolled his eyes. That smirk
always
meant that bad things were on the way, but at least he had his best friend in his corner. If he didn’t, Derek might just have gone mad.

***

“Brother, I think that avocado green is completely not your color,” Ron said, slipping on the face mask and also a hair covering. Covered up like that, it would be hard to tell him from any other orderly or candy striper who hadn’t taken off their anti-contamination gear. Still, Derek resented the fact the other man, almost six inches shorter, was able to wear blue.

“It’s fine. We get to the nurses’ station, make some bullshit up about being new and get our asses down to the lost and found and hunt like crazy,” Derek said.

“Just saying, you look like a big 1970s refrigerator. It’s not a good look.”

“It’s moot with everyone packing in this county on our asses,” he said, slipping his own mask into place and striding out of the closet door.

Slipping in there had been hard enough, but a few lies at the front desk about a sick aunt and then smiling pretty for an actual candy striper had gotten them through the first bids of the so-called security at Boone General. Derek led the way as he walked down the winding, color-coded corridors. Currently the magenta walls indicated if they kept going another hundred yards that they’d be at the emergency desk.

He at least knew that and figured the lost and found for the E.R. had to be close to the actual E.R., even if hospital policies were probably far from sensible or logical. He stopped at the desk and swallowed hard. It was very late that night, and he hadn’t expected the other nurse who attended to him that night to be there. Was it Lizzy? That was the woman who’d left the first voice message for him, wasn’t it?

Anyway, he kept his eyes down and forced his voice to be more nasally and high pitched than it usually was. “Uh, hi, Nurse Alcorn.”

“Alacron,” she corrected, drumming long fingernails on the counter. “Do you need something, and where are your badges?”

“We’re new. Interns in pre-med from App State,” Ron said, falling easily as always into his second in command role. When Derek couldn’t make up bullshit lines fast enough, he could always rely on Ron to be the pinch hitter and fill in. “The head of the program said there was a delay in that, but that he’d have them by the weekend.”

“Freaking perfect, that idiota is always shoving the new meat off on us as if emergency isn’t slammed. Frankly, we’re the last place anyone should be.”

“Oh,” Derek said, seizing the opportunity. “That’s good then. He, uh, wanted us to help file and organize the lost and found.”

Lizzy eyed him, and he kept his gaze averted, trying to play the nerdy, shy college kid stereotype hard even if he was a hell of a lot more muscular than any weasel-like whiner. “Do I know you?”

“I’d like you to know me, baby,” Ron said, winking at her. “I just got an apartment off campus. I’m also my frat’s beer pong champ. You know you want this.”

“Ugh, no, and I have a boyfriend,” she said, even as she spared Derek one more confused glance. “It’s two floors up in room 208B, and good luck. That place is a snake pit. They haven’t checked it over in two years.”

Perfect
.

They made their hasty thank you’s and hurried back to the bank of elevators. As they waited, Ron pulled down his mask and smiled broadly. “So do you think she likes me?”

“Dream on.”

“Oh go fuck yourself, Grinder.”

Chapter Eighteen

“We’ve been through every inch of this stupid place,” Ron said, dumping out a cardboard box and grimacing when a plasticized, preserved brain fell out with an alarming thud on the floor. “I’m serious this is the worst.”

Derek wanted to join him in the frustration. They’d spent three hours going through every cupboard, drawer, and locker and they’d found more forgotten specimens than any person should have to deal with. They’d also found endless supplies of clothes, some with collars so wide that Derek assumed they’d been lost at Boon General since the seventies. There were even cellphones and I-Pods galore. Ron had set aside a pilfered duffle for them. He argued it wouldn’t hurt to resell those and finders, keepers.

All of that and not one trace of any blade that wasn’t an old scalpel. He thought he’d been close when he found a pocket knife but the dull blade was ancient and a quick inspection at the brand on the handle revealed it was an army knife circa WWII. While an heirloom, it wasn’t the linchpin in any murder case the state of North Carolina would try and mount against Spike.

“I don’t think it’s here,” Derek said.

Ron frowned and stroked his chin even as he used his left leg to kick the offending brain under a locker. “Gross, that thing is something no one is going to miss.”

“Organs bother you that much?”

“Sometimes they do, and today is definitely one of those times,” he admitted. “So if we’ve looked for it here and Tess didn’t have it in her car or house, then where the hell is it?”

Derek frowned and leaned against a locker with a particular pungent collection of old and yellowed (yes yellowed) lab coats. Some doctor on staff, once upon a time, hadn’t been a fan of the spin cycle. That much was for sure. “If the hospital found it, it would be here. If she found it, why not keep it on her person?”

“I think Smitty and Company answered that question for you, Grinder,” Ron said.

“Okay, then you hide it but not in a place that’s easily accessible and damn it!” he shouted, slamming his fist into the metal door of the locker. The force of his blow was hard enough to leave the locker shaking. “Her locker.”

“Huh?”

“Staff have a changing area to get out of their scrubs,” he said, slipping back on his mask and his head covering. “We have to go back to the emergency room and see where her personal stuff is stored. That’s the only answer.”

“Then I’m right behind you, and hopefully your girl doesn’t keep brains stashed somewhere.”

“She’s not my girl, not anymore, and I doubt she ever was.”

“Maybe,” Ron said as they headed to the stairs, taking them two a time in their haste. “Maybe when all this is over and you return to her whatever you fished out of the drink then you can actually patch things up. But let’s interrupt this soap opera in order to get our shit done. I like you, man, and I like you not riddled with bullet holes from Bones’s nine mil.”

“Gee, that’s touching,” Derek chuffed, trying not to let things get too heavy between them. Truth was, he felt the same way about Ron. Two of them against the world in foster homes, in juvie, and now as key members (damn it he still was) of the Blacktop Sinners. “Okay, slow down.”

They eased to a normal pace and caught their breath as they entered onto the emergency floor. Ron pulled down his mask and grinned broadly for Lizzy (that was her name, right?). Somewhere along the way with sweet butt and the hookers at the club sucking up to him, Ron had gotten the idea that he was charming.

He wasn’t.

Derek just hoped he could get the needed information out of the quick tempered Latina without getting them both kicked out for being too lewd. A man could dream, couldn’t he?

“Hey, sweet thing.”

“Oh, great, I have not missed the college kid set,” she said, even as she eyed Derek again and shook her head. “God, I swear I know you.”

“Probably not, ma’am,” Derek said, forcing his voice to break like a pimply faced teen as he said it. If he held onto the fiction then they could get out of here with the switchblade before the cops were called.

Hopefully.

“What do you need now? I’ve seen the storage room. It makes Chernobyl look manageable. You can’t possibly be done organizing.”

“We did find all the missing specimen organs, though,” Ron said earnestly. “Look, that asshole who’s running our internship says we got switched to cleaning out the E.R. staff locker room. It wasn’t our idea. Can you just tell us where to grab mops and give us a card that can get us in?”

“That’s a terrible job, and I don’t see why Henderson would assign that. After all, we have professional janitors for that.”

“Uh,” Ron said, recovering quickly. “He might have caught us going long and tossing a preserved brain. It’s a punishment.”

“I’ll say, nothing’s messier,” she said, handing him a card key. Lizzy stared hard at Derek for interminable moments until she spoke again. “I wish I could shake the déjà vu, guys. Anyway, go serve your punishment.”

“Thank you, darling, and if you need to ever relax after a long day.”

She snorted. “I have a boyfriend, and I can get a restraining order. Don’t tempt me, Opey.”

“Ouch,” Derek said, snickering under his mask as they passed down the hall to where Lizzy was pointing. “I think you struck out, but way to keep her off balance. That helps a ton.”

“She was eying you pretty hard, brother. I suggest we just get the damn switchblade and get back to the roadhouse. Hospitals end up with cops coming in. Cops are bad luck, even with Albert at the public defender’s office on payroll.”

“Agreed,” he said as they scanned the card and slid into the women’s locker room. Derek breathed a sigh of relief when he realized that the lockers were labeled with the last names of the nurses. “Oh man, let me think.”

“So you don’t even know your so-called soulmate’s last name? That’s weak, Grinder.”

“No, it’s just a lot has happened,” he said passing through a row of lockers and snapping his fingers when he saw the “Everhart” name. “I got it. She was talking about her adopted family and how great the Everharts are. It’s not that common a last name, so let’s pop it open.”

“Sweet, makes me think of that hot redhead actress Angie Everhart.”

“Great, I’ll let her know that key point if she ever bothers to talk to me again,” he said, reaching up and grabbing the combination lock. He’d been able to pick those since a helpful cellmate juvie had showed him how. The key was to put your head to the metal and listen for very quiet clicks. He eased the numbers into place and sprung the lock. “Let’s do it.”

He and Ron were shuffling through all of Tess’s crap, which amounted to a few pairs of scrubs and a spare pair of crocs along with a few medical terminology textbooks and two pictures of her family on the inner wall.

There was
nothing
else.

Groaning, he went through it again, shoving his hands on the top shelf as if it would make the knife appear. “The hell? Where could it be?”

“Tess must have stashed it in her bedroom or something. Shit,” Ron said as they both turned to her fast squeaking of rubber soles on the linoleum.

There was Lizzy and several hospital guards storming behind her. “I know where I saw you. You’re Mr. Tall, Dark, and Busted. You’re the motorcycle patient.”

“No, I’m not,” Derek said, wishing he weren’t so exhausted. Usually he was a better liar, but it was clear that Lizzy had made them and figured the ruse out.

“Oh you are. I called Henderson and he said they don’t even have new interns over the summer. Now, you all can go quietly or not, but I’m sure the guards have wanted to try out their tasers.”

Ron looked fast at him and gave a terse nod. It was enough for Derek to know exactly what his best friend was planning. He took one step back with his hands held up in the air so he was shoulder to shoulder with the redheaded enforcer. “You have us.”

One of the rent-a-cop guards pulled out a pair of riot cuffs, the kind made of just plastic, the ones that were guaranteed to cinch even tighter the more you struggled. Derek held out his arms flat to them and let them get close, all the while clicking his tongue. On the third click, both he and Ron spun around and slugged the first two guards. The men went down hard with a satisfying thud to the floor. One spit out some blood and a molar from his mouth as he lost consciousness on the linoleum. The other two rushed for them, and he had to give them credit. They were foolish but at least brave.

Derek easily side-stepped the rush and pushed that guard’s back hard. With the added momentum, the guard couldn’t stop and ran headfirst into the locker, falling to the floor like a sack of potatoes. Over his shoulder, he caught Ron wrestling the taser out of Barney Fife’s hands and jamming it into the man’s hip. He jolted about before falling down as well.

“We run!” He shouted as they started past Lizzy.

“You do that because my boyfriend?” she said. “He’s a cop, a freaking lieutenant who works with the S.W.A.T. team, and he’s going to be here in minutes. So you get your asses out of here, and you leave this hospital alone. We’ll be ready next time.”

“That’s a shame, you were a cute thing,” Ron called back as they rounded out of the locker room.

“And you’re an asshole, well both of you,” she said, and, just for good measure, she added (faintly now to their ears). “Also leave Tess alone. She’s too good for you!”