Force: Blacktop Sinners MC (2 page)

Chapter Two

The lunge threw his momentum off and caused him to drop his flashlight. Growling to himself, he got low and tackled the man who’d attacked him. There was a satisfying crunch of bone as ribs snapped under his weight. His blade, however, hadn’t made contact with flesh, but merely had torn the bastard’s leathers.

Derek rolled off of the other man, who was gasping too hard to even try to get up. Rushing as best around the other fallen Death’s Head crew member as he could, he scrambled for the flashlight as well. His hands kept coming up empty because he was dividing scrambling for the light with hopping back up to check out for other gang members coming for him, Spike, and Ron. Finally, deciding discretion was the better part of valor and that it would be safer to rush than keep fumbling for something that could have slid under a machine anyway, he rushed forward to try and find his crew. There was a shout from Spike and Derek broke into a run, praying his president was still alive.

When he got to the shouting, he watched in the darkness as a shadow rose from a crumpled mound. He tensed again, not sure if whoever had won that match was Spike or whoever had attacked him. Gripping his weapon close to his side, Derek didn’t move. He remained taut and ready to spring.

“Make your move,” he growled from the darkness.

“I don’t need to,” Spike said, pulling out his cell and illuminating everything with the light of his flash. “Damn, shit got more real than I thought.”

Derek frowned down at the body before him. He recognized Gunner, the vice president of the Death’s Head crew. The large man’s face was pale, and there was a huge gash in his temple by his dark hair. His hands were tied in front of him, but the most obvious thing about him was the large switch blade jammed through his breast bone and the blood still guzzling from it.

Spike hunched down and pulled out his blade, wiping the blood off on his jeans. It was then that Derek wanted to curse all of them for being so foolish as not to wear gloves on a run like this, but it was supposed to be a summit not anything devoted to wet works, at least not until now.

“I felt him lunge at me, but,” he started, gesturing to the man’s bound ankles and wrists. “I think someone flung him at me.”

“So what? We got a third gang trying to get us to eliminate each other? Some crazy vigilante playing games? Help me out here, boss?”

“We have some fucked up shit going on here, and we need to move,” Spike corrected, standing back up.

Before Derek could even ask where the Hell Ron was, the lights flood on in the whole building. There was no sign of his friend, just the other crew member that he’d beaten up a few yards over, still gurgling but basically unconscious, and the freshly eliminated yet trussed up Death’s Head vice president.

“That can’t be good,” Spike said, starting to run back to the other side of the factory and where they’d parked their bikes.

“Nope,” he agreed.

As they rushed out, heads down and pace quickening, there was the sound of boots clomping into the catty-cornered end of the warehouse. Derek had been in raids long enough to know the sound of S.W.A.T. team boots, and he also knew that looking back would only serve to both slow him down and risk the chance the cops would spy his face. They had a good portion of the cops in the county on payroll, at least for what usual club standards were, but they could only look the other way so much. Part of that meant that having half the local Boone force walk in on a murder victim was going to be too much for them to throw money at.

Instead, he and Spike kept running, even as it tore into Derek to leave Ron behind. They’d been inseparable since he’d joined the Blacktop Sinners ten years ago, fresh out of juvie. Now? God, if the Death’s Head crew had him…if they touched a hair on his head…fuck it, Derek would burn
their
clubhouse down and piss on the ashes. No one touched his brothers and lived.

No one
.

The cops were rushing faster now, and they just made it out of the warehouse. He flung his leg over his bike and throttled up, all while his eyes were kept on the door. Shoving his sunglasses on, he struggled for anything to help hide his face. It was a crazy move this late at night, but he couldn’t afford to be made. Beside him, Spike had repurposed the bandana around his forehead into a bandit mask of his own, one that covered everything below his eyes.

“Here!” He called, shoving the now closed switch blade to him. “We split up, and we hide the evidence. Meet back at the clubhouse, and we plan what we can. Do you hear me?”

“Ron---”

“We’ll make the Death’s Head pay, but we can’t behind bars. Now go. That’s an order.”

He nodded and peeled out even as four S.W.A.T. members burst through the doors and started shooting at their wheels. It was far from safe so-called police etiquette, but he’d learned long ago that police shot first and asked questions and faked paper trails later. The wind roared in his ears and he fled out of the alley like a deer racing from a forest fire, like as a kid he’d run from his foster father’s wrath. The scenery whizzed by him as he poured on the throttle. Even as he raced against the pavement, he heard the sirens whirring behind him. It was good they hadn’t settled on Spike.

He was the enforcer.

Let him take the heat off of his leader.

The cops were drawing closer, so he risked darting across four lanes of traffic and almost being slammed by an eighteen wheeler. It allowed him enough of an edge to take an exit off to a smaller country path and a more winding mountain road. It was a long way around to the clubhouse, but he could manage. The trees were close on this road, hadn’t been pruned back, and he could still hear the sirens. They were growing apart in distance, but he was still terrified they’d catch him. He already had a couple strikes for dealing and battery. If he were caught now, that would be his third strike and his free trip up the river.

Digging into the speed, he took the upcoming curve too fast. His rear wheel flew out from under him, and he rolled several times before hitting a rock off the side of the path. The last thing he remembered was the blood dripping from his temple into his eyes. The last thought going through his mind was a prayer that the switchblade was hidden well enough.

Chapter Three

Her throat was dry.

That was the first thing that Tess noticed as they wheeled the gurney into her bay. The second was that her palms were so slick that she would have trouble holding the instruments. The man before her was huge, well over six feet, and his legs hung off the edge of the gurney. He was in leathers, and they were badly shredded but seemed to have taken the brunt of whatever crash he’d had. While they were torn, his arms and legs underneath showed barely any signs of road rash. But his head, dear God, he clearly hadn’t been wearing a helmet at impact, and there was a deep gash on his left temple and blood coating his face and the hair of his beard.

Tess bit back her nausea and forced the lightheadedness swirling around her from throwing her to her knees. No, she was beyond this now. Trauma wasn’t an excuse for being unable to do her job. There would always be motorcycle accidents. It was a fact of life in any emergency room, and it certainly was something they saw when their town bordered so many narrow mountain paths.

Dr. Malek trailed efficiently behind the paramedics and started barking orders for all of them. A new graduate of UNC’s medical school, she was a sharp edition to the staff, even if she could be hard to work with and a stickler for perfection. If Tess had even considered backing off this case for emotional reasons, Malek would have her written up.

Tough but fair.

Gritting her teeth, Tess reached for the gloves and slipped them on. “What’s first?”

“I need you to cut everything off, even the jacket. The lacerations on the skin look superficial, but we want to make sure we haven’t missed anything. Alacron, start getting him hooked up to the heart monitors!”

Tess and her friend split up, and she did as she was asked, sheering through his chaps and denim easily. His legs were scraped a bit, but there was nothing deep and nothing that needed debridement. That was a relief, the leather had kept his skin from being torn off, and that was lowering any chance of severe infection. She hesitated at the jacket. It wasn’t that it was beautiful by any means. This rough and tumble victim was a man’s man; that was for sure. Burly as a bear almost, but the leather was well-worn. He’d probably had this jacket for years and worn it every day of that time.

She sighed and cut into it, shoving it into the plastic bag they’d put in storage for him anyway. It might be something he was fond of, but his life was on the line, and he’d have to deal with it, assuming he survived.

Next came his boots and, despite her years in the E.R., Tess’s eyes went wide when she pulled off his right boot. Inside of it was a switch blade. That was something she saw often in emergency, sometimes still embedded in victims or confiscated off people until they were released. There was no reason to think it had been anything more than something he’d stowed, possibly even as a resource for a mountain retreat. He’d been found on a dirt road by private cabins after all. Shrugging, she threw that into the bag as well.

The final strokes of her shears were used to cut off the t-shirt on his torso.

Despite her years of nurse’s training, Tess lost her professional eye just a bit. His chest was amazing. Not a scratch was on it---thank God---but it was lean and well-defined. It even led to an eight pack of abs that trailed tantalizingly to his boxers.

“Everhart! I need the gown on him now!” Malek called out.

Shaking herself out of her revelry, Tess obliged. She and an orderly shoved his gown on. Beside her, Lizzy had finished setting up the monitor, and his heartbeat was strong.

“BP is one-thirty over sixty, pulse holding steady at eighty. O2 saturation looks average,” Malek said. “Everhart, I need you to do the basic neuro with him. Ask him the questions while I get a look at his foot; left one looks crunched. Alacron, you need to clean the blood off his face, don’t want it crusting in his beard.”

Tess nodded and turned on her pen light, flashing it in the patient’s open eyes. To her relief, they both dilated normally, neither bigger than the other nor fixed. That was a positive sign; with his crash and possible head trauma, they’d be sending him for an MRI soon. However, knowing that his eyes were acting normally did argue against the odds that he’d had a stroke or another cerebral event.

“Sir, can you hear me?”

“Where’s Spike?” He asked.

She blinked, confused by his question. “I don’t understand. You need a spike? What for?”

He shook his head, and she stepped back as blood flecks splashed from his still dripping forehead. “No my pre…friend. He was riding with me too. Did he crash?”

“Sir---”

“It’s Derek, Derek Allanson.”

“Good, at least you know your name.”

He groaned but continued to focus perfectly on her, following her face smoothly with his eyes. “Of course I know my name.”

“Good, so what day is it?”

“June 11, 2015.”

“And who is president.”

“Obama.”

“And how many fingers am I holding up?” She said, striking the peace sign pose for him with her right hand.

“Two, but I’m serious. Where’s Spike?”

“You’re the only motorcycle rider we’ve had come in tonight. Sir---”

“Derek,” he gritted out. “You don’t have to be formal.”

She blushed, despite herself. God, she wasn’t going to become some Florence Nightingale cliché. After all, Tess had never fallen for a patient before; she was damned if she were going to start now, even if he were the hottest man she’d ever seen in her life. “Fine, Mr…I mean, Derek, can you tell me how you got here?”

“I was with Spike at this, uh, meeting.” He closed his eyes then and his brow furrowed with wrinkles as seemed to be struggling to remember more. Soon, Derek’s eye shot open and he frowned. “I don’t know. We were together and then I was here. I don’t understand.”

“You’ve had a motorcycle accident. You crashed.”

“My bike?”

“It’s mostly unscathed. I think it was taken to an impound lot,” Dr. Malek added from the foot of the gurney. “That can be sorted out with your possessions soon enough. You have a few broken toes, and we can set a splint for the bigger ones.”

“Great, so where’s Spike?” He asked, his eyes blinking back at both of them confused.

Tess bit her lip. “You just asked that.”

“No, I didn’t. Wait, did I?”

Malek shook her head and turned to the resident who’d joined her. “We’ll work on setting the toes later; get him into the MRI. He may have hurt his head worse than we realized.”