Leave a Trail (55 page)

He was lost, and he didn’t look.

The next thing he new, he was being tackled to the ground, his back screaming at the way it was forced to twist, then a line of hot, new pain fired across his throat, and he felt his chest soaking with thick heat. From a distance, he heard Len shouting his name. He turned to his back and tried to answer, but nothing came out but a wet gurgle.

The last thing he saw was Len’s frightened face looming over him.

~oOo~

He came awake and knew four things: one, he was alive; two, he was cuffed to a bed in a public hospital; three, there was no way Lilli wasn’t going to find out about this attack; and four, he wasn’t going to get parole in eighteen months. Because he had to retaliate this time. This was the fifth attempt in four and a half years. They’d almost gotten him this time. They would next time, unless he made a stand. His days of trying to stay off the radar and just get the fuck home were over. Badger had been right about the constantly turning cycle of violence that came from vengeance. But if they didn’t retaliate, Isaac would be killed. That simple.

About fifteen minutes after he’d woken, a nurse came in and checked on him. She’d asked him how he was feeling, but he couldn’t get more than a weird kind of growl past his sutured throat. A doctor came in and checked on him, described how long he’d been unconscious (eighteen hours), the procedure to sew him back together, how many pints of blood he’d needed (five), and other bullshit he didn’t care about. They’d have him in the infirmary in two days and probably back in his cell in four. Fine. Whatever.

When the doctor left, he saw the legs of the guard stationed outside his door. He wondered if they’d already notified Lilli. If so, she’d be out of her head.

Before the door could latch, though, it opened again, and there she was. She looked like she hadn’t slept or eaten in, oh, about a year. Damn. He must have been pretty close to kicking, then, if she was here, and if they were letting her through that door. He noticed that the guard wedged the door open as she came in.

“You asshole.” She said it sadly, with a twist of a smile, her eyes shiny and wet, and he knew what she meant.

Sorry
, he mouthed.

She nodded.

“They’re only giving me fifteen minutes, and then I have to wait until the next visiting day to see you again. I swear on all that is holy, Isaac Lunden, if you die, I will dig you back up and cut your throat again.”

He laughed with his breath and nodded. Ow.

Then she pulled up a chair as close to the bed as it would go, wrapped her arms around his one free arm, linked fingers with him, and laid her head on his chest. For fifteen minutes, until the guard turned and waved her out, she did not speak. They did not move. He lay there with his throat cut, Lilli’s head on his chest, and thought that, for a shot at fifteen more minutes like this, he might well put a hit on himself.

X

The 1,681
^st
Day

It didn’t take much to find out who’d done it. Len had seen enough of the guys to narrow down the field, and they had enough friends who had enough friends. It had to be him and Len. They couldn’t hire it out. And it had to be visible. It had to be known, or the hits on Isaac would never fucking stop. They were going down for this retaliation.

It didn’t take much to get a couple of actual blades, either. No piece of shit shank was going to do here. But the black market was robust in prison, and their needs were within their means.

They waited until Isaac had regained his strength. And then they took out the two contract killers from the Hermanos de los Muertos crew out of Texas. They did it at breakfast, driving the blades deep into their hearts, and they didn’t run.

As he lay on the bare slab in the hole later, bruised and bleeding in the pitch dark, Isaac wondered if they’d ever see home again.

X

The 2,008
^th
Day

In the end, with the usual plea bullshitting, and because no guard had seen them do it, and no inmate had ratted, they’d added only a new eighteen-month bid, for intent to incite, to their standing sentence. If they could find a way to stay both safe and out of trouble, they could still get home.

But Isaac and Len were separated and transferred to high-security facilities, Len in Colorado and Isaac in Pennsylvania. Far from home. Hopefully, the message they’d sent by taking down Isaac’s attackers had gone over the national wire, because Isaac was on his own, and Len was, too.

For the three months between the retaliation and the sentence, while they’d still been fairly close to home, they’d been locked down in the Special Housing Unit and denied visitation entirely. For nearly three months after the transfer, for Isaac, it was the same. Locked down, full restriction. Then, for two more months, he’d only been able to see Lilli and the kids via video.

The eight months he’d spent without feeling the touch of Lilli’s skin had made him wish with all he had that the Hermanos had just fucking killed him.

When he finally got to hold her again, even for a precious few seconds, he about came in his pants and wept like a baby both at the same time. But he’d held his shit together. That was all he was doing anymore. Holding his shit together.

He’d had to fight for his place among a nastier bunch of hardened men. He’d done so—he had size, strength, skill, will, and an increasingly fragile sense of self-preservation, and that had held him in good stead in the stalls. But his victories had not come without their physical price.

He could not catch a break. He could not.

Now, he saw his family once a month, if he was lucky. Lilli was tired. She tried not to show it, but he knew her. He saw. The way his life in the Horde had constantly fucked with their life together was beating her down. He could see it happening, even as she continued to fight like the warrior she was.

She understood why he’d done what he’d done. She’d agreed. But she was angry nonetheless. Not at him, but at the cosmos or something. Just angry and tired, and he could offer her no ease.

Bo continued to be quiet and pulled further away with every visit. He’d sit on his hands and stare around the room, wide-eyed and silent, or he’d stare at his lap, and be perfectly still for the entire visit. Lilli would try to make him engage, but he would not. Isaac never let her push him much. He didn’t want his son to feel forced to love him. Bo just wasn’t wired right to be able to cope with his father’s situation.

Isaac could look around that room, bleaker than the last, filled with even scarier people, men who made the Horde look like the Vienna Boys Choir—okay, not that, but still, not as scary as these guys—and understand. This was no place for children to spend any of their lives. He knew he should tell Lilli to keep them home. He’d tried to talk to her about it in letters, but she wouldn’t discuss it. He was their father. He was here. This is the only place they could be with him. End of story, as far as she was concerned. And honestly, he hadn’t fought as hard as he could have. He needed to see them.

Gia seemed to adapt. She was his girl, and she didn’t seem to care one way or the other where she saw him, as long as she was with him. She’d grown too big to sit on his lap, but she held his hand and talked to him. She wrote him letters of her own, sending him pictures of her horse and their new kittens, and Kodi, who had taken on care of the kittens as well. Pip had died; Lilli had found him curled in his basket one day, stiff and cold.

Isaac’s life was changing while he wasn’t living it.

From the day he’d arrived in Pennsylvania, he’d ended every letter to Lilli with two words:

I’m sorry.

The 2,736
^th
Day

Isaac came out of the Springfield Greyhound station on a hot, muggy, brilliantly sunny July afternoon and met a long line of Harleys parked at the curb. His feet were on Missouri soil. Missouri concrete, actually. But Missouri. Seven years, six months, and four days since he had last been in his home state. His homeland.

He had been assigned a parole officer in Springfield, and he’d need to check in soon, but he had a couple of days before he had to think about that. Right now, Show was walking toward him, and his brothers were all standing in a line. He realized he didn’t know them all, but he didn’t let himself think about that, either. He’d get to know them. He embraced every fucking one of them, even the strangers. Len was there; he’d been released a couple of weeks earlier. He embraced Len first.

They were both home. They were both whole. As whole as they ever could be.

When he’d greeted and hugged the line of men in Horde leather, Show turned to the curb, and the men separated so the Isaac could see his old Fat Bob, with his kutte lying over the saddle. Show lifted the leather and held it up, and Isaac turned and slid his arms in. He remembered a day once before that he’d reclaimed this leather after he’d despaired of ever wearing it again. He wasn’t supposed to wear it now, not while he was on parole. Neither was Len. But for this ride, right now, fuck it.

Show put his meaty hand on Isaac’s shoulder. “Can you ride, brother?”

Isaac smiled. “One way to find out.” He walked around his big, beautiful bike and stared down at it, wondering. Could he? Had the years of hard prison life—the fighting, the attacks, the brutal guards, the bad meds, just his fucking age, past fifty now—had that life left him this thing? But then, looking at his beautiful, badass bike, feeling Missouri under his boots, standing with his brothers, he knew. Yes, it had. He could. He swung his leg over the saddle, ignoring the twinge in his back. It wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d feared.

He strapped on his helmet and then slid on his Ray-Bans. The world looked suddenly brighter.

“You good?” Show asked, strapping on his own helmet.

Isaac grinned like he hadn’t grinned in seven and a half years. “Let’s ride, brothers. Let’s ride.”

As they flew down the interstate toward home, he could feel the scales on his heart and soul loosen and begin to break away. Somewhere under there, deep down below the crust of loss and bitterness and despair that was his prison life, he felt a small flutter of something still alive. The buffet and roar of the wind in his face, the tang and the grit of the road, all of it brought his senses to life. When they took the off-ramp that would bring him home, his heart began to beat with real vigor. And when he saw the sign that bid him a cheery
Welcome to Signal Bend
, he laughed, loud, shaking his head with it.

Lilli was just around the corner. Gia and Bo. His wife. His children. His family. His life.

Home.

Just around the corner.

LILLI

“Bud, come talk to me.” Lilli combed Bo’s dark hair back from his forehead.

“Helpin’ Parrot.” Bo had really clicked with Parrot, one of the current Prospects. He had a lot of patience for the watchful ten-year-old and let him hang around with him in the clubhouse and ‘help.’

“I know. But I need to talk to you. You can come back and help Parrot again in five minutes.” She held up her hand, her fingers splayed. Bo looked at his watch and nodded. He let her take his hand, and they went outside to sit on one of the picnic tables in the July sunshine.

Bo was comfortable in the clubhouse, and had a fairly good tolerance, by his standard, for its chaos, but even here he didn’t connect much. He had a hard time understanding people and never really got in on the joke, even with other kids. He and Loki were not even two years apart in age, and Cory and Lilli had sort of expected them to be close. When Bo was a preschooler, he’d seemed totally normal, if a little slow to speak, and had been great with Loki the toddler. But Bo began to pull inward when he was around four, and Loki had eclipsed his social development quickly once they were both school age. Now Loki—a loud, energetic kid who had both a quick, charming laugh and a fiery temper—didn’t have much patience for the older, quieter Bo, who would rather play on his computer or draw mazes and fractals in one of his hundreds of sketchbooks than throw a ball or run a race and, when he talked at all, sometimes said things that were better left unspoken. He got along better with Nolan and Parrot than he did the kids closer to his own age.

He’d been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome almost four years earlier. He didn’t have the tics and quirks a lot of children on the autism spectrum had, and Lilli had been reluctant to see that his differences were in his way—they weren’t in his way at all when he was home. He didn’t mind being touched, as long as he knew and was comfortable with the person doing the touching. He liked and sought out hugs from his family. He didn’t rock or hum or flail when he got stressed, and he almost never yelled or lost control. For him, when he was over-stimulated or stressed, he sort of stopped. Lilli called it ‘hitting his pause button.’ He became almost entirely unresponsive. At first, his fugues had terrified her; her mother had often gone into similar states during her depressive phases. Now, understanding, she’d simply say, “G—Bo’s hit pause. Let’s turn it down.” And she and Gia would make his world a little saner until he could come back.

For Bo, public school had been an unmitigated disaster. With a tested IQ of 163, learning was not his problem. But learning in the clamor and cacophony of thirty other children had been impossible. She’d fought his kindergarten teacher hard at first—hard enough to scare the little twat. Well, Jesus, she’d nearly instantly decided he was ‘intellectually disabled’—which was the new term for what used to be ‘mentally retarded’—because he was quiet. Six weeks into kindergarten, and she’d decided she knew everything she needed to know about his intellect and abilities. So, since kindergarten attendance wasn’t mandatory in Missouri, and since he’d been reading chapter books already, she’d pulled him out of kindergarten at the winter break and started with first grade the next fall.