Rest & Trust (5 page)

“Fuck you. Fucking martyr.” J.R. pushed five hundred dollars back at Trick and opened his own envelope.

When Bart had collected the money, Hoosier nodded. Then he laid his hands flat on the table. “We need to watch the petty…disagreements, brothers. The work we do, we need to be whole. There’s a ring out there; use it. If you’re stewing in resentment, then call it out and settle it. But I don’t want us going into the shit we go into unless we are all in…sync. Understood?”

The heads around the table moved up and down.

“Good. Sherlock—you’re on the intel for the new run?” Sherlock had detailed the new run and the logistical challenges earlier in the meeting.

“I am. I’ll hit my buddy up in Transportation on Monday, and I’ll work out a route around the construction.”

“Good. Okay, brothers. We’re adjourned.” The President knocked his rings on the table, and the Horde pushed their chairs back and stood.

Sherlock closed up and stacked his tech. He wanted to get it stowed away and hunt up Shaylee. And get a drink.

~oOo~

While he was up talking to Lloyd, he should have worked out an alternate route to get back out of downtown San Bernardino, too. There was some kind of mess going on at the courthouse, and traffic was absolutely fucked—so fucked that even on his bike, he would have had to jump the curb and ride down the sidewalk to move.

One of the beauteous things about being out of a cage was that a rider was almost impervious to traffic. Cars and trucks had to stay in line and get bogged down. A biker could swing out and split the lanes. Getting truly stuck in traffic was rare—and all the more infuriating for it.

He was stewing in the jam, feeling the last effects of the morning’s hangover, eating a fucking diesel pickup’s foul exhaust and getting a bellyful of rage, a block from the melee at the courthouse. Some kind of demonstration, it looked like. It seemed too…
condensed
to be a riot or something like that. And there were signs bobbing around, and the indeterminate noise of somebody shouting into a bullhorn.

Sherlock rolled his eyes and fidgeted on the saddle. What people thought they could accomplish by waving a sign, he did not know. You want to get people to notice you? You want them to change? Hit them where they live. Dig into their secrets and their treasures. Don’t wave a fucking cardboard sign and think anybody else gives a shit.

The first bark of noise that overtopped the din of traffic and the rumble of the crowd at the courthouse, Sherlock figured for a backfire. But then there was another. And another. And then the air was full of it. Gunfire—and some of it automatic.

Now what was happening at the courthouse wasn’t condensed at all. Now it was a riot. Now it was madness.

He was trapped between a parked car to his right, an idling car in the next lane to his left, a too-wide-for-the-lane delivery truck behind him, and the fucking dualie diesel in front of him. He was boxed in, but he looked for an opening to jump the curb. He wanted no part of whatever was going on up the block.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sadie didn’t know where the flashpoint was that made everything fall apart. She’d never been involved in a protest that had gone so wrong.

Blake had; he was older. He’d started protesting during the invasion of Iraq after 9-11, while he was in grad school, and he’d been sort of an expert protester since. He’d also been part of the Occupy protests, and the Ferguson and Baltimore protests, from about ten or fifteen years ago, so he’d seen peaceful assemblies turn violent, and he’d seen angry groups become deadly riots. His stalwart assertion was that police and Guardsmen invariably made the move that turned tension into blood.

But Sadie didn’t know what move had been made now. All she knew was that gunfire seemed to be coming from every direction at once, and fear and fury had turned the crowd into a mob.

They’d been standing on the courthouse steps. Blake had been using a bullhorn to keep a chant going, and Sadie and the other organizers had been handing out flyers and fielding questions—people looking for information about the status of the trial inside, or directions about where to go or what to do, or just where the port-a-potties were. Everything had been pretty normal. It was the first day of the trial, so energies were high, but so was hope.

And then there was an explosion—Sadie had never heard a gun fired in real life before, and it was so very much louder than anything she’d ever heard on television or in a movie. She’d first, irrationally, thought it had been something like a cannon. Then the crowd had erupted, moving first like a wave, from a point near the sidewalk, and then a surge, and then, when bullets seemed to fill the air like a leaden hailstorm, everything was chaos.

She’d been standing there, frozen, when Blake grabbed her arm and yanked her down into a crouch. Throwing his arm over her, he scrambled them through the crowd. She had no idea where he was leading her; she still hadn’t fully processed what the fuck was going on.

Finally finding a break in the chaos, he paused and looked back. She did, too, and her heart leapt up and filled her throat at what she saw: three police or National Guard or whatever in full riot gear, massive, terrifying guns drawn, coming straight for them, pushing people out of their way.

Coming for them specifically.

Blake turned to her and grabbed her shoulders. “Run. Run now.”

“Not without you!”

“Yes! I know what I’m doing. You don’t. Fucking RUN!” He turned her and gave her a shove so hard that she fell forward, landing on her hands.

She got up again as quickly as she could, before she got swallowed by the teeming, frantic crowd. Turning back to Blake, she saw one of the riot-gear guys slam the butt of his huge gun into her friend’s face. Blake went down in a gush of blood, and she took one step back toward him.

Then one of the cops took two steps toward her, and she turned and did what Blake had demanded. She ran.

Sadie was short, and with every step, she risked getting mowed down in the frenzy. She was punched ferociously in the arm, turning her bicep into instant fire, but she didn’t stop to see who’d done it. People were running and screaming, shouting and fighting. It wasn’t only the cops who had guns. She was caught in the middle of an honest-to-God shootout, and she wondered, as she ran, how many of the people dropping had been shot.

A teeny, tiny voice in the back of her head kept insisting that she was one of the organizers of this protest, and she should stand pat. But fear had her in its teeth now. Seeing Blake go down so hard, so viciously—he’d been armed only with a bullhorn and had been standing still!—had shaken her spirit. He wanted her to run. With that permission for cowardice, she ran.

Clearing the thickest part of the chaos about half a block away from the courthouse, Sadie took a beat to look over her shoulder—and saw that the cop was still coming for her. He was maybe fifty feet away. Before fear could paralyze her, she spun and turned on the afterburners. She’d started running in rehab, as a way to reclaim her body from the poison she’d filled it with for years. She was wearing Docs and had been training for a marathon, not a sprint, but she was small and light and not weighed down by fifty pounds of Kevlar and weaponry.

Traffic before her was a locked snarl, and she tried to visualize a way through the cars to the other side. Just as she neared the corner, a guy on a huge Harley jumped the curb between two parked cars, just up from the intersection, like he meant to ride on the sidewalk around the jam.

He had a passenger seat. Sadie didn’t think beyond that. She ran straight for him, dropped her hands onto the seat and leap-frogged on.

His head flew around to look over his shoulder. “What the fuck?”

“RIDE! FUCKING RIDE!” She grabbed his hips.

He wore dark Oakleys, so she couldn’t see his eyes, but he seemed to look past her. Then he turned and went full throttle, pulling forward so fast she almost flew off the back; only her hands clawing into his waist saved her.

As they pulled away, the cop fired twice; both she and the biker crouched low, and he took a sharp turn around the sidewalk, almost laying the bike down. Then he flung the bike the other direction, into an alley, and gunned the engine again.

She wrapped her arms around him and held on, closing her eyes and pressing herself as closely to his back as she could. Her head was so full of adrenaline and confusion that she didn’t have once single cogent though. She just held on.

He stayed on alleys and side streets, going full tilt, rocketing around cars and people, and didn’t stop or even slow down until they were clear of downtown entirely. Finally, he pulled into a nook in a residential alley and stopped. He cut the engine and kicked the stand down, then looked over his shoulder at her.

“Off.”

She nodded, but she couldn’t let go. Her left arm was absolutely frozen, and just at that very moment, she realized that she was in agony.

Something about how she had moved must have clued him in, because he looked down at her arm and muttered, “Fuck. Goddammit.”

Her brain moving as if through molasses, she finally thought to look herself. Her whole left arm was bright red with blood; it was flowing freely through three different wounds—a lateral gash just above her elbow, and two holes, one neat and tiny and the other larger and ragged, near her shoulder.

The biker put his gloved hands on hers where they were still clenched together at his belly. He forced them apart—being surprisingly gentle—and eased her off his bike. Now that hurt had made its way to her senses, she couldn’t hold back a cry as he moved her sore arm. Not sore. So much more than sore.

She expected him to use that opportunity to ride away and leave her wherever she was, but instead he dismounted.

Oh, he was tall. A weird thought to have at that time, but she had it anyway. She was five-three. He might have been a whole foot taller. She craned her neck to see his face—what she could see, under his helmet and behind his sunglasses.

“You got shot, sweetheart. Twice.” He nodded at her arm.

She looked dumbly down at it, now hanging useless from her shoulder.

He reached inside his kutte and pulled out a bandana. While she watched, passive and speechless, he tied it around the gash, which was bleeding most freely. It hurt, and she winced and pulled away from the pain, but he held on and tied it tight.

“I’m gonna drop you off at SB General. You need seen to.”

That got her words back in action. “No! No!
Cops
shot me—I can’t go to a hospital.” Holy shit! She’d been shot! She made her brain think. Shit, her arm really hurt now. Like her blood was made of hot sauce. “Um…can you—can you just take me home? I can take care of it. There’s not, like, a bullet in me, right?”

He smiled—a great smile, with straight, white teeth, surrounded by a thick auburn beard. A ring bisected his bottom lip, and he had a ring through his septum, too. “That’s a through-and-through, yeah, and that’s a graze. But it’s gonna take more than a Band-Aid to fix these, sweetheart.” He seemed to hear something and looked sharply up and around. When he seemed again satisfied that they were safe, he turned back to her. “Where do you live?”

“Riverside.”

His hands on his hips, he sighed and looked down, like he was studying the broken asphalt between his boots. Then he shrugged off his kutte and laid it across the seat of his bike. That bike was a monster—gleaming black and chrome, with a rear tire that was at least a foot wide.

With his kutte off, he began unbuttoning his dark green shirt. That didn’t make any sense.

“What are you doing?”

“You can’t ride with that bloody arm out for everybody to see. The goal is to escape LEO, not invite them along for the ride, right?”

“Leo?”

“Law Enforcement Officers.”

“Oh.”

He pulled his shirt off; underneath, he wore a white beater. Oh. He had a lot of ink—covering both arms and across his chest. Colorful and various. The beater was snug and showed definition over—

Was she seriously standing here in this scary alley, bleeding from gunshot wounds and checking out the strange biker?

Yes, of course she was. This was exactly the kind of out-of-control mindfuck that made her horniest.

With a step toward her—shit, she only came up to his chest—he eased his shirt over her wounded arm.

It hurt, and she hissed. “Ow!”

“Sorry,” he muttered but didn’t stop working the shirt up over her shoulder. She helped with the right arm and let him button the shirt over her black, sleeveless top.

Then he unfastened his helmet and took it off. The auburn tone of his hair was a shade darker than his beard. He had kind of a punk cut, undercut all around, and about three inches long on the top. It flopped over his forehead as he leaned down, set the helmet on her head and tightened the strap under her chin.

His ears were pierced, too—one-inch gauges in his lobes and an industrial piercing in his left ear.

She wasn’t even fighting the urge to check him out and catalogue his features. He was hot, and noticing his hotness distracted her from the shrieking pain in her arm.

“I’m Sherlock,” he said as his hands dropped from the strap.

Strange name, but she didn’t comment on it. It seemed rude to mock her rescuer. “Sadie.”

With a nod, he turned back to his bike. As he slipped his kutte back on—he had ink across the top of his back, too—he said, “I live closer, and I have a lot of first aid supplies.” On that note, he mounted his bike and kicked up the stand.

“Wait—what?” There was no way she was going to his house. That would be massive stranger-danger stupidity. “It’s okay. I can make it home on my own.”

He turned a look on her so icy she could feel it even through his dark glasses. “You’re telling me that after jumping uninvited on my bike, using me to run from the law, bleeding all over my kutte, and my shirt, you’re not gonna extend that little bit of trust?”

“That’s a
lot
of trust.”

“Sweetheart, if I was gonna hurt you, you’d be hurt already—and I’m not talking about your arm. If you want me to ride away, I will. No sweat for me.” He brushed his hands together to make the point. “I’ll just need my helmet back.” Now he held out his hand to make that point.

“Fuck.” She did not want to be left alone in this alley. She didn’t even know where they were. Feeling buffaloed, she took a step toward his bike. The smile he gave her as he fired the engine up didn’t make her feel any less resentful of his manipulation. But when he held out his arm, she grabbed it with her good hand and swung on behind him.

He took her good hand and pulled it around his waist. “Hold on tight. I’ll ride easy now.”

Sadie nodded and held on tight.