King started dialing numbers on his phone.
Dre’s eyes rolled back in her head and she began to shake. Then the world began to shake.
We were only a few steps from the house when it exploded around us with a boom that was both blinding and deafening. Bursts of orange flooded my vision, bits of metal tore open my skin as I was blown forward.
My wife torn from my arms by the blast.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Preppy
I hate the term ‘nothing left to lose’.
Because lying there in that hospital room was everything I had to lose. I barely let the hospital staff tend to my gunshot wound and stop the bleeding, it was barely even a wound. It was a sandspur in my sock compared to the chunk of my guts destroyed the last time I’d been shot. But my injury wasn’t important. What was important was Dre and that’s why as ridiculous as the idea I just had was, I couldn’t ignore it. I’d try everything and anything to bring her back. I didn’t care if she was getting comfortable wherever she was. I didn’t care if they were ushering her through the pearly gates with a bottle of champagne and three-dozen white fucking roses. I didn’t care if she was the happiest she’d ever been and if heaven was everything she could ever want. Didn’t care. I was a selfish man.
She was mine, and I wasn’t letting her go.
Ever.
I closed my eyes and started the deep breathing technique Mirna had taught me years before. I hadn’t meditated since getting out of Narnia, but sitting there next to my wife I felt helpless. It was worth a shot.
It was only seconds, or at least that’s what I felt like, when I was no longer in the hospital room, holding onto my wife’s bloody hand as the machines she was hooked up to beeped and blink with the erratic rise and fall of her chest.
We were now on top of the water tower. She was awake, standing on the edge just like the night I met her. Except this time, she wasn’t naked. She was in a hospital gown splattered with red. The IV tube still taped to her wrist. Her eye and lip swollen and bruised. She looked over the edge of the rail. Her black hair blew around her battered face.
“Don’t jump,” I said, taking a step toward her. I tried to keep my voice as calm as possible, hiding the fear pitting in the depths of my stomach. Dre turned to me and smiled. I gasped when she leapt up to sit on the very top of the thin and rusted railing. My heart leaped into my throat and I step between her legs, wrapping my arms around her waist and resting my head against her tits. Holding her to me. Holding her onto the tower. “Don’t leave me,” I told her. “Don’t leave us. Bo misses you. I miss you.” I felt the vibration of her laugh and looked up into her bruised but beautiful face. Her smile was big although her bottom teeth were coated in red.
“Save me, Preppy,” she said, her voice an eerie echo that doesn’t sound like it’s coming from her mouth, but from the air around us. Her lips weren’t even moving.
“I did save you,” I argue. “At least I tried to save you. It’s up to the doctors now.” I held her tighter, but it’s not tight enough. It never was.
She shook her head and pressed her index finger to my lips, which I kissed on instinct. “No, you still have some saving to do. It’s not over yet. Not yet.” She touched my face and suddenly I was awash in an image. A doctor leaning over me and I realize it’s not me at all. I’m seeing him through Dre’s eyes. The doctor laughs when she tries to cough out her words. Questioning what he was doing and why. “Save me,” she said to me again, and the image of the doctor is gone. I’m back looking into the dark eyes of the only woman I’d ever loved. The breeze is now a wind. Leaves and pine needles from nearby trees cyclone around us, creating a wall of debris and a noise that sounds like a train clattering against the tracks.
“But...” I started to argue. I was cut off when she leaned back over the rail, pulling me with her. She’s falling and I fell right along with her, but I didn’t let go. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Right before we reach the ground she shows me the backside of her hand, which has some sort of sticker on it. No, it’s a tattoo. A cheesy yellow smiley face. As the wind rips through my hair and the ground grows closer and closer I recognized the tattoo. A flood of memory I didn’t know I had rushes forward, playing like a movie in front of my eyes.
The truth won’t save us because it’s too late.
We crashed into the ground.
****
My eyes popped open and I inhaled sharply like I’d been drowning and someone had given me CPR. I was back in Dre’s hospital room and my eyes immediately landed on the doctor who was leaning over Dre. He had a needle in his hand, fidgeting with her tubes. He looked up at me with a smile that faded the second he saw the recognition in my eyes. “You look familiar,” he said, gulping nervously and pushing back on the sleeves of his white coat, revealing the stupid tattoo on his hand that gave away his identity.
I stood from my chair, reluctantly dropping Dre’s hand gently back to the bed. “I should look familiar.” I looked around the room. “I died here once,” I said, not recognizing my own voice that was deep dark and deadly, full of the anger pulling in my veins. Doctor Gonna-Be-Dead-Soon straightened his posture and was shuffling backward toward the door when Bear and King appeared in the doorway. Right away they noticed the look on my face and all it took was a tip of my chin for them to push the doctor back into the room and slam the door shut behind them. He fell to the ground and scurried into the corner like the scared fucking rat he was. “We’ve been looking for you.”
“What’s up?” King asked as casually as if he was wondering if I wanted to go grab a bite to eat. He points to the doctor.
I bend down on the floor over the doctor and grab him by the throat. “So you hand me over to the fucking lunatic biker, you try and make it seem like I was dead, you try to kill me, my wife, and you killed my fucking mother?”
The doctor frantically shook his head.
“It’s a little too late for denial now,” I tell him.
“No, I mean yes. I did that. Everything but kill your mom. Grace. It was the cancer. Not me. I swear!” he shouted. “At first I just did some paperwork for him. Patched him up a while back at his house when he got cut or shot. He paid me cash.” The doctor shook his head. “I was losing my house. I didn’t want to do all those other things for him. I had no choice!”
“You had to? Why?”
“Because...he had my sister. She was one of their biker whores. Their BBB’s.” He waved at Bear’s leather cut. “I just wanted to take her home. Keep her safe. Chop said if I didn’t do what I asked of him he’d kill her and then me.”
“That never happened though,” Bear said. It wasn’t a question.