Nitro shot him a look. “She’s safe. We got a guy tailing her.”
“Who?”
Nitro shrugged. “One of the prospects. Lug, I think. He’s got a Honda, blends in. Your old lady’s a moving target.” He was too casual.
“Bullshit,” Damron said. “If you were tailing her, she’d be here.” He tried to swing his legs off the bed, but all he accomplished was dragging the IV pole three inches and almost pitching himself onto the tile. Augustine caught him under one arm, propping him upright with a grunt.
“You want me to walk you to the can?” Augustine asked, deadpan. “Or just aim the piss jug for you?”
Damron gripped the edge of the bed until his knuckles went white. His body felt like it was made of pulped meat, stitched together with wire. Still, the pain was less of an adversary than the uncertainty. He looked at the phone again. He fired off a text: “U alive?” and sent it to Carly. The status stayed “delivered” for a long, stuttering minute. Nothing came back.
“She leave me?” Damron asked. He tried for humor.
This time even Nitro didn’t answer right away. “Prez, you got your hands full,” he said finally. “If she’s not here, she’s got her reasons.”
“Yeah, like not wanting to mop up the blood,” Damron said.
A long silence. The fluorescent light stuttered in the ceiling, making everything look jaundiced and cheap.
Damron remembered the fight in pieces: headlights blinding him, then the crunch of metal and fiberglass. Someone screaming—a high, tearing sound, not even human. The feel of cold steel slicing into his side, the wet heat, the moment he realized he couldn’t breathe. And then Carly, always Carly, somewhere far away and unreachable, like the sun behind storm glass.
He glanced at Junior, then Augustine, then Nitro, all of them lined up like a firing squad.
“If she left,” Damron said, “I want to hear it from her.”
Nitro nodded, but there was defeat in it. “You will,” he said. “But right now, you got club business.”
“I’ll be ready,” Damron said, though even he didn’t believe it. He fell back into the pillows, vision swimming. The pain was almost a comfort.
###
Carly packed her life in silence, room by room, drawer by drawer. The house was a tomb, all the noise and blood drained from it, but she couldn’t leave anything to chance. Every step had to be precise, or she’d lose her nerve. She started with the closet. Each movement should have been clean, but her fingers kept shaking. She gritted her teeth and kept going.
The suitcase was cheap, the kind they give you for opening a new credit card. She filled it half with clothes, half with paperwork—legal pads, folders, bills, a zippered pouch of flash drives. She didn’t bother with the hangers. When she finished, the closet looked like a crime scene: his leather jackets and club cuts slouched together, everything else missing. She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the battered nightstand. Damron’s side had a ring of dust the size of a whiskey bottle, a collapsed paperback with an American flag bookmark, and a scattering of loose change. Her side was all charger cables and half-used chapstick. She let her eyes move over it, slow, taking inventory.Nothing here worth saving, really. She found her purse by the bathroom door, slung it over her shoulder, and zipped the suitcase shut. The sound echoed in the house like a gunshot. She waited for something to happen—yelling, footsteps, a door slamming. But the only noise was the hum of the fridge and the whir of cicadas outside.
She padded into the bathroom, the tile cold beneath her bare feet. The counter was a still life: his safety razor flecked with dried blood, her toothbrush worn down to nubs, the cap from his aftershave thrown beside her expensive moisturizer. The contrast was obscene, but familiar. She wiped the counter with a towel, leaving everything a little too clean. Back in the bedroom, she paused at the dresser. Their wedding photo waited there, trapped in a five-dollar frame. The shot was all sun and wind—her hair loose, his hands in her pockets, two idiots grinning at nothing. She stared at his face, the way his eyes narrowed when he laughed, the scar that made him look dangerous even when he smiled. She touched the glass, then flipped the frame down. It landed with a flat, resigned smack.
The ring was harder. She’d stopped wearing it around the club, but here, in the house, it was always on. She twisted it back and forth, letting the metal bite the skin. There was a tan line, paler than the rest of her hand, a perfect white circle that would probably never fade. She pulled the ring off, slow, and set it on the nightstand beside Damron’s keys and wallet. For a second she thought about taking it with her, but that would have been a lie. She left it there, like a crime scene marker.
Carly grabbed a yellow sticky note from the kitchen counter, wrote “I can’t do this anymore. Not after last night. I’m sorry,” and stuck it under the bottle of Advil by his side of the bed. She almost added more, but there wasn’t anything else to say. She was tired of explaining herself to people who didn’t want to listen. She walked through the house one last time. The livingroom was a patchwork of their life: her law books wedged next to his motorcycle magazines on the shelves, a coffee table stained with both tequila and highlighter, the couch where they’d made up after every single fight. She smelled his cologne in the cushions, her perfume in the curtains, and for a second she almost sat down and waited for him to come back, let him yell, let him break something, let him convince her to stay. But she kept moving.
At the door, she hesitated. She realized she’d never know which ones to pack and which to leave behind. All of it felt borrowed, rented, doomed to be repossessed. Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She knew it was the hospital, an automated update, maybe a nurse. She silenced it without looking. The last thing she needed was another excuse to turn around. Carly gripped the handle of the suitcase, stepped outside, and let the screen door snap shut behind her. For the first time in years, she didn’t lock it.
###
They let him out at noon. The nurse was younger than some of his tattoos, and she had a way of talking that made every instruction sound like a threat.
“You need to rest,” she said, peeling the blood-crusted bandage from his side. “No heavy lifting, no driving, no alcohol for at least—”
Damron grunted, which was all the answer she was going to get. He yanked on his shirt, wincing as it tugged at the stitches. She tried to hand him a paper bag full of painkillers and paperwork; he left it on the chair. At the lobby, the discharge clerk wanted a signature. Damron made an X on the line and walked out before she could ask for ID.
The sun was brutal, cutting through the parking lot in white-hot slabs. A prospect waited near the curb, sweating through a brand new Bloody Scythes vest, hands tucked awkwardly intothe pockets of his cargo shorts. Damron didn’t know the kid’s name, but he respected the punctuality.
“Your bike’s out back, sir,” the prospect said, eyes pointed somewhere over Damron’s shoulder.
“Call me Damron or call me Boss. ‘Sir’ gets you punched,” Damron said, limping past.
They circled to the loading dock. The Harley was there, gleaming but with a smear of dried blood on the clutch lever. Damron ran his hand over the tank, felt the heat, the memory of the fight stitched into his skin. He swung a leg over, every muscle in his side screaming, but he didn’t let it show. The prospect tried to offer a helmet. Damron waved him off. “Go get me a fifth of something worth drinking,” Damron said. “And none of that plastic bottle shit.”
