Katie
“Just try not to get yourself killed before we figure it out.”
Great advice. There was just one problem.
If Damian came to my store and tried to stir shit up, I was probably the worst person for exercising self-restraint. For better or for worse, mostly better but occasionally worse, I could not back down when a customer tried to stir shit up. It just wasn’t in my blood to back down.
And that certainly wasn’t going to start just because some asshole happened to have a gun.
I understood the stand your ground rules in this state. As long as I felt like my life was in genuine danger, I could defend myself by any means necessary. Damian had been more than willing to show me that he had a gun before his brother had been killed and before he knew that Connor and I had hung out. What was going to happen now?
A whole lot of danger. A whole lot of risk. A whole lot of action.
I welcomed it. Maybe it would be my undoing—it certainly explained well why I had a tendency to pick poor guys—but I wasn’t going to be a damsel in distress. I was going to be the damsel raising hell, putting the assholes in distress.
I just had to make sure that no one else suffered because of it.
* * *
In the morning, I called an all-hands meeting with my employees at ten a.m. A few of the slackers bitched about having to be up so early in the morning—a notion that seemed downright laughable to me—but somehow, for one of the few times in my life, I got one hundred percent attendance from all my employees. How I had pulled that off would be a greater miracle than Connor possibly coming back into the picture.
“Listen up,” I said. “Recently, this store has been the target of gang-related activity. And so far, that activity has remained at tomfoolery and some minor theft. However, tensions are flaring up between rival gangs out in Santa Maria, the suburb just east of here.”
A few people’s eyes widened. A few looked like they already knew. I wasn’t surprised by either. My employees, nice as they were, did not come from the greatest or healthiest walks of life. If some of them had boyfriends or just friends in either the Bandits or the Black Reapers, that would have been less surprising than if they didn’t.
“I am telling you this not to scare you, but just to say that if you see the two in the store at the same time, you need to be prepared for the worst. And let me tell you right now, if one of them robs you and asks for money, if one of them asks for cigarettes or booze, give it to them.”
“What?” Lakisha said.
She had long known me as the tough-as-nails, don’t-give-an-inch type of store owner. And when I didn’t worry about my employees’ lives, that was the right approach. But when I did? I could be a bitch, but I wasn’t a sociopath.
“Your lives are not worth breaking up a fight while getting paid ten bucks an hour, let’s just call it for what it is,” I said. “I would say the same no matter what you are getting paid. I am working on reaching out to local law enforcement to get further reinforcements, but the cops don’t have unlimited reach. You all need to be prepared.”
“Shit, didn’t think this job would be my life,” another employee, Ricardo, said.
“I’ll cover shifts for anyone who doesn’t want to risk it for the next two weeks.”
It was also a convenient excuse to be on station grounds if Connor took me up on my offer to use this area for an ambush.
“You will keep your job. You won’t get paid, but I’ll make sure you don’t get fired. You can come and speak to me individually if that’s what you want.”
I looked around the room. A couple of the late-night people looked like they wanted to speak up but feared doing so would somehow hurt them. Little did they know that doing so would actually make me like them even more, not less.
“So, to summarize. Do not risk your life to stop them. I will cover any shift for the next two weeks if someone wants to stay home, and you won’t be fired. If that is the case, come and speak to me individually. I will be in the office.”
I headed to the office, leaving my employees back. I had barely sat down at the desk in there when a knock came. About four employees—three who worked nights, one who worked in the mornings—were already ready to ask for the time off. The morning one would suck, for morning was five a.m., not eight a.m., but it was a small sacrifice I had to make to ensure my store’s safety.
I texted Connor once all the meetings were done, encouraging him to set something up for the evening. I didn’t get a response back. Justine, though, texted me, asking me how the store was.
Her appearance on my phone reminded me of how much reason I had to dislike bikers. Was I really willing to riskmy lifefor this?
Well, this wasn’t for the bikers. This was for my store. This was for me. Connor and crew just so happened to benefit.
That was what I told myself, at least.
“The store is fine,” I said. “I think we have to hunker down, though. I think this is just the start of a spree of sorts.”
Justine started to respond immediately. She was easily the most caretaking of the entire four of us, and the very thought that someone could be in some kind of danger was horrifying to her.
“Be careful! Is there anything I can do?”
I couldn’t help but smile. I would never be like Justine, but maybe I could take a nicer approach to Connor. Maybe instead of berating him for being an asshole, I could recognize what had caused him to be an asshole.
Maybe I could give him a second chance.
“Pray for me,” I said.
I was not religious.
But for what was about to go down, I probably needed the help of every deity and supernatural being there ever was.
