Page 41 of Iggy

“No. I think it makes the next five seconds clear.”

For a moment neither moved. The palms thrashed. A loose piece of gutter sailed across the neighboring yard and vanished into the dark. Tank released the handlebar.

“You got a gun?” he asked.

She refused to answer and swung one leg over the seat. Tank grabbed the back of the slicker.

“What’s in the bag?” Neela twisted free so fast the fabric tore at the shoulder.

“Touch me again.” His face changed—not frightened, not sorry, but careful.

“Neela. We deserve to know. We are one club or are you leaving when all this is done?”

“I said don’t.”

“You don’t know what he’ll do. Maybe he’s fucking tired of running from you and he’ll kill you. You have no idea what he’s capable of.”

“Neither do you.” She kicked the starter. The bike coughed, shuddered, died. Tank gave a bitter laugh.

“There. God gets a vote.”

She kicked again. The engine caught with a ragged snarl. The weak headlamp trembled yellow against the rain. Tank stepped in front of it.

“God voted yes. Move.”

“If you leave, I follow.” Now it was Neela’s turn to laugh.

“In what? The truck’s axle-deep behind the shed. The Harley’s will be swallowed up in this weather.”

“I’ll find a way.”

“Then find one after I’m gone.” She hesitated for a moment as he opened his mouth to speak, then she stopped him. She tried the old bike again and it started, still coughing but it was alive. “You wanted one clear thing? Here it is. If you follow me, Olive will disappear forever. That will be on you.”

He stood there another second, rain washing the anger off his face and exposing something more helpless underneath. Then he stepped aside.

Neela shot into the driveway before he could change his mind. The rear tire slewed the moment it hit the road. Neela put a boot down, corrected, and drove into the rain.

The world beyond the headlamp had been erased. Houses appeared as pale rectangles and vanished. Ditches overflowed across the asphalt in shining brown sheets. Every gust shoved the bike toward the center line or the shoulder, and each time she fought it back with her elbows locked and her teeth clenched. Her phone buzzed inside the slicker.

Tank. She let it buzz.

At the highway, deputies had parked a cruiser sideways beside a ROAD CLOSED barricade. Neela cut through the lot of a shuttered bait shop before their headlights found her, bounced over a curb, and followed a service road lined with drowned cane. The bike bucked under her. Rain found the split in the slicker and ran cold down her spine.

The hospital had been empty since the flood three years ago. Its upper windows were boarded; its lower windows were black gaps. A strip of faded blue paint ran along the facade beneath letters that had once spelled ST. CATHERINE REGIONAL. Only CATHER remained, pale and crooked over the entrance.

Neela killed the engine beneath the emergency canopy. Silence rushed in, enormous except for the rain drumming on the metal roof. A red pickup sat near the ambulance bay with its lights off. Mud coated the doors. No plates.

She checked the time. 3:42. Early. Or he was.

She pulled the backpack tight and crossed to the sliding emergency doors. One hung shattered in its frame. The other had been forced aside enough to admit a body.

Inside, the air smelled of mold, wet gypsum, and something medicinal that had survived everything. Her headlamp swept over overturned wheelchairs, a row of plastic chairs bolted together, and a reception desk furred with black mildew. Paper signs curled from the walls. TRIAGE. RADIOLOGY. FAMILY WAITING.

The irony was so ugly she nearly laughed. An emergency room for the emergency Terry had made of her life. Everything was his fault.

“Luca?”

Her voice traveled down two corridors and came back thin. Nothing. She stepped farther in. Water ticked from the ceiling into metal pans someone had arranged beneath leaks. A curtain moved at the end of the trauma bay.