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  I think Splitter sensed as much, because at some point, maybe about ten minutes from outside the shop, he looked at me, tightened his grip on the steering wheel, and pretended to rev the car.

  “Would you get mad if I did some donuts here?” he said, throwing his head back in a good-natured laugh.

  “What, right here in the street? Do you want me to go back to the hospital?”

  “I wanna see these tires burn!” he roared as if rushing into battle on the flames of a chopper itself.

  I laughed but then held on for dear life, my hand going for the door as tightly as it could, when he hit the accelerator upon the light turning green so hard that the tires squealed. This was certainly a rush, but I’m not sure thrill was the right word.

  In any case, Splitter had only meant the moment as a short, intense burst of giddiness, and when we got to the shop, he came to a complete stop, no donuts necessary.

  “Krispy would’ve loved to have seen that,” I said as I breathed easy once the car was off.

  “Krispy would’ve happily given you a dozen of those if he’d driven you,” he said. “Why I picked you up.”

  I murmured a “hmm” and kept going to the clubhouse. A few of the relatively newer members, the non-officers, all nodded to me and said it was good to see me back so quickly. I didn’t quite have the patience or energy to tell them that in the Savage Saints, you rarely healed completely; you healed just enough to get where you needed to go and then you went there. I would instead let the wheels of time reveal that to them.

  I headed inside, saw the remaining officers—BK, Sensei, Sword, Mafia, and Krispy—standing there, pounding the table with shot glasses there. “Trace! Trace! Trace! Trace!”

  I smirked as I grabbed my own shot glass, wondering what was the greater number—the six shots on the table, or the average number of shots done per officer at this point. With this club, it was always a question one needed to ask.

  “What’s this for?” I said. “We don’t throw parties for getting out of the hospital.”

  “We do when we cripple the DMs of their coke,” Krispy said. “Now I want to cripple the rest of their skulls!”

  “They ain’t doing anything now,” BK grumbled. “Probably ain’t even able to stand upright on streets. Lookin’ like addicts lookin’ for a hit.”

  “We did good, you see?” Mafia said.

  “All right, all right,” I said. “But one shot for now. We need to be focused going into the hall. What would your mamas say if you showed up plastered for the hall?”

  “I’d just say the blood o’ Christ got too much for me!”

  We all shared a contagious laugh at Mafia’s humor, said “to Green Hills,” and then downed the shot. The whiskey felt lukewarm, as if they’d anticipated me for some time but had just not gotten around to taking the shot until now. Better than actual warm, I suppose.

  “Come on,” Sensei said, more than willing to play the role of buzzkill.

  The seven of us headed in, dropping our phones outside and any other means of communicating with the outside world. Once everyone had stepped in, I made sure to seal the door shut.

  “All right, let’s get started. What’s the general consensus on the other night?”

  “We’ll get something healthy out of this if we choose to sell it,” Sword said. “Five figures worth of coke in that place. The kind of thing that would get the entire DMs arrested if the officers in that area had balls a third of the size as we do.”

  A few whistles filled the room, along with some cheering from Krispy and Splitter. Most of the rest of the room, though, didn’t show as much, perhaps having had too much experience in this sort of thing. I preferred just to take a puff of my cigarette as I let the group continue.

  “What would Jane say if she saw you smoking that thing?” Splitter said.

  I rolled my eyes, drawing a few chuckles from the crowd.

  “She ain’t my doctor,” I said. “She just nursed me back to health.”

  Just. Yeah, hopefully, goes a little bit further.

  “In any case, if she were my doctor, she’d probably also tell me to pick a safer hobby than bikes and shootouts. But she’s not a cop, so she’s not about to force me to do anything.”

  “Yeah, cuz the cops tell us what to do,” Mafia interjected.

  “Touché,” I said. “Mafia. What’s the response been from the Mercs, if any?”

  “Very, very pissed off, as you can guess,” he said. “We need to plan for a retaliation, you see?”

  “How soon, if you had to guess?”

  “Within the week.”

  No surprise there, but it did immediately silence the general jocular humor going around the room.

  “I don’t like the idea of going out tonight,” I said. “I think that you fly into a bee’s nest that’s ornery and you’re just going to get stung multiple times.”

  “Or,” BK said. “We knock those fuckers out while they’re reeling. They ain’t doing shit right now, boss.”

  “We’re low on ammo,” Sword said. “It would have to be a sort of hit and run. We can sell the drugs and get guns, but—”

  “We’re not selling coke here in Green Hills,” I said before that train of thought went somewhere it shouldn’t have. “We’ve kept anything harder than weed out of here for as long as Paul has run the show, and I’m not about to change up that part of his legacy.”

  I spoke as harshly as I could, almost bitterly, to avoid that from ever coming up again. We were here to protect the populace on a level that the police just didn’t have the manpower to, not to make it a drugged-out nightmare. There were many gray lines that I was more than willing to cross, but drugs in Green Hills was not one of them.

  “Could sell ‘em to the colors down in Los Angeles,” Sensei suggested. “We can charge a premium since the DMs won’t be able to deliver their full supply. Make it sound like we got new connections, but that because of scarcity, it’s going to be difficult.”

  “True,” I said. “Anyone got an objection to that?”

  No one did. It made almost too much sense.

  “OK, we’ll do it like that. Mafia, Splitter, you two head down to LA—be careful, I don’t need to remind you that you’ll be going past Merc territory—and reach out to our friends in Watts and Compton. Get rid of all of the powder in this building; if I were an ATF agent coming through here with X-Ray vision, I wouldn’t ever want to find that shit. Clear?”

  Both of them acknowledged as much.

  “I agree we need to strike at the Mercs, perhaps get them reeling while we can. But Sword, when you say we’re low on ammo, how low do you mean?”

  “My best guess,” he said, taking a puff to give himself time to think. “If we sent a group of a dozen down to their warehouse and armed them with rifles and pistols, rifles have one clip and pistols two.”

  Shit. That’s not good enough.

  “That’s enough for a stealth and an escape,” I said. “We have to assume that whatever shit we get ourselves into, we’re going to be in a shootout for it. I’ll put it to a vote, but I think we oughta wait until we get some cash from selling the coke and seeing if we can get some ammo. All in favor of delaying our attack at least to the next hall session?”

  I regretted what I’d said as soon as I did, not because of the content, but because I was supposed to put it to a vote if we’d fight or not, not if we’d abstain. I felt like I had just asked a group of soldiers if they’d rather read poems than go and fight—even if the measure passed, I was going to get a judgment and looks for this.

  “Nay,” BK said. “Kick their ass now. We got bombs.”

  I looked to Sensei, who had his hands down.

  “Nay,” he said, drawing a surprised look from me. “You don’t let an enemy reeling get back on its feet.”

  Sword was next, and his vote did not draw the same surprised look.

  “Yea,” he said. “You think I’m full of shit when I said we don’t have the ammo? Be my fucking
guest.”

  I turned next to Mafia.

  “Yea. They aren’t as beaten down as you’d a hope.”

  I knew how Krispy would vote, perhaps the most violence-lusting member of the group.

  “Nay!” he growled.

  That left just one person before it came to me. 4-2 would make it impossible for me to gridlock, and even if my vote counted twice and I could gridlock it, I wanted to show my respect for the due process.

  “Splitter?”

  “I’m tired of what the DMs have done,” he groused. “But if we’re really low on ammo, that’s a damn good way to get ourselves killed.”

  Despite his seemingly easy set up for saying yea, he went into the tank for so long that I almost had to prod him to make a decision.

  “Yea,” he finally said. “Keep the guns.”

  “Gridlocked at three a piece, I vote yea, we stay our action,” I said. “Mafia? Splitter? You still good for running the drugs?”

  Both nodded.

  “To the rest of you, lay low,” I said with a long sigh. “In case you’ve forgotten, we had one of our own murdered in cold blood. I just got out of the hospital. We’re all a little too much on edge right now. We should always have a chip on our shoulder when it comes to the Mercs, but make that chip too big, and it weighs you down. Mafia and Splitter, your job, done right, should never put you in the line of danger. OK? To all of you, finish whatever shift you have in the shop, and we’ll reconvene tomorrow afternoon around two, OK?”

  “Got it,” they all said to some degree.

  Truthfully, I knew that most of them, even Sword and Splitter, wanted to go and attack the Mercs. Hell, I wanted to fucking attack the Mercs. For all that they had done in the last few years?

  But rationality had to win the day.

  … Or, more honestly, I didn’t want anything to interrupt my drinks with Jane. Granted, there was absolutely no way I would ever confess that to being the truth with the group—even with Sensei and Splitter—but I didn’t need to. It was a truth that they needed the time off, and I needed my lady time.

  It just was a matter of how much they knew that mattered. And they knew enough.

  Chapter 6: Jane

  When my shift finally ended, as I removed my lab coat and the various instruments, taking only my key card so I could swipe in and out of the building, I just had one question following me.

  What the hell was I thinking?

  Walking through the now-calm ER—a room that was perhaps more aptly described as “part-time ER” given that Green Hills didn’t have that many true emergencies—and out into the bright, sunny day felt like it should have given me clarity of what I was trying to do. The drive home in my 2016 Honda Civic, as opposite a vehicle as what the Savage Saints would ever be caught in, should have reminded me that I didn’t want to get back involved with that beyond what the Hippocratic Oath required of me in times of them being my patients.

  But, well, should and did had become two very divergent paths, one which, if I’d off-ramped to it at the right time, would probably have me somewhere like Chicago or New York, far away from the madness and insanity of Green Hills. Even if it had just taken me to UCLA, that would at least have put enough reasonable distance for me not to have to worry about the boys ever coming to see me more than once in a blue moon.

  Instead, I found myself back in Green Hills, death place of my father and a living symbol of everything that I feared.

  It couldn’t just have been paying back the Saints. You could have done that remotely. What… why did you come back here?

  Is it because maybe you actually feel safe here? That you know the Saints will better protect you than anyone else?

  Or… is there something you haven’t admitted to yourself yet?

  The car ride did me no favors, and by the time I’d gotten back to my gated apartment complex—which I knew wouldn’t protect me if violence broke out—I felt myself coming back to my decision earlier today as perhaps a clue for why I had done what I had done.

  I had said yes to meeting Tracy for drinks.

  As friends.

  As nothing more than friends.

  … Really.

  Even if I knew where these types of things tended to lead.

  Admittedly, I had crushed on Tracy before. He was always the hot guy from afar with his slicked-back black hair, his early stubble, and his lithe, muscular body. Now that I’d come back, he’d added a few club tattoos, more muscle, and some more lines on his face that made him look like he had aged like a fine wine. His crow's feet had become more pronounced, as had his dimples. His biceps and chest had swelled.

  Still, for all of his physical features, nothing had ever happened between us. We’d never even hung out that much. Back then, he was just too old—five years didn’t sound like much, but in the days of high school, it would have meant a high school freshman would be dating a college freshman, which just seemed wrong on so many levels. By the time it finally would have been appropriate, I had long left Green Hills behind.

  So what now?

  Two and a half years, Jane.

  Two and a half years.

  Those five words rang in my head on an almost daily routine. I’d wake up, brush my teeth, and look presentable. Two and a half years. I’d drive my car to the hospital. Two and a half years. I’d finish my shift, as I had now, and think the same five words. Two and a half years.

  Someday, those two and a half years would become two years. Then one year. Then one month. Then one week. Then one day.

  And then, I’d be gone, never to return.

  Why would I ever want to get involved with someone if I knew it had an expiration date on it? I wanted my next relationship to be long-lasting; even if it wasn’t, I certainly wasn’t going to be an old mama for the club, and most certainly I wasn’t going to be one for Tracy.

  Funny thing to say for someone who has never had a relationship for longer than six months. So, really, might as well let things play out since they’ll inevitably fade with time.

  That’s a dumb thing to think. You were in undergrad at a really good school and then med school. No one would have time for a relationship under those circumstances.

  Except for all the people who did, which doesn’t include you. All the people who found the time to be happy with other people. So what’s your excuse?

  “Fuck,” I muttered to myself.

  I’d done so well at dodging these relationship questions because I’d thrown myself so much at school and my job. The desired stats were easy—forever marriage, two kids, a house somewhere on the outskirts of a safe city…

  But what woman didn’t want that? Or, at least, what woman who wanted a family didn’t want that?

  My actions spoke to the fact that I was afraid of commitment, for whatever reasons—well, I knew the reasons, but I didn’t dare speak them out loud at this point. It was too painful to contemplate.

  Maybe a drink or two with an old friend would help that out.

  * * *

  At five minutes past eight, I walked into Rick’s, feeling like I was drawn to the magnetic charm of Tracy in a way that I could not rationally explain. I told myself that I would have one drink—I know I had said two, but I decided in renegotiations with myself to limit it to one—a meal, and then duck out. I legitimately did have a shift at eight the next morning, and anything that took me out past nine was a good way to ensure I had a rather unproductive shift the next day.

  Not that those shifts ever involve anything. Especially in the morning? At most, get a heart attack patient or someone in a morning wreck who isn’t even seriously injured.

  Just… see where it goes.

  I looked to the left, not seeing Tracy. I looked ahead at the bar and didn’t see him there either. I turned right—

  Nope, I had seen him—or rather, his back. The colors gave it away. You just better not have brought any other colors, Tracy. You know what the deal is.

  I approached, never realizing how broad hi
s back looked when hunched over a bar like this. He looked like he had gotten his hair cut since this morning, which… he didn’t have any reason to other than this date.

  My stomach got a little bit hotter and felt a little more turbulent as I approached.

  “You got all cut up for me,” I said.

  Not expecting that, he jumped but quickly settled himself down as he turned to me. He then threw on that easy smile—a smile I swore he never had with his buddies around—and embraced me tightly. I felt safe in those burly arms, those arms that had once more looked akin to skinny spears than something that could waltz out on stage for the gun show.

  “I just figured if I’m meeting a professional, I oughta look professional.”

  “You?” I said. “You’re the last person I’d expect to look professional.”

  “Hey now, I’m a blue collar, professional, with-it mechanic.”

  “Uh huh. And I’m a white collar, professional toucher of people. That’s what I say is my real job, right?”

  “All right, jackass,” Tracy said with a smile and a gentle touch of my arm. “So tell me what you’ve been up to. Last I saw you before today…”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. I was wearing a black dress at that time, standing at a podium, criticizing him and his entire crew for being an abomination upon the city of Green Hills.

  Sometimes, we make mistakes in our youth. Or, at the very least, we say things we will regret.

  “Well, after everything that happened here, I spent all my time on the East Coast,” I said. “I spent my school years at NYU—New York University—and my summers interning everywhere I could.”

  “Tough stuff?”

  “Quite. I became very driven and determined to do well in my studies.”

  Because I never wanted to come back here for the longest time.

  “When I graduated, I had distant relatives reach out and say I could stay with them. But I had a summer program lined up with Johns Hopkins—”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, sorry, it’s a school in Baltimore.”

  “Ah, gotcha,” Tracy said in a manner that suggested he absolutely did not get it but wasn’t about to interrupt the conversation for further clarification.