Page 61 of Zen's Crash

“She’s just a girl. I didn’t like her more or less than any other girl.”

“You sure cut and pasted a lot of pictures of her onto nude bodies for your comic book.”

Terrance is so casual, you’d think he was talking about the weather. “I do that to a lot of girls, so that doesn’t exactly make her special.”

“But you had that shrine with all the pictures of her in your old office. Seems like you were crushing pretty hard on her.”

Terrance laughs. “I did that to freak you and your club brothers out because I knew you were looking for me.”

“That was fairly stupid,” Rigs tells him. “It led us right to you.”

“No,” Terrance contradicts him. Looking over at him, he clarifies, “Zen tracked down my real name on the computer somehow.”

“You used your mom’s credit card when you first moved into the apartment. You clearly thought you’d covered your trail but forgot about that one payment.”

Terrance almost looks proud. “You must have wanted me pretty bad to go digging through archived files.”

“Oh, I did. And if I have my way, you ain’t gonna walk out of here alive.”

Terrance’s eyes narrow on Zen, but he’s surprised when Zen shoots back. “I think you do have a thing for your cousin because you tried to get into her house while delivering food, and you came to her house the night of the break-in looking for her, right?”

“I thought at first the killer had just noticed my picture on the mantel and wanted to see me. But that wasn’t it. You came looking for me. And when my dad wouldn’t tell you where I was, you killed him in a fit of rage.”

“That’s just speculation on your part,” Terrance deadpans back. It’s weird that he won’t confirm or deny it.

Rigs says, “It’s not that he has a thing for you, I think he broke into your house with the intention of killing you both. What I want to know is why.”

Zen joins the conversation. “Rigs is right. You wanted to kill them both. But the question remains, why?”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Terrance says with such authority that I would believe him if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Although his face was obscured, he looks exactly like the man who broke into our house and killed my dad.

Rigs switches up the conversation a bit. “Tell us why your fingerprints were found on items in the kill bag buried on Lexi’s property.”

That surprises me, no one had told me they’d gotten information back from the police. Unless of course, Rigs is just bluffing. This question throws him for a loop. For the first time, he looks truly shaken. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What kill bag?”

Rigs shoots me an odd look but decides to let it go, likely because he wants to see what Terrance’s dad has to say about it. A couple of the brothers take Terrance away, but I’m not totally sure where.

I get distracted watching Rage prep Zen’s shoulder for surgery. I realize the room has gone silent, and there is a strange man without a cut standing in the doorway with Siege’s wife, Cleo, and Rider’s old lady, Fran, who says, “No insult intended, Rage, but I thought we’d go with a real doctor this time.”

“None taken. I’m happy to defer to a real doctor.”

Cleo and the doctor walk in together. Cleo introduces him, “Dr. Patchett, I’d like you to meet my husband, Siege—he’s the president of the Savage Legion. Siege, this is Dr. Thomas Patchett.”

“Nice to meet you, Dr. Patch. I appreciate you making a house call to an MC. Not many doctors are up for a gig like that.”

“I’m a surgeon with the VA. Fran was kind enough to introduce me to your wife, and they both spoke highly of your MC. I’m a bit of a motorcycle enthusiast myself, so when I heard one of your club members was injured, I agreed to stop by.”

I can tell the club officers are shocked and a bit annoyed at how Cleo just came walking in with this stranger, catching us all by surprise. They don’t show it, though. In fact, Siege steps forward and extends his hand. “Any friend of my wife’s is a friend of mine.”

“Thanks for the warm welcome. I’d best get to it.” Turning to Rage, he asks, “What do you have for me tonight?”

“My club brother has a four-inch laceration on his exterior deltoid muscle. It looks like it just missed severing a ligament. I have it prepped and ready to suture. It’s a clean cut with a knife, so I don’t think it needs to be x rayed or anything.”

They continue to chat, involving Zen in the conversation when issues relating to pain management, cleaning and dressing the wound, and how to know if it becomes infected come up.

The wives stay, and the conversation turns to more mundane things. I know they must be curious about what happened, but you’d never be able to tell by looking at them. The whole situation is surreal.

It doesn’t take the doctor long to stitch up the wound. It’s a little nauseating to see him trimming away jagged flesh for a clean closure. By the time he’s finished, I’m thinking to myself that the scar will be a lot less noticeable because of the doctor’s expertise.

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