Page 2 of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

That’s how I grew up. The worthless daughter of a club whore. Women, old ladies included, are nothing more than second-class citizens with the Lords. The Brimstone Lords. My brother’s club. Our father’s club. Chaos’s club.

He didn’t grow up in the life, just hung at the fringes. Knew my brother from school. Best friends from, like, kindergarten on.

Once upon a time I thought he could give me a life away from all this. If it weren’t for that stupid bro code, the one that says you don’t fuck your best friend’s younger sister, which kept us apart for so long.

Until he couldn’t stay away any longer, which happened to be the night my father was murdered and my brother, the stupid idiot, avenged his death—along with his best friend, my love. The love he pulled from my bed and didn’t even know it, not until a few months ago, which would be why he stopped talking to me. And Chaos.

Two guards, newly patched, guard the front gate. But that’s okay because I have no intension of waltzing out the front gate.

It took some time, but eventually I started to venture outside again, after my kidnapping and subsequent rescue, after Elise’s kidnapping and subsequent rescue the day of her wedding—well, the rescue happened a day later. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is how Houdini accessed the Lord property from an old access road at the back of the property, a road where they keep an old pickup truck parked to block the unguarded back gate. A pickup for which I have a key, a gate for which I also have a key hanging on the keyring next to my car keys.

Keys that neither Chaos nor my brother, nor Boss or even Duke know I grifted.

So as Blaze and Blue stare out at the road in front of the compound, I run silently through the short, mowed grass running along the singlewide trailers off to the side of the main clubhouse and into the tall never-been mowed grass leading back to the access road and my freedom.

The truck is loud but far enough away from the compound that it shouldn’t wake up a bunch of drunken bikers. And if it does, I’ll already be far enough away before they mobilize and figure out it was me who’d run off.

I’ve tried to stay.

But I just can’t do it. Can’t be here anymore, slowly drowning on the phantom water filling up the blackness of the room where Chaos, Gage, sleeps.

The truck turns over after a strangled start but rumbles to life. End of the access road joins a back state highway.

By the time the distant rumble of bikes disturbs the night, I’ve already turned off the old highway to cross the bridge into Ohio. Bridges connect Ohio and Kentucky at various spots all the way up the Ohio River. We stay near one such bridge.

My stomach hurts being off the compound, making me vulnerable to Houdini once again. But he couldn’t know my escape would come tonight.

By the time dawn breaks, I’m firmly inside the border of West Virginia. To fool them, to fool Gage, I crossed from Kentucky into Ohio. But they’d expect me to head north again, wouldn’t they? Back to Chicago.

I’m smarter than that.

I drive east. A destination in mind.

Several hours into my getaway, my mouth parched, eyelids drooping and gas tank sputtering, I coast into a truck stop.

Truckers openly gawk at my dress, or lack of dress. A Lords T-shirt, no pants, no shoes. But they could never understand I had to get out. Gage, he’d have known, heard me moving around the room. Can’t live the life and sleep deep. Everything had to be the same. Same. He’d have seen through a change in routine, even down to what I wear to bed. Besides, I have money. I have money to fill the gas tank.

I have money for coffee. Coffee to fill the Livvy tank.

I even find a cheap pair of pink jersey shorts with a West Virginia logo in white on the right leg corner, and a pair of plastic flip-flops.

The shorts, a size too small, hardly cover my ass cheeks, but cover enough to not get me arrested for indecent exposure when I tie up the T-shirt, so reports of a crazy woman in nothing but a T-shirt don’t find their way back to The Lords.

The very last thing I do is walk over to the meager electronics department where they sell replacement phone cords and car chargers, and thankfully exactly what I’m looking for. I pick up the package for one of those cheap, disposable flip phones, one of thoseuntraceableflip phones, and a card with triple the minutes. This card has a thousand minutes, which means three-thousand when I load it onto my account.

Twenty minutes after sitting in the parking lot of the truck stop setting up my phone account with those minutes and new number, the open road calls to me again, eastward bound. Disturbingly toward the sea.

If I allow myself to think about it, finding myself anywhere near a large body of water in my state of mind is probably not the smartest choice.

But this is an escape from bikers and murderers, so I hardly allow myself to think about it.

***

Several hours of highway behind me, mountains turn coastal, heat turns light breeze and the briny scent of freedom wafts through the truck cab along with the call of the gulls flying overhead.

I’ll be safe here.

I have to be.

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