Chapter Ten

The empty desk where Seth usually sat was like a black hole in the corner of the room. All of Pete’s energy, focus, and overall good-vibes ability was getting sucked into it never to be seen again.

Without Seth there, Pete’s afternoon Geology 100 section was just like every other interaction he had with the students here. He spent an hour talking to a brick wall, and his students paid as little attention as they could possibly get away with while still passing the class.

He handed quizzes back at the end of the lecture, and a parade of bored teenagers came up and avoided eye contact while they picked up their papers. You could not tell from their faces who had gotten a perfect score and who had barely passed.

Pete reminded himself that after this semester, this was probably what all his classes were going to look like.

As he packed his things, he sent a text to Seth. I have your quiz from last week, by the way. If you want me to bring it to you, I can.

Seth had been out for almost a week now. His texts had all assured Pete that he was fine, that he’d just strained a muscle or something and would be back in class soon. Pete didn’t want to intrude on his space or bother him when he was in pain, but…

He almost dropped his laptop when his phone buzzed. Seth had gotten back to him much faster than he had been doing this week.

Come by Watty’s, the text said. I’m gonna be here all night.

Pete swallowed. Even if you didn’t know it was an infamous biker gang hangout, Watty’s looked like a terrifying place to hang out.

I don’t think I’ll be staying long, he typed. But I’ll bring it by :)

Seth replied with a thumbs-up emoji almost instantly. Pete paused for a while before deciding not to reply. This was not the time to be clingy.

***

The street in front of Watty’s was packed on both sides with motorcycles and big, flashy SUVs. A small crowd had gathered in front of the bar, smoking and laughing while they drank out of red plastic cups.

Pete’s heart was pounding in his chest. Maybe he could just tell Seth he’d had to work late. He could just...oh. There was Seth, waving to him from his wheelchair on the sidewalk.

Pete rolled his window down and slowed to a crawl. “Hey,” he said. “Um, why don’t…”

“There’s more parking in back,” Seth yelled. “Burgers and brats on the house!”

“Um…” As Pete looked over the crowd of jolly bikers, he realized the inside of the bar was packed. “Okay,” he said. He pulled past the bar and into the parking lot behind it. At what point did he need to send a safety text to Jeff?

The parking lot behind the bar was almost as crowded as the street. Pete slowly made his way to the very back, where there was a spot open between two black pickup trucks with their cabs lifted almost as high as Pete’s roof.

His phone buzzed as he was trying to figure out a route to the front of the bar without anybody seeing him.

A text from Seth: Meet me by the back door. I’ll come find u.

Pete gulped and got out of his car. A boom box was playing loud, crunchy blues rock near a storage shed by the fence. He could smell a barbecue, and it looked like there was a temporary beer garden set up under awnings in the back of the bar.

Nobody seemed to notice Pete as he made his way toward the building. Going by the volume of the party and the smell of weed on the breeze, they had plenty of distractions from his outsider’s presence.

“Hey, Professor!”

Pete looked around when he heard Seth’s voice. He was hard to miss in his wheelchair, and the leather newsboy cap and matching vest covered in regalia.

“Hi, there!” Pete waved as Seth wheeled closer to him, parting the crowd in front of him. The other partygoers got out of his way in a hurry; most of them nodded to him and raised their drinks in salute.

“What’s up, brother?” Seth said. “You missed the rehearsal.”

“The rehearsal...oh!” Pete said. “Your brother’s wedding!”

“It’s his last night as a single man,” Seth said. “The Club’s sending him off in style.”

“Well, congratulations!” Pete said. “I should have brought a gift…”

“If we had people bringing gifts, we’d need a couple of semis,” Seth said. “We’ve got the whole extended family in town.”

“Big family,” Pete said.

“Blood and gasoline, brother!” Seth grinned and turned his wheelchair around. “Come on, let’s get you some grub.”

Pete realized, as he followed Seth through the rowdy mob, that he’d left Seth’s quiz in the car. It was too late to do anything about it now. A huge bald man in a vest that matched Seth’s was swaggering up to them, arm-in-arm with a sharp-boned bottle blonde who held a liter of bourbon by the neck.

“Seth, sweetie!” she said. “Is that tattoo shop guy?”

“Uh.” Seth glanced to the side for a second and laughed. “Uhh, yeah, this is Pete. Pete, this is my baby mama.”

“You son of a bitch, I’ll put you in one of them fuckin’ motorized…”

Seth tipped his head back and cackled at the blonde’s outrage.

“I’m his sister,” the blonde said, handing Pete the bottle of bourbon. “Jessica. And this is my husband Alexei.”

Alexei gave Pete a single chin-up nod.

Pete waved in reply with the hand that wasn’t holding the bourbon. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

“This one been giving you trouble down at the college?” Alexei jerked his elbow toward Seth.

“He’s making it very difficult to return his class assignments,” Pete said. He assumed he was supposed to put the bottle to his lips and take a swig, which seemed to be correct. He also assumed it was going to be foul, which it was not. “Ooh, what is this?”

“It’s just a little sumthin-sumthin,” Seth said. He grabbed the bottle from Pete and took a swig. “Can’t drink much of it on these pills, though.” He handed it to Alexei.

Alexei laughed. “Go get another burger and you’ll be fine.”

“You motherfuckers trying to get me too fat to ride,” Seth said. “C’mon. My little bro is one hell of a cook.”

Pete wasn’t sure how Seth’s sister seemed to know who he was. She seemed friendly enough, and so did her husband. They asked Pete where he was from, if he liked teaching, what you had to do to become a professor at Canyon Bluffs Community College. They complained about the heat wave that had come with the first months of fall.

The more they talked, the easier it was to forget that Pete was hanging out at a local crime den. Seth’s little brother—the one he’d been injured defending—was indeed one hell of a cook.

Pete wound up sitting with Jessica and Alexei on the tailgate of Alexei’s mother’s truck. Alexei’s mother had brought a folding lawn chair with its own built-in footrest. If he was being honest with himself, Pete was jealous.

She was a tall, thick woman with a face full of flawless makeup. She smoked thin white cigarettes in a tiny holder, and she was wearing more jewelry than anybody Pete had seen in his short life.

“So we are driving down through the desert when we get this phone call,” she was saying, her English just slightly accented. “She says, the baby is coming, you need to come to the hospital right now.”

“I said?” Jessica said. “I don’t think I was saying anything to anybody…”

“Babe, you had a lot to say at that point,” Alexei said. “But no, Mama, that was me on the phone.”

“Hmph.” Nadia gazed up at the sky and took a drag of her cigarette. “However it happened, I hung up the phone and said to Justin, we are turning this car around.”

“See, the way my dad used to tell the story, she just started firing in the air,” Alexei said, swinging the whiskey bottle back and forth between his knees. “He can never get it straight who else was in the car with him.”

“He was trying to save face,” Nadia said. “He was a tough man, could not admit I threw, what is it, a bitch fit when he started arguing.”

“I think I remember the bitch fit,” Jessica said. “See, what my dad…”

All five parties to the conversation straightened up a little at the roar of engines on the other side of the building. Someone was yelling.

“Ahh, shit!” Alexei shoved the bottle at his wife and took off running toward the bar. “Hey, settle down!”

His mother followed close behind him, yelling something in Serbian.

Pete could recognize the sounds of someone revving a motorcycle or eight.

“Oh, goddammit,” Jessica said. She dug in her giant studded purse until she found the cap to the bottle.

Seth’s face was calm, but there was a pilot light of rage burning behind those blue eyes.

Pete edged closer to him. “Umm, what is…”

“Scorpions,” Seth said. “I bet you dollars to…”

Three gunshots and several screams came from the other side of the bar.

“Fuck.” Jessica shoved the bottle in her purse and grabbed Seth’s wheelchair handles. “We gotta get out of here.”

As she took off across the parking lot with Seth, Pete realized that there was no way that woman was good to drive.

“Hey!” Pete ran after her. “Hey, I brought my car!”

“Jess, take his car,” Seth said. “Cops don’t know it!”

“You’re right!” Jessica stopped. “Where…”

“Over here!” Pete sprinted ahead of them and unlocked his little red beater. “Come on, we can fit the wheelchair in the backseat.”

“Fuck the wheelchair,” Seth said. “We gotta move!”

Pete didn’t argue. He opened the passenger door and cleared a seat out for Seth. His sister got him to the car and helped him transfer inside while Pete put his satchel in the backseat.

“Where are we going?” Pete said.

“Nadia has a little place by the lake,” Jessica said. “If this gets real we’ll be meeting up there anyway.”

“Got it.” Pete got in and started the car. As soon as Jessica closed her rear door he was getting out of the parking lot, behind a couple of SUVs that still had their doors open to take on passengers.

“Turn left!” Seth said when they made it to the street.

As Pete split off from the other cars fleeing the scene, he could hear sirens coming from a few blocks away. Jessica was in the backseat, peering through the window at the chaos behind them.

“I can’t see if anyone got shot,” she said.

“Put your fuckin’ seatbelt on, sis!” Seth said. “We’re making enough trouble for Pete.”

***

“The lake” was not the same lake that Pete had in mind. It was a good two-hour drive from the lake Pete was thinking of, and by Pete’s standards it wasn’t nearly big enough to be a lake. It was a small pond created out of a dammed stream, nestled in the hills high above Canyon Bluffs.

A small group of cabins had been built on the uphill side, and Pete only had a couple of minor panic attacks getting his little red car up the rocky driveway. He ignored the signals Seth gave out the window as they passed suspiciously thick clusters of trees and shrubs.

When they arrived at the cabins, a young man with a long beard and dark glasses came out one of the doors with a shotgun in one hand.

Jessica opened her door. “It’s family!” she said as she hopped out, waving at the gunman.

“Oh, hey!” The young man set his gun down against the door and walked up to Jessica. “Mom told me we were expecting company.”

Jessica motioned for Pete to join her. “Pete, this is my brother-in-law Miroslav. Miroslav, this is Seth’s boyfriend Pete.”

Pete froze in his tracks. He glanced back at Seth, who winked at him and waved.

He turned back to the man on the porch. “Hi?” he said.

“What’s up, brother?” Miroslav gave him the chin-up nod. “Looks like you got an official welcome to the family.”

Pete managed a nervous laugh. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “I’m not sure exactly what happened back there…”

“One of the fuckin’ gopniks tried to shoot someone’s tires out,” Miroslav said. “Cops are still trying to pin someone for it, but the Scorps took off and ran north before anything actually went down.”

“What the fuck did they think they were gonna do in broad daylight?” Jessica said.

“They probably aimed to drive by and start some shit,” Miroslav said. “Which they did.”

“Come on,” Jessica said. “Let’s get Seth out of the car.”

“You want me to call someone about the wheelchair?” Miroslav said. “Does he have a spare?”

“Fuck that,” Jessica said. “These fuckin’ things cost more than a goddamn job car.”

Miroslav let out a low whistle and shook his head. “I’ll go inside and get a chair,” he said.

Seth had already opened his door and gotten his legs out of the car. “Where’s my boyfriend?” he yelled, awfully loud and loose for someone who wasn’t supposed to be drinking.

“Good Lord,” Pete said as he helped Seth to his feet. “I hope you’re not telling everyone in town…”

“Hey, man, the boyfriend thing is all Jessica.” He leaned in to give Pete a kiss on the cheek. “Miroslav’s chill.”

“Yeah, it’s the guys from back East you gotta be careful with,” Jessica said. “Some of them are chill, some of them are, uh…”

“Some of them can try me,” Seth said. “I can’t walk, but I can still blow a hole in someone if I feel like it.”

Pete was partially horrified by the dead-serious snarl in Seth’s voice, and partially turned on… and, partially horrified by the very fact that he was turned on.

“See, our family abides by the Club’s rules,” Jessica said, “And Club Rules hold, first and foremost, that you don’t turn on family.”

“Oh.” Pete nodded. “Um. Right.” He was still processing the “boyfriend” part of things. Was Seth being serious? Was Jessica being serious?

Miroslav returned to the porch with a pile of folding chairs in each thick arm. “Here we go,” he said. “Just got a beep on the radio saying we’ll have more company. Mom’s coming by. She snagged your wheelchair.”

“Oh, good,” Seth said. “That’ll make it way easier to get down the stairs from this porch.”