Moose went off to get in contact with Cindy himself after a few days of speaking to her over the phone and planting the seeds of nostalgia. Chance told him they didn’t have time to completely immerse themselves in the rekindling of an old friendship. If she knew she was being used she’d just have to deal with it. Moose wasn’t over happy at the idea of that but he decided to go for it anyway.
“She agreed to meet for coffee,” Moose said a few days later.
“How urban college student of her,” Ben said.
He’d been a pill the past few days and Chance was seconds away from leveling him with a punch at any given moment. He had a permanent sneer on his face that was grating to Chance’s patience. Between Ben’s attitude, the need for swiftness with Moose’s plan, and the confusion over what to do about Hannah and her avoidance of him, he was ready to explode. If Benn didn’t watch out, it was going to be him that got the brunt of Chance’s anger.
For now, Chance ignored him, turning to Moose. “Bring her back here. Get coffee to-go, I don’t care. We need to move fast on this and the less time you two spend out in the open the better it will be.”
“Aye, aye captain.”
Moose took off leaving Chance and Ben there in silence. Chance took a breath and let it out, going to sit down with his beer while Ben just continued to chuckle to himself like he knew exactly when the world was going to end and was choosing not to tell anyone. Maybe Chance should take up meditation, some of that eastern medicine crap. Or maybe he should just break a glass on Ben’s head to knock the smirk right off his face.
Instead he drank more of his beer and glared into the wall behind the bar. He squeezed tightly on the handle counting the seconds until Moose returned.
“You need to relax, chief,” Ben said. “I can get you some stuff for that.”
“I want a clear head.”
“Is that why you’re pounding pints?”
“I’ve been drinking beer since I was 13, it’s going to take more than a pitcher of Bud Light to mess with me.”
“If this goes south too, you know I’m always willing to offer my services in any way.”
Chance knew what kind of services he wanted to offer. He wasn’t going to hurt Gabe, as much as he wanted to be done with this mess, it would kill Hannah and he knew, even now, he still cared. God he wanted to just bash his head against the nearest brick wall and be done with all of this.
He finished the beer in silence and left without saying a word to Ben. He walked outside. He couldn’t escape far, he told Moose to meet him here when he was done. He wondered if he should call back home, see if Hannah was around. It was strange the way he was craving her presence more and more in his life. It was her face he thought of when he asked himself how would he see himself calm. It wasn’t even her face in the throes of passion and in the middle of their orgasms, it was the way she looked after. He pictured her curled up into his bed, quietly breathing as she was between sleep and wakefulness. She seemed so calm and sincere.
He was sure he literally felt his blood pressure drop just thinking about it. It was a mess. He was a gang leader, a bike rider, he’d beaten men up so bad they had to go to the hospital. And here he was, practically swooning over some girl. Ben was chuckling away about it. And she was avoiding him, he felt like such a high school boy, pining his way after a girl, wondering if she was going to say yes to his request to ask her to prom.
He didn’t smoke often. It had been a habit his father had gotten him into so he didn’t often like to give in to it. It would be like giving in to every scary thing he felt about himself. Everything he was afraid of becoming was encapsulated in his father but fuck he needed a cigarette right now. He pulled out the package of tobacco and the filter paper and set to rolling it. Link had been the one to suggest he try hand rolled cigarettes. He said it would help Chance focus, give him a task when he was stressed out, and maybe even keep him from smoking too many if he knew he had to put in about 10 minutes of effort to get them rolled up.
It helped then, to make him feel useful with movement in his hands and a goal in mind. It helped take him away from the truth that he was simply sitting there waiting for information. Moose was the one doing all the work right now just like Link had been the one doing work before. He said that leadership was about not having to do things yourself, about having people who willingly did things for you. But it made Chance feel useless and antsy. He wanted to be out in the fray, helping his friends. He wanted to protect his men, not throw them into harm’s way or expect so much of them. But it was what leadership meant, he’d been elected to this position and he was going to do everything in his power to make sure he did his job right.
So he started by rolling up a cigarette and lighting it. The taste of the tobacco and the smell of the smoke in there was a small victory but one he was proud of nonetheless. It was a start. One thing checked off the box. Now all he had to do was figure out what to do when he finished it.
He didn’t have to wait long, Moose returned a few minutes later, just as Chance was putting out what was left of the cigarette under the heel of his boot. He wedged it into the asphalt as Moose pulled up with another rider to his back. This seemed like a good sign, he got the girl to go with him, it didn’t take too long. But as soon as Moose pulled up and killed the engine on the bike, Chance saw that something was very, very wrong.
The woman was slumped against Moose’s back. It looked like she might have been asleep except for the subtle movements to hold onto him, gripping as tightly as she could, to his waist. Chance stepped closer and saw, even in the dim light of the parking lot, that bruises were beginning to pepper over her arms. Her face was hidden by the visor of the helmet but he turned to look at Moose and saw his own face was incredibly pale. He watched the muscles in Moose’s neck and jaw flex with stress as he moved to help the girl off the bike.
She was as pliable as a doll, falling into Moose’s arms in a slump.
“What the hell happened?” Chance asked, taking one of the girl’s arms to help move her inside. He was afraid to touch anywhere on her body. Every inch of skin looked like it was in pain.
“I’ll explain when we get her inside and get her some water,” Moose said with more command in his voice than Chance had ever heard. He was scared. And Moose rarely got scared. Chance felt his own chest constrict a bit at the idea. If Moose was scared then something had to be wrong.
Together they helped move her inside. By the end of it they were virtually carrying her the rest of the way, her legs giving out to nothing but uselessness. Ben’s face was waiting inside to make a comment but turned to a confused frown when he saw the pair of them and the girl in between.
“Christ,” he whispered out and got up. He cleared off a table of salt and pepper shakers and random utensils, not bothering to ask the bartender if he cared.
They set her down on the table and Chance got his first real look at the state of her body. There were bruises everywhere. Most of them were oblong spots of marks, peppering her skin like deep purple ponds. Others were in the unfortunate shape of human fingers in a tight grip. It didn’t take a genius to figure out this had been done to her with purpose. Her face was swelling in spots, her lip bleeding, a small gash opened above her eye. Bruises were there as well with marks of dry blood caked.
“Call Link and my mother,” Chance ordered to Ben who had managed to curb his attitude from before and nodded, moving to use the phone behind the bar.
She was barely awake, Chance wasn’t even sure if she knew where she was.
“Cindy,” Moose said carefully, quietly into her ear. She stirred just a bit but it was barely enough. “Fuck.”
“What happened?” Chance said, grabbing Moose’s arm and holding him there to bring his attention in.
“They’re on their way,” Ben said, coming over to take his own look at the girl.
“I found her like this,” Moose said. “I got her out of there but that Black Death asshole beat the crap out of her. Someone leaked our plan to them. He totally wrecked her.”
Chance looked back at the girl. The guilt was coming over him in waves. So girl was hurt because of a plan he outlined. She was innocent, as innocent as an old lady in the Black Death could be but now she was a mess. He tried to look her over, see if there was anywhere he could tend to, any blood to clean up, but the cuts were still bleeding a little too freely. He felt a sense of pure helplessness.
Moose got a pitch over water and a bag full of ice from the bartender but stood there, confused about where he should put it first, which part of her was more wounded, in need of more attention. Several parts of her face were swelling and her nose might have been broken. It was impossible to tell with the amount of damage what was and what wasn’t actual wounds or just collateral damage. They settled for placing the bag of ice over one of her eyes that seemed to be swelling up more than the others. They dipped a handful of napkins into the water, not trusting the cleanliness of any of the bar rags, and began to dab her wounds in places. She let out small whimpers of pain but Moose insisted on continuing, though he looked positively miserable doing it.
“Oh good Lord,” Link said when they entered the bar in a flurry. The entire group was there, Link, Kat, Scout, and Hannah.
She didn’t have time to trade awkward eye contact with Chance again, moving forward in an instant at the sight of the girl on the table, moaning in pain. Scout followed soon after. They both, silently, all but pushed the men out of the way.
“We need soap,” Hannah said. “We need to clean these out. None of them are too deep but we have no idea what did this to her.”
The chilling thought crossed through his mind that she had been beaten with more than just fists, hurt with more than just human hands. He’d heard stories, and he knew how his father had been. He’d been an evil, vicious man to his mother. Everything could be an instrument for pain if he wanted it to be.
Chance looked at Hannah. She was concentrated on the task at hand, staring with intensity as she did her work. This could be her if the Black Death got their hands on her. This could be her or worse, as they sold her out to any man who would pay the right price. He wasn’t going to let that happen. He knew that much already, but now it was serious. This girl was near death, and Chance wasn’t going to let there be a day Hannah was the one in need of rags of water and ice.
***
Hannah hadn’t been incredibly excited at the idea of seeing Chance when Link came into the guest room and told her to put her shoes on because they were going to meet up with some of the others. All he said was there was something urgent but they didn’t know what. When she walked into the room and saw that girl, she felt an immediate need to help. It was something ingrained in all women of the world, she thought. They saw a woman in pain and wanted to move in to help. There was a sisterly bond. And that woman was hurt bad.
Scout was moving up beside her. This was a girl who had been beaten. She’d seen this before. They’d looked at domestic cases in class before and this was a perfect example right out of a text book. The bruises on her skin were in familiar shapes, human fingers, gripping tightly, welts in the shape of fists. Her eyes were swelling from trauma and she had to be in a tremendous amount of pain. Hannah almost wanted to cry when she saw her. It was awful and unfair.
She and Scout set to work without a word. She didn’t need to know what happened; she didn’t need to know why she was staring at the beaten body of this young woman. Chance had been out of the house almost the entire week, making plans and doing things without talking to her. So far her brother hadn’t ended up dead in a ditch somewhere so she was willing to let it go, it was easier than dancing awkwardly around each other. But now she felt shivers.
What had he been doing? And what had he done?
“Nothing is too serious,” Hannah said. “From what I can see anyway.”
“Nothing needs stitches,” Scout agreed. “Anything broken?”
Hannah had been performing pressure tests across the girls arms and legs to see if anything was particularly more tender than a bruise would suggest. So far she’d found nothing, which she was grateful for. She didn’t know how to bandage up and splint a broken bone and if it wasn’t done right the girl could get an infection. She desperately didn’t want to make any of it worse.
After a while the girl was cleaned up and looking a little better. She was still in a state of pain, and swelling, and the bruises didn’t magically disappear, but the blood was cleaned off and the cuts covered with bandages. She still looked awful.
“I’m going to take a minute,” Hannah said, getting up.
Her hands were stained pink from all the blood that had passed over them as she cleaned off the woman. She went to the bathroom, out the faucet on hot, and scrubbed to the point where she thought her skin might come off. The pink stain was gone but a sheen of red irritation remained in its place. She could handle that.
She heard the door open and close behind her. In the mirror she looked to see Chance standing behind her, looking smaller than she’d ever really seen him before. His hands were shoved into his pockets and his shoulders were slouched. He was worrying on his lip and occasionally looking up at her. But mostly he was just frowning at the ground.
“This is the women’s room.” She didn’t know what else to say. It was the last place she expected to see him and he was the last person she really expected to see anywhere. He didn’t react. He didn’t look up. He just blinked and thought some more.
“Can we talk?”
“Well I’m kind of a captive audience in here, aren’t I?”
She moved to pull down some towels to dry of her hands, numb from the heat and the force of her scrubbing. He stepped out of her way to get to the trash can. She moved back to look at him, crossing her arms and sighing.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“A lot,” Chance said. “We know that. But right now we need to talk about that out there.”
“What about it?”
“That’s what’s waiting for you if the Black Death get their hands on you,” he said. “Moose found her like that, beaten because someone leaked our plan and she was left out as a message. I won’t let that happen, I won’t let you be the next girl I’m giving first aid help to on a table.”
“I don’t want to be that girl either,” she said, quietly.
“You know what I’m saying though,” he said. “You understand what I mean.”
She did. She’d been so afraid of it all but she did know. She’d been both craving it and running from it. She wanted to know she was more to him than a notch in a bedpost but was also so scared of what that would mean. She’d never felt so strongly about someone or been so serious before. It was uncharted territory in several ways.
“I do,” she whispered.
And finally, for the first time in days, their eyes truly met. They were saying a lot with absolutely no words. And what they were saying was so much more beautiful than Hannah could have imagined. There was a gap bridged entirely in their looks, they were trading feelings in the middle of a shitty bar bathroom. It wasn’t at all how she expected her own fairy tale to go but she wasn’t about to complain.