Adler (The Henchmen MC 14)

Then she woke up, hurting and - if I was right, and I usually was - hurt, acting all distant and dismissive, making me realize it was going to take a while to get her to open up, let me in a little.

Then she did that weird as shite bedroom freakout thing, something both unexpected but not wholly unusual, and reinforcing an idea I had about her.

Lou had secrets, had a past that wasn't fully in her past, it was still hanging around, a purple elephant in the corner. Or, in her case, in her bedroom.

I could look into it, could dig it up myself. Maybe. Some people - people like me - have next to no strings leading back to their ugly origins. But I didn't want to snoop, to trace, to dig it up.

I wanted her to tell me.

So I agreed.

We moved on.

And I would wait.

Until she was ready.

Until she learned she could trust me with it.

"You're breathing on me," she ground out about forty minutes into the drive that would take us up and over into Pennsatucky where this bastard was supposedly hiding out with a sister and her dirtbag husband.

"Ya sure ya don't need to stop for another cup of coffee?" I asked, raising a brow at her.

"I wasn't talking to you. Linny, get back in your seat," she demanded, nudging the mass of muscle with her shoulder, trying to dislodge her feet from the armrest she was steadily trying to haul her weight over. "It is your fault though," she informed me, shooting me a look. "You're in her seat," she specified. "She hasn't been able to hang her head out and slime all the windows and side of the car with drool yet."

"We'll take turns," I assured Linny, turning to push her back into her comfortable back seat. "Lou, maybe taking the day off to nurse yer hangover might be a good idea."

"Why? I'm in a shitty mood. I'd like to take that out on a shitty person."

I couldn't exactly fault that logic, so I shut up and let her stew on the four-hour drive, watching as things went from decently populated to sparse until we were on a literal country road like some cheesy ass country song, flanked on both sides by the occasional trailer. Some were nice, the kind of place people took some pride of ownership in, the yards trimmed, flower boxes overflowing, kids playing out back on those aluminum swing sets you see out front of big box stores every spring. Others, though, were not so well-cared-for.

In my personal opinion, you could always spot trash by their willingness to have actual piles of trash scattered all around visible parts of their yards. Why pay to have your old, moth-eaten furniture picked up by the garbage company when you could just start your own old furniture landfill right out the side of your garage?

We drove almost to the end of the road, finding a robin's egg blue trailer sitting back on a mostly wooded lot. The driveway was like a used car lot, except no one would want to buy a single one of the train-wrecks compiled there, some missing tires, sitting on cinderblocks, others missing windows and dashes, branches sticking out of them, implying some local wildlife settled in, called it home, and started a family there. Dangling icicle Christmas lights lined the gutters while Easter egg decals were stuck to the front window.

"Looks like a nice place to... cook meth," Lou decided, parking her car beside the others, looking almost troubled at the idea of having her precious car anywhere near them. "Alright, Linny, you protect the car," she demanded with a firm nod as she climbed out of her seat, closing her door with barely a click, leading me to do the same.

"Want me to go out back?"

"There won't be a door there," she said with confidence.

"Windows?"

"Let him try to escape into the woods. Making me run on top of everything else would be a really, really stupid idea right now."

With that, she knocked on the screen door, the sound making my shoulders move up instinctively, somehow worse than nails on a chalkboard.

There was a pause before the inside door pulled open, revealing a kid whose face just barely reached over the cutout in the screen door to - I shite you not - glower at us.

"What you want?" he asked, tone very much implying we were bothering him. What he had going on at seven or eight years old that could have been so important completely stumped me. Cartoons? Coloring? Plotting how to fix the shitestorm of an economy two generations before him fucked up? I had no clue.

"We're looking for someone."

"Well... someone ain't here. Fuck off."

Lou turned to me, eyes bright, lips parted in what almost seemed like shocked joy even as her hand flew out to jerk open the screen and slam on the door as the kid tried to close it in her face.