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His eyes—blue, like Eight’s—came up and locked on hers. “Why? That’s dumb.”
“Are you telling me you’ve never imagined that?”
“Sometimes, but I don’t like it when I do. Why are you asking me about this stuff?”
Her grand plan to subtly feel him out was crashing into a brick wall. So Marcella took a long swig of her Diet Coke and said, “He looked me up to ask about you.”
“When?”
It had been going on for a few weeks, but Marcella hedged a little. “He showed up at my show on Friday.”
“He wants to see me?”
“I think so. I shut him down pretty fast, so I’m not totally sure exactly what he wants, but I think the only reason he’d come looking is if he wanted to see you, yeah.”
“Why? Why now? I’m ten. I’ve been here.”
In many ways, Ajax was every inch a ten-year-old child, but somewhere deep inside him dwelled a fifty-year-old philosopher, too.
“I don’t know, tiger. When grownups have lived a while, they think about stuff they did when they were younger, and sometimes they regret it. Maybe that’s it. Maybe he regrets bailing. But that’s not your problem. If you don’t want to think about him, we’ll drop this right now and never bring it up again. But if you’d like to see him, even just to ask why he hasn’t been around, or tell him you don’t ever want to see him again, this might be your chance. I’ve been trying to decide what the best thing to do is, to tell you about this or just pretend it didn’t happen, but I think it should be your call. You’re old enough, and smart enough, to say if you think it’s a good idea. Whatever you decide, I’ve got your back, you know that.”
While Ajax considered all that, his head down, his focus on his plate, his fingers plucking at jalapeno bits, Marcella began to feel queasy—and also angry. Fuck Eight Ball for dropping back in after a decade and tearing this open again. Fuck him for putting her in the position of having to figure out whether and how to make her ten-year-old son decide what he wanted of a man who’d never before shown the slightest interest. Fuck him all the way to hell.
Ajax hadn’t looked up for a long time. Marcella reached across the table and clasped his hand. “Hey, tiger. I’m sorry. It was a mistake to bring it up. You don’t have to think about it at all, okay?”
“No.” He looked up. “I think … I think I might want to see him. But I want to know why he wants to. If he just wants to, like, know what I look like, I don’t care. But if he wants … do you think he wants to be my dad?”
What she knew of Eight didn’t support that idea. But hell, eleven years was a long time. Maybe he’d grown. Maybe he really did regret the past. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know what he wants.”
Jesus. What if hedidwant to be a dad? What the hell would that mean for the life Marcella had worked so hard to make for her son?
“If I knew that, I could decide. Can you ask him?”
The thought of speaking to Eight Ball, especially to ask him for anything remotely resembling a favor, made her physically ill. The thought that doing so might upend everything she had, made her afraid. But she smiled at her son. “I can definitely do that.”
CHAPTER FIVE
In the pitch black of a pre-dawn Monday morning, Eight Ball walked through the automatic doors of the Osage Regional emergency entrance. Duncan stood right inside the door, clearly waiting for him, but the kid flinched when he saw him.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” the kid burst out before Eight could open his mouth. “I didn’t know what else to do!”
The way Eight recognized himself in the kid made him patient, so he took a breath and said, “Okay, Dunc. Start with what matters most. We’ll fill in details in a minute. Any word yet?”
The kid was covered in blood, but Eight knew it wasn’t his.
Duncan had called him about thirty minutes earlier to say that JJ had been shot. Eight had been surprised, to put it mildly, seeing as how the Bulls had a longstanding peace with all the crews in Tulsa and no dark work going on this weekend. Not even a high-risk protection run. Just a couple penny-ante security gigs—neither of which these boys were working.
Which left mischief. Something Eight himself was intimately familiar with.
Eight had leapt out of bed so fast he hadn’t asked Duncan any questions on that call. On the way, he’d called Maverick and Rad, these boys’ fathers, but he hadn’t had anything to tell them except that JJ had been shot, Dunc had been with him, and they needed to get to the hospital.
In answer to Eight’s question now, Duncan shook his head and raked his hands through his shaggy hair. The kid looked like he was about to lose his shit.
“They wouldn’t let me go back. They wouldn’t even let me ride with him! But I was right behind, and I saw them bring him in. He was out of it, bleedin’ bad. Everybody was running. I know this is gonna draw heat from law, but they got him in the chest and belly, Prez! So much fuckin’ blood. Ihadto call!”
The club did not call 911 unless there was no other choice. To every degree they could, they handled injuries themselves, including—especially—gunshot wounds. There were two nurses in the family: JJ’s mother, Willa, a former labor and delivery nurse who was now head of nursing at this very hospital, and Jazz Brooks’ wife, Felicia, who’d been an ER nurse before they had kids and now worked in a suite of doctors.
Gunshots were especially troublesome in hospitals because hospitals were required to report them to the cops. The Bulls got a lot of leeway at Osage Regional, because of Willa, but she drew the line at falsifying records. A gunshot wound in the ER was a gunshot wound the cops would be notified of.
