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Since he ordered my ankles tied too, Ramsey has his men carry me to a black SUV that’s waiting outside. It shines a bit more than the others lined up around the block, and the windows are a bit darker. My bet is this is the Cobra’s personal ride, which means all the fancy bulletproof shit to keep his happy ass protected.
It takes all I have not to bust out laughing when they buckle me into the seat all proper and stuff. As if Ramsey would be upset if I got hurt in a wreck.
Although now that I think about it, he might be just the kind of psycho who would get pissed that he couldn’t off me the way he wanted to. Almost makes me want to make a break for it and get run over after jumping out of the moving car.
Ramsey gets in and sits right next to me. He gives me a weird look, then slaps his hand down on my cut thigh, digging his fingers into the letters.
“Don’t get any of your famously crazy ideas,” he says. “I found you easily enough, so don’t underestimate my ability to find your little harem. My reach extends well beyond Summer City, so they’re not safe from me. No matter where they are, I’ll find them, and if you misbehave, I’ll end them.”
I don’t think Ramsey knows what a giant mistake he’s just made. Point a gun at me? Sure. Shoot my backstabbing mother? Fine. But threaten those that I love? Oh, hell, no. That’s not gonna fly.
Rather than let him get me riled up, I flash him my sweetest smile and flex my thigh muscles against his grip, causing a fresh ooze of blood from the lettering.
“Noted.”
His annoying little smirk reappears, but he lets go of my leg and turns to look out the other window, leaving me more or less to my own devices. I can’t physically do anything at the moment, but I can plot, and plot I do. While the world races by outside the car window, my mind races with plans to murder Samson Ramsey and bring his whole operation crashing down in a fiery blaze.
Chapter 23
Neil
“Fuck, Neil, it’s a whole fucking Viper motorcade. Duck!”
I dart behind a parked van with Doc hot on my heels as a line of black SUVs tears past us. The windows are all tinted, so I can’t see inside, and I wonder if Samson Ramsey is in one of them. I’ve never been a hateful individual, but I’m starting to hate that guy.
We’re on day two of life after the Burrow, and Doc’s not looking too good. The creamy tan of his skin is almost gone, replaced with a ghostly white that rivals even my pale ass. His green eyes are red-rimmed and sunken in, and there’s a tremor in his hands that makes me glad he doesn’t have any surgeries to perform right now.
I wouldn’t have thought that one dose of morphine could have fucked him up so badly, but he’s worse off now than when he was bleeding out with a piece of shrapnel buried in his side. So far, I’ve had to slap a stolen bottle of pills out of his hand, yank his collar to keep him from climbing into an ambulance while the EMTs weren’t looking, and tackle him when we walked past a drug deal going down in an alley.
That last one’s going to put me on the shit list with Bunny when we find her. It opened the wound in his side and caused the bleeding to pick back up. Doc came to his senses enough to talk me through fixing it, but we’re so far out of my comfort zone that I find myself wishing that Kendrick was with us to help out … and that guy terrifies me.
We tried procuring a phone to get in contact with everyone, but either their phones were destroyed in the explosion like ours, or they lost them. I feel bad that Doc has to do all the dialing; I should be able to at least call Keys or Bunny, but I never knew their numbers.
I’m such a shitty boyfriend. I should’ve gotten those right off.
The first three safehouses Doc led me to after we left the makeshift clinic were completely empty. No squatters, no signs of life or recent use. We came close to finding someone at the fourth place—a holistic healing center—but by the time we got there, we learned that Kendrick and Keys had left several hours before, gone off in search of Bunny. I took that as a good sign until the woman running the center, Mama Navid, mentioned Keys’ head injury. My heart plummeted into my stomach, and I almost vomited right there as my nerves went haywire.
Keys is hurt. Bad enough that he showed up at the center with a hospital armband on. Bad enough that Mama Navid avoided talking about how bad it is. Bad enough to, as Doc puts it, “turn Kendrick paternal.” The thought of big, scary Kendrick morphing into a protective softie over someone he despises as much as he despises Keys is even worse than thinking Keys might be dead.
Mama Navid is kind enough to cook us dinner and give us a place to crash for the night. Since we’ve already missed Kendrick and Keys, it makes no sense to try looking for them so close to nightfall. Better to rest up and try again in the morning.
Ha. Rest. That’s a laugh. I haven’t slept since Doc got dosed. Every time I start to doze, he sneaks off towards the next source of a potential fix. Mama Navid figures it out pretty quickly, and she even offers to have her son watch him while I get some shuteye. I’d take her up on that, but I feel responsible for him. It’s my fault he got the morphine in the first place; if I hadn’t kept quiet, or if I had stopped Manny, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in. Who knows? My fuckup may be what slowed us down enough to miss catching up with Kendrick and Keys.
So, I don’t sleep. I stay up through the night, watching Doc twitch and jerk and shiver. I pile more blankets on him, but nothing seems to cut through the chill he feels.
It could be worse, I suppose. Thanks to many nights gaming with Keys until dawn, I’m sort of used to going on little to no sleep. Not this many nights in a row of it, but enough that some coffee is really all I need to keep myself sharp.
Doc keeps saying he’ll be fine once we find Kendrick or Bunny. I don’t know how the two of them can possibly detox him faster than cold turkey, but he’s certain that’s all he needs: Kendrick or Bunny. He won’t go into too much detail on it other than to say that they “temper” him when he’s jonesing. I’m not quite sure what that means, and I’m not entirely sure I want to know.
When Doc asks me to tie him up halfway through the night at Mama Navid’s, I just about lose it.
“Listen, Doc, I am trying to be nice here. Why don’t you just fucking sleep, man? I can’t with this anymore.” I rake my hand through my hair and pound a fist against the wall, which achieves nothing more than bruising my hand. “You’re testing my patience with this weird shit.”
“I need to be restrained.”
His answer is so matter of fact, so straightforward while still somehow being completely obtuse. How does he do that?
“You need to sleep.”
