Nolan: Return to Signal Bend Read online

  He was laid out on a sheet-covered mattress, still in his jeans and belt, but barefoot and bare-chested. The bandage over his chest and shoulder seemed carefully done. The wound hurt like a motherfucker and felt like a six-inch hole through his heart, but Vega seemed to have taken real care of it.

  Would he have taken such good care if he only meant to kill him later? But what else would he mean to do? Nolan was there to fucking kill him, and he would do it the first chance he had. Vega had to know that.

  So why wasn’t he dead? Why was he alone? Did Vega mean to let him die like this?

  Too tired and sick, too hurt, and thirsty as hell, to think anymore, Nolan let his head drop back to the pillow. As unconsciousness came on him again, his mind became a starry night sky.

  ~oOo~

  “Kid. C’mon.” Nolan woke as a hand patted his face with sharp impatience. “C’mon.”

  His eyes opened, and he was alert at once. It was daylight; he’d slept through the full night, at least. Vega was leaning over him. Nolan tried to jerk out of reach, but, as he was still tied to the bed, only succeeded in making his chest hurt like hell. He couldn’t hold back the groan.

  “Take it easy, Nolan. I’m not a threat. Dehydration, on the other hand…” Vega sat down beside the bed and held up a plastic sports bottle, the kind with a straw at the top. The plastic was clear and red; Nolan could see the liquid slosh back and forth.

  Vega had used his name. He knew who he was.

  “How…” the word came out as a croak and died halfway through. Nolan tried to swallow and couldn’t manage it. That water bottle looked wonderful, but how could he trust what was in it? David Vega was offering it to him.

  “Your ink. You’re Havoc Mariano’s stepson.”

  Len had warned him that his ink could be a problem. In their world, it identified him better than any other kind of ID.

  “Son,” Nolan corrected forcing the word out like a cough.

  Nodding, Vega accepted the correction. “His son. I guess I don’t have to ask what you’re doing out here.”

  Nolan stared in silence.

  “I ran a wide perimeter last night and came up empty. You’re out here alone, aren’t you?”

  Nolan didn’t answer.

  “Are you rogue, then? The Horde’s been out of the game almost a year—the mother charter a hell of a lot longer than that.”

  Nolan put his head back on the pillow and stared up at the ceiling, trying not to think about the water bottle. He wasn’t talking to David fucking Vega.

  He heard the rush of breath as Vega sighed. “I’m sorry I shot you. I didn’t know who you were until I saw your ink. I thought you…had a different affiliation.” He chuckled. “But you didn’t trek out to my little acre to borrow a cup of sugar, did you?”

  “Fuck off,” Nolan rasped.

  “I didn’t think so.” Vega held the water bottle over Nolan’s face. “You need to drink, kid. You’re running a fever. I got the wound as clean as I could, and I’ve got antibiotics to give you, but you need to stay hydrated. It’s been a full day now.”

  Again, Nolan tried and failed to swallow. His mouth was made of Velcro. He stared at the bottle, feeling desperate. But it could have been filled with bleach for all he knew. He shook his head.

  “¡Cabron!” Vega muttered and then put the straw in his own mouth and took a long sip. Nolan’s eyes had slid in that direction, and he watched with need as Vega swallowed.

  “I am not a threat to you, pendejo. You came here to kill me, but I’m trying to make you well. Take the fucking drink. It’s water.”

  He needed the water. Wasting away on this flimsy bed was not the way he wanted to go out. Nolan raised his head and let Vega put the straw in his mouth. He drank the cool, sweet water until his breath gave out, and he grunted a protest when Vega took it away.

  “See? I know you’ve got no reason to trust me and every reason to kill me, but I hope we can come to an understanding, kid.”

  “Don’t call me kid.” They were the first words Nolan managed to put some voice behind.

  Vega paused, his focus intent, and then he nodded. “Nolan. I’m sorry about your father. I didn’t have a choice.”

  Nolan gave that claim a derisive huff. “Fuck you. If you’re my best friend, then why am I tied to this fucking bed? You shot me.”

  “In your pack is a detailed map to my location, two big handguns, a suppressor, and night-vision binoculars. I’m more than twenty miles off any road, I fly a plane to get my groceries, I’m buried as deep as I can be buried while I’m breathing, and yet you show up outside my cabin on foot. You’re Horde. Of the two of us, you’re the threat, ese. And I’m sorry about the arrow. I went out for the bear and found you, too.” He laughed and leaned back in his chair. “You saying you wouldn’t have put one between my eyes if I hadn’t hit you first?”

  “You didn’t shoot to kill.”

  “Second one would’ve been. I wanted to know who’d found me first. Of everybody it could’ve been, I wasn’t expecting it to be Horde. If you’re still Horde. Out here alone, you don’t have the club’s backing, do you? I’m right about that.”

  “I’m not telling you shit. If you’re not gonna kill me, then turn me loose.”

  Vega laughed. “Even if I did, and even if you didn’t repay the favor with a bullet in my head, you’d never make it out alive. Not with your shoulder fucked up. We’re bunking together for a week or two, at least. By the time you’re healed, maybe we’ll have found our understanding. I can’t let you go until we have.”

  ~oOo~

  “I need to take a goddamn piss.”

  Nolan had been tied to the bed for a whole day and the better part of another. Vega had given him water throughout this second day, two bottles’ worth. He’d given him antibiotics, which Nolan had been reluctant to take, but the heavy, hot pain in his chest and shoulder made him willing to take the risk. He’d refused painkillers except the ones he could read the word Tylenol on, and he’d refused to let Vega feed him like a fucking baby.

  Now, he was fucking starving, his ass itched, his back ached, and his feet and hands were numb, in addition to the pain of his wound. And he had to piss.

  But actually, he did feel a little better. His head was clearer, and it didn’t hurt so much to think.

  Vega was at the wood stove, heating a pot of canned pasta on it, stirring with a wooden spoon. At Nolan’s complaint, he paused and looked over. “Yes. I would think that you do.” He went back to stirring.

  “You want me to piss the bed?”

  “If you do, you’ll be sitting in it a long time.”

  “Are you gonna let me up to use the toilet or not?”

  Vega took a long breath, like an exasperated father filling himself up with patience. He left the spoon in the pot and went to his weapon rack. Nolan had noticed a cabinet underneath the rack; now Vega opened it and brought out a revolver. He checked the load and came over to the bed, pulling a blade from his pocket.

  Nolan eyed him with suspicion as he popped the blade open. “You’ll forgive me if I take some precautions.”

  Vega had no accent at all unless he was cussing in Spanish—except sometimes, he rolled over the letter R or seemed to swallow his Ls. Like an old accent bleeding through.

  “I’m going to cut your ankles free first, and then your wrists. You are going to stay still until I say otherwise. Agreed?”

  Glaring at his enemy, Nolan nodded.

  Vega did as he’d described, and Nolan remained still until he’d backed up. “Okay. See if you can sit up.”

  Suddenly frantic to get up off that damn bed, Nolan rolled to his good side and swung his legs over the side. His feet touched the wood floor, and he pushed himself into a seated position.

  Pain blasted through his torso and left arm, and the room canted wildly up and down and to and fro. “Agh! Fuck,” he groaned and nearly fell back to the pillows.

  Vega grabbed his good shoulder and held him up. “Give yourself a m
inute to get oriented.”

  Nodding, Nolan closed his eyes and waited for his brain to stop sloshing around in his skull. Fuck, he hurt. Vega’s steady hand felt not altogether terrible; it grounded him.

  He opened his eyes. Vega was a foot away from him, if that. Since he was sixteen years old, he’d wanted this motherfucker dead, and here he was, literally within reach, and Nolan was leaning on him so he wouldn’t fall over. Jesus fucking Christ, what a fuckup he was.

  The hand that wasn’t holding him up held a revolver pointed at his head.

  “You ready to stand up?”

  “Yeah,” Nolan gritted, not remotely sure that he was.

  Using his right hand, he pushed himself off the bed. Pins and needles exploded in his feet, and agony in his chest, and he nearly fell again, this time on the floor, but Vega still had him. He shifted his hold so that his arm was around Nolan’s waist, and he helped him gimp his way to the door at the other side of the cabin.

  Managing to support Nolan and keep his gun, Vega opened the door and helped him into the bathroom.

  Such as it was. There was another pump sink, and a strange little toilet that looked…

  “This is an outhouse.”

  “It’s a composting toilet. I’m off the grid here, remember? Just the well for water. No sewer or septic, no power.”

  “It’s an outhouse. Inside your house.”

  Vega made that patronizing huff again. “Do you need to piss or not?”

  He really needed to piss. His feet still bit at him, like he was walking over broken glass, but he made it on his own to the toilet. As he undid his belt, he turned to the open door, where Vega remained, his revolver aimed.

  “You’re gonna watch?”

  “I am. I’m not turning away while you’re untied. Do what you need to do.

  “Perv,” he grumbled and opened his jeans.

  Sweet fuck, it felt good to piss. He did it forever, and when it was done, he closed his jeans and, from habit, reached to flush. There was nothing. He didn’t know what to do.

  “Just close the lid, pendejo.”

  “You know, I know what pendejo means.”

  “Good for you.”

  Nolan went to the sink. The pump was on the left, though, and with his left side fucked, and the angle off to use his right arm, he couldn’t get the pump to bring water. Vega came over and got it going, and Nolan washed his hands.

  All at once, he ran out of gas. A sound like static filled his ears, and his vision went dim. Certain he was going to pass out, he grabbed the side of the sink. Only the pain pulsing through his torso kept him conscious.

  Vega’s arm went around him. “You’re pale. Come on, let’s get you off your feet.”

  He was too fucking weak to resist.

  Rather than the bed, Vega took him to the table and sat him in one of the straight-backed chairs. “You need to eat.”

  With the gun trained on Nolan all the while, he went for the pot of pasta and brought it to the table. He filled a plastic bowl and gave him a plastic spoon. Nolan wanted to refuse it, but his stomach rumbled at the smell. It was just cheap-ass kid pasta, little raviolis from a can, but he’d been eating protein bars for a couple of days before his fast here in the cabin, and he was famished.

  From a cabinet, Vega got a can of vegetable juice. Warm. “Drink this, too. You need vitamins.”

  Then he sat at the other end of the table and, with that gun aimed, set himself up with the same meal.

  Nolan dug in; he couldn’t help it. Halfway through his gorging, he looked up and asked, “Why the fuck aren’t you killing me? I’ll kill you first chance I get.”

  “I know.” He grinned and waved the gun. “That’s why I’m eating one-handed.” After a bite of ravioli, he added, “I’m not going to kill you unless you give me no choice, Nolan. I understand why you want me dead. It’s right that you do. It’s right, but it won’t make anything right. What I did to Havoc—that haunts me, to this day. I know now that that day is when it all started to go wrong. I tried to make it right, but there is no making it right. Killing me won’t make it right. It will only make you wrong. And I don’t want to kill you, because I don’t want to compound my many sins by laying your body on top of your father’s.”

  “His body, and Riley Chase’s body, and Hoosier Elliott. And more.”

  “And my wife and my children. And more. Yes. Many died. There is blood and pain all around me. Si.” He stared down into his bowl. The gun sagged an inch in his hand, and he shook off that moment of introspection and faced Nolan again. “I want no more of it.”

  “Why? Why did you do everything you did? Because it was your job?”

  With an expression like disgust, Vega chuckled dryly. “I made the job serve my mission. My mission was everything. It was more than my family, more than my home, more than myself. More than my eternal soul. Have you never needed something so much that you were willing to risk everything you had to make it happen?”

  Nolan’s shock at the question, a question that had reached into his head and coiled around his deepest thoughts, must have shown all over his face, because Vega smiled sadly.

  “Yes. I suppose you have.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Iris checked the dark hallway and listened for signs of stirring among her family. The only sounds she heard, besides the ticking of the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs, came from the end of the hall, where her dad and Shannon slept. She didn’t linger to listen to those sounds too long. Those two were getting old, but they behaved like horny teenagers half the time.

  She closed her bedroom door and turned off the overhead light. She went back to her bed and stretched out on her belly, then tapped the volume down on her laptop.

  “Okay. Nobody’s going to bust in. The kids are asleep, and Daddy and Shannon are…in bed. What’s going on?”

  Her sister let out a breath, and the image on Iris’s screen shook as she repositioned herself. “It’s fine. The usual. Mom’s doing better—she has a different cast on her arm, and her foot is just in one of those soft boot things. She can get around on her feet now, as long as she plays it cool.”

  “And Ray? Is he still around?”

  “Yeah. He went off for a few days last week, but otherwise he’s in town. Not around the house much, but that’s normal. And nobody’s complaining.”

  “Is he being a dick?”

  Rose tipped her head back and forth in a gesture of equivocation. “He’s Ray. You know. It’s okay. He likes me better than he likes you, and he’s treating Mom okay. He did make some comment about her weight, but it was pretty mellow, for him. I think he honestly feels really bad that she got so hurt.”

  “I want to tell Daddy what happened. What’s been happening all this time.”

  “What? Irie, no.” Rose brought her tablet right up to her face. If they’d been in the same room, she would have been leaning close. “You know you can’t.”

  Iris sat up and leaned on her crossed legs. “How can we not? What if she’d landed at the foot of those stairs just a little bit differently? What if he’d broken her neck and killed her?”

  “It’s not our call, sis. Mom’s not stupid, and she’s not crazy. You know what she says. She wants things as they are.” It was a refrain among them—that their mom wasn’t stupid or crazy. Whenever the topic came up, Rose or her mom said it. They said it so much, Iris had to wonder if they weren’t all in denial. Well, she wasn’t. Not anymore.

  “She’s stupid and crazy to let a man treat her like this. And she says Daddy is the bad guy!”

  “It’s not our call.”

  “Well, it sucks.”

  With a sigh, Rose changed the subject. “Any word about Nolan?”

  Almost three weeks, and no word. “No. I know the club knows what’s going on with him. Daddy gets this weird look when I bring him up. But he won’t tell me. I’m scared it’s really bad.”

  “If Daddy knows what’s going on, he’d tell you if it was all that bad
. Like, if he’d died. Daddy wouldn’t hold that back.”

  “Rose! Don’t even say that.”

  “I’m saying he must be alive, or they’d tell you. Just chill. He’s probably on some super-secret spy mission to kill some poor slob. That’s what they do, right?”

  “Don’t be a bitch. You know it’s not.” She knew Nolan was doing whatever he was doing outside the club, their father had told her that much, and she had told Rose that much as well. But Rose always assumed the club was lying or at least prevaricating about most things. Like they were perpetrating a massive conspiracy.