Nolan: Return to Signal Bend (28 page)

She thought he smiled, but it was hard to tell, with his mouth buried in yellowing grey mustache. But his cheeks rose a little. “Lots of chicks in here, darlin’. Gotta be more specific.”

“Tall, thin. Long dark hair. Straight—with bangs.” She swiped her fingers across her forehead to demonstrate, in case the guy didn’t know what ‘bangs’ meant. It crossed her mind to say something more about the way Gia was built, but decided that could be counterproductive.

He gave her a noncommittal shrug. “Sorry.”

“She’s underage.”

That got a raise of bushy eyebrows. “I’ll keep an eye out. You orderin’?”

She shook her head, and with that, her help from Mr. Walrus was at an end. Iris shook her head and left the stool. She’d have to search.

She found Gia at a cluster of pushed-together tables near the back of the bar. She was with three other girls, one of whom was Mindy Jasper’s little sister, Hilary. The other two, Iris didn’t know. Hilary Jasper was underage, too, but not like Gia. Hilary was eighteen or nineteen.

All four girls, including Gia, were dressed for a night out. Iris had never seen so much makeup on Gia’s face. She’d tried, and mostly failed, to do winged eyeliner. And she was wearing a top that her father would have burned to ash if he’d ever seen it. Nothing but loosely knitted lace, and a bra underneath. Holy hell. Gia already had way too much body for that to look like anything but an advertisement.

Iris was all for women dressing the way they wanted to dress and having the right to be safe in whatever that was, wherever they went, but this was not the kind of place where many other people agreed with that stance.

The worst part of the scene was the men—
men
, not boys—they were with. Six of them, all of them very hands-on. It was practically pornographic. Gia was clearly in trouble. She was being held on one man’s lap, and she was slumped against his shoulder—conscious, but barely. He had a hand between her legs. Another guy was forcing her to drink.

Iris would lay her savings down on a bet that it wasn’t just beer in that glass. It hadn’t even been half an hour since Gia had called, and now she was almost comatose. She’d been drugged.

No one had noticed Iris yet. With her hand in her pocket, clutching the baton, and with her heart leapfrogging around in her throat, she pushed her way to stand at the table, so that she was between the two guys, next to Gia.

“Gia. Come on.” She kept her face from showing too much emotion—she hoped—and made her voice as loud as she could without sounding hostile.

Gia’s eyes focused a bit and lit up with relief, and she struggled weakly against the hold of the guy who had her on his lap.

“Hey, baby. Don’t be a bitch, now. There’s plenty of room for you. Have a seat. Butch’ll pour you a beer.” The guy who held Gia nodded toward another guy, who leaned over to a pitcher on one of the tables.

“Hey, Iris. You should party.” That was Hilary, slurring her words and staring with glassy eyes. She might well have been drugged, too, but for all Iris cared, Hilary Jasper could get fucked. All she wanted was Gia out of here.

“Nope. Just here to pick up Gia. We’ll leave you to your fun.” She reached for Gia’s arm, meaning to try to lift her away from the guy who held her, but the other one, the guy who’d been making her drink, grabbed Iris by the hips and pulled her down to his lap.

“Now I’ve got one of my own,” he crowed and shoved his hand between her legs.

Iris had pulled her hand from her pocket as he’d grabbed her. Now, she gave her wrist a sharp pop, and the baton in her fist went long and locked. She swung her arm and cracked the guy right in the face with it.

She’d acted from instinct and fear, and she hadn’t played out the near future at all. The reality that there were six men in this group hadn’t been part of her thinking. A guy had grabbed her, touched her in a way she hated, and she had reacted. The day with Daisy and her mother had flowered into a full memory, in vivid detail, and she’d simply fought back.

He jumped to his feet and grabbed his head, yelling in rage and pain. Iris fell to the floor, taking one of the small tables down with her. A pitcher of beer landed on her. Before she could get back to her feet, somebody yanked her up by her hoodie.

And then she was punched in the face. She felt her nose break. Another punch, and another, and Iris started to forget what was happening.

Her last clear thought before everything went dim and quiet: she should have told her father.

~oOo~

Her senses came back, she thought, pretty quickly, and Iris found herself on the floor while chaos seethed around her. A full-on brawl had broken out. For a while, she could only lie where she was, her face throbbing, blood running down her chin, and down her throat, while legs flew about around her.

Then somebody kicked her in the belly, probably accidentally, and agony blasted through her. Realizing she needed to get out of the way, she rolled to her knees and tried to crawl toward a wall. Her hand landed on something sharp, and she thought she’d put her palm down on broken glass, but when she looked, it was her keychain, the attached baton still extended.

She’d been just as stupid about using the baton as she would have been about a gun. At least she hadn’t accidentally hurt anyone else, though.

Grabbing her keys, she hobble-crawled toward the wall, stopping and recoiling each time somebody or something crashed in her direction. She’d almost made it when she caught a glimpse of an arm in loose black lace, and she remembered why she was crawling on the beer-soaked floor of this bar.

Gia. She was unconscious on the floor. Still not thinking clearly, but knowing that she had to help her, Iris changed course and crawled to Gia instead. Her first thought was to help her up, but she didn’t know how she could lift the dead weight of a girl who had at least six inches on her. Her head hurt too much, and she was having to think too hard about breathing, to leave room to solve such a problem.

With no other idea, Iris simply lay over Gia and used her body to shield the girl as best she could. What good that would do, Iris couldn’t say. What would happen when the brawl was over, she couldn’t say, either. They were in trouble, no matter what.

As she cowered over Gia’s inert form, her old memories churned into a foam in her head. She could feel the ropes that had bound her and Rose. She could hear, even in this din, Daisy’s screams and the end of them. She could see her mother’s eyes, both cold with despair and hot with rage, while the man raped her. She was in that place. Like she had never left it. The brawl around them in the present was just an overlay.

Clutching Gia close, struggling past her fear and her pain and her broken face to pull air into her body, Iris wept.

And then she heard a sound she’d never heard before but recognized at once. It was joined by another just like it, except in a different timbre. Roars of rage, in two voices she knew and loved: Her father and her Uncle Isaac.

The tempest around her instantly became even wilder. Iris tried to lift her head to see her daddy, but all she could see was legs and rubble.

A pair of legs ran right toward her and crouched next to her. It was Lilli. Saving her again.

“Fuck. Fuck!” Lilli yanked Iris back and laid her fingers on her daughter’s neck. When she found a pulse, her head dropped in relief. Then she grabbed Iris’s chin and gave her a sharp-eyed instant of a once-over. “Can you walk?”

Iris hoped so. She nodded.

“Okay. Let’s go. Fuck!” Somebody must have kicked her or hit her or something, because she flinched, then leapt back to her feet and swung her fist. It was hard to see more than that, but she must have connected, because she came back down, and her hand was bleeding.

Lilli pulled her daughter into her arms and stood, lifting the girl like she weighed nothing, then grabbed hold of Iris’s hoodie and dragged her out of the bar. Iris let her. She was too scared and confused even to know where the door was, her eyes weren’t working very well anyway, and the brawl was still in full swing. Somehow, though, Lilli got them through the bar without even slowing down, and then they were in the humid night air.

Outside, people were streaming to their trucks. Without a word, Lilli carried Gia and dragged Iris straight to her SUV.

“Get in the front,” she ordered and opened the back door. As Lilli laid Gia on the back seat, Iris got in the front passenger seat. Blood still ran thickly from her nose, and she swiped at her face—her keys were still in her hand. That baton mocked her. Had she made everything worse? Or had starting a brawl saved them from something worse?

Lilli climbed in and slammed the door. As she started the engine, making it roar, she turned a furious, sweating face on Iris. “What the
fuck
, Iris? What the holy fuck were you
thinking
?”

It didn’t even occur to her to make up a story. “I didn’t bring Gia here. She called me to pick her up.” Her voice, working its way around her broken nose, sounded cartoonish in her head.

Lilli had backed out immediately and was already at the road, turning out of the parking lot, her tires shrieking over the asphalt. “What do you mean? Pick her up from
Moe’s
?”

Iris nodded.

“How’d she get there?”

“She said she’d snuck out with some friends. Hilary Jasper was with her, and a couple of girls I don’t know. They were older, I think. Or looked it—but Gia looked older tonight, too.”

Lilli slammed her hands on the steering wheel. “
Fuck
!”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Call us. What you should have done was
call us
. Not go yourself. You know better.” She glanced over and took Iris in again. “We’re going to the clinic. Tasha’s meeting us there.”

“How—how did you know to come?”

“Ox Breuer is there. He saw Gia and called Isaac.”

“I’m sorry.”

Lilli stared in the rearview mirror at her daughter, then turned her attention to Iris. She nodded to the baton in her hand. “You fought back.”

“I think I made it worse. I think I started all that back there. I just hit the guy and everything went crazy.”

“Better that than what was going to happen. You need to know how to fight.” She stared in the mirror again. “She does, but…” She punched the wheel. “Fuck!”

The rest of the ride went by in silence. Iris sat and watched the road speed past. She hurt—her body, her head, and her mind. Now that the old memory had gotten center stage while she was awake, for the first time in a long time, it didn’t want to step back into the scenery.

The Signal Bend welcome sign went by, and they were home. Moments later, Lilli turned into the clinic lot and squealed to a stop.

“Go in. I’ve got her.” She barely gave Iris a glance as she jumped from the car and opened the back door.

Before Iris could get to the clinic door, Tasha and her head nurse, Pattie, were through it. Tasha caught Iris’s face in her hands and studied her quickly. “Oh, honey. Anything I can’t see?”

“I got kicked in the stomach, too. Sorry, Tash.”

“Hush. Go in with Pattie. She’ll get you cleaned up, and we’ll take a good look.” She eased her toward Pattie as Lilli came up with Gia, and they all hurried into the clinic.

~oOo~

Iris kind of remembered when the clinic was just a little box of a place, but it had expanded a lot over the years. Now Tasha had two other doctors on staff and a physician’s assistant who operated a weekend clinic, as well as a bunch of nurses. The building itself had grown to maybe three times its original size.