Whiskey Neat (The Uncertain Saints MC Book 1) (24 page)

I didn’t have to wait long, though, which was a rarity for this hospital.

“Can he come in with me?” I asked the lady.

She shook her head. “He can wait in the hall outside the MRI room, but he can’t be in the room with you.”

I nodded. “That’ll do, thank you.”

Twenty minutes later, I was laying inside a huge, hulking machine, trying valiantly to tune out the annoyance of the machine clicking and clanking away.

At first it wasn’t too bad, but the longer you sit there, the harder it becomes to ignore.

And, by that point, I had a splitting headache that I was sure would turn into a migraine from hell in less time than it would take to snap my fingers.

A loud roar of what I assumed was thunder and not the machine sounded overhead, and I sighed when everything around me went black.

Seconds later, lights came on, and an odd, eerie, glow filled the room as the emergency lights blinked on.

The machine, however, was done for.

I assumed it wasn’t needed during a power outage, so I looked down the tube, pulling my head out of the lovely cage that held me still.

“Can I get out?” I called loudly.

Nobody answered, and I started to freak out.

I’d never been what one would call ‘claustrophobic,’ but being in this tube wasn’t really that great for my nerves in the first place.

So I started to shimmy out, using my heels for purchase until I was out of the tube and able to sit up.

And I wished I’d never come out.

Especially when I saw a man wearing a black mask and gray scrubs pointing a gun at me.

My eyes darted around, and I saw the bodies of the medical staff on the floor behind the glass of the observation room.

“W-what…”

I didn’t get to finish my sentence, because in the next instant, he pulled the trigger, and I fell backwards, hitting my head on the large machine behind me.

I raised my hand up to my head, wincing in pain as my hand met something warm and wet.

I pulled my hand away to look at it and saw red smearing my fingers.

“She’s done…” the man said, turning to someone beside him.

“The old man’s down, too. Took out Peter, Brady, and Paul, though,” whomever was behind him said. “And the other team’s about to breach the perimeter of the lake house.”

My heart sank.

And I watched as the two men left the room, unable to move a single inch from where I was.

I must’ve had a concussion or something from when I hit my head, because I couldn’t make my brain work correctly.

Couldn’t make my mouth speak the words that were screaming to get out.

The only thing that did seem to work were my eyes, and I watched the door for long moments after the men exited the room.

I wasn’t sure how long it was when I saw the door inch forward a couple of inches, and Carrick’s gray head pop through.

He was on the floor like me, and the moment he saw me, his eyes went wide.

I blinked at him, and he dropped his head to rest on the ground for a few long seconds before he started to painfully crawl inside.

There was something wrong with his legs. It was almost like they were broken.

His arm was at an odd angle, but nothing else looked wrong until you looked beyond his legs.

There was a smear of blood following behind him, staining the floor in dark red streaks as he pulled himself towards me.

“You alive?” He asked once he was within a few feet of me.

I blinked.

“That a yes?” He asked.

I blinked again.

“Good. Because if you’re not alive, we’re gonna have problems.”

I blinked again.

He nodded and rolled over to his back, painfully.

“Shot me in the back. And I broke my arm in the fall,” he muttered.

He must’ve read the question in my eyes, because I knew I didn’t speak it.

He pulled out his phone, and he spoke all of four words into the speaker before he passed out from what I assumed was blood loss.

There did seem to be quite a bit of it now…but it may be because I was bleeding, too.

“They shot us. Radiology.”

Shot us?

I wasn’t shot, was I?

I didn’t feel shot.

My head did hurt, though.

But that was because of the way I’d fallen back…
wasn’t it?

I didn’t know how long I sat there, slumped against that machine.

Could’ve been two minutes…or fifty.

I didn’t know.

But I’d never been so happy to see a doctor in his white coat before in my life.

“Two in here, too!” He yelled.

I smiled.

Or at least I tried.

Because I knew I’d make it now.

I’d held on.

And Griffin would be here soon.

When shit hits the fan, and everyone around you is losing their mind, find the silent guy. The one that looks calm enough to take a nap. He’s about to fuck something up, and you’ll want to follow him.

-Rule of Thumb

Griffin

“They shot her in the head,” I muttered in shock.

The doctor nodded his head. “Right. But as far as we can tell, nothing seems really wrong with her. The most damage was caused when she was thrown back from the force, and the following concussion. The bullet entered through here,” he said, pointing at a bandaged part of Lenore’s head. “And exited here.” He continued, pointing at the back of her head, just under her left ear. “But it missed her brain nearly completely, turning the moment it hit bone to travel along the curve of the skull.”

He demonstrated this by drawing a
U
shape in the air.

“It hit one part of the brain,” another doctor said from the doorway.

I immediately recognized the name.

He was the doctor Lenore had told me about…her cancer doc.

He held up a computer in his hand and walked swiftly into the room.

“I’m sorry to barge in like this. But when I heard about what happened to Lenore, I pulled her file of the scan she had this afternoon before the shooting happened, then compared it to the one you had done once you had the bleeding under control,” Dr. Parsons continued.

He stopped directly between the doctor that’d been talking to me, Dr. Jeffries, and I.

And on the computer were two scans.

One was what I assumed was this afternoon’s, and one that was the one Dr. Jeffries had just shown me.

After comparing the two, I couldn’t see a single difference.

“I hadn’t realized she was being treated for brain cancer,” Dr. Jeffries said.

Dr. Parsons nodded. “This is the mass I was treating her for, it hasn’t grown in well over a month. In fact, it hasn’t grown at all since I’ve started seeing her. From what we can tell, the mass is benign, but because of its location, it causes her to suffer from severe migraines on occasion.”

She hadn’t had one of those since I’d started seeing her, but just before she’d left for the appointment today, she’d mentioned that she felt one coming on.

“Okay, so what’s the difference between the two scans?” I asked, looking closer, but not seeing anything.

“The mass is gone,” he said, indicating where the mass was located on the earlier scan, and then pointing to where it should’ve been on the later scan.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “So what does that mean?”

“Essentially?” Dr. Parsons asked. “It could be that the bullet did what we were unable to do, and removed it by forcing it out. Or it could be that it wasn’t a mass, per se, maybe it was more of a cyst, and it ruptured during the fall. I’m not sure we’ll ever really know, though.”

I nodded. “And what does that mean for her?”

Dr. Parsons closed his computer and set it down on the bedside table next to Lenore’s bed.

“I don’t know, yet. And we won’t know until she wakes up,” he explained. “The reason we didn’t operate is because it was inoperable…at least for us,” he said, walking forward to the board. “This part of the brain is called the brain stem. It controls her breathing.”

I nodded.

“But she’s still breathing on her own,” I said smartly, looking over at Lenore where she laid peacefully on the bed. The only thing signaling that anything was wrong were the two white bandages on her head covering the bullet’s entry and exit wound.

“Yes,” he continued. “Which is what we were worried about when we decided not to operate.”

“So what does that mean? That we won’t have to worry about this anymore?” I asked.

Dr. Parsons smiled. “For right now, I think Lenore is going to be just fine. In the future, I’d still like her to have regular scans done every three months, then move to every six if everything continues to stay clear.”

I couldn’t tell whether I was relived she was shot in the head, or upset.

It was a combination of both.

“So why is she asleep if she’s okay?” I finally asked, studying the woman that I loved.

“She’s in a medically induced coma. It’s just a precaution. We’re giving her body a chance to focus its energy on healing, not routine functions, and we’re also waiting for the swelling to go down,”

I nodded warily. “Okay.”

“Are there any other questions we can answer for you?” Dr. Parsons asked.

I took a seat at Lenore’s side, and looked at her.

I almost lost her today.

“No. Well…I’m going to have to leave in a few minutes on police business. So you’ll need to explain this to her parents who haven’t gotten here yet,” I said, picking up Lenore’s hand.

“We can do that,” Dr. Parsons said, patting my shoulder as he started to exit the room.

“Dr. Parsons?” I called. “Dr. Jeffries?”

They stopped. “Yes?”

“Thank you.”

Dr. Jeffries smiled. “Your welcome, but I didn’t do anything. It was all on your lady, there. She’s the fighter, not me.”

Indeed, my girl was a fighter.

But she wouldn’t need to fight for much longer.

Not with me at her side.

But now I was about to wipe the earth clean of ten people responsible for tainting our lives with their brand of evil.

With one final kiss to Lenore’s hand, I stood up and walked out the door.

Calm on the outside, raging in the inside.

“Give me the names!” I roared.

I slammed the man who was responsible for shooting my child into the wall behind him, suspending him at least six inches off the floor as I did.

“Perry. A-Abraham P-Perry.”

My blood ran cold.

He was a preacher I’d quarreled with when I’d first moved here. The one who’d refused to give me a ride on his expensive boat to show me around the area.

Mr. I can only use my boat for church related purposes. No exceptions.

Although it seemed a minor occurrence then…
now it wasn’t.

I dropped the man, and he slammed to his knees, no fight left in him to hold him up.

“You better hope you gave me the right information, or I’ll take your limbs off, and burn the stumps so you don’t bleed to death,” I growled, giving him one last kick before I surged out the door.

I’d deal with him later.

There were bigger fish to fry right now.

An hour later

“This is all you have on him?” I asked, scanning the paperwork Wolf had just handed me.

He nodded. “This was all we’d been able to get on him. He’s a fuckin’ preacher for Uncertain’s only fuckin’ church.”

I shook my head. “Good cover, to be honest. Would know everything about this town, too.”

“So how’s a preacher able to afford a boat like that? Seems hellaciously suspicious,” I nodded.

We had our man.

Wolf nodded. “We’ve been watching him since that killer gave you his name. Got the approval from the boss man, as well as the warrant, leaving me with the power to do almost anything I want to.”

I grinned a tad manically.

“Good. Let’s go.”

Thirty minutes later, the entire team was dressed and ready to penetrate Perry’s house.

I knocked on the door, not worried that they’d bother to look through the hole.

I didn’t care if they saw me.

I was ready for them, too.

The first man I saw when I entered through the door to Abraham Perry’s place was the man I’d seen on the security cameras across the street from the hospital.

The one who’d thrown the black mask in the trashcan when he thought he’d been far enough away from the security cameras.

And…I’d give him credit. He had been. At least from the hospital’s.

He hadn’t been from the drug rehab place across the street who’d been battling a bunch of petty thefts.

I didn’t even pause to think.

I pulled my .45 out, aimed it at the man’s chest, and fired.

He stumbled back as the bark of the gun sounded in my ear, then fell slowly to the floor as he clutched his chest in his hands.

Two more men ran through the door, weapons drawn, but the two men at my side, Mig and Wolf, took them down, too.

The next two on the outside of the door’s entrance were smarter.

They fired through the walls.

What they failed to do, though, was aim for where we were actually standing.

Which wasn’t in the line of fire.

Lesson one in tactical training.

We were down on the ground, and the moment they poked their heads around the wall, they were taken down.

“That’s five. There’s only six reported in the house, and most likely he’s already in the panic room,” I said through my mic that connected me to the other four men that’d come with me.

Casten, Ridley, Wolf, and Mig confirmed my thoughts as they scanned the last few rooms.

Finally, we came to the very last room where the panic room was supposed to be, according to the information we’d been able to extract from the ‘friend’ that gave us Abraham Perry’s name.

“Bet it’s wired,” Wolf said, looking around the room. “He knows we’re here. I’ll bet he has a hidden latch here somewhere.”

The five of us moved throughout the room, pulling everything off the walls and bookshelves.

I went to the desk and upended it, smiling somewhat evilly when I saw the small button on the floor where the desk had previously occupied.

“Got it,” I said, pressing the button.