Page 95 of Baker

He crumbled to the floor. Confused, scared, and deaf from the two gunshots being fired in the confines of the home, I ran the length of the living room, toward Andy.

I kicked his pistol across the concrete floor and dropped to my knees at Andy’s side. As I brushed her blood-soaked hair away from her face, she opened her eyes.

“I didn’t. I didn’t tell him a thing,” She muttered. “I swear.”

“Oh my God.” I blubbered. “You’re…you’re okay?”

“God damned right she’s okay,” Cash spouted. “No thanks to you.”

I pulled off my shirt and wiped the blood from her face. “You haven’t been hit?”

“Not by anything but the back of his hand.” She sat up and hugged me. “He’s uhhm. He’s a cop. Did you see his badge? It was on his belt.”

I looked over my right shoulder. With an open-eyed death stare, the dead man looked back at me. Blood oozed from a hole in the center of his forehead.

Confused, I started to speak, but couldn’t.

Cash picked up the man’s pistol, looked at it, and then at me. “Government issue Sig Sauer. Must be a fed. Good thing I got that prick before he got your girl, huh?”

At that instant, for the first time, it dawned on me. The man didn’t get a shot off. The gunshot that deafened me was Cash’s. He’d shot the man right between the eyes. He’d taken the one in a ten million shot that I feared taking.

Doing so saved Andy’s life.

“Good work, Brother,” I said, my voice laced with emotion. “You saved her.”

“Can’t let cocksuckers go around threatenin’ my best friend’s ol’ lady, can I?” He walked past us and kicked the dead man in the ribs. “Wonder who this fucker is.”

“Get his wallet and his keys out of his pocket,” Andy said. “Push the door lock button on his key fob and you’ll find his car. Then you can search it. Maybe that’ll help you find out. Find his phone, too. They’ll be doing a trace on it.”

“God damn,” Cash said with a laugh. “Is your night job being a hit woman?”

She wiped the back of her head, and then looked at her blood-stained hand. “I watch a lot of Netflix. At least I used to.”

Cash searched the man, found his keys and wallet, and shoved them in his front pocket. Then, he reached over my shoulder with a bloody hand. “We haven’t officially met yet. Name’s Brock, but everyone in the MC calls me Cash.”

She shook his hand. “Andy. Andy Winslow. Nice to meet you, Brock.”

He released her hand and cleared his throat. “Call me Cash.”

FORTY-ONE - Andy

“Seriously,” Baker said demandingly. “You need to take a shower, lay down, and get some rest. We’ve got a medic that I can have come by here and--”

“Remember that asshole I told you I used to date?” I asked from my seat at the bar. “The one that beat me?”

His jaw muscles flexed. “Yeah.”

“What he did to me was ten times worse than this. I’m fine,” I assured him.

“Leave her alone,” Cash said from the kitchen. “Girl says she’s fine, she’s fine.”

They’d covered the dead cop with a blanket and rolled him up in a rug. I stared at it for some time, thinking about what my father had gone through. No differently than me, he’d been held hostage by my mother the night she shot him.

My perspective on the entire event changed. I no longer felt hatred toward him. Nor did I cherish her the way I had for all those years. A decision was made, and in an instant, lives were forever changed. Not just theirs, either. The repercussions of such an event ripple outward, touching everyone in their path until there’s no one else to touch.

I shifted my eyes from the dead cop to Baker. “He was looking for something. Around the bar. That’s where he was when I came out of the bedroom.”

Baker searched the bar and found a small listening device tucked into the molding that surrounded the brass railing used as a footrest.