Saved by the Outlaw(16)

On the way down, there’s a deafening crack as the gun goes off. I can feel the bullet whiz past me, and then there’s the sound of more glass breaking as the bullet goes through the window. The next sound I hear is the worst one yet: an agonized scream in a foreign language.

Someone’s been shot.

“You fucking mudak!” Leon bellows, kicking Mickey hard in the side as he lies crumpled on the ground, pinned under the bearded biker guy’s powerful arms.

“I’m sorry, Prez,” grunts the biker, shaking his head and looking up at Leon dolefully. “I didn’t know the gun was gonna go off. Chert voz’mi, I tried to stop him — ”

“Not your fault, Genn,” Leon replies, “Just keep him down.”

“Oh my God,” I murmur, turning around to see a woman in a leather jacket bolt out the entrance and kneel down beside a fallen guy outside. Through the shattered window I can make out the spread of scarlet blood pooling on the pavement.

“B-blood,” I mumble, just as my head starts to get fuzzy inside. I don’t do well with blood. Not at all. They make me lie down on a stretcher any time I have to give blood because I have a reputation for fainting. I start to feel that familiar, terrible wave of nausea and lightheadedness.

“Man down!” shouts the woman from outside, looking up through the hole in the window to give Leon a panicked expression.

“Where’s he hit?” asks a guy running past me.

“Left shoulder blade. Anya, we need you!” answers the woman. Another female biker comes bolting past, her cropped blonde ponytail bouncing. She nearly shoves me out of the way in her haste to get outside. She crouches down next to the guy on the ground and immediately rips his shirt to make a tourniquet from the thin material.

“Oh my… oh no,” I mumble, my vision going dark.

Some guy, possibly the huge bearded biker named Genn, calls out, “Uh oh, think we got a fainter there, Prez.”

I can feel my knees buckling beneath me but before I start to fall, a pair of muscular arms catch me around the chest and hold me up. “Already got one down, can’t afford another,” growls Leon in my ear, sending a shiver down my spine.

“What is going on?” I ask, my voice wavering and weak.

“I don’t know — you tell me,” he retorts, spinning me around slowly to face him. Once again, his hands are on my shoulders, bracing me. This is the second time in one day.

In my hazy brain, the only words I can manage are: “We gotta stop meeting like this.”

Leon sighs and pats my cheek, trying to break me out of my near-faint.

“Gotta get this guy back to church, immediately,” calls out a woman.

Leon looks past me to give her a nod. “Alright, do your best. Eva! Rod! Get our patient up off the ground and get him out of here so Anya can stitch him up. Everybody out! I’ll meet you back at church later, khorosho?”

“Got it, Prez.”

“Byet ostorozhen!”

With that, every single one of the bikers file out of the liquor store at once, except for Leon and the bearded, bear-like guy pinning Mickey to the floor. Leon looks back over his shoulder at the two of them, and the bearish guy speaks up.

“What should I do with him?”

“Stand him up, Genn. We’re gonna have a little business chat.”

“You think you got time for that?” spits Mickey as Genn swings him up onto his feet effortlessly. “Nosy neighbors ‘round this neighborhood must’ve called the cops by now. This gun, ya know, it’s small but it’s still awfully loud.”

“Yeah, and I bet you had the good sense to register it under your name legally, eh?” Leon says, turning back away from me to take an aggressive step toward Mickey, who shrinks back.

Mickey is silent.

“That’s what I thought. They’re gonna get here and see that gun and know exactly who shot it. You wanna go down for shooting an innocent man, Mr. Lamar?”

“Pfft!” the store owner snorts. “He’s an illegal. They’ll just toss his ass back over the border and be done with it. I’ll just tell ‘em he lunged at me or something. Self-defense is still a valid reason to fire in this country. And besides, who’re the cops gonna believe: me or some foreigner with no ID?”

Leon gives Genn just the slightest, subtlest nod. The bearlike guy pulls back and pummels Mickey in the gut, hard, causing him to gasp in pain and shock. With the wind knocked out of him so suddenly, he doubles over.

“Here’s what’s gonna happen,” Leon says, calmly and quietly. “You’re gonna hire back everyone you let go, including the innocent man you just wounded, once his shoulder’s all healed up. And speaking of which, you are also going to pay for every dime of his medical care until he’s even better off than when he first met your slimy ass.”