to the vehicle. The lot is filled with cars, and Pip scans the area quickly before leading the way to the doors.
He must be looking for cops, I realize nervously, relaxing when I don’t see any in the lot.
“What’s wrong?” Dee asks, looking at him over her shoulder in the front entrance.
“I thought I saw someone follow us in here,” he says with a shrug, heading to the front desk.
A man gets out of a car that looks like it’s just pulled in, but he heads across the street toward a store.
We stop at the front desk and give Penny’s name. The lady behind it looks at Pip with a grin and blushes at the sight of his cut. Getting in the elevator headed for the second floor, I notice her standing and leaning over the desk, watching Pip get in with us. She stares at him until the doors close, as if she wants to look at him for as long as possible until the doors close.
Dee shakes her head.
“Will people stare at me like that when I get a cut?” Ben asks me softly. When I widen my eyes at him, the kid shrugs. “She was kind of cute.”
I laugh.
“Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up, kiddo.” Dee squeezes his hand, casting a subtle scowl at me as if it annoys her that he’s taken to me so much. “When you get older, you’ll have more girls swooning over you than you know what to do with even before you have a cut. You’ll have to drive them off with a stick.”
With that cleft in his chin, all that hair, and those big baby blues, she’s probably right.
Dee holds one of his hands and I hold his other as we make our way down the second floor hall toward his mother’s room. Practically everyone we pass stares at Pip with wonder or fear or both. I have to wonder what they’d be doing if Spider was with us. Some of the women give Dee looks of worry when they see her tattoos.
One guy sitting in the waiting room with them has his phone in hand, his scruffy face half hidden by his Chicago Bulls hoodie. He visibly draws back in his seat as if he expects Pip to draw the gun concealed under his cut and shoot him.
Halfway down the hall, a woman’s shout rings out, loud and distressed.
“They’re trying to kill me in here, Reginald! They keep poisoning me!”
A man’s consoling, slightly irritated voice answers, and a little girl’s follows, but except for the word “Grandma” in a small scared voice, I miss what either says over what I assume is the nurse, telling the old woman to calm down, no one is trying to kill her.
“Fuck, I hate hospitals,” Dee mutters. “Everyone’s either sick, dying, or fucking insane.”
“Dee, she’ll hear you,” Pip says halfheartedly.
Dee shrugs. “I doubt she’d notice.”
“Let me go in and see if Penny’s awake,” Pip says, stopping us at the entrance to a room at the end. “Come on, tiger.” He takes Ben’s hand.
The old woman from down the hall’s voice is still ringing out. “Get that needle away from me! Stop trying to do me in!”
I withhold the inappropriate urge to laugh.
When Pip and Ben step into Penny’s room, I hear Pip’s voice and a softer female one, croaked and too quiet to make out what she says.
Dee pinches my shirt with her fingers and pulls me aside, away from the door.
“What?” I look up at her.
“You are here because Ben asked you to be,” she says in a low tone. “Speak to anyone other than him or Penny unless spoken to, and I’ll haul you out of here so fast your head will spin.”
Anger bolts through me. I suppress the urge to ask her if she’s afraid I’ll try to slip someone a note or tell the nice nurses here that I’m being held captive by a big scary biker. She doesn’t look at all nervous, but then I suppose she’s used to having to lay down the law with less than cooperative people.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to get you and Pip in trouble,” I say with only a hint of respect.
“Good. Because if you do, it’s our asses. Snake will have mine, and Spider will have Pip’s.”
I blink at her, getting the weird feeling she felt it necessary to point out that it was Snake who’d deal with her, not Spider. It has the slight hint of