Fifteen

After he hung up on Ghost, Walsh felt oddly lighter. Like a man who’d washed his hands of something nasty and no longer had to worry about it.

Then he got up from the desk, walked calmly to the first available dorm, went into its bathroom, and spent ten minutes puking up his guts.

He felt actually lighter after that. Or emptier. Same difference, he figured, as he sat on the cool tile floor, leaning back against the side of the tub and staring up at the ceiling, waiting for his now-vacant stomach to stop churning. He had dozens upon dozens of things to do, but, sweating like a heroin addict going through detox, not sure he could pick his head up without dry-heaving, he was pinned in place for the moment by his own poor decisions, and stuck with nothing to do but reason his way through the solutions.

The problem was – well, perhaps the chief problem amidst a host of problems – that Walsh wasn’t a liar. He was a liar as a Lean Dog: as a money launderer, an outlaw, a transporter of arms, and, when it counted, a killer and, most recently, a torturer. But when he sat to the left of the head of the table in church, when he wore his VP patches, he wasn’t a liar. Not to his brothers. He didn’t lie to his wife, either, not even before she was his wife, when she’d been a frightened new employee, and he’d realized he had a choice to make between marrying her or…well, no, there’d been no choice.

He wasn’t a liar. He was a loyal vice president. Loyal to the Dogs, to his president. He’d told himself loyalty was what had driven him to lie, finally, and to lie on a grand scale. He’d told the sort of lie that couldn’t be taken back with a shrug and an apology, and now, for the first time in his life, he didn’t know what to do .

The obvious answer was: start telling the truth.

But it was hard to envision a scenario in which that didn’t get him held down on the floor while Michael took a sharp knife to his tattoos. Would they pull the rings off his fingers? Or take the rings, fingers and all?

He shuddered, cold, and clammy, and sick. He wanted Emmie. Wanted to lay his head on her knee and feel her fingers scritch through his hair. Birds outside the window, and the distant thunder of hooves as the horses ran in to dinner.

He asked himself, in that pitiful moment, if he could live without the club. If he could step down, offer up his patches, and his rings, and his tats voluntarily. Let them hang his picture in the chapel with a big red line through it, warning none to trust him.

His fingers itched toward the phone in his pocket, but when he lifted his head, he was so dizzy he had to thunk it back down on the edge of the tub. Dehydrated, he thought absently. He needed to drink his weight in water and Gatorade for a while to even out his system. Who would he call?

Emmie? Tell me it’s going to be okay.

Phil? Will you fight for me, if they want me dead?

From the back of his mind, the solitary version of himself who’d lived in a tidy cabin along the railroad tracks sneered. Pathetic . He’d always been so self-reliant, so self-contained, a house unto himself.

And maybe that was the problem. Maybe, instead of self-contained, he’d merely been repressed, deprived, and now, with the veil half-lifted – by marriage, by fatherhood, by family – he’d found himself on the brink.

He thought back to that night in the farmhouse kitchen, before a Boyle-sent intruder had shattered their afterglow. When Emmie had sat at the island in one of his shirts – not her plush and warm and comfy robe, no; one of his shirts, because it was comforting to her. Because he was comforting to her. Even though he hadn’t known himself capable of comforting anyone before she’d come into his life. And she’d pleaded with him with big eyes, and asked him not to lock things away, not from her.

Self-reliance had been a strength his whole life.

And now it was drowning him.

A figure filled the doorway, suddenly, silently.

Walsh was too spent to be startled by it.

It was Michael. It was funny, Walsh reflected, all the ways his face had never softened in the time he’d known him. Not even after Holly and Lucy. Not even after Mercy started kidding him, and including him, and his shoulders had relaxed a noticeable fraction. That was just his face, Walsh supposed. A blue-eyed blank wall, inscrutable and unscalable.

He stood a moment, staring down at Walsh without a shred of social grace: which was to say, he held awkward eye contact without flinching. “You good?” he said, after a while. Voice as flat as his expression.

Walsh’s voice came out croaky and unsteady. “Potassium’s low.” Among other things. “You bring me one of those banana bags in the chest cooler?”

Michael reacted neither with surprise nor censure, merely nodded and moved off. He returned less than a minute later, toting the IV bag, a length of medical tubing, and a needle.

“Thanks,” Walsh said, and hitched himself up higher against the tub. Standing was beyond him at the moment, but he rolled up his right sleeve and reached for the needle. When it became apparent he couldn’t manage to hit the vein without going through, the way his hands were trembling, Michael knelt and did it himself. A fast pinch, then the stickiness of the tape. With deft movements, he attached the bag, then stood to hang it off the shower rod, and released the clip to start the fluids going.

“Thanks,” Walsh said again, and tipped his head back once more.

Though it had taken one of Ratchet’s many shady connections to procure them, keeping the hydration IV bags on hand had been Walsh’s idea. They had Narcan and an assortment of other emergency supplies, too. An overdose or case of alcohol poisoning wasn’t the sort of thing they could afford to wait around for an ambulance crew to handle. More of that self-reliance.

He'd never had to hook himself up to one before.

Well. Michael had done it, but it was the principle of the thing.

He closed his eyes, and waited. Michael could move like a cat, but Walsh could feel his presence lingering in the room, that vibration of another heartbeat, like a TV left on just out of hearing range.

He expected Michael to say something, eventually. That humming energy of his was that of a man with a piece to speak.

But he was in no way prepared for what Michael would say.

“Ghost’s not dead, is he?”

Walsh slitted his eyes open to peer up at him, searching for a trace of judgement, even contempt, that of course wasn’t there. Or at least wasn’t visible. He was too woozy to deny it. Swallowed and said, “When did you know?”

“Immediately.”

“Jesus. There goes my convincing side.”

“I think Aidan believes.”

“Yeah. That’s going to be a big problem.” When Michael nodded, and continued to peer at him without anger, Walsh volunteered, “He went with Fox to Virginia.”

“How’s that going?”

“Fox said to watch the news tonight.” He blearily checked his watch. “Or this morning. Whatever.” He could feel the fluids perking him up a little, but only in a way that served to remind him how badly his head hurt.

“Can you stand?” Michael asked.

“Maybe.”

Michael held out a hand, and Walsh knew it wasn’t merely an offer of physical help.

He took it, and let himself be hauled to his feet.