Lane

by Trent Jordan

  For now.

  “Alright, that concludes this weekly meeting,” Lane said. “Gentlemen, thanks for holding down the fort while I was out. Even if you bastards were the ones that held me out.”

  “Nonsense,” Axle said. “Thank you for taking the lead.”

  Lane smiled before he pounded the gavel once. Everyone slowly stood up, walking out the door, except for me. It wasn’t uncommon for me or someone else to hang back; private one-on-ones were a hallmark of Lane’s teaching style. He was also brutally honest and upfront in these meetings, so no one outside the doors wondered if any shit-talking was being done behind their back.

  “So, Mr. President,” I said with a smile. “I’d say you got the club in tip-top shape. You have pretty good control over them all.”

  “For now,” Lane said as he puffed on a cigar. “Care to have one? We might as well celebrate my return.”

  “Ah, hell, I’d prefer a cigarette, but alright,” I said as I took one from him and lit it up.

  It just felt like we were celebrating a temporary victory. This battle against the Saints wasn’t going to end until Lucius fell or until we found a way to make the peace. There was just too much bad blood.

  “By the way,” I said. “What was that all about? That club vote?”

  “Oh, just something about getting medical help on call, but all that aside, though,” Lane said. “I do need to talk to you about something. I know you’re good for keeping secrets, Patriot, but in this case, I need you to be very, very quiet. OK?”

  “Of course, man,” I said. “Why?”

  Lane sighed, his heavy look second only to the expression he’d had when he thought about his deceased girlfriend, Shannon, the one he’d dated for a long time before he met Angela.

  “If I’m right,” he said. “It could very well spell the end of the club.”

  Kaitlyn Meade

  It had been a rather busy month at Springsville General Hospital, full of gunshot wounds, violence, and a few drunk driving accidents.

  At the moment, though, I was just on my break with my best friend Devon in the lunch hall of the hospital. We both had on our nursing scrubs, and instead of talking about issues of work—we had all the time to do that—we were on the topic familiar to anyone without a ring on their finger or an official social media status.

  Dating.

  “Telling you, girl, as soon as we can, we need to get the hell out of here and get in Los Angeles,” Devon said. “There’s absolutely no dating scene here!”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I corrected.

  “Oh, please, what are you going to do, date one of the biker men?” Devon said with a chuckle. “They are the only guys who are single here, and for how much one of them comes to the hospital, we might as well.”

  I smirked but quickly interjected with a different thought, not really interested in going down that road.

  “I mean, think about the places that exist in every municipality,” I said. “Firefighters. Police. Government jobs. Surely, there are some men in their twenties and thirties.”

  “OK, sure, but you’re talking a dating pool of, what, a dozen men? Most of which will have a small-town mentality?”

  I sat against my chair and crossed my arms.

  “I’m just saying, Kaitlyn, for as smart a girl as you are, as badass and tough as you are, you deserve someone better than someone who’s going to talk about putting women in the kitchen and saying you need to be a stay-at-home mom as soon as your belly expands half an inch.”

  “They can’t all be that bad,” I said, even though prior experience had shown otherwise.

  “Really,” Devon said. “When was the last time one of your dates talked about a foreign country they had visited? Or climate change? Or, hell, trying a dish that wasn’t pizza or hamburgers?”

  I hated that, even if Devon had meant to say what she did as an exaggeration or a joke, she actually wasn’t kidding. I could not remember the last time those things had happened in Springsville—I had to go back to when I was in nursing school in Los Angeles.

  “Point made,” I said.

  “Like I said, if we’re going to restrict ourselves to this town, we might as well go for the bikers. At least a lot of them are hot and a lot of them are badass.”

  My smile faded. There was nothing hot about them. There was nothing attractive about gangsters. Whether they rode bikes or pimped-out vehicles, whether they wore cuts or bandanas, death followed them everywhere they went.

  I only had to flash back a year ago to one of the worst overnight shifts I had ever done. I was dealing with a personal tragedy at that time with my older sister, and what came in around one in the morning was one of the few times I had lost my composure as a nurse.

  A beautiful woman by the name of Shannon had come in, having suffered fatal wounds at the scene of the crime. Though there was nothing we could really do for her, I was tasked with putting her downstairs so the team could conduct tests to officially give a cause of death. I tried my best to maintain my composure, but seeing another woman killed my gang violence—in this case, seeing the aftermath of someone killed by gang violence—made me break down and cry. I had managed to at least get to a bathroom and do it, but it just happened far too close in proximity to what had happened to my sister.

  It was like God had a sick sense of humor and wanted to remind me of how Kristina had died. At least in that death, the first time I saw her body was after being embalmed with all of the scars and ugly stuff hidden. In Shannon’s case, though, not only was she not embalmed, she had come in with her eyes wide open, as if her eyes would forever remain aware of what had happened.

  We weren’t supposed to do this, but I wound up shutting her eyes for her. I couldn’t believe that no one who had brought her in had done so, and someone had to give her peace from all of the gang violence. If I hadn’t, who would have?

  All of this was to say that while I considered it my professional duty to treat whoever came through our doors, regardless of gang or group affiliation, that was a very different question from dating one of them.

  And even if I could look past their violent tendencies, there was also the fact that hot and attractive were two different things in my eyes. Hot was someone that would have looked great in porn or to fantasize about. Attractive was someone who I wanted to actually spend time with. The bikers were hot, absolutely. Attractive?

  “Yeah, but I don’t want a badass, I want some good asses,” I cracked, causing Devon to laugh.

  This was just how the two of us operated. We’d trade dark humor, crack jokes, and ignore the seriousness of some of the other stuff. We were nurses; we had to resort to something to get through it all.

  At the tail end of my break, shortly before six in the evening, I got up and headed to my car to put my phone away. I got all the way to my vehicle, a black Honda Civic, before I heard the familiar sound of a motorcycle approaching. I didn’t mind the sound of a motorcycle; I could see the appeal in riding one. I just disliked who typically rode those bikes in certain cities.

  But when I turned around, I realized that the guy on the bike was approaching me. I recognized him—he was a light-skinned black man with good arms and an apparent lack of smile whom I had treated a couple of weeks ago. If memory served me right, he liked to go by Axle, although I always referred to patients by their real names, which I believed was something like LeCharles Williamson. It was a very unique name, that much I knew.

  I crossed my arms and stood up, not wanting to show any fear or intimidation at the sight. Axle pulled up right in front of me, killed his engine, and placed his helmet on his handlebars.

  “Hi, can I help you?” I said. “If you need medical attention, you should—”

  “I don’t need it,” he said. “But we might in the future. I remember you. You helped out the doctors.”

  “I did, I’m a nurse, it’s what I do,” I said dryly. “But I’m not a fortune teller. I can’t tell you if you’ll need treatment in the
future, so—”

  “Yes, but if such a thing happens, we need to be able to have people help us on the spot,” LeCharles said. “We can’t be going to the hospital and drawing attention like that.”

  “So then don’t get hurt,” I said. “Look, if you came here for a conversation on this, then you can leave now. No one here is going to help you with what you’re saying, and—”

  Very subtly, LeCharles reached into his jacket, reached at something, and casually showed me a few hundred dollar bills, held together by a rubber band.

  “How would you like to make some extra money under the table for us? At far better rates than what you’re being paid right now?”

  I looked wide-eyed at the amount of money in his jacket and then stared back at LeCharles. I knew, given that dollar amount, what my answer would be.

  Patriot

  Lane had his occasional flaw, to be sure. We all did. It’s why we were a club and not a bunch of one-man individual operations.

  But exaggeration and hyperbole were not one of them. He sometimes oversold himself, but it was very rare for him to oversell club business. If he said there was something that could potentially cause the club serious problems down the road, that was something that I needed to pay attention to—especially if he said those problems could cause the end of the club.

  “Let me explain first why I say that and what I intend to do,” Lane said. “I let my emotions get the best of me when we went to attack the Fallen Saints’ base. I let my emotions get the best of me in a lot of ways, right? So I’ve got to focus, now more than ever, on being logical and very cold in what I do.”

  “Up to a point, man,” I said, remembering all the times my commanding officers in the military would make sweeping, overreacting proclamations, making life difficult for everyone. “You’re Lane, not Butch. Don’t lose sight of who you are and the heart you got.”

  “I appreciate it, brother, and to some degree, I’m saying this out loud for myself as much for you,” he said.

  He gave a long sigh.

  “You know, I keep trying to figure out if I’m going to need Cole. Especially if this issue really is something that’s going to undermine the club.”

  To me, the answer was simple. Yes, we were going to need Cole, even if we didn’t truly need him. Cole Carter had the last name of the founder, had not killed Angela—thankfully, Lane had gotten over that belief, even if it took him nearly a year to clear his mind of the false story—and had always been loyal and faithful to all of the other Reapers. The two of them had never become co-presidents as their father had wanted, but I could just imagine the two of them bouncing off each other so well.

  But this wasn’t the place to have that conversation. I bit my lip and just shrugged. It was my way of telling Lane that that question didn’t matter that much right now.

  “What’s the issue?” I finally said when it seemed like Lane was more interested in me waiting to say something.

  He stood up for a second, made sure the door was locked shut, peered out the crack of it, and sat down.

  “I think there’s a spy in the Black Reapers for the Fallen Saints. And I think it’s one of the officers.”

  My body went cold immediately. I could literally feel shivers and chills go down my spine as the tip of my nose went numb, my fingers started to, and I felt like I needed a hoodie to combat the cold. This was… this was…

  Deja vu all over again.

  I remembered back to that fateful night in Ramadi, when I’d lost a few brothers… when I later learned why I had lost some of my best friends… how one of the men in the group had fallen for the beliefs of the enemy… how they had deserted us…

  No, no, this shit couldn’t be happening again. There was just no fucking way. Life couldn’t give me a second traitor in this short a time upon me. That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t fucking fair!

  “There’s no way,” I said, gritting my teeth as I struggled to maintain proper appearances. “All of those officers were handpicked by your father. Your father knew people better than anyone else. There is no way that he picked someone who would be a traitor.”

  “Patriot, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I keep thinking about everything since my father’s death,” he said. “Every time that we strike the Saints, it’s like they’re one step ahead of us. The only reason either of us are alive right now is because my brother came out of nowhere to save the day. And that only happened because of a lucky breakthrough for Angela. We can’t rely on fate saving our asses again. You know?”

  “I know, man, I know,” I said.

  At this point, I felt like I was fighting more out of principle than out of belief. I had never said Lane’s thought out loud, but the thought had crossed my mind more than once about how a group as ill-disciplined as the Saints shouldn’t have known what we were going to do so well. The only way they had was either an incredible string of luck, or…

  “Are you sure?” I said, even as I began to suspect the truth. “You had better be damn well sure. You make that sort of accusation against someone here, that’s the kind of thing that gets people killed. You kill the wrong guy, well…”

  “I know, I know,” Lane said. “And look, I’ll admit, I can’t be one hundred percent sure. If you ask me who I suspect is the spy, I have no idea. I’m telling you, so I trust that you’re not the spy, but I was warned—”

  “By whom?”

  Lane sighed.

  “Angela.”

  My eyes cocked at that one.

  “You’re taking a really big risk bringing outside people into club business, man,” I said, doing my best not to get frustrated. “You know how much the brotherhood means. Angela’s a great woman and I’m glad you got her, but you’re being foolish if you think that bringing her in for something like that is smart.”

  “I know, I know.”

  But still, I understood it. My reaction and my words had less to do with Angela or Lane than my own reactions to what was being told. I sure wasn’t about to tell Lane about any of this, either.

  “In any case, she warned me that anyone, even you, could be the spy, but just to be one hundred percent clear, I don’t think you’re the spy.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’d have to kick your ass anyways if you thought I was, man.”

  Lane laughed at that, and I smiled back to be polite, but this wasn’t a conversation I was particularly enjoying. It was just reminding me of how much I hated what had happened in my past, and how futile my efforts to date had been to deal with it.

  “I am thankful, though, that you have that level of trust in me.”

  “Of course,” Lane said easily. “You’re the closest thing I have to a brother in here.”

  No, that’s Cole. But I get what you mean.

  “So if you really think there’s a spy among us,” I said. “If you really think that someone is ratting out our secrets to the Saints… what do you want me to do? I can get some equipment to test for bugs, maybe I can put tracers on people’s phones to listen in to calls, but it’ll take some time and some sneaking around. And if we do this wrong…”

  “I know, I know,” Lane said. “Why don’t we discuss this later? I don’t want someone to barge in at the wrong moment right now.”

  “Brewskis?” I immediately suggested.

  “Think it might be hot after what happened a couple weeks ago?”

  “Could be,” I admitted. “But I doubt it. That place is well protected and well established. It would have to take someone really stupid to end that peace. It would be the equivalent of invoking World War Three. So long as we both show up at the same time.”

  Lane smiled.

  “I guess right now, I’m just being extra cautious about how we handle things,” Lane said. “There’s a lot that I’m realizing I used to believe in, but now, I can’t say for sure if I do anymore.”

  Like your own skill and confidence, for example.

  OK, that was perhaps a bit brutally harsh. But it’s not without reaso
n.

  “By the way, did you zone out during the club vote?”

  Shit. OK, yep, you can’t hide that anymore, that’s a good sign that you don’t have it like you used to, man.

  “Yeah,” I said after a hesitation. “Just thinking about some shit. What was the vote on again?”

  “Do you…”

  Lane thought better of asking if I wanted to talk about it first. Unlike him, who seemed to not mind opening up and confessing his fears, I had trouble doing that to anything beyond a surface level.

  “The vote was on if we should go and reach out to some of the medical staff at the hospital and see if we can get them on our payroll,” Lane said. “I don’t like having to have our men go all the way to the hospital for treatment, dragging the club away from here and splitting us apart. I want us centralized as much as we can.”

  “Well, I said yay, didn’t I?” I said with a laugh.

  “Yeah, but I think you should have had a bigger role in it,” Lane said. “I sent Axle to do it just by default, since he and Butch are usually the outreach guys, but such outreach usually entails a harder touch with those two. I should have asked someone with a softer touch—”

  “You’re saying I’m soft, aren’t you?” I deadpanned.

  Lane raised his hands but couldn’t help his smirk.

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “Fine,” I said, but I also had a smile on as I rose out of my chair. “So you want me to go over there and apologize for sending the big, scary black man over?”

  “Well, maybe not so bluntly, but if Axle comes back with bad news, just, you know, see what you can do,” Lane said. “You know I’m not wrong when I say that you’re the friendliest and most approachable of the club.”

  “Which is why you made me treasurer, huh?” I said with a laugh. “Because you want the guy who interacts with the outside world and other club members the least to be the one who has the most personal and soft skills.”