Lane Read online

  Or would not, depending on who had given them better bribes at a given time.

  I tended to agree with all of the perspectives, but I felt such guidelines repeated as often as they were threatened to become overbearing. Since we had only gained two new members since the end of my father’s reign, resulting in a net decrease, it wasn’t like we were in dire need of creating a seminar to outline our guidelines. We just had to lead by example.

  That was the ideal, at least.

  “I will see to it that they better understand,” I said. “Thanks, Marc.”

  “Of course,” he said, patting my arms. “Are we set to begin church?”

  “In about three minutes, yep,” I said. “If you don’t see anyone else come in at the appropriate time, round them up or let me know, will ya?”

  “Of course.”

  I smiled, patted him on the shoulder, and sat down at my seat at the front of the church. Maybe Father Marcellus and the others were right.

  Maybe I did need to get more involved. Maybe I need to be a more present member of the club.

  But...

  I had a few fears about that which I wasn’t willing to clarify, not even to myself.

  A few seconds later, Michael “Patriot” Giordano, my closest friend in the club, came in with a big grin.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” he said, raising his arms for a hug. “The big man decided to actually show up early.”

  “Oh, please, it can’t be that bad.”

  “Oh, it is,” he said, but his laughter and his physical contact distracted from the weight of his bluntness. “How are you, man? You look like you’re dragging a bit.”

  I looked over his shoulder and focused my ears on the door, trying to sense if someone else was about to come into the room.

  “I went to the graveyard this morning,” he said. “I don’t know that that will ever be enjoyable.”

  “Shit, man, why would it be?” Patriot said as he took his seat, lighting a cigarette and then taking a gulp of whiskey.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just thought maybe by now, a full year later, I might be over it. I mean, the club is going great, we’re making money, and—”

  “Profit’s not everything here,” Patriot interrupted. “In fact, unlike most businesses, I would argue it’s second. Or third. Sure as hell ain’t first, man.”

  I crossed my arms. What were we, if not a business?

  “We’re a club, Lane,” he said, answering my silent question as he usually tended to do. “A club is about brotherhood. You can pay people and bail them out with the funds we have, but that’s just the minimum of what we do here. You need to partake more.”

  How many fucking times was I going to have to listen to that shit?

  “I hear you,” I said, deflecting his statement.

  “Well, you may hear me, but the other club members don’t hear you, man,” Patriot said.

  I was about to bum a cigarette from him, but the harshness of his words left me reeling so bad I just stared at him for several seconds.

  “You think I’m kidding?” he said, arching an eyebrow. “You know of all the people here, I’m going to tell you the truth the most, brother.”

  “I’m well aware, thanks,” I grumbled. “Can we just drop this until after the meeting?”

  Patriot looked like he wanted to do anything but. He was now leaning forward in his chair, elbows on the table, as if trying to get closer to peer into my mind and better understand what I was asking.

  “Alright,” he finally said.

  He wasn’t letting me off the hook. We both heard footsteps approaching.

  “But you have to promise me you will, man. We’ll do it right here if we have to.”

  “Okay,” I said, quickly finishing my words before the oldest officer, Red Raven, the Secretary, walked in. He gave me a firm handshake, looked at me with his one good eye, nodded, and took his seat.

  Red Raven was the oldest member of the club, not just the officers, and probably the closest to having to retire due to physical limitations. His hands didn’t hold as steady as they once had, he had one functioning eye, and he ran out of breath easily thanks to years of smoking, eating shitty food, and just, in general, being old. But he also was a sage unlike anyone in the club, and though he wasn’t much of a speaker, when Red Raven spoke, unlike Butch, we all fucking listened.

  Red Raven also had a son in the club, whom we nicknamed Pink Raven. He was still in the prospect stage, but it was fully understood that once Red Raven retired or quit, Pink Raven was assuming his title. The younger Raven had all the skills, smarts, and social timing Red Raven had, and the energy and physical skill to boot.

  Seconds later, the rest of the club entered. Axle and Butch walked in together, as they often did, and Father Marcellus was the last to enter, as usual. Father Marcellus wasn’t exactly a prude as most ministers were—he smoked, he drank—but he had a very serious tone to him that was not overbearing like Butch or Axle. When he went silent, so did everyone else—including me.

  Case in point, as soon as he sat down, the room stopped talking.

  “Thanks, everyone, for coming,” I said, trying to be a little bit warmer than usual. It was my attempt to at least break the ice with everyone, recognizing I wouldn’t melt it completely in the course of a single day. “I guess we could just get right down to business.”

  In my defense, if we aren’t making money, there is no club. No matter what the others say, we have to make money.

  “We’re facing some issues with the gun trade,” I said, getting to an issue that had bugged us since January and hadn’t been solved in the past few months. “Thanks to political pressure, more and more people are holding on to their guns, and it’s getting harder just to purchase them legally. Sometimes, I swear this state has such a rifle stuck up its own ass.”

  My attempt at humor fell flat. I wasn’t sure what good it would be to connect to members of the club if they didn’t seem interested in engaging me back either.

  “In any case, because of this, we’re going to need to go and visit some of the local gun shops and some of the local politicians, see if we can throw our weight behind this,” I said. “I’m thinking Axle, Butch, and Marc, you three could make a visit over. You can play the role of the good, the bad, and the ugly, and—”

  “Hold up.”

  I had almost never gotten interrupted in a meeting before, and when I had, the person usually apologized to me. Typically, it really came because of an accident, and I was never that bothered by it.

  But when it came from my Vice President, Axle? When the look on his face seemed completely unapologetic? When, in fact, he seemed to be challenging me?

  “What?”

  Yeah, I was a little pissed off.

  “You’re going to send the three of us off, fine,” he said. “But what are you going to do?”

  “Me?” I said. “I’m going to make sure the right people go to the right targets so we can maximize what we’re trying to do.”

  “Bullshit,” Butch said. “You’re scared.”

  “What?” I said, reeling. Because Butch is right. “Okay, what would you have me do? What do you want me to do? It’ll be hard for me to lead if I’m not detached and able to take a high-level view.”

  “What are you, the fucking CEO of Google?” Axle said. “We have, what, six officers in this room and maybe a few dozen people in the club otherwise. You’re not some guy in a suit on the fiftieth floor overseeing two thousand people. You should know everyone in this room.”

  “I do.”

  “You should have done runs with everyone in this room.”

  “I have.”

  And then Axle went for the jugular.

  “Your father always went out with us, Lane,” he said. “He wasn’t trying to be macho or detached. He wasn’t trying to prove he was the President. He was leading by example.”

  “Do I look like my goddamn father?” I shouted.

  That seemed to spark off
a round of words from multiple sides, with everyone except Patriot and Red Raven speaking. Red Raven was impossible to read, as he always was. Patriot just crossed his arms and looked at me with disappointment, as if to say, “I told you so.”

  “Alright, enough,” I said, slamming my fists on the table. “I recognize what I am doing may not work for everyone here. I am happy to bring up such issues individually.”

  I bit my lip. Maybe I was a bit on edge because I had visited my father’s grave and Shannon’s as well, but the other officers had not. They didn’t have a reason to be angry.

  As if I need more trouble in my life.

  But if it’s trouble I deserve...

  “However,” I said, doing all I could to keep my words calm and not inflammatory. “The gun issue is a sincere one. The politicians are getting more and more anti-gun. I am happy to help on the ground, but I sincerely, truly believe the three of you will make a better communicative force than I would.”

  “He’s right, you know.”

  All eyes shifted to the raspy voice of Red Raven.

  “The boy has much to learn about leadership, but one thing he is good at is seeing people for who they are. He would do terribly in your spot. He is much better at organizing a charge into battle than actually partaking in the charge.”

  Well, great. That started out well, went down, went back up to much better, and ended in the worst possible place.

  I’m not ready to die.

  That right there was the fear that undermined everything, what had led to me being so avoidant of much of the club. Witnessing my father die and Shannon die had scarred me and left me in a position of impossibility.

  On the one hand, I loved my father and wanted to honor him. He made me President for a reason—well, co-President technically, but I was glad my “brother” was out the window. I wanted to carry on his legacy and grow the Black Reapers.

  On the other, though? I wasn’t even thirty yet. I was so young. I had a life to live, women to... eventually meet, places to see. I didn’t want to fall into a gunfight. I didn’t want to die.

  Maybe that was cowardly to say, and maybe a certain level of arrogance helped to mask it, but it was the truth. I saw how Shannon’s death affected those who loved her, and I did not want to disappoint those around me by doing the same.

  But such thoughts were rarely something I wanted to admit, and the fact it had come to mind now was more a function of the thought blasting out of my subconscious than a careful examination of my fears.

  “Let’s just agree that for right now, the three of you will go talk to some of the leaders in the area,” I said. “I will do what I need to do to see how I can get more involved. Okay?”

  Axle grumbled something so low I couldn’t hear him, even with him no more than three feet to my left.

  “Okay,” he finally got out.

  “Yes,” Butch said.

  “Of course,” Father Marcellus said.

  “Thank you all,” I said. “I... I think, after that, we should all take a break. Unless anyone else has anything else to say?”

  No one did.

  Patriot wanted to, but not here in church.

  “Okay,” I said, slamming the gavel.

  Everyone stood up and shuffled out without a word, except for Patriot. No one looked at me as they left. I had walked in feeling mighty high about where things stood, and I had ended the meeting feeling down and needing change... and now that everyone had left, I wasn’t sure if this was just a generational thing or if they had legitimate gripes.

  At least, I wanted to believe I wasn’t sure.

  “I promised Axle that I would work in the shop until five,” Patriot said. “So, when I go on break, we can talk then.”

  “Deal,” I said. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “What is there to think about, man?” he responded.

  Oh, there was plenty. How much was my arrogance a mask for the ongoing depression I felt? How could I learn to lower that self-defense mechanism without costing myself my relationships and status with the rest of the club? How could I overcome my fear of dying?

  And... if I was being really honest... how did I move past Shannon?

  “I guess we’ll find out at five,” I said with a weak smile.

  “Believe it or not, you’ll probably score some brownie points for at least sounding remorseful,” Patriot said. “Compared to how you were right after your father’s death and in the months after, that’s a wild leap ahead. But Lane? The club’s pissed at you. You have a lot of making up to do. Simple tone isn’t going to be enough.”

  With that, he left, shutting the door behind him.

  I was left alone in church.

  Angela

  It was my first day of work, and as I walked to my private office, I thought of all of the people who had helped me get here.

  There was my mother, of course, who had paid for me to go to undergrad at UC-Berkeley before I wound up at UCLA law school.

  There were my teachers, who taught me everything I needed to know… and some things that were good but not necessary to know.

  But in the last year, as the final year of law school got easier, the absence of one person in particular really guided me and pushed me.

  Shannon.

  The grief I felt when I found out my childhood best friend had gotten killed had devastated me. Thank God my law school professors had allowed me to take my exams a week after while I grieved, because I would have bombed so bad that I wouldn’t have made it out of UCLA. On top of the grief, though, I was filled with rage.

  Rage at her arrogant prick of a boyfriend, Lane. That very name was like a slur and a curse to me, the kind of thing that could make me visibly recoil in shock at hearing it. I had not seen Lane since the funeral until this morning, but when I did, all I could think was, “You don’t deserve to be at her grave.”

  It was his lifestyle that had dragged Shannon, a sweet girl who saw the world as a place of hope and potential, into a darkness she never had a reason to associate with. It wasn’t like Shannon struggled with drugs or alcohol at any point. She just had a thing for bad boys, nothing more. Why should that have cost her her life?

  It shouldn’t have.

  But as my second-year law professor said, “You don’t live in a world of what should have, you live in a world of what did. So act accordingly.”

  Ever since her death, my mission to “act accordingly” had focused around one single mission—get a job in the District Attorney’s Office in the town with the Black Reapers so I could lead the charge to see them all eliminated. Nothing less than the full destruction of the Black Reapers would make me feel comfortable, most especially since Lane led them. I didn’t know how he had ever gotten the position he did, but the rumor I heard was that his daddy had given him the position.

  Just what the world needed. Another damn case of nepotism. I suppose it gave me even more motivation to take Lane and the Reapers out, as if I didn’t have enough already.

  Thus, when I walked through the sleek hallways, on the marble floor, past the rising granite pillars, and through the wooden doors of our office, I moved with gratitude to have the job. But I also walked in with a clear agenda, one that, while admittedly grounded in vengeance, would have the benefit of improving Springville’s crime rate and hospitality.

  If nothing else, the amount of drunken behavior and public disturbances would certainly go down. And as someone who, by default, did not drink as much as those assholes, that did not bother me in the least.

  I found the key to my door inside an envelope on the window with my name, Angela Sanders, on it. I quickly dumped the key out, dropping it to the floor, and hurried inside once I had the door unlocked. On my desk, a welcome packet in another envelope awaited me, complete with a bevy of official documents I needed to sign. There was so much paperwork asking me to keep government secrets confidential and requesting personal information that I wondered if I would actually do any work on my first
day.

  Of course, that wasn’t how it went down. The thing about paperwork was it either went by ten times faster than one could have ever thought or ten times slower, depending on how often pen had to touch paper, but this was one of those “ten times shorter” moments. Though it might have been bad form as a lawyer to breeze over the fine print, I had gotten good at reading through such documents quickly and knowing what was standard and what was not. I had everything done within two hours.

  I could have gotten up and sent that to my supervisor, the district attorney, Bethany Johnson, but for the moment, while I still had some privacy in my office, I decided I wanted to take care of some personal interest work first.

  On the company computer given to me, I pulled up tabs for every Black Reaper member who had a rap sheet beyond just a minor traffic misdemeanor—a sheet that small would have suggested they either hadn’t been in the club very long, or they just weren’t high up on the food chain.

  After a few minutes of going through the system, I had five names of particular interest to me, given their records and their names: Brian “Butch” Young, LeCharles “Axle” Williamson, Michael “Patriot” Giordano, and the brothers, Lane and Cole Carter. It was a bit interesting to me to note that two of them, Axle and Patriot, had military backgrounds. I would have thought they would have known better, but I suppose I couldn’t expect every soldier to be perfect.

  Butch had a few aggravated assaults to his name, illegal possession of a gun, and a few intimidations of a federal official notches on him. Somehow, he had never gotten convicted of anything worse than the gun, for which he only had to pay a fine. For a man of his crimes, I figured there had to be something more, but right now, I could only go by what was on the record.

  Axle had a similar rap sheet, although the drunken charges were much more noticeable for him. He also had a few charges for cocaine and marijuana possession. I don’t think I had seen a meaner mugshot in my life.

  Patriot was a little bit more low-key, as most of his crimes were related to public disturbances and minor theft. Of everyone here, he seemed the most innocent. “Innocent,” of course, was a loose term.