“Nope,” I said.None that I’m willing to ask right now.
“Very good. I’ll let you get back to the rest of your paperwork and your job. You can come knock on my door at any time.”
Unless it’s to ask questions about the Black Reapers, right?
But I didn’t do anything to suggest that question was guiding me. I merely stood, nodded, and headed out of her large office.
There were too many ways for her to track my work while I was on the clock. I might get away with the occasional browsing of personal interest, but I couldn’t devote entire days to it.
I would have to take on this interest of mine on my own time.
It was just as well. It wasn’t like I wasn’t used to being on my own throughout my life.
Lane
The few hours that passed between when I finally left church and five o’clock did nothing to clarify my thoughts.
On the one hand, we had grown the club so much in the past year, and no one had said anything to me. Sure, I’d heard grumblings, but no one had actually confronted me on anything.
On the other hand, I had never gotten called out so publicly in church like that. Axle had never been a friend by any stretch of the imagination, but to have undermined me so hard... and possibly so justifiably… it was brutal, I wasn’t going to lie.
Maybe I have been a little bit too arrogant.
But to reveal to them the amount of fear I had, the paralyzing notion that I could actually get killed like Shannon and my father?
That would have truly ended me. At least my arrogance could be dismissed as being young and stupid, something I could grow out of. Being fearful and being afraid was something that would not only get me tossed out as President in a heartbeat, it would also get me out of the Black Reapers faster than I could say the name.
And so, for the foreseeable future, at least, there was not going to be any changing my demeanor around the rest of the club. I would do my best to remain more active, but I needed to figure out how I could become braver or just not be so arrogant while maintaining my cool.
I had no idea how the fuck to do that, though.
Which is why the next few hours until five o’clock rolled around were beyond stressful and tense. I had all these ideas in my head for how I could work and operate, and they all had the effectiveness of beating my own brains in with a baseball bat covered in spikes and fire. Everything I thought of— from just operating totally at a distance to having a real church confessional type of meeting— all just seemed too stupid to work. I tried to tell myself that I was just exaggerating the problem, that when the time came to reveal something, I could just act my way through it, but that felt like a way of avoiding the issue.
Finally, Patriot emerged from the garage, wiping some oil from his hands. When he saw me, having to raise a hand to his forehead to block the setting sun, he started laughing. I was sitting on my bike, just waiting for him like a man waiting for his date.
“Geez, desperate to meet me, huh?” Patriot said.
“More like I’m just as ready as anyone to grab a beer,” I said with a smile, just in case anyone was watching. “I know you military folks. You can’t say no to a drink when work ends.”
“Damn you, it’s almost like you’re an armchair psychologist, man.”
“Little known fact. I know my people.”
Patriot laughed harder than I had expected, perhaps on the heels of our very own conversation. He headed to his bike, kicked it on, and nodded to me to move ahead. I took the opportunity to rev my engine as loud as it would go— my little way of announcing to the club that I was in the “office,” that I had made an appearance, and that I was hanging with club members. Then I peeled out of Carter’s Auto Repairs and blazed down the busy Springsville street.
Well, busy in the relative sense. It was nothing like the highways of Los Angeles, which I made a strong point of avoiding as much as possible. Not because of the bad traffic—I could just go through the cars and around them with ease. It was because the assholes in L.A. seemed more and more hellbent on opening doors, sideswiping bikers, and doing anything passive-aggressive that they could to cause accidents. Whether envy or just annoyance, I really didn’t give a fuck.
Again, I just didn’t want to die.
I wanted to stay alive for quite some time, and while dying at the bullet of a Fallen Saint might have been one thing, dying because soccer mom Emily was upset at me getting a bead on her in traffic was not exactly the way I wanted to go. “Here Lies Lane Carter, a man who thought he was tough... until a Honda Civic killed him.”
Yeah, my reputation didn’t need that stamped onto it.
Here in Springsville, though, we had none of that. The residents all knew who we were, and while maybe I had a blind spot to the locals, I believed they all liked us. We did our part to keep the city clean, we kept the negative outside influence away as best as we could, and if things had to get bloody, we kept it out of the public eye.
Not every club operated in such a professional manner. The Saints, for one. We had also helped a club in a distant neighborhood, the Blood Knights, a couple of years ago in a very public squabble with their rivals, but thankfully, my father had ensured that we suffered no casualties and only helped at the very end of their confrontation.
Because of these good relations that we had, I felt like I could rev and speed across the city—within limits, of course. I’d heard a few comments about being a pussy for not hitting triple digits on the roads—again, self-preservation was a goal of mine—but compared to the grandma going to the pharmacy for her meds, I knew how to let loose.
