But, again, in my defense, it’s not like anyone else was doing the work.
“Lane, I have a question for you,” I said, drawing a slightly nervous expression on his face. “Imagine that you’re in my spot. Your best friend gets murdered. The person you blamed at first turns out to not be the one who did it. You’re a little blind right now because of everything that’s going on. You want to still bring her to justice. If you were in my shoes and wanted to get justice for Shannon, what would you do?”
Lane stared at the TV screen for a few seconds, losing himself in thought.
“Do you want to know what I would do?” he said ominously. “Because I’m not sure someone in your position would want to know what I would do, let alone what I think you should actually do.”
“I want to know,” I said. “This isn’t about following the law. This is about doing what’s right.”
I could scarcely believe the words had left my mouth. I didn’t quite mean I was going to flout the law, but given that I had gone out of my way to try and implicate Lane in the first place, I couldn’t exactly say I had the highest respect for what the law prioritized right now.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know you well enough to say what I would do,” Lane said. “And even if I did, club business remains within club walls. However, like I said before, I can tell you that I would target the Fallen Saints and my brother. If you can find him, that is.”
“About that,” I said. “You know, we have a long, long list of crimes we’re trying to get the Fallen Saints for. That’s a list that goes on for several pages. But your brother? He didn’t even have a speeding ticket. He’s disappeared, but we’re not chasing him because we don’t really have a reason to. He hasn’t committed any crime. Do you really think he played a part?”
“I mean, I saw him standing over her with a gun and—”
“Lane,” I interrupted.
In fact, I had interrupted him by putting a hand on his forearm. I withdrew it quickly, a little concerned with how it might have looked, but not before I hadn’t noticed just how taut and firm his forearm muscles were. I didn’t date or flirt much, but the few men who had tried to take me out and approach me did not have muscles like that. That... that caused my mind run a little bit.
“Think about it for a second. I can frame context in a lot of different ways to make people look bad.”
Lane bit his lip, sighed, and put his head on his left hand, propping his elbow up on the bar. He took a noticeably long gulp of his Yuengling before turning to me.
“You want me to be really honest here, Angela?” he said, not able to look at me. “Cole was always the nice guy of the two of us. I knew that I could be a little bit of a jackass, but that was never an issue with Cole. Cole was the guy that everyone liked, the guy that no one had a bad word to say about. And honestly, I was a little jealous of that. So I fought it by trying to be above it all.”
I could tell by the hesitation and little pauses that Lane had that he hadn’t had such a confession to anyone before. Bikers, I suspected, were not exactly prone to seeing therapists or counselors, and even amongst themselves, the brothers weren’t the greatest about being vulnerable. Maybe in one on one settings with individual members, they could let their guard down, but I wasn’t naive enough to think that a club that prided itself on manhood and being made up of outlaws was prone to being open and vulnerable.
“I had the looks, charm, and charisma. That’s not a secret to anyone. But Cole had real depth to him. He was someone that people actually flocked to. It was always a little unusual to me, honestly, how I was the one who was going to get married while Cole was still single at the time of my father’s passing.”
“He’s a little younger, though, right?”
“Well, yes, but only by two years, not like I’m late twenties, and he’s a teenager.”
We both took sips of our drinks.
“But the thing about it, and the thing I’m... the thing I’m holding on to here is that he was jealous of my relationship with Shannon. It was barely noticeable at first. He’d make little smartass remarks, you know, ‘how did a guy like him get a girl like you?’ It seemed innocent enough, like the kind of thing that brothers would pick up on. But as time went by, those comments were accompanied by a laugh less and less, and I could see that Cole was the person that Shannon would go to whenever we had gotten into a fight.”
The classic nice guy,I thought. I couldn’t even imagine what that must have been like for Lane.
“It didn’t help matters that right before the shootout, Cole and I were already very close to each other’s throats. Our father’s passing didn’t help matters in the slightest, and how we coped with it were two very different ways. Cole wanted to be around the club as much as possible to support everyone else, and I just needed to be with Shannon, to be with someone I loved. I know on the surface Cole’s approach sounds best, but—”
“Not necessarily,” I said.
I found myself again touching his arm. I had to consciously withdraw my hand—he was handsome, but he was also still, in some ways, an adversary to my position. That was perhaps true only in the sense that our job titles mandated that we had conflicts, for our personalities and our lives outside work seemed to suggest more synergy than either of us had suspected, but it wasn’t like work was one percent of my life. It was closer to ninety-nine percent these days.
“When Shannon died, I just went home for the weekend and didn’t leave my room,” I said, remembering that horrible day. “My parents came to my apartment at UCLA to put food outside my door, but I’d just bawl my eyes out and let it get cold. Imagine a twenty-four-year-old just acting like a little girl, being so stubborn as to refuse all outside contact with the world. But you know? We cope in our own ways.”
“Guess so,” Lane mumbled.
He bit his lip.
“Obviously, you know I brought her to my dad’s house, everything went down, and I remember the first thing I saw when I looked up from Shannon was Cole standing there, gun in his hand, looking down on both of us. My mind needed a scapegoat. I was going to shoulder enough of the burden having brought her here. If I had to bear it all, I don’t know what would have happened. So my mind immediately blamed Cole, most especially given how much we had fought that evening and how much he had been envious of our relationship.”
He finished all his beer, let out a long sigh, and turned his body away from me.
“You decide if Cole is guilty based on what I just said,” he said. “If I ever realized what I had done to Cole was based on a false statement... ”
