LeCharles “Axle” Williamson.
“Axle?” I said as if saying his name might suddenly undo the illusion.
He nodded. There was no apparent breaking this illusion. This was our club VP, here in the flesh, dozens upon dozens of miles away from base. At least I knew why I was gone, but... why was he here? And how the hell had he known I would be here?
“Let’s go grab a drink, shall we?”
* * *
I found myself at an empty bar just outside the beaches of San Diego. It being an early Friday afternoon, well before the working class had even finished their lunch break, let alone let out for the day, we were the only ones in the bar. Though we could see the ocean from our seats, we were not paying any attention to that or even considering it.
Instead, first, as soon as we received our drinks, we clinked glasses and took a sip of our Yuenglings. But then we just sort of settled into a gentle silence, which wasn’t all that different from the moment Axle had offered me a drink. Such silence was common between soldiers.
But now, for how far both of us had come, it was time to change that.
“How in the hell did you know I’d come down here?” I asked as Axle sipped on his drink.
He took his time finishing his gulp.
“I just had a feeling,” he said. “But let’s talk, you and I. Veteran to veteran.”
I nodded, fully aware of what that meant. It did not mean I was going to tell him the story as I had told Kaitlyn. When war buddies got together, they didn’t discuss some of the darker events that had happened. Instead, we traded funny stories of what happened on base, we gossiped about some of the more amusing COs, and we bitched about the softness of America today.
“You think there’s a rat, don’t you?” Axle said.
I swore it was like Axle knew exactly what was on our mind and could just pick and choose whatever he wanted from my brain.
“And more than that, you think I’m the rat.”
Well, now there’s really no getting around it.
“We do think there’s a rat,” I said. “And... well, if you asked me right after you picked me up from Brewskis with the slashed tires, I’d say yeah, I have my suspicions. But I don’t have any hard evidence.”
Axle scoffed with a laugh. But it wasn’t the kind of laugh meant to indulge. It was laughter borne out of humoring me but reminding me that what Lane and I had thought was ridiculous.
“I’ve had my suspicions too,” Axle said. “I think someone’s ratting us out. But Lane can’t handle it the way he did today.”
I had a million and one questions now. Did this mean every officer thought there was a spy? If so, did that mean the rat came from outside the circle? Or were we just so incompetent as a group that the Fallen Saints could trail us as if we had a rat in the group?
And if we all knew the two us and Lane were innocent, then which of the three was it? Father Marcellus, Butch, or Red Raven? Was Axle so effectively mind-fucking me right now that I had no choice but to believe in his innocence?
My gut told me Axle was on my side. No man who was military so recently would betray us. Of course, history had its fair share of defectors and traitors, but my gut had rarely been wrong. My gut had told me to speak up in that meeting with the traitorous CO, and my gut had told me that there was a spy in the club.
My gut, here, said that Axle was not the spy.
“I knew as soon as I got pulled into that room, I was going to get accused of something, and I knew that you recognized that,” Axle said. “I knew you were full of shit when you said there were discussions about promoting you. Lane doesn’t need my permission to promote you to a second VP.”
“Yeah, true,” I admitted.
“But you did the right thing. I recognize that Lane is under a lot of stress.”
Because...
The very thing that had made me fight Lane was now bubbling at the surface. I no longer believed Lane was the rat, but for the sake of my own sanity, to make sure that I wasn’t losing my mind, I had to know.
“Axle, help me,” I said. “You’re sane. You’re level-headed. Any chance Lane is the rat?”
Axle thundered with a short laugh. He was so loud, even the bartender looked our way for the first time since she had delivered us our beers.
