I looked to Steele, our own club VP, to talk first. I would say my bit when I needed to.
“You know your brother is in a coma, right?”
“Yes,” Lane said. “I also know that the doctors have said he will make a full recovery.”
“In time,” Steele said. “Which is something we don’t have a lot of.”
Lane bit his lip but said nothing.
“The Bandits are our rivals. They’ve started to take after the Fallen Saints, whom you fought.”
Lane looked back at Patriot and Butch as if someone had failed to tell him that detail. It left me wondering just how much Cole and Lane communicated—my best guess was that Cole’s decision to start us had created some friction back home, though not to the point of outright rejection.
“They have left graffiti calling themselves ‘Fallen Saints’, and reports indicate they have received backing from a criminal warlord of sorts named King. He lives in Las Vegas.”
“King?” Lane repeated.
I was starting to think that after the Black Reapers here had defeated the Fallen Saints, they had fallen into peacetime mode. And who could blame them? From everything Cole had told me, the fight with the Saints was bloody, vicious, and taxing. They’d probably yearn for just a month without wondering if someone would shoot them for being in the wrong neighborhood in the middle of the night.
“We don’t know much about him,” I said. “The local sheriff came to us and told us a bit. Said he got his information from federal officials. So we’re hearing it third-hand. But it sounds like he funded the Fallen Saints, and now he’s funding the Bandits.”
“Lucius never said anything about King…” Lane said, but as his voice trailed off, it looked like he was recalling something from the past, something that he hadn’t considered. We stood in silence, hoping that whatever he said would be of use to us.
He shrugged a second later, but it wasn’t the shrug of someone very confident in whatever conclusion they had reached.
“Let’s just get right to the point. What the hell do you want?”
“Help,” Steele said. “Experience with manpower.”
“The fights used to be just fistfights in bars, the kind of shit that we could handle ourselves,” I added. “But now they’ve got weaponry that you’d see in the military. We need people who have experience in that. We’re hoping you could help.”
Lane nodded to Patriot, who stepped forward.
“It’s not as easy as just bringing us down, man,” he said. “There are two officers in the club that have military experience. Me, I’m one. Axle’s the other, but he’s not here right now. The rest of us? We learned on the fly, man. And I gotta tell you, if your enemy is using military tactics, it’s not complicated. Cover-and-move, hold the high ground; you could read it in a book.”
“Sure, but that’s different than having feet on the ground to help us when the bullets start flying,” Steele said.
Patriot shrugged.
This wasn’t going well. There was something left unsaid that I could not quite pinpoint, some sort of resistance to helping us. Did they not consider us legitimate Black Reapers? Did they not want to get entangled in any fights, period? It didn’t feel like my place to press such questions, given that doing so would backfire pretty badly, but Cole also might have oversold how much the Black Reapers wanted to actually expand.
But if I couldn’t press them directly about us, that didn’t mean there weren’t angles I could take that might work.
“You all understand that if King comes for us, he will come back for you, right?”
That got Lane’s attention. Everyone behind him stiffened, too. I wasn’t trying to make a threat, just state the reality of the situation, but boy, was it easy to see how what I had said had been taken.
“None of us know much about King. But it seems pretty obvious that if the Bandits took after the Fallen Saints and have funding from him, he’s going to be hungry for revenge against you guys. Sure, he hasn’t struck in a while. But if he’s as good as the sheriff says he is, he’s not going to act impulsively. He’s going to be patient. And when he does strike at you, you’re not going to see it coming.”
Lane grimaced.
“We just survived years of fucking hell, and now after, what, two or so years of vacation, you mean to tell me that this battle isn’t over yet, that it’s just beginning?”
He spat on the ground. He looked like he wanted to punch the nearest wall. And who the fuck could blame him?
“You know, I told Cole it was a bad idea to get you guys off the ground.”
And there it was.
