by Hazel Parker
The cop, though, was nowhere to be seen. I had to move very slowly and right myself a couple of times as I struggled to orient my vision, but I could see the cop had taken off. Maybe he’d found something better to do, or maybe he had just… I don’t know, not given a fuck.
I couldn’t even think straight now. This was definitely the drunkest I had been in some time. I was quite good at getting drunk enough to be hungover; now we’d see if I was good enough to get drunk enough that I could blackout an entire day’s worth of events.
I stumbled back to the car, turned it on, and focused. I pulled out of the lot and took a right. I started the drive home.
I got all the way to… fuck if I know.
I just know the last thing I remember was me falling asleep at the wheel as the lights of Green Hills came up.
Chapter 15: Sensei
I had spent the last couple of hours trying to make sense of why I was a fucking coward.
Of course, trying to make sense of one’s own flaws rarely went well. I suppose I could have done some psychotherapy introspection where I would think about what my parents had done to me and how that had made me weak, but I wasn’t in the mood for it. I’m not sure what I was in the mood for other than some serious self-shaming.
BK, Krispy, Mafia, and even Sword sat around me. One of the first three had told Sword what had happened, and everyone rallied to be around me. But I’m not sure I deserved their support right now.
“So she didn’t know that you were a Saint?” Sword said as he was the only one who didn’t know what had transpired.
“Yep.”
“And she claims that one of us murdered her husband a few years ago?”
“Yep.”
“Jesus…”
“Yep.”
It was all I was reduced to saying at that point. I couldn’t muster the energy or the words to say anything more. What could I say? The truth.
“Her husband’s name was Nathaniel Ingles,” I said. “I sent a text to the sheriff asking him to send me any case files about his death. Apparently, Courtney has never looked at the files. I’m hoping that if I can look through those files and I can see them, I might uncover something in there that would proclaim our innocence. But right now…”
“I mean, I don’t see how that wouldn’t help,” Krispy said. “She claims we fucking killed him, but we didn’t, right? So if we didn’t fucking kill him and we can prove it, the whole reason she hates your guts goes out the window! I fail to see—”
“Krispy,” I said with a long sigh. “It doesn’t erase the fact that multiple times, she mentioned how much she hates the Saints, and there were multiple times I had the chance to tell her the truth. But I really liked her, and I didn’t want it to end. So I didn’t tell her.”
Even though, like I always felt, it was going to be an inevitable tragedy.
No one spoke up after that. I don’t think anyone knew what to say to that. And why the fuck would they? There wasn’t anything that any of them had experienced. Even BK had probably had the hard conversations with Megan early enough in their relationship, or at least gotten right to the tough topics.
Then we heard a loud crash outside.
“The fuck was that?” Krispy said.
“Company,” BK said, grabbing his gun.
We all headed outside, pistols in hand, waiting for the DM’s and Zane to jump us as he had so delightfully promised. When we turned the corner, we didn’t see anything. Whoever was trying to lay a trap for us was out on the main street.
And then we saw it.
There was no trap.
Someone had drunkenly crashed into a fire hydrant and a nearby store.
“Jesus Christ,” Mafia said.
I moved over to the car door and looked inside.
“Courtney!”
* * *
The ambulance showed up in record time. Since I wasn’t family, the emergency personnel wouldn’t let me ride with them, and I was relegated to following on my bike. Krispy, Mafia, BK, and Sword all followed me, forming a wave behind me as if I were president.
But this was a ride I would have taken even if I had to do it alone. I alone bore the responsibility for putting Courtney in such a spot where she had, apparently, gotten drunk, driven drunk, and then crashed the car. At least the nurses had advised that she was alive and would probably make it through OK, but clearly, her problems were only just beginning.
As soon as we got to the hospital, I followed the nurses as best as I could. They took her into a room and refused to let me in. I argued with them to no avail—even to the point that BK put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me away.
I was frustrated and mad as hell. I was pissed at myself for putting that girl in a spot where she had to drink herself into oblivion, and I was disappointed that I had allowed the delay in conversation to reach such a point. I knew it wasn’t really my fault per se, but I still blamed myself for it. If I had had the conversation at any point before… if I hadn’t let her see something like all of us acing off with Zane and the remaining Mercs…
Maybe she still would have gone to the bottle. But I doubt she would have wound up in this much of a mess.
“Surprised to see you boys here.”
We all looked up at the unexpected appearance of one Jane Peters, Trace’s girlfriend and a doctor in the ER.
“Hey, Jane,” I said solemnly.
“Sensei? What’s going on here?”
I nodded to the room over.
“That girl right there? She drove drunk and crashed. And it’s my fault.”
“Oh, Christ,” she murmured. “Let me go take a look and see what’s going on. She looks stable, but I’ll get some answers for you; one minute.”
She then let herself into the room before shutting the door, preventing any of us from hearing what was going on inside. I looked at BK and just chuckled sadly at how low I’d let myself go.
“You were smart enough to get yourself a woman like Trace has,” I said. “Seems like I can’t.”
BK didn’t say anything. That was so typical and, unfortunately, not exactly what I needed right now. I wasn’t sure what I needed, really. The assurance that Courtney would be OK would be a good start, but the only problem with that was that even if she was OK right now, she had too many issues for me to leave the hospital with the assurance that she would be OK.
Jane came out of the room less than two minutes later.
“She has some broken ribs and likely a concussion, but she’s fine otherwise,” Jane said. “She got lucky. Apparently, she fell asleep at the wheel and took her foot off the accelerator in the process. If she hadn’t, she’d probably be dead.”
And I would have been the one responsible for it. I would have been at fault because I would have not said anything until it was too late. Keeping the secret…
Secrets…
“Hey, Jane?” I said. “Thanks for letting me know. Can we also check up on Trace?”
“Sure,” she said with a smile. “It’ll be good for him to see you all now, anyway. He’s been awake for a few days now, and I think he’s getting tired of not being able to flirt with me while I’m working.”
I gave a polite smile, but I wasn’t really in the mood for joking. I was about to confess something else that needed to be said, and the most I could muster up was a weak, half-meaningful smile.
The five of us followed Jane down the hallway, ignoring the glances we got from wearing our cuts. Most everyone knew about Jane’s connection to the club by now, but everyone was smart enough to remain professional and above it. Jane, by all accounts, was also very much on top of her work and didn’t let anything that happened with Trace interfere with her work.
We turned two corners before Jane pointed toward the room.
“You’re not joining?” BK asked.
“I got other patients to take care of,” Jane said. “Unless he doesn’t respond to you, just let him rest and keep the talking to a minimum.”
BK nodde
d while Jane then turned around. She really was a beautiful woman, and though I didn’t envy Trace having her in particular, I did envy the fact that he had someone he could be around and care for. I didn’t have that—well, I had briefly, but a lot good that that had done.
We all walked inside at once. Trace was watching some baseball game on the television, and boy, did he look like shit. His eyes were half-open, bandages wrapped around his skull, and what skin was visible around his face was swollen. But he was alive, and he was alert.
“Hey, assholes,” he said with a smile.
His voice wasn’t as strong as before, but it wasn’t like Trace Cole had turned into Tiny Tim. He’d suffered a nasty attack, but not a life-threatening one.
“El Presidente,” Mafia said with a joking tone. “We have come to introduce you to the temporary president.”
“You?” Trace said to Mafia, drawing a laugh from everyone—even me, and even Mafia.
“Hell no, you kidding me? No—him.”
Trace turned to me, confusion on his face. Remember, he just had a concussion; his mind may not totally be there.
“I thought you quit?”
I shrugged as I sat down at the chair by his bed.
“I did,” I said. “But after what happened to you, I had to come back. I…”
I knew that wasn’t true. I had fought so hard not to come back; I’d tried to ignore the begging of the other officers in the room to come back. You came here to tell the truths. So tell all of them.
“OK, I have to be honest, Trace, I didn’t want to at first,” I said. “I… I just wanted to spend time with Alyssa. But she pointed out that if I said no and left the rest of them to figure it out on their own, things might go to shit. And I didn’t want to risk that at all. So, yeah, I came back. I came back as president.”
“Good,” Trace said. “Did you kill the asshole who hit me?”
“Working on it,” I said with a smile, grateful to avoid the follow-up conversation about my truths.
No. No, you don’t get off the hook that easily. You need to tell them the story right now. They’re your brothers; it doesn’t matter if nothing will change. They need to know.
“Trace,” I said, taking a deep breath. “And all of you. There’s something you need to know, something that I’ve been hiding for, God, almost fourteen years now. I’m sorry it took this goddamn long to tell you, but…”
I let the words linger. I looked into the eyes of every man in that room, trying to get a sense of how they felt. They were all watching me intently. The truth and nothing but the truth.
“I told all of you fourteen years ago that Olivia died because a Merc hit us,” I said. “And, I suppose… well… shit, no. It’s my fault.”
I exhaled. No one said a word.
“The only reason the Merc hit us was because I failed to stop at a stop sign,” I continued. “I was so horrified at what I had done and so ashamed of myself that I told you all the Mercs had killed her. It created something of a rallying cry, and so it just exacerbated everything we were facing. Paul already had his issues with the Mercs, so it wasn’t like creating an enemy out of thin air, and they’ve given us reason to hate them since, but…”
God, how much of an idiot I felt like. There was obviously a measure of relief in having finally confessed the truth, but now came the part of the fallout. I’d have to face the fact that everyone in the club would now know me not as the wise, old sage but as the man who lied for over a decade to avoid responsibility for his wife’s death.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just lost the girl that I was really starting to take to because I couldn’t tell her the truth about being a Saint. But I’m no saint. I hide behind half-truths to avoid the ugly nature of me. I’m not proud of it, but I wasn’t strong enough until now to confess it. So. I’m sorry.”
I looked down at the ground for several seconds, as if having a moment of silence for my arrogance and avoidance. When I finally did look up, I looked straight at Trace—the man who would determine what, if any, reaction the club would have to this revelation.
“Why did you say it was the Mercs?” Trace asked.
Thank God his tone seemed completely neutral and one of fact gathering. If he had displayed any judgment at all in his voice, I think I would have just crumbled.
“Because so many of you guys think I’m this wise, smart guy, and I was scared to lose that reputation. I was scared to look bad. I’m… I’ve always been afraid to look bad, especially as the now-elder in the club. I was going to explain it all to Paul just a couple of years later and then break it to the club, but he died shortly after. So once that happened…”
Another silence fell over the club.
“Well, I can’t speak for anyone else,” Trace said. “But do you see me right now? I think I look pretty bad.”
A gentle laugh rippled through the group. It was a completely different kind of looking bad, but the point was made—forgiveness would be the order of the day, not a tongue lashing.
“I think we’ve all looked bad, Sensei,” Trace said. “We’ve all made mistakes. I understand why you did what you did, but I’ve looked up to you not because you’re perfect, but because you step back and take the time to make the best decision.”
“Not with myself,” I interjected.
But Trace wouldn’t have any of it.
“That’s all of us. We’re all experts at giving advice and not taking it ourselves. But you are an expert among experts at knowing what to do. So don’t feel bad, Sensei. We appreciate you coming forward, but it doesn’t change how I feel about you.”
“Nor me,” BK added.
“Same,” Krispy said.
“Yep,” Mafia said.
I looked to Sword, who just smiled.
“What, just because I’m the last one to speak it raises some drama?” he said, drawing a relieved laugh from everyone. “Of course it doesn’t change anything, brother. We’ve all got skeletons in the closet. Yours was just leaning on the door and coming down at any second.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling so utterly relieved. “Yeah.”
“Does Alyssa know?”
And just like that, I was back in a dark place. I understood that Trace had just asked the question casually, but if I had thought about it, I would’ve realized that would be a much harder discussion than here. Even if the Saints had kicked me out for telling a lie for over a decade, I’d still have my daughter.
But losing my daughter and keeping the Saints wasn’t a life worth living. I’d just be going through the motions until she came back or until she died.
“No,” I said, and the laughter died immediately. “You wanna know the fucked up part? I told Courtney on our second date. She told me… funny enough, she told me she holds us responsible.”
“The fuck?” Trace said.
“Yeah, apparently her husband was killed in a shootout between the Saints and the Mercs. I don’t know the first fucking thing about it, so I asked Wiggins to take a closer look.”
“You let me know if you need help on that,” Trace said. “Wiggins and I are closer than these bandages and me.”
“Got it, but yeah… Alyssa doesn’t know.”
My shoulders slumped forward. I felt a hand go on my shoulder, and I looked up to see Trace weakly smiling.
“You should go and tell her,” he said. “The rest of these guys are going to stay here with me. We’ll figure out something with the Mercs and whoever got the hit on me. Take some time for your daughter, Sensei.”
“You sure?” I asked.
I’d avoided that conversation for fourteen years, another fourteen days or so until we got rid of Zane seemed relatively inconsequential. Zane had sent a clear message at the Italian restaurant—he was here to burn us to the ground, even if it meant—especially if it meant—showing the world that he had done it. Our only hope to end this all was to take out Zane and then bring peace with the Saints.
“Yes,” Trace said. “You already left
us once.”
We all laughed. Even I laughed. I knew what Trace was saying.
“OK,” I said. “Thanks, buddy.”
“No, thank you, mentor,” Trace said. “You just showed me what it means to have strength.”
I was practically beaming with pride when he said that. I then nodded to the other officers and headed out the door. I walked down the hall, only to see Jane approaching.
“Everything all good?”
I smirked.
“Same old Trace,” I said. “Same old Trace.”
I hurried downstairs, got on my bike, and roared back to my house. At times, I felt really good about myself for having told the club; I had no more secrets, so it wasn’t like I was going to surprise them with yet another revelation in two years’ time.
But on the other hand… this was the harder conversation for sure.
And what a letdown it would be if Alyssa wasn’t even home.
Fortunately, though, when I pulled up to the house, I saw lights on that I had not left on before, indicating that she was home. When I got even closer, I could see her silhouette in the window. I killed the engine, put the kickstand down, and fast-walked into the home. Inside, Alyssa, the good student that she was, was doing homework. On a Saturday night no less. She’s definitely her mother’s daughter.
“Hey, Dad,” she said.
For a split second, I considered asking her about her homework. But I decided against it—this needed to be about the tough conversation.
“You got a few minutes, dear?” I asked.
Alyssa looked up, concern etched on her face.
“Did something happen?”
Actually, yes. Your English and drama teacher got in a drunk wreck and is recovering in the hospital. But we’ll get to that in a moment.
“Yes, but that’s not why I’m here. Don’t worry; no one died,” I said. “There’s something about your mother that I haven’t been fully honest with you about.”
And so, I laid it all out there. I told her the exact same details that I had told the Saints, but there was one big difference.