by Hazel Parker
But it was heavily conditional, and I would not have a future if I stuck with the same habits and behaviors. I—
The door opened again.
“Jerry, I—”
“It’s not,” a familiar voice said.
I looked over to see Vance walking in. He didn’t come any closer than the entrance of the door, though he did shut it at least.
“The nurse is supposed to give you permission to enter,” I said.
“I know the staff here.”
I wanted to be angry at seeing Vance. I wanted to slap him for everything again. It wasn’t helping matters that he was now wearing his Saints jacket, as if to shove what he had told me last night in my face. But…
Not only did I not have the strength, I had to acknowledge he had gotten me to the hospital.
“You feeling OK?”
I snorted.
“No.”
“I can understand that,” he said. “I’m sorry, Courtney. I know what I said last night led to this. I should have told you sooner, but—”
“No, it’s… it’s me,” I said, weakly. “I reacted weakly to what you said, and that’s on me. If I was stronger, I wouldn’t have. So…”
I let the words fall as I turned my head away, too tired and too sick to keep going. I could hear Vance give a gentle breath.
“What did the principal tell you?”
“Nothing.”
“Courtney…”
I knew I was just being stupidly stubborn. I didn’t need to go back to dating Vance to be friendly with him, but… I just couldn’t shake it so easily.
“Not teaching rest of the year,” I said. “Can come back next year.”
I left it at that. I wasn’t really in the mood to tell him all of the things that I needed to do. He didn’t deserve to know them, especially since he didn’t seem interested in telling me the things he had needed to do.
“If you need money,” he said. “I—”
“No,” I snapped. “Just… let me be alone.”
“You can tutor Alyssa in acting.”
“She won’t see me after last night,” I said. “None of my students will. So, no, Vance, no.”
I rolled over in the bed to make the point stronger. It was childish and stupid, and I wasn’t proving anything other than that I was being a huge bitch right now. But three visitors in a short time span was killing me.
I just wanted to be left the fuck alone. I just wanted a chance to wallow in myself and my misery for just a little bit of time. Could I fucking do that? Could I have that?
“OK,” Vance said. “Sorry, Courtney.”
He didn’t say anything else. I didn’t want him to.
I was sorry enough for myself and for everyone else I let down.
Chapter 17: Sensei
Well, that went about as well as expected.
I stood outside Courtney’s room for several moments after I had spoken to her, still holding myself accountable for what had happened the night before. It might have been true that Courtney was the one to choose the bottle, but it was also true she never would have had a need to if I’d just told the truth earlier. If I had just had some balls…
I needed to stop beating myself up. It wasn’t doing any good, and I’d said my apologies already. I just had to accept whatever happened from here on out. At least I had shown myself that I was ready to date again. I was ready to put myself back out there.
That was the positive that I took in all of this, and I also knew I would never again put myself in a position to date someone who so strongly opposed the Saints, even when I did step back after this shit with Zane had ended. If I still want to step back.
After the way the Saints took me in despite my confession… is that something you really want to leave behind?
It wasn’t a question that needed to be answered right now. Instead, on this Sunday, what did need to be answered was something that could only be addressed in a hall meeting.
I headed to Trace’s room, where BK, Sword, Mafia, and Krispy awaited with a Trace who was even more rested. Jane was also there, but only at the very beginning.
“I’ll make sure that you all have the privacy you need,” she said. “But I cannot let Trace leave at this point. It would be medical malpractice to do so, and I could get in a lot of trouble for that. And as his girlfriend, there is no way in hell that you guys are taking him out while he’s still recovering. Got it?”
No one dared to question Jane. There were few things in life scarier than an angry girlfriend, and none of us were about to test just how angry she could get.
“Alright,” she said, turning back to kiss Trace. “Love you. Don’t make me kick your ass.”
“Never, baby,” Trace said with a chuckle.
Jane left shortly after, shutting the door behind her.
“So, how do you like this new hall?” Trace said.
“I like it a lot better now that you’re the president,” I said with a short laugh.
“Maybe so,” Trace said as we all fell into our natural positions in the hall around Trace’s bed, albeit with all of us standing instead of leaning back in some comfortable chairs. “But you heard Jane. I’m not going on this run. So when you all go, you’re going to be the one in charge, Sensei.”
Well, it’s one thing if Krispy says it. If the president says it? I’m definitely not backing down from this leadership position.
“You got it,” I said.
“Oh, and by the way,” Trace said. “We have the whole club here.”
He grabbed his phone from his side and pulled up Splitter chatting in on FaceTime.
“You mean you took time away from Amber and Hawaii to speak to us?” I said.
“You guys are my brothers,” he said. “I tried like hell to stay away, but eventually, Amber picked up on it and relented. She won’t let me come home early, though.”
“I’d beat your ass if you did, you Hawaiian asshole,” Trace said, leading to a good laugh from all of us. “In any case, though, thanks for joining.”
“Anything for the club, man.”
Anything for the club… I don’t know why those words resonated with me so much, but it was like the jolt I needed to have my ass kicked for ever doubting what the Savage Saints were. Maybe I would eventually need to step back as an officer to make room for the young blood so the club could progress, but I wasn’t sixty years old and on the verge of going to the grave. I was barely into my forties, still able to throw a punch, still able to ride a bike, and still able to do all the things needed.
I was going to give more time to Alyssa, that was non-negotiable. But I’m not sure why I ever believed that I had to put it all aside for the sake of being with her. Especially if we do this right…
“So here’s a quick recap,” Trace said. “The DMs are like the cockroach that won’t die. Their newest ringleader is someone named Zane, the guy who put me in the hospital. We can put a hit on him, but honestly, I’m more interested in ideas to stop this shit once and for all. And don’t tell me ‘it’s the way things will always be.’ That’s the easy answer. It may wind up being the real answer, but I’m not going to accept it as such until we exhaust all possibilities. Thoughts?”
All eyes seemed to naturally shift to me, as if everyone thought I had an answer.
“Well,” I said, deciding just to say whatever came to mind. “I’ve had this idea in mind that violence begets violence. Right? We kill the Mercs, they kill us, we kill them, and so on. The Mercs are also the kind of group that is just going to come back at us with more violence if we just roll over and say no more. Zane, especially, is not going to have any mercy. So the answer, obviously, is not just ‘let them get away with it.’ However…”
I gulped. This idea was only half-baked in my head, and I had no idea if it would work or not.
“We need to kill Zane. It’s clear he’s sociopathic. I’m not convinced, however, that all of the Mercs are so interested in killing. I believe that many of them, in fact, ar
e probably still with the group because they fear leaving. It’s pretty well known that if you leave the Mercs, they hunt you down and kill you, right? So many of them probably wanted to leave, but as soon as Zane rose up, they were even more fearful than they had been with Diablo around. So…”
Here goes nothing.
“We kill Zane. But for every other Merc, we offer two options. Both are controversial, so just hear me out. The first one is we let them run. We tell them they need to pack their shit and move out of the city. This gets them off our hands, and someone else can deal with them. The second one is that we offer them membership into our club.”
“A patch up?” Krispy said in surprise.
I raised my hand to quell any possible arguments before it got out of hand.
“We’ll have to take it on a case by case basis, and if anyone doesn’t want to do it, we don’t force them to,” I said. “However—and I recognize I may be stupid, but I can’t help but think this might work—I think enough of them will join us. I think enough of them will come over that the ones who don’t will be too weak to do anything. I’m still emphatic we need to kill Zane because if we brought him in, he’d just kill us all. But the rest? They just want to be a part of something. I say we give them the shot.”
A long silence came as the rest of the club pondered the choice. Eyes shifted back to Trace, as had usually been the case in these moments, curious to see what the president would say or do. None of us had the slightest notion of what was to come; none of us knew if Trace was going to think the idea was utter shit or decent, most especially me.
“It’s a radical move,” Trace said. “Of the two, frankly, I’m of the opinion that we can’t let them get away. It’s going to be too hard to track, and it’s not as powerful as swallowing them up. However, if we do do that, if we let them join our club, then our vetting process needs to be stricter than US border patrol. We cannot be letting anyone in who has any incentive to kill us. We do this, and it’s only to help those who got into a situation they weren’t ready for.”
He shook his head. I knew this wasn’t going to be an easy sell.
“I don’t know, Sensei,” he said. “Seems to me like this would be a great way to just let them in on the inside.”
“I agree, which is why we need to kill Zane and threaten anyone who is on his side voluntarily,” I said. “We get there and try and kill Zane; if we get shot at, we’re shooting back. By no means am I saying we become pacifists. But think about it. We’ve never offered them the chance to surrender. We just keep fighting. So what do the Mercs do? They keep fighting. The worst that happens is we offer it to them, they shoot at us, and we kill them.”
From the look in Trace’s eye, the idea seemed to be taking hold a little bit. The gears were turning in an encouraging way, and I believed that there was a real chance I could get this idea to work.
“It’s just…” Trace said. “Fuck. They killed Paul Peters. They kidnapped my girlfriend. They tried to kill Amber. They kidnapped Megan. They—”
“Think about what ‘they’ means, Trace,” I said. “Yes, absolutely, members of the Mercs killed Paul. But it was Diablo who killed him and who kidnapped Jane. It was Jose who funded the club enough to try and do a public shootout in North Hollywood and then hold Megan hostage. It’s Zane who is leading this current charge. It’s not the prospects of the Mercs; it’s not even the officers in there. It’s the work of a bunch of sociopaths. We kill them and absorb the rest.”
Not only did it look like Trace was getting it, it looked like other club members were getting it.
“And you swear that if they say no, you’ll kill them?” Trace said.
“Tell them to run or kill them,” I said.
Trace bit his lip.
“I have to put this one to a vote,” Trace said. “This is the most audacious thing I think the club has ever done, and I’m not going just to presume that everyone agrees with me. I want everyone to vote, but I want to hear rationales for your votes. I still haven’t made up my mind. BK?”
BK stayed silent for a long, long time. Trace had to say his name once to see if he had even heard him the first time.
“Nay,” he said. “They kill too many people. I want to eradicate them. They would just hurt us on the inside.”
Trace nodded and looked to me.
“Yea,” I said. “Pretty sure I just outlined all my reasons. And keep in mind, this is not a one-track approach; we do have the right to kill anyone who doesn’t comply or does but we find out later is planning on hurting us.”
Sword went next, and he cleared his throat.
“Yea,” he said. “We’ve been fighting the Mercs for over a decade now, almost two decades. It’s not winding down. What we’ve done so far hasn’t gotten rid of them. So, fuck it; maybe this will work.”
“Nay,” Mafia said before Sword had even finished as if he were itching to get the statement out. “It’s the fucking Mercs. Do you know how these things work? This isn’t the goddamn White House, where the two sides fighting with words. We fight with bloodshed. We just haven’t spilled enough fucking blood!”
I sighed and crossed my arms but vowed not to interrupt. We still had a tie at this point.
“Nay,” Krispy said. “They’re not our friends, and they never will be.”
It felt like a lost cause at this point. I didn’t see how we’d get Splitter to agree. He was just as emotionally volatile as Krispy and Mafia, as bound to commit violence as anyone else in the club. I braced myself for a nay.
But instead, Splitter hemmed and hawed for quite some time, muttering points in favor of both positions.
“Fuck it, yea,” Splitter said, drawing stunned reactions from everyone, including me. “What have we got to lose? We’re not going to make a show of putting our goddamn guns up. Let’s roll the fucking dice, man.”
I was almost one hundred percent certain that the only reason Splitter said yay was because he was in Hawaii. It wasn’t so much an issue of him being a coward and away from the danger as much as it was his mind being in vacation mode. If he was surrounded by Krispy and Mafia instead of sand and his mega-hot girlfriend in a bikini, I saw no way that he was going to be saying “yea” at the moment of truth.
I tried not to show my happiness or blurt out my theory, but damn if I wasn’t going to give Splitter a big fucking hug when he came back. If this all worked out for the best, then maybe I’d confess my theory to him, but right now, that was my little theory that was going to remain private.
“Comes down to you, boss,” Splitter said, and all eyes shifted to Trace.
“Why does it always seem that way,” Trace muttered, and a few quiet laughs came from everyone around. “I feel like I shouldn’t be making this vote, given that I’m not going to be leaving here anytime soon. I don’t like to make votes where I won’t make an impact.”
“Club votes,” BK said. “You vote.”
I smiled at that; even when he was voting against the proposal, BK supported open voting.
“I mean, I’m here working on my tan, and you let me vote,” Splitter said, though the room was too tense now for anyone to laugh at his joke. “We’re members of the club, and that’s true for life.”
For life.
You got that right.
“Whether you’re in a hospital room, your bedroom, or hall, you’re voting until you can’t any longer. And besides, this is hall, anyway. We’re just changing a few of the rules because of the circumstances.”
I don’t know that I had ever seen Trace look so worn out and so tired as at that moment. The head injury couldn’t be helping matters.
“I think of what Sword just said, that the Mercs have been our enemies for decades now, and nothing has changed despite all the murders. We kill a president, and someone else rises up. But on the other hand, Krispy is right. If they’ve been our enemies for this long, what makes us think that they’re just suddenly going to become our allies and we’re all going to sing Disney together? Yo
u know?”
Trace groaned.
“I’m going to say this right now. Sensei, you are in charge, and BK, Krispy, Mafia, and Sword. You guys are the ones following Sensei. So, in a way, this is really up to you for at least another week or so until I’m out and Splitter comes back. But if we’re going to make this a club vote… yea.”
I felt an enormous sigh of relief. Krispy didn’t bother to hide his frustration, calling the vote “fucking stupid.” Trace didn’t say anything in response; I think he knew that Krispy would fall in line, and our idea was one of the most radical ones to date.
“I am only voting yea because we’re leaving our options open,” Trace said. “Part of me thinks you’re going to show up to the Mercs, try and make the offering, and then you’re going to have to kill everyone there. And then this whole discussion would just be rendered moot. But if we ever want to have peaceful lives, if we ever want to get to the spot where, as Sensei told me before, the club feels peaceful, we have to try something different.
“So, here’s the deal. Sensei: you and the others come up with a plan. Splitter, hang the fuck up and get back to Hawaii.”
“You sure—”
“I’m hanging up on you, enjoy,” Trace said, doing just that. “I’ll be here by cell phone communication if you need it. But right now, Jane will literally kill me if I pack up and leave so I cannot do that. So, the five of you—decide however you want to do this. But it needs to be done soon.”
I had no intentions of waiting.
In fact, I had every intention of ending this as soon as I could.
“Come on,” I said, motioning to the other officers. “Let’s get to the clubhouse. It’s time to gear up and get some new recruits.”
I wasn’t going to pretend that because we’d taken a vote, everyone in the club was going to fall lock and step into what I planned to do.
Leaving the hospital, in fact, gave me just the chance to realize that. Mafia and Krispy were talking to each other, pretending to be silent enough that no one else could hear them, but deliberately loud enough that we all could. It was pretty fucking passive aggressive, but in this case, I could understand. We were doing something very different and very un-club like, and it didn’t take much to see how this could be interpreted as us going soft.