Lane

by Trent Jordan

  Angela really was the first one to hear me talk about it like this. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was the first one she’d talked to about the case as well.

  She was...

  Don’t think it, Lane. Don’t let yourself go down this road right now. Stay focused.

  “I respect the hell out of your drive to bring her the justice she deserves, Angela,” I said, meaning every word.

  Now she turned her body to me, resting her right arm on the bar and her head in her hand as I spoke.

  “I think it’s pointed in the wrong direction—Cole’s to blame, I saw him standing before her with a gun, but... anyway, it’s not me nor is it anyone in the Reapers. I take full responsibility for her death in the sense that I should never have brought her over, but the responsibility of justice falls to my missing brother and to the Fallen Saints.”

  Angela bowed her head, nodded a couple of times, and sipped on her drink without looking up. She let out a sigh, brushed back her hair, and raised her face to meet mine.

  “Maybe this is bad to say to you, Lane,” she said. “Especially because I’m still not sure if your club is better or worse for Springsville. But I’m beginning to have doubts about how I’ve viewed you for the last year. Maybe you weren’t so bad for Shannon.”

  I didn’t consider myself an overly emotional guy, and I certainly didn’t react in such fashion, but Angela’s words hit me with a force I could not have anticipated. I was left reeling in the positive sense of the word—I finally had someone besides fellow Reapers telling me I had treated her well.

  Shannon... the love of my life... the most beautiful woman I’d ever known...

  And now, as stupid as I knew this sounded, it was as if her spirit had returned through Angela. Of course, Angela was her own person, and of course, Angela still had her serious—and in some ways, legitimate—doubts about me and the Reapers. But I could see how they had been very close growing up. There were shades of Shannon’s personality in Angela.

  “I appreciate that,” I said. “I can’t express enough how much Shannon meant to me. She was the one who was going to get me to shift out of the life of the Reapers.”

  Angela’s eyes widened.

  “I cared about her so much. I was going to marry her, Angela, there was no doubt about that. I love my brothers in the Reapers, and I still do, but the love I had for Shannon was intense, and it was real. If I had to leave the club for the sake of our relationship, that was a risk I was willing to take. But... well, it kills me every day. Every day I wake up, and I hurt like hell. Every day, I wake up and wish I hadn’t been so damn stupid as to do what I did. Every day... I miss her.”

  I sighed and stared straight at her, waiting until she looked into my eyes, our eyes locked perfectly.

  “Do you understand?”

  Angela

  I really have been looking at you the wrong way this whole time.

  Hearing Lane speak about Shannon and how he felt truly solidified for me just how dramatically I had underestimated his love for her. I figured he had “loved” her like teenagers love each other. They might have said they loved each other, but in reality, the only thing I had seen was that they liked each other a lot and probably had some wild sex I preferred not to think about.

  But, honestly, I was almost envious of the way he had spoken about her. I had never had any man speak to me in such a fashion, and it hurt me so bad to know that he had been so kind and so good to her... and all I had done was just criticize him and threaten to throw him in jail.

  It left me reeling. Shannon hadn’t been forced into anything. Shannon hadn’t been coerced into following his every whim. He had always given her choices and even probably pushed her not to make the choice that would have her affected by the Black Reapers.

  I couldn’t believe I was saying this, but Lane seemed like a really good man. Not just a normal guy or a good guy, but a really good guy.

  I wasn’t about to let my guard down completely. He could have just as easily been an incredible actor and a sociopath who fooled me, but I didn’t know whether I believed that. When I said that he was good to Shannon, his reaction, though subtle and barely noticeable, was remarkable. It was emotional, a far cry from how he had acted at his own clubhouse.

  Shannon had picked well, it seemed. I wasn’t about to say I would never investigate the Black Reapers ever again or give Lane a free pass on all future actions, but I could see the appeal in Lane. If I was being really honest, I might even say I wasn’t having to try to see the appeal in Lane. I was feeling it.

  But that was ridiculous and just me letting the stress and the emotions of the day get to me. I didn’t like Lane, not like that. Did I like him more than before? Of course. Did I have the beginnings of feelings for him? No. Not in the slightest.

  “Yeah,” I finally said in response to his question, asking if I understood. “Absolutely. I miss her every day. You probably noticed me at her grave a couple of times.”

  “I did,” Lane said. “You always wore sunglasses.”

  “Because it was sunny out.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me as if to say he didn’t believe me. He had good reason to.

  “Okay, because I didn’t want anyone to see how I felt,” I said with a sad smile. “I’m working in the DA’s office now, Lane. I have to be strong. Do you get that?”

  “More than you might realize,” he said.

  “Right, I can’t show emotion in public. The DA and anyone who represents the office needs to act in accordance with it. Bring things to justice, and don’t let your emotions get in the way of what you are feeling. Funny I should say that since I let my emotions get in the way of things.”

  “How so?” Lane asked.

  This is not the Lane I expected to run across. The arrogant, aloof Lane, the one who almost tried to flirt with me at the shop... it’s like he’s gone. Something has happened, I bet.

  “Nothing that I haven’t told you already. I wanted to see you in jail because I held you responsible, but I never bothered to look past my emotions. The idea that you were the one responsible for her death was an easy thing to grasp onto. You were the ‘bad boy’ she dated, the son of a biker and a biker yourself. Of course, it was easy to say you were responsible for her death, but... I mean, were you really going to leave the club for her?”

  By now, I felt like I knew Lane well enough to notice when he was telling the truth and when he was brushing things aside with a cocky or infuriated demeanor. I felt certain, then, that when he nodded, he was telling the full truth.

  “I may sound like a broken record, but she was everything for me, Angela,” he said. “Obviously, I’m not leaving the club now. I’m not sure I would even if I found someone to love. They’d have to understand how much the club means to me and how much it’s helping me grow right now. But yeah, for her, at the time? Absolutely.”

  I nodded as I felt a certain warmth emanating from within. I only wished I had been able to detach from this case and see Lane for what he was long ago—a man consumed by passion for Shannon, but a man who cared very much about her. There wasn’t a great motive. I’d just let my anger and beliefs about motorcycle clubs and Lane get in the way of the truth.

  Some future DA I was, huh?

  Well, that was a little self-critical. I knew I’d make a great DA someday. But on this particular case, maybe I wasn’t the one to do the work.

  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... ”

  He didn’t finish the words. He banished him. He told him to never come back. Maybe that’s why Cole is missing.

  “Fucked up, right?” Lane said with a laugh. “I can’t forgive Cole because of how things unfolded. He could be innocent—fuck, probably is, why the fuck not—and yet I can’t forgive him. It’s fucked up. All because I’m jealous of what he was to the club.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder, this time ignoring how it might have looked, and gave a gentle rub. I had hoped that the gesture, so far up on the shoulder and away from any romantic or courting spots, might have not seemed to flirtatious and more just friendly.

  I wasn’t sure, though, that either of us actually believed or wanted it to be that way.

  “You’re a very self-aware individual,” I said. “I guess that’s why you’re President of the club.”

  “Hah,” Lane snorted, shaking his head. “I’m President because my last name is Carter. I’m barely holding on as it is.”

  “Why?”

  Lane struggled to form an answer. Eventually, he just bowed his head, looking down at the bar before resting his head on his forearm.

  “Lane, are you okay?”

  He didn’t answer for a few moments. I swore I even heard sobbing, but I didn’t dare ask the biker if he was crying. Instead, I just let the silence give him the space he needed to contemplate my question. Whatever conclusion he came to, I wanted him to come to it without my questioning him.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “It needs to stay in the club. Besides, you’re the Deputy DA. You hear things, and... ”

  He tilted his head slightly toward his other shoulder, which had a few bandages on it. I got the picture clearly enough. I could have asked him questions and turned this into a criminal investigation... but that didn’t seem healthy for my long-term relationship with a club that, really, wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  Granted, that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to put pressure on the club. Lane, the President of the Blac
k Reapers, and Lane, the human before me, could very well be two different people, and it was my job to hold the former accountable for his actions. But as a human, it was my duty to help the latter in a spot like this.

  “I understand,” I said. “Listen, any time you want to talk about it... I want to help you.”

  Lane looked up with red, bloodshot eyes. It was pretty clear what he’d been doing, but like I said, there was no way I was going to call it out for what it was.

  “I need to get going,” I said, which was a true statement. I’d stayed out way later than I had ever anticipated. “But if you ever come to me, if you ever want to meet, I’m happy to talk Cole and your relationship with him. I promise I won’t be doing it to investigate criminal activity. I’m not going to bullshit you, I’m still going to do that as needed. And if you tell me you did something illegal, that’s really bad in our conversations... you get the idea.”

  “Yeah,” Lane said weakly before chuckling.

  “Listen, here’s my number,” I said, scribbling it on a napkin before handing it to him. “Text or call me if you want to talk about this.”

  I stood up from my barstool, an action that Lane mirrored as well. We didn’t even have a moment before the next thing happened. It just happened as if we’d been hanging out for weeks on end, not for minutes upon minutes.

  He embraced me tightly.

  And you know what? It felt perfectly right. I was pretty good at separating the President and the man, and I was hugging the man, not the President.

  What happened next, though, what happened when we pulled back, I was not ready for.

  I looked up into Lane’s eyes, and I felt myself almost magnetically pulled to him. I could not pull away from his gaze, no matter how much my mind begged to just step back. I could separate the President and the man, but if I let myself get too close, that was going to be impossible. Separation was only possible because of boundaries.

  And yet... and yet, for several seconds, I felt like I was looking at someone who was a lot closer to me than I could have ever imagined. We were both fighting to avenge the death of a loved one. We both had parts of ourselves that we had trouble revealing to each other. We both were hard-nosed, stubborn people.