Page 15 of Saint's Sinner

“Vic.”

Sinn came half out of his chair at hearing that.

“Vic as in Victor Reigns? My Vic! The asshole who chose the club over me the moment they took my bike away?”

“It wasn’t that he chose the club, it..he just…”

“Wasn’t willing to fight them for me. Yeah, he made that clear!” Sinn snapped, grumbling as he settled back in his chair and shook his head at his brother.

“I know. I was there.”

“But clearly it didn’t matter to you until you found yourself potentially facing the same situation.”

“Notpotentially. Doc. Filbert diagnosed me with the same disease as he did you. Said it tended to run in families, lucky us. We hit the jackpot in the gene pool. First poor fuckers to wind up with it in two generations,” Dougie said, his tone low but resolute.

“Then you’ve got some hard decisions to make.”

“There are days when I just want to get it out in the open while I can still see the looks on everyone’s faces when they find out.”

“And other days you want to drag it out as long as possible, enjoy as much freedom as you can, and hope something major pops off that will allow you to delay the inevitable even longer,” Sinn replied.

“Or go out in a blaze of glory.”

“Thus why you want out of that office.”

“I should be riding beside Vic,” Dougie said.

“Don’t you really mean you should be getting shot at alongside Vic, so maybe a bullet cuts you down and makes you a legend like the rest of the guys on the clubhouse wall, only you do know what would happen to Vic if you went out there with him and got yourself killed and he came back to the clubhouse with your corpse to present to our folks, don’t you? Not to mention what Gramps would do to him if Pops didn’t kill him outright.”

“He wouldn’t come back without me,” Dougie said with such certainty Sinn found himself once again wondering if they were talking about the same Vic.

“Are you trying to tell me you have a death wish now?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t fuckin’ know. The only thing I do know is that I don’t want to deal with this from behind a desk. If the world is going to fade into a flat gray blob, then I want it to happen on some two lane somewhere, throttle wide open and blue lights fading in the rearview.”

“Then I guess you’d better work out your exit strategy,” Sinn cautioned.

“Can you help me?”

Sinn slammed his fist on the arm of the chair. “How when I can’t even help myself! Sure, I can make it out the door, no problem. It’s not like anyone’s guarding me now that I’ve been dumped off here. Why would they? I leave at night and I won’t make it ten feet without tripping over Juniper Brush.”

“So slip out of here when the sun comes up,” Dougie suggested. “It’ll take hours for someone to figure out you’ve gone.”

“Gone where, the highway? I can’t hear it from here so I’ll have to head north and hope I don’t veer off course, not that I’ll get far. Even if I managed to avoid all the brush and the prickly pear cactus, the moles, voles, and pocket gophers have left enough holes around to resemble a minefield.”

“Don’t forget the armadillos.”

“How could I? I’ve still got scars from the barbed wire fence I crashed into the last time I tripped over one.”

They both laughed a little at that, then Dougie sighed, and the chair creaked, suggesting that he was about to take off.

“Heading back to the office?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Want me to come with?” Sinn suggested. “I can’t help you crunch the numbers but I’m sure I can figure out a way to fuck something up.”

“What good is that going to do me?”

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