I could hear them talking, but they were keeping their voices low. The conversation was obviously just between them; we weren’t meant to hear it. As I got closer, I realized it was getting much easier to see outside. The light was getting brighter. Soon, the sun would be coming up, and traffic would pick up again along the interstate.
“It’s going to be daylight soon,” I told Dante.
“I know. We need to hurry up and finish this. I wish Cole would go ahead and shoot him already,” Dante said.
“Well, shouldn’t we do something about the mess?” I asked.
“Already on it,” he said, pulling his phone out of his pocket. He lowered his rifle and started tapping on the screen, apparently texting someone.
I turned my attention back to Cole and Fang sitting on the ground in front of me. They didn’t seem to be moving. Whatever their conversation was about, it must have been pretty important. I could still hear them murmuring, though I couldn’t hear a word they were actually saying.
“I’ve got a cleaner on the way,” Dante said. “We need to hurry this up, because anyone who’s left alive won’t be for long once he gets here.”
“Alright, good,” I told him. I’d never been around when a cleaner was working before. I was only a thief. I had never been exposed to anyone else’s job. All I ever did was get in, grab the loot, and get out. I had no real concept of what anyone else did, and I didn’t really care, not at the moment anyway. At that moment, all I cared about was what was going on between Cole and Fang.
“Don’t,” Dante warned me again. “Do not interfere.”
“Look, I’m the one who got him into this mess,” I argued. “I need to be the one to get him out.” I stopped and turned back to Dante.
“That’s where you’re wrong. You may have facilitated it happening this way, but this has been coming for a long, long time, Sasha. These two have been at each other’s throats for years,” he said to me.
I looked back at the two men on the ground. I could have sworn they hadn’t even moved since Fang had pushed Cole onto his back. For all I knew, he’d already choked Cole out and was just sitting there enjoying his victory over his rival.
“Dammit, Dante,” I said, “I need to do this.”
“No, what you need to do is let the fight take its course, Sasha. Let them duke it out,” Dante continued to argue.
But they weren’t duking it out. They were just sitting there. It sounded like they might have been talking, but I wasn’t completely confident in that assessment either. Something wasn’t right, and regardless of what Dante thought I should have been doing, I crept up to the two men to see what the hell was going on.
I couldn’t just let a fight I’d started take its course, not without my intervention. Besides, we needed to get out of here before we created a spectacle. In the early morning light, everything was already pretty obvious.
There was car sitting completely upright on the passenger side. There were bodies everywhere. Less than a mile back on the highway itself, there was a wrecked motorcycle with a body tangled up in it. There were guns everywhere. There was an SUV parked and running along the side of the interstate, where it had plowed into several motorcycles.
To top it off, there were four people with guns hanging out by the wreckage of the car. Two of them were fighting, and the other two were just hanging around with their guns drawn, watching the fight.
Once law enforcement arrived, it really was going to be a mess. They were going to find countless guns on the side of the highway, and some of them were fully automatic, which was going to cause some problems for everyone on the street.
“Don’t worry,” Dante said, catching me looking around at the scene before us. “Our cleaner will have this handled like it never even happened,” he assured me.
“Look, maybe you should get the car ready,” I told him, trying to get him off my back.
“The car?” His eyes focused on the car beside us.
“No, the SUV. I assume we’re going to take it since they ran over the bikes with it.”
He turned and looked at the mangled motorcycles.
“Oh, man, Cole isn’t going to be happy about this,” he groaned.
“I know,” I added.
“No, you have no idea. He was riding the bike Gage gave to him when he became an official member of Hell’s Overlords,” Dante told me.
“That Gage gave him?” I was taken back to when Cole and Dante had escorted Gage out of HQ when I first arrived. Suddenly, I really felt like shit for stirring things up for him. It seemed I had caused a lot more problems than I had realized by coming here and getting involved with Gage. I needed to fix things, and quick.