“Yeah, I saw him. He’s fine,” Preacher growled into the receiver. “Two cracked ribs, maybe a bruised kidney. He won’t admit it. You know Hank. He’s stubborn as rust. No, some kid pulled him out of the fire. Yeah, I’m serious. A kid. Eighteen, maybe nineteen, skinny little gearhead from the East Side. Yeah, I know. I know. Hank wants the entire table assembled at the flagship shop tomorrow morning. The whole table. And tell Marcus to bring the photographer.”
He hung up the phone just as the SUV crested the hill, rolling past the heavy iron security gates and the pacing guard dogs.
The second gear was turning downtown, in a bustling, air-conditioned newsroom.
Linda Brennan, a veteran investigative reporter at the local Channel 7 news station, frowned deeply at the blinking red light of the voicemail on her desk phone. She played the anonymous tip back twice, her brow furrowing.
She stood up, walked briskly down the hall to the dusty basement records room, and pulled open a low filing cabinet that nobody had bothered to unlock in years. Her fingers danced over the manila tabs until she found it.
The tab read: “Callaway, Henry. Callaway Custom Cycles / MC Affiliation. 1995 - present.”
She pulled the thick file out and opened it on a reading table.
The very first photograph inside was a grainy, black-and-white print of a heavily tattooed man in his thirties, standing proudly in front of a tiny, rundown garage. Parked directly behind him was a gleaming, cherry-red Panhead.
Linda smiled, the thrill of the chase lighting up her eyes. She picked up her cell phone and dialed her producer.
“Hey, Dave. It’s Linda. Clear my afternoon schedule. I think I have something huge.”
The third gear was turning inside the heavily fortified walls of the chapter clubhouse on the industrial edge of town.
It was a cavernous room smelling of stale beer, woodsmoke, and old leather. A massive, scarred oak table dominated the center of the room. The wall directly behind the head chair was a shrine, covered from floor to ceiling in framed photographs of legendary motorcycles and the hard men who had built them.
Hank Callaway sat at the head of the oak table. Ten other men—the inner circle, the shot-callers of the chapter—sat down the length of the wood. Nobody touched the black coffee steaming in their mugs.
Hank spoke quietly, leaning forward on his elbows. He didn’t need to raise his voice here, either.
“There’s a kid,” Hank said, his slate eyes scanning the faces of his brothers. “He wrenches at Hartman’s Auto over on the East Side. I want to know absolutely everything there is to know about him by midnight tonight. I want his family history, his school records, his medical history. I want to know about his debts, his bills, his friends, his enemies. Everything.”
One of the older men, a gray-bearded rider named Dutch, shifted uncomfortably in his chair and spoke up.
“What exactly are we doing with this information, Hank?”
Hank looked at Dutch for a long, heavy moment.
“Twenty-five years,” Hank said softly. “Twenty-five years I’ve sat at the head of this table. We’ve spent two and a half decades remembering the men we lost, remembering the blood we spilled, and honoring the code. Now, I want to know if it’s finally time to start passing that code on to somebody else.”
Nobody at the table said a single word in response to that. It was too profound.
Hank tapped his right hand against the table once. The heavy steel compass ring made a sharp, clean clack against the oak grain.
“Find me everything on the boy. But nobody approaches him. Not yet.”
Across town, the heat was already rising. Brandon got to work an hour early.
He had slept terribly. His left arm throbbed with a dull, constant ache, and his shoulder screamed every time he lifted a tool above his chest.
Cole Hartman looked up from where he was wrestling a tire iron and raised a bushy eyebrow at his young apprentice.
“What the hell happened to your arm, kid?”
“Walked into a chain-link fence in the dark,” Brandon lied smoothly, grabbing a wrench.
Cole grunted, clearly not buying it, but he went back to the tire iron without pressing the issue.
On his walk home that afternoon, Brandon felt a strange prickle on the back of his neck. He glanced across the street and noticed a large man in a leather jacket leaning against a brick wall, pretending to read a newspaper. He wasn't doing a very good job of blending in.
Brandon didn’t think much of it. He was too exhausted. His bones ached.
He had absolutely no idea that, at that very moment, over forty custom motorcycles were already fired up, moving in perfect unison, pointed directly at his street.
Brandon was lying on his back on a creeper, sliding under the oil pan of a rusted Honda Civic, when he first heard it.
He thought it was a freak summer thunderstorm rolling in. A low, bass-heavy rumble vibrating through the concrete floor of the garage, traveling straight up his spine.
He slid out from under the car, wiped his greasy hands on a red shop rag, and stood up, listening harder.
The rumble was getting louder. And then, he started unconsciously counting the individual engines within the thunder.
Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty.
He stopped counting at twenty, because the sound wasn’t slowing down. It was multiplying. It was becoming a physical wall of noise.
Cole came walking out from under the hydraulic lift in the next bay, a heavy torque wrench dangling forgotten from his hand. He looked at Brandon, his eyes wide. Brandon looked back at Cole.
“What the hell is that?” Cole yelled over the growing noise.
“I don’t know.”
They walked out together, stepping past the roll-up bay doors and out onto the sidewalk.