The rain had quit an hour before the Black River Riders hit Route 12, which was exactly the problem. When rain quits on a country highway, it leaves the road to decide what to do with all that water, and Route 12 — two lanes of tired asphalt winding through the bottomland west of Cedar Falls — had decided to keep most of it in a single enormous puddle just past the Miller's Crossing turnoff. It was a wide, brown, oil-slicked lake stretched clear across the westbound lane, fed by the ditch runoff, deep enough in the middle to hide the center line completely. In the low afternoon sun it threw back the sky in broken pieces.
Wade Mercer saw it coming from a quarter mile out, and he smiled.
He was forty-five years old, president of the Black River Riders' Cedar Falls chapter, and he had the kind of smile that arrived a half second before trouble did — a slow, private thing that never quite reached his eyes. He rode a black Road King with ape hangers, a stereo loud enough to rattle windows two blocks away, and a brand-new bottom rocker he'd had made special when he took the presidency six years back. Behind him, in staggered formation, came six more bikes: Deke Hoffman on a Street Glide, his vice president and the only man in the chapter who ever told Wade no; Ray "Hoss" Kowalski, three hundred pounds of beard and leather on a fat-tired Softail; Tommy Vance, twenty-nine and mean as a stepped-on rake; Big Mike Dreyer, quiet, forty, who laughed at things he shouldn't; Jace Poole, thirty-three, always half a beat behind the joke; and last of all, Eli Foster, twenty-two, on a battered 2004 Sportster with mismatched paint and a headlight that flickered when he hit bumps.
They were rolling home from a swap meet in Dalton — a good day, everybody's pockets a little lighter, everybody's mood a little meaner than it needed to be. Three beers at the VFW hall afterward had sanded the edges off Wade's judgment, which was never his strongest feature to begin with.
Up ahead on the shoulder, a thin old man was walking.
He was seventy-eight if he was a day, with wispy gray hair lifting in the wind off the bikes, a brown coat that had seen better decades buttoned crooked against the damp, and a paper grocery bag clutched in both arms like it was something precious. He walked with the careful, measured steps of a man who had learned not to trust his knees, close to the white line because the gravel beyond it was treacherous for old ankles. Every few steps he hitched the bag a little higher.
Wade didn't slow down. He did the opposite. He rolled on the throttle, felt the Road King surge, and aimed for the deepest part of the puddle — and at the last second, he swerved just enough to throw the whole brown wave sideways, a glittering curtain of ditch water arcing through the sunlight.
The water hit the old man like a thrown bucket.
It took him across the shoulders and head, soaked his thin hair flat against his skull, spattered his glasses with mud, and poured down inside his collar in a cold rush. His foot slipped on the wet gravel. The paper bag dissolved in his hands — sagged, split along the bottom seam, and dropped everything. A dozen eggs burst on the gravel in yellow stars. Apples rolled, bouncing, toward the highway. A loaf of bread in its plastic sleeve landed in the mud and stayed there. A can of soup clanged and rolled into the ditch.
The old man stood there, water dripping off his chin, and stared down at the wreckage of his groceries.
Behind Wade, six bikes roared through the shallows at the puddle's edge, throwing up their own lesser sprays, and laughter crackled over the wind — Tommy's high bray, Hoss's deep boom. Wade lifted one fist in the air — got him — and twisted the throttle harder, and the formation howled on toward the Fast Stop gas station half a mile ahead, where the coffee was hot and the story would get better every time it was told.
Only one motorcycle didn't laugh.
Eli Foster rode last in the formation, and he'd seen the whole thing develop in front of him like a slow-motion film: the old man's small figure, the swerve, the wave, the bag coming apart. He was eleven months into his prospect year with the Black River Riders, which meant he wore no full colors — just a small prospect patch on a denim vest, no bottom rocker, no vote, no voice. He'd spent those eleven months fetching beer, sweeping the clubhouse, holding flashlights in the cold, and learning that the fastest way to earn respect in the club was to laugh at whatever Wade laughed at, exactly when Wade laughed at it.
He didn't laugh now.
He watched the old man standing on the shoulder in the settling mist of road spray, water dripping off his chin onto the ruined groceries, and something in Eli's chest — something he'd been carefully keeping quiet for eleven months, something his mother had put there years ago with bedtime stories about right and wrong — finally made enough noise that he couldn't pretend he didn't hear it.
He rolled off the throttle and let the formation pull away without him, pipes thundering into the distance. Then Eli Foster made a U-turn on an empty highway, the Sportster's headlight flickering once, and rode back to the old man alone.
The wind was cold against his face without the formation's slipstream, and the road felt wider than it had five minutes ago — emptier, too, the way roads feel when you've just done something your whole crew would call stupid. Eli could already hear Tommy's voice in his head: Prospect's gone soft. He could see Wade's grin sharpening.
He thought about his mother, then — about the winter he was nine and she'd made him walk back two blocks in the snow to return a dollar the cashier had given him by mistake. "It's not about the dollar, baby," she'd said, chafing his frozen hands. "It's about who you are when nobody's watching."
Nobody was watching now. Just the empty highway, the settling mist, and a small wet figure on the shoulder up ahead, getting slowly larger. Eli rolled on the throttle, and the Sportster — tired, mismatched, faithful — carried him back toward the one thing he'd been taught, in eleven months of prospecting, never to do: the right thing, alone, without permission.
The prospect patch on his vest felt heavier than it had that morning. He didn't know yet that it was about to get a lot heavier — or that by the end of it, he'd understand exactly what it was supposed to weigh.