The Fast Stop had six picnic tables out front under a buzzing sodium light, and by the time Eli rolled in, the story of the puddle had already been told twice and was improving rapidly.
"—so the bag just disintegrates, right, and the eggs go everywhere, and the old guy's standing there like —" Wade did the face, eyes wide, mouth open, water dripping off his chin. "Like a drowned rat in a church suit!"
Tommy Vance laughed so hard he choked on his coffee. Hoss slapped the table. Big Mike chuckled into his cup. Jace, who hadn't actually seen the splash because he'd been watching his mirrors, laughed anyway, a half-beat late, the way he did.
Eli parked the Sportster at the far end of the row, out of the light, and walked over slowly.
"There he is!" Wade crowed. "The Good Samaritan! Tell us, Prospect — did you wipe his nose for him? Read him a bedtime story?"
"I replaced his groceries," Eli said flatly. "Forty-two bucks."
That got a bigger laugh. "Forty-two bucks!" Tommy wheezed. "You paid the toll for the old man! Wade, you owe this kid forty-two bucks!"
"I owe him nothing," Wade said, grinning. "It was a joke. The old man's fine. Hell, he probably needed a bath." He turned to Eli, and his grin sharpened just a little. "You know what your problem is, Prospect? You're soft. Eleven months in and you're still soft. The club's not a charity, son. You want to earn that rocker, you gotta harden up."
Eli said nothing. He got a coffee from inside — black, because that's what prospects drank, whether they liked it or not — and sat at the end of the table, out of the spill of the light.
Deke slid down the bench toward him. "You all right?" he asked quietly. Deke Hoffman, VP, forty years old, the only man in the chapter who'd ever told Wade no to his face and lived to keep his patch. He had a way of watching people that made Eli nervous.
"Fine," Eli said.
"You were gone twenty minutes."
"Grocery run."
Deke studied him. "You saw something out there. On the shoulder. I can see it sitting on you."
Eli's throat went dry. For one wild second he almost told him — about the coat, the patch, the word FOUNDER burned into his vision. But Deke was Wade's VP. Deke had laughed at the story twice. And Eli had no proof, nothing but a one-second glimpse and an old man's mild deflection. A prospect who accused the president's whole formation of desecrating a founder on the basis of a glimpse would be out before the coffee cooled.
"Just felt bad for the guy," Eli said. "That's all."
Deke held his gaze a moment longer, then nodded and let it go. But Eli saw him file it away.
Wade told the story a third time, bigger now — the old man was eighty-five, the puddle was a lake, the eggs had hit a passing car. The men laughed, and Eli sat in the dark at the end of the table and thought about a brown coat falling open, and three wavy lines, and a word he couldn't unsee.
On the ride home, the formation strung out along Route 12 in the dark, headlights sweeping the ditches. They passed the puddle — smaller now, the water sinking into the gravel — and they passed the spot on the shoulder where the eggs had burst, and Eli looked away from it, because looking at it made his hands tight on the bars.
At the little rented house he shared with two other guys from the auto shop, Eli sat on the porch steps long after he'd killed the Sportster's engine. His phone was in his hand. Three times he started to call his mother in Dayton — she always knew what to do — and three times he stopped, because what would he even say? Mom, I think we soaked a founding father of my motorcycle club in a puddle today, and I'm the only one who turned around, and I don't know what to do.
He didn't call. He went inside, lay on his bunk in the dark, and stared at the ceiling until the gray light came up, doing the arithmetic over and over.
If the old man was Earl Whitaker, charter founder, then the bylaws — the ones Deke had made him memorize — had exactly one thing to say about what had happened at that puddle. Eli remembered the passage word for word, because prospects got quizzed on it: Any member who brings dishonor upon a founder of this club shall answer to the national charter.
He finally slept at dawn, and dreamed of brown water, and woke with the taste of it in his mouth.
He called in sick to the shop — the first time in two years — and spent the morning on his porch with cold coffee, turning the thing over and over. The problem was simple and impossible: he knew something enormous, and he had no proof, and the men he'd have to accuse were the men whose approval he needed.
By noon, he couldn't stand his own company anymore. He needed someone older, someone outside the club's gravity — someone who'd known the old code and wouldn't laugh at him for caring about it.
He thought of Bobby. His uncle had ridden in the eighties, back when the club still meant something, and he'd walked away from it without bitterness — or at least without talking about it, which in Bobby's case meant the same thing. More importantly, Bobby had known Eli since he was in diapers. Bobby wouldn't laugh.
Eli showered, put on clean jeans, and drove to Foster's Auto with two coffees from the Fast Stop — a peace offering, a bribe, a white flag. Bobby was under a lift, and when he rolled out and saw his nephew's face, he set down his wrench and said, "You look like somebody died."
"Nobody died," Eli said. "Worse. Maybe. Uncle Bobby — I need to tell you something, and I need you to not tell anybody. Not Mom. Nobody."
Bobby studied him for a long moment, then nodded. "Talk."
And Eli talked — the puddle, the swerve, the groceries, the forty-two dollars — and then, quieter, leaning in though the shop was empty, the coat falling open and what he'd seen inside it.