"An oral history," Derek repeated, stretching the words until they sounded ridiculous. "You hear that, boys? We're about to become a school assignment. Maybe she'll put us in a glass case next to the dinosaurs."
A few men grinned. Others looked uncomfortable without being quite willing to challenge him. Cassie noticed the difference and wrote it down in her head. She had come looking for a brotherhood, a word her father used with a seriousness that always made her curious. Yet the very first thing she had discovered was that a group could laugh together without everybody finding the joke funny.
A woman at the bar turned on her stool. Maria Torres had gray streaks in her long black hair, a lined brown face, and a leather vest so worn that the edges of its patches had become part of the leather itself. She was seventy-two, though Cassie did not yet know her age, and the younger members tended to straighten when she spoke. "Honey, this isn't a petting zoo," Maria said. Her tone was kinder than Derek's, but her eyes were assessing. "These people aren't characters you can put into a notebook and take home."
"I know that," Cassie answered.
"Do you?" Maria asked. "Because everybody says they want the truth right up until somebody tells it."
Cassie could have told them who she was then. She could have said the name that would change the room, explained why she knew so much about the emblem over the bar, or mentioned that the man who had given her driving lessons had been wearing Iron Wolves colors since before most of the members were born. But she had come to find out whether anyone would listen to her without that name. She had promised herself she would make the request in her own voice before she borrowed her father's authority.
"I'm willing to earn your trust," she said. "And if you tell me something isn't for the project, it won't be in the project. I brought consent forms, and I can show you my teacher's instructions."
Derek let his chair fall onto all four legs. "A consent form," he said. "Wonderful. Should we ask the motorcycles to sign, too?"
Before Cassie could respond, an engine sounded outside. It was low and uneven in a particular way, a deep mechanical rhythm followed by a brief, deliberate rise in the throttle. Voices died in different parts of the room, not because the sound was loud enough to drown them out, but because the people listening knew that engine. Someone near the pool table looked toward the window and whispered, "Graham."
A black Harley-Davidson rolled into the gravel lot beyond the front windows. It was an older touring machine kept in immaculate mechanical condition, though its paint had stone chips and the leather saddlebags showed their age. The rider turned it into a parking space, cut the engine, and sat for a moment with both hands resting on the bars. He climbed off carefully, favoring his left knee, then removed his helmet and ran his fingers through a thick crop of silver hair.
Graham Hale was seventy-five. His beard was almost entirely gray, his shoulders still broad, and his hands carried the permanent marks of a lifetime spent working with machines. He moved more slowly than he had when Cassie was little, but there was nothing uncertain about him. The leather cut he wore bore the Iron Wolves emblem across the back and, beneath it, a small worn patch that read FOUNDING MEMBER, 1971.