Leo tried to brace his heels against the ground. He was weaker than Hank and exhausted by the effort of trying to resist. The concrete tore at his shoe soles. He thought of the note he had left Jaden and Mia and felt a helpless rage that they might hear he had returned without ever hearing why.
'Please,' he said to Higgins. 'You have a badge. Help me.'
The deputy looked away. 'Get him loaded, Hank.'
Leo stopped pleading. Something in him understood that no amount of explanation could make these two men become the adults they were supposed to be. He was not being misunderstood. He was being ignored.
Then Higgins lifted his head.
The change was small at first. He had been leaning against the door of the law-enforcement vehicle, but now he stood upright and turned toward the distant road. The expression on his face shifted from impatience to confusion.
'Hold on,' he said.
Hank tightened his grip. 'What?'
'Listen.'
Leo heard nothing but wind and his own breathing. The deputy took two steps toward the highway and stood with his head slightly tilted. On the roof of the old office, a loose strip of metal rattled in a rhythm unlike the breeze.
A moment later Leo heard a low vibration beneath everything else. It was too deep to be the engine of a passing car, too sustained to be a single truck shifting gears. The sound seemed to rise from somewhere beyond the hills and gather strength as it approached.
Hank looked irritated. 'It's traffic.'
'Not like that,' Higgins said.
Leo had grown up in a motorcycle shop. He knew engines by the sounds they made under load, and he could distinguish the high mechanical buzz of sport bikes from the long heavy pulse of large V-twins. What he heard now was neither one machine nor several. It was a whole road full of motors moving together.
Dust began to lift along the highway. The first distant shapes appeared as moving shadows at the top of a low rise. They vanished behind heat shimmer, then appeared again, larger, aligned in pairs.
Hank released Leo's collar and squinted. 'What is that?'
The first ten motorcycles broke over the rise. Behind them came another formation, then another. Black leather, chrome, dark helmets, and broad shoulders emerged through the wavering air. Their engines did not sound like individual vehicles anymore. They sounded like a single weather system bearing down on the old Sinclair sign.
Higgins put his hand near his holster, then took it away as more riders appeared. Leo counted twenty before he lost the line. Then thirty. Then fifty. He had never seen so many motorcycles moving in one direction with such strange, deliberate purpose.
The deputy hurried toward his vehicle. 'Who told them to come here?'
Hank took a step toward the Ram. He looked at the crowd approaching through the desert light and, for the first time since finding Leo, seemed uncertain whether he had chosen the right place to stop.
Leo remained on one knee. He was too weak to stand quickly, and a thin stream of blood had dried at the corner of his mouth. Yet beneath the fear a memory began to move: a gray-streaked beard, a damaged shoulder, a silver lighter, and a voice saying that the club did not forget.
The road filled with motorcycles.