Wiped the surface with his thumb.
The dark tarnish did not hide the engraving.
Winged skull.
Missing jaw.
Broken chain.
E.C.
Bones stared.
Sal noticed.
“What?”
Bones did not answer.
“Bones?”
The big man’s eyes lifted slowly toward Toby.
Then returned to the lighter.
“Sal.”
His voice had changed so completely that Sal straightened.
“Yeah?”
“Kill the music.”
Sal reached beneath the bar and unplugged the jukebox.
The guitar vanished mid-riff.
The sudden silence cut through the room.
A cue ball rolled slowly across green felt and bumped the rail.
Nobody shot again.
Thirty faces turned toward Bones.
Toby stepped backward.
Bones barely seemed to notice him.
“Where did you get this?”
“My dad.”
“Where?”
“In his box.”
“What box?”
“Upstairs.”
“Your house?”
Toby nodded rapidly.
Bones rotated the lighter.
The initials remained.
He called toward the back.
“Nicky.”
A wiry red-haired biker near the pool table straightened.
“Yeah?”
“Get Reaper.”
Nicky’s expression changed.
He hurried toward a reinforced door behind the bar.
The room remained silent.
Toby could feel everyone looking at him now.
Not laughing.
Studying.
That was worse.
He gripped the edge of his jacket.
One man whispered something to another.
The second man shook his head.
Then the rear door opened.
Silas “Reaper” Cole entered.
At fifty-one, Silas was older than most of the men in the room.
Silver had overtaken the dark in his hair, which he wore tied loosely at the back of his neck.
His face carried none of Bones’s dramatic scars.
His authority came from somewhere quieter.
When he walked through the room, people moved before he asked.
Silas approached the bar.
“What is it, Arthur?”
Bones opened his palm.
The lighter rested there.
Silas looked down.
His body went rigid.
For several seconds he did not breathe.
Then he reached for it.
His hand shook.
Toby noticed because nobody else in the room seemed capable of imagining Silas Cole’s hands shaking.
Silas turned the lighter beneath the hanging lamp.
His thumb moved over the broken-jaw skull.
Then the chain.
Then the initials.
E.C.
Fifteen years earlier, those initials had belonged to Elias Cole.
Silas’s older brother.
The man who founded the Bakersfield charter.
The man who taught Silas how to rebuild his first motorcycle engine.
The man who once pulled Silas out of a canal after a wreck.
The man who disappeared in 1973.
No body.
No confirmed grave.
No explanation.
Only an abandoned trail and enemies who claimed ignorance.
For years, Silas believed Elias had been murdered.
The chapter searched.
Friends searched.
Enemies were questioned.
Nothing.
Eventually the club held a memorial without remains.
Silas had stood in this very building, younger and angrier, and watched men place Elias’s photograph beneath a black ribbon.
He had kept one private memory to himself.
That lighter.
Elias commissioned it years before his disappearance.