"Nicky," Bones called across the room. A wiry red-haired man near the back straightened instantly. "Get Reaper. Tell him to come out here and bring his eyes with him." Nicky Gallagher hurried through the steel door behind the pool tables, and silence settled over the room like a closed lid.
Toby became conscious of the sweat running between his shoulder blades. He looked at the compass, the ring, and the watch lying unattended on the wood, and wondered whether he should put them away. He had the terrible sense that the lighter had changed the rules of the room in a way nobody had explained to him. When he reached for the pouch, Bones caught his movement and shook his head, not threateningly but firmly.
"Leave them there for a minute," Bones said. "Nobody's taking your things." The assurance should have helped, but Toby had already learned how easy it was for adults to say one thing and mean another. He kept his hands visible on the edge of the bar and watched the steel door.
Silas Cole appeared a moment later, and the men nearest the door stepped aside without being asked. He had silver threaded through hair pulled back in a short tail, a clean leather vest, and an expression that suggested he spent more time listening than shouting. His stride was unhurried, yet nobody called out or tried to delay him. Bones stood a little straighter as the president of the Bakersfield charter approached.
"What is it, Arthur?" Silas asked. Bones opened his palm. The lighter lay there, blackened at its edges and shining faintly where many years of handling had rubbed the silver smooth. Silas stared, and Toby watched the composure leave a face that otherwise might have been cut from stone.
The older man's fingers trembled as he took the lighter. He passed his thumb over the damaged jaw, then the chain, then the initials that Toby had failed to read. "Elias Cole," Silas whispered. "Dear God." Bones stood beside him, very still, as if the name itself had opened a door neither man knew how to close.
Silas turned the lighter over and inspected a tiny repair near the hinge, a piece of silver solder shaped like a crescent moon. "My brother did that himself," he said, more to himself than to anyone else. "He dropped it off a workbench in seventy-two and swore he would never buy another one." He looked at Toby, and the careful authority in his eyes became something far more painful.
"Son," Silas said, "where did you find this?" Toby told him about the attic, the lockbox, the bills, and his mother. He tried to leave out the part about the bank, but once he started talking he could not stop, and suddenly he was explaining more than he had meant to explain in front of thirty strangers. "I didn't know it belonged to anyone else," he finished. "I wasn't trying to take anything."