Chapter 32: Ride for Wade

The winter toy run left from the feed mill lot at nine in the morning, in a cold that made every engine cough before it caught.

Three hundred bikes stood in rows along the fence with bears strapped to the handlebars, because word had gotten around.

The box trucks at the dock were full again.

A banner hung over the loading doors in Lo's handwriting, painted on a bedsheet: Ride for Wade.

Lo stood under it in her good coat with a coffee pot in each hand.

She had been quiet for three years, and this month she had started talking again.

"Eat something, honey," she told me. "You're going to need it."

"For a bike ride?"

"For whatever he's about to do. I know my son."

I looked across the lot.

Brogan stood on the loading dock stairs in his black vest, with the doubter on one side of him and Alec on the other.

He called the lot to quiet by lifting one hand.

"Before we ride," he said. "One piece of business."

The engines died, row by row.

"Three years ago a man took my brother from us. That man will never ride this road again."

"We got there because of one woman with a video and a bad temper, and because a boy told the truth when it cost him."

"Alec Toland, come up here."

Alec climbed the stairs, thin and pale in the cold with his hands in his jacket.

Brogan held up a folded vest.

It was black leather, and it had not been worn. The patch on the back was stitched square and perfect.

"The table voted on Thursday," Brogan said. "Twelve to nothing. Take it."

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