She answered weakly.
“Do you know where you are?”
“Parking…”
Her eyes moved.
Then widened.
She saw leather.
Tattooed arms.
A black-winged patch.
Her heart monitor changed.
“What—”
The paramedic said:
“Easy.”
The mother tried to sit.
“My daughter.”
“She’s safe.”
The chapter president stepped into her line of sight but remained several feet away.
“She found us.”
The mother stared at him.
At the patch.
Her face drained of what little color remained.
“No.”
He frowned.
She whispered:
“He said…”
Her eyes filled.
“He said you’d know.”
The chapter president leaned closer.
“Know what?”
The mother’s eyes closed.
The paramedic intervened.
“Sir, we need space.”
The chapter president stepped back.
They loaded the mother onto a stretcher.
The girl cried.
“Can I go?”
A paramedic nodded.
“You ride with us.”
The mother weakly reached one hand toward her.
The girl grabbed it.
As the stretcher moved, the child looked back toward the chapter president.
“Are you coming?”
Thirty-two bikers stared at him.
The president looked toward his motorcycle.
Then ambulance.
“Yes.”
The girl nodded as though there had never been any doubt.
The ambulance pulled away.
The chapter president put on his helmet.
The female rider approached.
“What do we do?”
He looked at thirty-one grieving faces.
“Hospital.”
Every engine started.
The convoy did not roar.
Not this time.
They rode quietly.
As quietly as motorcycles could.
They followed the ambulance through Denver after midnight, not clustered around it, not interfering, keeping distance.
At the hospital, only a few were allowed inside.
The rest waited outside near their bikes.
Nobody complained.
The little girl sat in a plastic waiting-room chair wrapped in a blanket a nurse had given her.
Her pink bicycle remained in the back of the gray-bearded mechanic’s truck.
He had loaded it carefully after the ambulance left.
The chapter president sat across from the child.
The female rider sat beside her.
The little girl’s eyes were red.
“Is Mommy going to die?”
The chapter president had no idea.
He hated that children could ask questions adults could not answer.
“The doctors are helping her.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He almost smiled.
The old biker would have answered exactly that way.
“No.”
“It isn’t.”
He leaned forward.
“I don’t know.”
The girl stared at him.
Then nodded.
“Okay.”
A minute passed.
She asked:
“Were you at Grandpa’s funeral?”
The chapter president’s throat tightened.
“Yes.”