Chapter 4

"I'm Elias Ward," I said.

I said it to Ruben, because he was the one with his hand on my arm, and because he was the only person in that room who'd asked me a question instead of making a speech.

Ruben Ortiz looked at me. Then he looked at Desmond, because that's what you do when you're paid by the hour.

Desmond Pike laughed.

It wasn't the performing laugh from before. It was quieter and much worse - the laugh of a man who has just been handed something he can actually use.

"Say that again," he said. "Louder."

"Elias Ward."

He had his phone up before I finished. He swiped twice, turned it around, and held it over his head like a man holding up a fish.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is Apex Moto's own company history," he said. "It's on our website. It's in the anniversary book. 'The founder sold the company in 1998 and passed away in New Mexico in 2004.'" He let it sit. "That's the man this gentleman is claiming to be."

Somebody near the bar said, "Oh, come on."

"Nineteen years ago," Desmond said. "He's been dead nineteen years. And this man walked in here in work boots and told my staff he built the bike."

Marisol Vega - the singer, the one with the Grammys - set her glass down and stepped back from me.

That was the moment I understood what I was actually up against. Not Desmond Pike. Desmond Pike was nothing. I was up against a sentence on a website, in small gray type, that had been sitting there for two decades doing its work.

I looked around at sixty faces, and every one of them was running the same arithmetic. Old man. No invitation. No documents. Bad boots. Dead nineteen years.

And they were right to run it. If I'd been standing where they were standing, I'd have run it too.

Ruben's hand closed on my arm above the elbow. Not rough. Professional. The way you move a drunk out of a wedding.

"Sir," he said, gently. "Do you have any identification?"

I took out my wallet.