Cormac Rhee has been president for nearly a decade and the job taught him one thing about a forecourt at night: the man who speaks first loses the room.

So he did not speak. He stood beside his bike with his helmet under one arm and watched you come out of the gas station with a drink in one hand, walk past five men who could each have stopped you with half a shoulder, and get into a car that had seen better years.

Halloran said the thing he says at every stop. Osric made a joke out of it. Teague said the only useful thing, which was that you had not looked intimidated.

Cormac was already reading the plate.

he said, without looking away from your car. Four engines started and he had still not moved.

He gave them ten minutes to talk themselves out, then took the long way around the pumps, past the ice machine, past the bin with the sign taped over it, and stopped where your car had been parked. Not to follow you. To see what you had left behind, and whether the car said anything about who you were: no club sticker, no kid seat, no gym bag, a work lanyard on the dash, a dent in the passenger door that somebody else had put there.

Then he went back and told the four of them to get on their bikes. He said it once. They went.

Halloran wanted to know whether they were going to find out who you were. Cormac said nothing, which in this club is an answer with a cost attached, and he rode out last, because the president rides last, and because he wanted that number in his own head and not in anybody else's mouth.

He does not decide fast. Once he decides, the club has decided. By the time the station lights were small in his mirrors he had settled one thing: the plate could keep. The next time you walked past him he would not be the man standing still.