The first time I saw Frank “Sarge” Riley die, it was on a 12-inch screen, buffered by my office’s Wi-Fi. The video was titled, “CRAZED BIKER ATTACKS US!! (SO SCARY),” and it already had four million views. It opened with a shaky camera, the bleached-out asphalt of the Mojave Desert screaming under a midday sun. You could see the chrome glint of an old Harley in the side mirror, steady as a heartbeat.
Then the screaming started.
“He’s right on our tail! Dude, he’s trying to run us off the road!” a young man’s voice, tight with what sounded like manufactured panic. The camera whipped around to a kid in the driver’s seat—Leo, I’d later learn—his face a perfect mask of telegenic fear. The car swerved. The sound that followed was a sickening symphony of tearing metal and shattering glass. The video cut to Leo’s face, tears welling in his eyes. “Oh my god… we… we had to stop him. He was out of control. We just wanted him to stop.”
The internet did the rest. Within hours, Frank Riley was not a man, but a monster. A hashtag—#RoadRageBiker—was trending. His photo, a grainy DMV picture, was plastered everywhere, his eyes squinted against the flash, making him look angry. Comments poured in by the thousands. “Drunk boomer.” “Menace to society.” “Glad they stopped him before he killed a family.”
They called him a menace. I called him my father’s best friend. And the bike they claimed was a weapon of rage… I knew it as the only thing that ever quieted the ghosts of Vietnam that haunted him.
Something inside me didn’t just snap. It vaporized.
I was a lawyer, or I had been. I’d quit my corporate job a month prior, sick of defending soulless companies. I was adrift, drowning in disillusionment. Then I saw that video, and a venomous sort of calm washed over me. I knew my purpose.
I called Bear, the president of the Patriot Riders Motorcycle Club. He picked up on the second ring, his voice already heavy. “Maria… you saw it?”
“I saw a lie,” I said, my voice flat. “A professionally produced lie.”
“They’re saying he was drunk, Maria. They found a bottle at the scene.”
I almost laughed. Sarge hadn’t touched a drop of liquor since 1975. He said it made the jungle grow back in his mind. “The news is repeating it?”
“Like parrots. They’re crucifying him.” A pause. “His granddaughter, Chloe… she’s with my wife. She keeps asking when Grandpa is coming home from his long ride.”
That’s when the calm broke. A hot tear slid down my cheek. Chloe was ten. Sarge was all she had left after her mother, his daughter, lost her fight with cancer. He wasn’t just a biker. He was a universe contained in a worn leather vest, and she was the single star he orbited.
“I’m driving out there,” I said. “To the site. Don’t let anyone from the club do anything stupid, Bear. Let me do this my way. The right way.”
“The legal way hasn’t done a damn thing for him.”
“Then we’ll make it,” I promised. “We’ll burn their world down with the truth.”
The two-hour drive to the stretch of old Route 66 where he died was a pilgrimage through memory. I remembered Sarge in my father’s garage, the smell of oil and old stories thick in the air. I remembered his hands, knuckles scarred from a lifetime of engines and service, gently showing a five-year-old me how a carburetor worked. I remembered him at my dad’s funeral, a silent, solid mountain of a man, the only one who didn’t offer empty platitudes. He just stood by me, his presence a shield.
And I remembered Chloe, perched on the back of his parked bike, wearing his helmet, her small voice muffled as she shouted, “Grandpa, are we riding to the moon today?”
He’d always smile that slow, sad smile of his. “Not today, little bird. But we’ll get there.”
I arrived at the scene. It was marked off with yellow tape, a grim punctuation on the empty road. The desert wind whispered through the scrub brush. I could see the dark stain on the asphalt, the glittering dust of the shattered turn signal. And I saw something else, something the forensics teams had missed. Tucked under a sagebrush, maybe twenty feet from the crash site, was a small, red plastic cap from a disposable water bottle. It was pristine. Too clean. It hadn’t been there long.
It was nothing. But sometimes, nothing is everything.
Meanwhile, the “Clout Chasers,” as they called themselves, were on a victory tour. Leo, Jenna, and Kyle were appearing on morning news shows, their faces etched with practiced grief.
They talked about their trauma. They announced a new line of merchandise, with 10% of proceeds going to a foundation for “victims of aggressive driving.” They were monetizing his death before his body was even cold.
They were heroes. He was a ghost, a villain in a story he never got to tell.
I met the Patriot Riders at a dusty roadside diner that night. They were fifteen men who looked like they were carved from granite and fury. Plumbers, electricians, teachers, ex-cops. They wanted blood.
“We know where they live,” a biker named Tank grumbled, his fists clenching. “We could pay them a visit.”
“And prove them right?” I countered, my voice cutting through the anger. “Prove that bikers are violent thugs? That’s exactly what they want. We don’t fight them in the street. We fight them on their battlefield. The screen.”
I held up my phone. “They built an empire on lies. We’ll tear it down with facts. Did anyone see the livestream? The original livestream, before they cut it?”
The room was silent. They’d all seen the edited video.
“They went live,” I pushed. “For a few minutes before the ‘attack.’ It’s their brand. Someone, somewhere, had to have seen it. We need that footage.”
A younger member in the corner, a kid they called Glitch because he was a tech genius, spoke up.
“Their followers are a cult. They delete anything that contradicts the narrative. But… livestreams get screen-recorded. All the time. If it exists, it’s floating around the dark corners of the web.”
“Then find it,” I said. “Find the ghost in their machine.”
For the next week, the world belonged to the Clout Chasers. Their subscriber count exploded.
Leo gave a tearful interview on NNA, the nation’s biggest news network, talking about how the incident had made him want to use his platform for good. He was a fraud elevated to a saint.
While he was accepting praise, we were digging. The bikers, using their vast network, found the gas station where the Clout Chasers had stopped an hour before the crash.
The security footage was gold. It showed Kyle buying four bottles of water and a bottle of cheap whiskey. Then, it showed Leo, laughing as he took the whiskey bottle and wiped it clean of prints with his shirt.
They didn’t just find the bottle. They planted it.
The dam was starting to crack. Two days later, Glitch called me at 3 AM. His voice was electric.
“I found him.”
“Found who?”
“The witness. A truck driver. He was on a forum, said he saw the whole thing go live before the feed cut. Said it looked… weird. Staged.
He screen-recorded the whole thing because he thought it was a stupid prank. He didn’t know the guy died. He’s scared, Maria. They’re doxing anyone who questions the story.”
“Give me his number,” I said, my heart pounding. “Tell him a lawyer is going to make sure he’s safe. Tell him he has a chance to give a good man his voice back.”
