Clean start. Leo turned it over. It had the quality of something from a language he'd once spoken and had mostly forgotten familiar in shape, but strange in application, like a tool he hadn't picked up in so long, he'd have to relearn how to hold it. "What do we do with that?" Leo said, and he said it like a genuine question, not a rhetorical one. He wasn't performing humility.
He was actually asking. Mike Callahan looked at him for a long moment. "First," Mike said, "you're going to go over to that counter and you're going to apologize to Brenda. Not because I'm telling you to, because she deserves it and you know she deserves it. And doing it anyway when you know you deserve nothing back from her is the first step toward being a different kind of man than you've been.
Leo looked at the counter. Brenda was standing behind it now, upright, her arms crossed at her waist, watching them with the level gaze of a woman who has decided to see what happens next before she decides what she feels about it. Leo slid out of the booth. His legs felt strange under him, not weak exactly, but unfamiliar, as though the ground had a different texture than it had had an hour ago. He walked to the counter.
He stood in front of Brenda Kowalski, 60 years old, 11 years of overnight shifts, a woman who had been doing her job in peace at 2:00 in the morning, and had had that piece shattered by a man who had pointed a gun at her because he had run out of ideas. He stood there and he looked at her. "I'm sorry," he said. He didn't dress it up, didn't explain it, didn't give her the context about Toad or Aranda or the Victorville hit or any of it because she didn't need context. She needed accountability.
And those were different things. I'm sorry for what I did tonight. You didn't deserve any of it. Brenda looked at him for a moment that stretched long enough that Leo didn't know what was coming at the end of it. Then she said, "No, I didn't." And she turned around and got two more mugs from the shelf and poured coffee into both of them and set them on the counter.
And she said, "Your friend looks like he's about to fall over. Get him some coffee." Leo picked up both mugs. "Thank you," he said. Don't thank me, Brenda said. And she said it in the way that someone says don't thank me when they mean I'm not sure you have earned thanks yet.
But I'm not withholding the coffee either, which was its own complicated kind of grace. Leo carried both mugs back to the booth and set one in front of Cory, and Cory wrapped his hands around it the way Leo had wrapped his hands around his first cup for the warmth for the solid, ordinary reality of a hot mug in shaking hands. Bobby looked at the two men from across the table with the calm evaluating eyes he'd had all night. "You two have people," he said. Leo looked up. ""What people?
Family? Someone who's been waiting to hear from you." Leo thought about his sister in Rialto, who hadn't heard from him in 6 weeks because he hadn't known what to tell her. He thought about what she would say if he called her at 3:00 in the morning. He thought about what it would feel like to call her at 3:00 in the morning and have something honest to say. Yeah, he said.
I've got people. "Then that's what comes next." Bobby said simply as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, which it was in which Leo had somehow lost sight of somewhere along the highway between Rialto and Barstow. Declan had his phone out and was typing something. And Leo didn't ask what because he'd learned by now that when Declan was doing something quietly, it was something that needed doing. And would be explained if explanation was warranted.
Garrett was watching the window again, but differently now, not with the tactical attention of before, but with the easy vigilance of someone keeping a general eye on things. The way you keep an eye on things when the danger has passed and you're staying alert out of habit rather than necessity. Mike sat in his booth and drank his coffee and said nothing. And in his silence, there was something that Leo identified slowly turning it over before he found the word for it. Satisfaction.
Not the satisfaction of having won something. The satisfaction of having resolved something. Of having taken a night that was moving toward catastrophe and redirected it towards something that was, if not good, at least less permanently damaging than it could have been. That was what Mike Callahan looked like when he was satisfied with a night's work. It was 3:02 a.m. And outside on Interstate 40, the desert held its breath, and the occasional truck moved through the dark like a thought moving through a quiet mind.
And Ali's 24/7 Diner sat at the edge of the world with its lights on the way it always did, the way it had done for longer than most of the people inside it could remember. Brenda started a third pot of coffee. She figured they were going to need it. The third pot of coffee was half gone by the time Declan put his phone away and looked at Mike. It's done," Declan said.
Mike didn't ask what was done. He nodded once the nod of a man who sent someone to handle something and trusts completely that it has been handled. And he picked up his cup and drank and set it back down. Leo had been watching Declan's phone for the last twenty minutes. The way you watch something you know matters without knowing exactly how.
He'd learned enough about these four men tonight to know that Declan typing quietly in the corner of a diner at 3:00 in the morning was not a casual act. It was a message sent a contact reached a piece moved on a board that Leo couldn't see the full dimensions of. He didn't ask. He'd learned that too. When to ask and when to let things be what they were.
Cory had his head back against the booth and his eyes half closed. Not asleep, his body didn't know how to sleep. Yet still wired on residual adrenaline in the chemical afterburn of a night that had taken him further outside himself than any night had before, but resting in the way that a machine rests when it's been running at maximum and finally allowed to idle. His coffee sat untouched and cooling in front of him. Bobby noticed.