Said we were responsible for the product from pickup to delivery and anything that happened in-between was our liability. How much? Declan asked. He'd been quiet since the guns came off the table, the sitting with that focused stillness of his. But now he was watching Leo with the precise attention of someone reconstructing a sequence of events. "$6,000 to Toad," Leo said.
Street value of what we lost was more like 14, but Toad's people handled that calculation and came back with six. Said they were being generous. Bobby made a sound in his throat that wasn't quite a laugh. "Generous." "We tried to get it," Cory said suddenly. His voice came out louder than he intended.
Cracking slightly. He looked at Mike like it mattered to him. Genuinely mattered, not as a performance that someone understood they tried. We tried everything. Leo sold his truck.
I sold everything I had in my apartment. We came up with $2,200. Toad's guy came to collect and we gave him the $2,200. And the guy just he looked at it. He looked at us and he said, "Toad says the number is 6 and the number doesn't change." Cory swallowed hard.
And then he said, "We had until Friday." "Tonight is Tuesday," Garrett said. He wasn't asking. He was noting it the way you note something that tells you the whole shape of a situation in one detail. "Was Tuesday?" Leo said quietly. "It's Wednesday now." Nobody said anything for a moment.
Brenda was behind the counter very still. Her hands wrapped around her own coffee mug now in the way people hold something warm when they're shaken and can't admit it. Dennis Parish had come out from under the table and was sitting on the edge of booth 3 with his coat half on looking at the main floor with the expression of a man who has not yet decided whether to stay or run and is managing his indecision by remaining extremely still. Mike Callahan looked at Leo for a long moment, not with sympathy exactly, with something more considered than sympathy. Something that took the whole picture into account before it arrived at any feeling about it.
"So, you drove out to the middle of the desert," Mike said. "Found the quietest, most isolated diner you could, and decided that Brenda here," he gestured toward the counter without looking away from Leo, "was your solution to a $6,000 debt to a cartel distributor." "Leo heard how it sounded. He'd known how it would sound, but hearing it laid out in someone else's voice flat and clear and without any of the internal justifications Leo had been running for the past 3 hours was something different from knowing. Yes, he said. How much did you think was in that register?
Bobby asked. Leo hesitated. Go ahead, Bobby said. We figured a roadside diner overnight. Maybe $800, maybe a thousand if we were lucky.
And there's usually a floor safe in the back. So, your plan, Bobby said, was to terrorize a 60-year-old woman and whoever else happened to be in here at 2 in the morning to get maybe $1,000, which is still 5,000 short of what Toad needs by Friday. Leo said nothing because there was nothing to say to that. The math had always been the math. He'd known it before he pulled the ski mask on.
The plan had never been a real plan. It had been the shape of a plan, the feeling of doing something, of moving, of not just sitting in that Honda Civic and waiting for Friday to arrive and bring with it whatever Toad's version of consequences looked like. "He wasn't thinking about the math," Declan said, and his voice wasn't cruel. It was analytical. He was thinking about the problem.
And when you're on stimulants and running on no sleep, and you owe money to someone who hurts people, you stop thinking about the math and you start thinking about the action. The action feels like control. Leo looked at Declan sharply. "You've been awake for how long?" Declan asked. A beat.
31 hours maybe. Declan nodded once like that confirmed a calculation. Yeah. "Doesn't excuse it," Mike said, and his voice came down on that sentence with a weight that reset the room. Not harshly, just clearly.
The way you close a door that needs to be closed. Understanding why someone does something stupid doesn't make it less stupid, and it definitely doesn't make it less dangerous to the people in the room. He let that sit. Then he said, "Brenda." She looked up from her coffee mug. "Are you okay?" The question was so ordinary, so direct that it seemed to surprise her.
She blinked, considered the question as though it were more complicated than it sounded. "I've had better nights," she said finally. I bet. Mike's expression shifted into something that was almost not quite a smile. You've got a hell of a lot of composure for someone who just had a gun waved at her.
11 years of overnight, she said. You develop a relationship with adrenaline. Bobby made that not quite laugh sound again. And this time there was actual warmth in it. Mike turned back to Leo and the warmth went away.