"That's him." Mike looked at the number for a moment. Then he took the phone back, studied the screen, and handed it to Declan. Something passed between them. A look efficient and wordless, the kind that required years of shared history to be that compact. Declan took the phone and stood up from the booth. ""I need two minutes"," he said to nobody in particular, and walked toward the far end of the diner, away from the tables, his voice already dropping to something inaudible before he'd taken five steps.
Leo watched him go. "What's he doing?" "Making sure we know who we're calling before we call them," Bobby said. "You don't just dial Toad cold," Garrett added. "You don't dial anyone cold when the conversation matters. You know what you're walking into first." Leo thought about all the phone calls he'd made in his life without knowing what he was walking into and thought that explained a significant portion of how he'd ended up here.
Cory leaned close to Leo, his voice barely above a breath. "You trust these guys?" Leo looked at him. It was a fair question and a strange one simultaneously because trust wasn't exactly the framework for what was happening. You didn't trust gravity. You didn't trust a current.
You recognized it and you moved accordingly. I trust that they haven't hurt us when they could have," Leo said quietly. "That's enough for right now." Cory sat back. His knee started bouncing again. It was the only answer he had.
Brenda set two mugs of fresh coffee on the edge of their table without a word. She didn't make eye contact with Leo. She didn't make eye contact with Cory. She set the mugs down and moved back to the counter with the economy of someone who has decided that normalcy or the performance of it is the only sensible response to an impossible situation. The coffee was hot and it smelled right and Leo wrapped both hands around his mug because his hands were still shaking and the warmth gave them something to do.
"Thank you," he said to her back. She didn't answer, but she did not answer either. It was somewhere in-between an acknowledgement that the words had landed and a withholding of more than that. He'd earned that much. Declan came back in 3 minutes, not two.
He set the phone face down on the table and looked at Mike. "Talk to me," Mike said. "The King of Spades mark," Declan said and his voice had a careful measured quality that Leo was already learning to pay attention to because careful and measured from Declan meant the information was significant and the delivery of it needed to be controlled. Belongs to a crew that runs enforcement for a man named Felix Aranda. Aranda operates out of Fontana.
He's been encroaching on Toad's distribution corridor for 8 months. The Victorville hit wasn't random product theft. It was a message to Toad. Mike said to Toad that his corridor isn't as secure as he thinks it is. That Aranda can move through his territory whenever he wants, take what he wants, and walk away clean.
Declan sat back down. The message was never meant to land on Leo and Cory. They were the delivery mechanism. Toad was supposed to read it and understand it was Aranda. But he didn't, Garrett said.
But he didn't, Declan confirmed. He read it as his own guys losing his product through incompetence or theft. So instead of pointing his anger at Aranda, he pointed it at the two men who were actually standing in the road when the Suburban drove away. The table absorbed this. Leo felt something cold and very specific moving through him.
Not fear exactly because fear required uncertainty and this was the opposite. This was the terrible clarity of understanding. The last three months of his life, the debt, the countdown, the nights lying awake doing math that never came out right, the afternoon in the McDonald's parking lot when he and Cory had looked at each other and had the conversation, all of it, every minute of it, had been built on a misreading. Toad hadn't been punishing them for a failure. Toad had been punishing them for something they hadn't done, something that had been done to him through them, and nobody in that chain had ever told him the difference.
"He thinks we stole from him," Leo said. His voice came out flat. Or lost his product through negligence. Declan said. Either way, in his accounting, you owe him.
We didn't lose it. It was taken from us. I know that, Declan said. You know that. Toad doesn't know that.
And Aranda is counting on the fact that Toad never finds out. Cory set his coffee mug down hard enough that it rang against the table. "So, we've been running from a debt that isn't ours for three months, he said. And his voice had shed all of the meth jittered fraying and had come down to something raw and tight and genuinely furious. We've been Leo.