Chapter 48 EMPTY

Chapter 48 EMPTY
POV: Jason De'Leon

"Your father never would have done this."

The words hit the back of Jason's neck like a hand stopping him and he stood at the lot entrance with one boot on the kickstand and the Sportster idling beneath him and Tony's voice still in the air behind him.

He did not turn around.

He stood there with the engine running and the Nevada afternoon pressing down on the lot with the specific weight of heat that had nowhere to go, and he held the words and he let them do what they were going to do, which was confirm something he had already known since he walked through Victor's office and read the clean desk and the three encrypted phones and the camera angles.

Your father never would have done this.

He knew that.

He had known it since the circled red number. He had known it since Victor leaned against the desk with the cigarette and delivered the assignment with the ease of a man who expected execution rather than consideration. He had known it since he rode Lincoln Boulevard and saw what the wrong kind of protection did to a strip of small businesses over eighteen months, the plywood and the iron bars and the territorial tags of things that moved in when the arrangement stopped being mutual.

He knew it and knowing it did not change the thing he had just said to Tony Alvarez, the thing that tasted like ash and had come out of his mouth anyway because the longer game required him to be here, to be Victor's man long enough to understand the operation well enough to dismantle it.

That was what he was telling himself.

He kicked the Sportster off the kickstand and rode out of the lot and he let Tony's words follow him down Lincoln Boulevard the way true things followed you when you could not outride them.

He passed the shuttered storefront with its plywood.

He passed the restaurant with the iron bars on its window that had not been there three years ago, and through the glass he could see a woman at the counter who looked up when the motorcycle passed and looked away again with the specific expression of a person who had learned to look away from men on motorcycles, which was its own form of information about what eighteen months of Victor's version of protection had taught the people on this street.

He stopped at the light at the intersection of Lincoln and Seventh.

To his left, two men in cuts he did not recognize were conducting a transaction in the doorway of the closed laundromat, moving with the efficient speed of people who had learned to use the blind spots in the surveillance of a block, and Jason looked at them and thought about the three encrypted phones on Victor's clean desk and the cartel partnerships Anna had told him about, and he thought about what those partnerships looked like at street level, which was what he was looking at.

The light changed.

He rode north toward the compound and he thought about the empty envelope against his chest and what it was going to mean to hand Victor an empty envelope, and he thought about what Victor was going to do with that information, and he thought about Tony's wife Maria watching through the window with worry lines carved deep around her mouth, and he thought about the specific cost of the longer game at the ground level where ordinary people paid it.

He thought about his father's handshake.

The one Tony had described, the fifteen years of a handshake between men who meant what the handshake meant, and he thought about what that handshake had built on Lincoln Boulevard and on every other street his father had kept and what Victor had done to those streets in eighteen months of a different kind of keeping.

The compound appeared on the horizon.

He rode toward it with the sun on his back and the empty envelope in his jacket and Tony's last words still in the air around him with the specific persistence of things that were true, and he thought about the man he had been before the prison gates and the man he was riding back toward the compound to pretend to be and the distance between those two things which was not as large as he needed it to be and was getting smaller every mile.

He thought about Walker's card in his pocket.

He thought about it as a weight, the specific weight of an option he had not yet decided to use, and he thought about what using it would mean and what not using it would mean and what Tony Alvarez's face had looked like in the afternoon light of his lot when he said this is not his street anymore.

He thought about all of it across the fifteen miles.

The Nevada sun beat down on his back as Jason rode toward the compound, carrying nothing but an empty envelope and the growing realization that returning home meant choosing between the man he used to be and the man Victor needed him to become.