The Neon made it nine miles.
Nine miles of Corey's blood on the door handle and Leo driving with his jaw locked so tight it ached into his ears, and the engine's expensive sound climbing from a complaint to an argument to a verdict — and then, at the mile marker the troopers would later write in their report, the old car simply stopped believing in the enterprise and coasted, sighing, onto the shoulder of the interstate, into a dark so complete it seemed to swallow the headlights before they died.
"Okay," Corey said, in the sudden silence. "Okay. Okay okay okay."
"Don't."
"I'm just— it's fine, it's— we walk. There's a—the truck stop at— Leo. Leo, we walked out of there. Do you get that? We're alive, we are currently alive, nobody got— did you see his jacket? Did you see what was under his jacket? I have had dreams where I've seen what's under that jacket and in the dreams I died—"
"Corey. Your hand."
Corey looked down at his hand as if reminded of a pet he'd forgotten to feed. The heel of it was still bleeding, steadily, dark in the dashboard's dying light, and he'd been talking around the fact of it for nine miles. Something about seeing it finally caught up with him all at once — the pain, or the night, or the image of his own revolver spinning across a clean tile floor toward a waitress's sneaker — and Corey Baxter, who would rather be hurt than be small, bent forward over his knees on the shoulder of Interstate 40 and was violently, comprehensively sick into the gravel.
Leo held his cousin's jacket. It was what he had. It was what he'd always had.
"I'm sorry," Corey said, eventually, hoarse. "I'm sorry, I talked it up, I did the research— Leo, the research—"
"You got us in. I'm the one who said yes." Leo wound his own T-shirt, torn off in the dark, around Corey's hand, and tied it with his teeth, and the knot held, which was more than he could say for anything else that night. "We tell it straight later. Right now we walk west and we don't talk to anybody and we don't—"
He stopped. Because Corey was looking at him the way he'd looked at him on the carport roof in 2014, with the whole choice of his life up in the air at once.
"Toad," Corey said.
The name did what it always did. It made Friday. It made the calendar turned around with two soft fingers. It made the car — dead now, eleven miles behind them getting towed by morning into evidence. It made the room over Denise's garage. It made two hands pressed flat against a young man's thighs to keep them from shaking, and a soft voice saying I'd hate for the set to be incomplete.
"We have to call him," Leo said, slowly. "Not tonight. Tomorrow. We tell him the car died. We tell him—"
"Tell him we're the idiots who robbed a diner full of Hells Angels and left the guns?" Corey's laugh came out wrong and kept going wrong, a scared animal of a sound. "Leo. We left the guns. Richie's gun is lying on that lady's floor. In about an hour every cop in San Bernardino County is going to be looking at that shotgun. Richie's gonna know before the sun's up. Toad's gonna know by breakfast. We don't have a Friday problem anymore. We have an everybody-knows-our-names problem with a deadline."
Leo stood on the shoulder of the interstate in the enormous desert dark, with his cousin bleeding through a T-shirt beside him and a dead car cooling behind him, and he did the arithmetic one more time — the arithmetic that had run his whole life, that had gotten them here, doorway by doorway, loan by loan, mistake by mistake.
For the first time in his life, the arithmetic came out blank.
"I keep hearing it," he said, finally, quiet enough that Corey had to lean in.
"Hearing what?"
Leo looked east, toward Barstow, toward the light he couldn't see.
"The cup," he said. "The sound it made when he put it down. Clack. Like— I keep waiting for the rest of the sound. Like there's a part two."
"There ain't a part two."
"No," Leo said. "That's what I keep hearing."
Walking, Corey told him about the urgent-care nurse in advance — that was how Corey processed anything, by narrating it into a future where it had already been survived. "We find a clinic, they stitch it, it's a work injury, people cut their hands every day, Leo, it's the most normal injury in America." Leo let him talk. The talking was a kind of tourniquet, and he'd have let Corey narrate the entire phone book if it kept his cousin upright and moving. His own silence had a different content: he was counting his remaining assets the way he had counted everything since he was eighteen, and the list was: one cousin, walking; one mother, asleep and safe for exactly as long as Toad believed the week was still young; one pair of hands, his, unhurt, still attached. He had started the night planning to protect the third item on that list with the first item's freedom. The list hadn't changed. The prices had.
They walked west along the shoulder, two small figures in the biggest dark in California, and behind them, in a diner with a cardboard door, a deputy was asking whether the camera was real — and the night, which had been so careful and so quiet for so long, began, at last, to get very loud.