Toad watched the video eleven times, and by the eleventh he was smiling, and the smiling was worse than anything his customers had ever seen him do.
His debtors were famous. That was the problem — and the opportunity, because Toad had never in twenty years failed to find the opportunity inside a problem, usually while the problem was still sitting in the plastic chair trying to understand the terms. Leo Danton and Corey Baxter owed him six thousand dollars, a sum that had been, until this week, collectible in the usual currencies: cash, fear, collateral, pain. Now Leo and Corey owed him six thousand dollars and were the two most recognizable faces in California, which made them, in Toad's gentle arithmetic, simultaneously worthless and priceless.
Worthless, because every policeman in three counties was looking for them, and a wanted man cannot work, cannot borrow, cannot be seen arriving at a smog station on Jensen Avenue.
Priceless, because a man the whole world has watched put a gun down in front of the Hells Angels is a man whose story — whose humiliation — could be sold, leveraged, spent. Toad did not deal in stories, exactly. But he knew men who did, in Fresno and further off, men who would pay a finder's fortune for the delivery of two famous fugitives to a place where cameras would never think to look. There were bounties that weren't official. There were collectors who collected people.
So when the call came — Wednesday, dusk, on a phone Leo had kept charged like a rosary — Toad's voice was softer than Leo had ever heard it, and that softness went through Leo's spine like cold water.
"Leo," Toad said. "Son. You've had a week."
"We lost the car," Leo said, standing in a phone booth outside a closed feed store near Kramer Junction, with Corey asleep against the glass. "The money didn't — the diner wasn't — we're figuring it out. I need— I'm asking for— more time. Not much time. A week. Two. I'll work it off, I'll—"
"Leo." The gentleness folded itself around the word. "You've misunderstood your situation in a way I find, honestly, impressive. There is no time anymore. Time was the product when you were a private citizen. You're a public event now. My other customers watch you on their phones while they wait to pay me. Do you understand what that does to my terms, Leo?"
What Leo did not yet know — what the soft voice was about to enjoy telling him — was that the week had merged his two debts into one pair of hands. Richie Colton had seen the video on a bar television in Fresno on the second day, and Richie, who forgave nothing, had recognized his own shotgun by the tape on its stock before he recognized Leo's face, and had done the only thing Richie ever did with information: he sold it. The highest bidder was Toad. So the calendar and the gun were one account now, with one gentle bookkeeper. "I understand young Mr. Colton has assigned his interest to me," Toad said. "Consolidation, Leo. One payment. One Friday. I'm told it's tidier."
Leo held the receiver and said nothing. The desert wind worked at the booth's seams.
"Here is what Friday looks like now," Toad said, like a man reading a menu in a restaurant he owns. "You and Corey come in — not to the station, I have a place, I'll give the boy the address when he wakes. You come in, and you go to work for some friends of mine, off the books, out of state, for as long as it takes. It might take a while. It might take the part of your life you were saving. The alternative—" the soft voice paused, and Leo could hear the two fingers turn the calendar that wasn't there, "—the alternative is I sell the information of where your mother does her dialysis, what hours, what days, to the men who are offering me quite a lot of money for exactly that, and I let them do my collecting for me. In their way. Which is not my way, Leo. My way is gentle."
"Mister—" Leo's voice cracked. "She's not— she never signed—"
"She's the emergency contact on your whole life, son. That's a signature."
The line clicked. Not hung up — released, the way you set down a cup.
Leo stood in the phone booth with the receiver cooling in his hand and Corey's forehead resting against the glass, asleep, twenty-three years old and bleeding through a bandage made of a work shirt, and the arithmetic that had run Leo's entire life ran one more time, automatically, the way a heart beats.
Lose the car. Lose the room. Lose fingers.
Then, underneath the arithmetic, quieter, from a room eleven miles behind him in the desert dark, another calculation presented itself — one he had never been offered before, in a president's level voice:
Those two things are only both available for about another minute.
He looked at his cousin asleep against the glass. He thought of a smog station. He thought of his mother's clinic bracelet, and the hours, and the days.
"Corey," Leo said, waking him with a hand on the shoulder, gentle as he could make it. "Get up. We're not doing Friday."
"Then what are we doing?" Corey said, thick with sleep, already afraid.
Leo didn't answer, because the answer was the one thing in his life he had never said out loud, and he needed to practice it on the walk first.
We're going toward it.