They had the fight at two in the morning, in a wash behind a billboard advertising a personal-injury lawyer in Victorville, which Corey said was God showing off.
"Mexico," Corey said, for the fortieth time, working the word like a key in a lock it didn't fit. "Listen to the whole plan before you do the face. I know a guy—"
"You know a guy is how we got a shotgun."
"—a guy in El Centro whose cousin runs people down there, Leo, it's a whole industry, it's like the opposite of the other industry— we'd be in Mexicali by Friday, we'd work kitchens, we'd be nobody, nobody watches videos in Mexicali, we'd grow mustaches—"
"You'd last four days in Mexico."
"I'd last forever in Mexico! I speak restaurant Spanish! Baño, cerveza, cuánto— that's ninety percent of Spanish, Leo, ask anybody—"
"And Mom?" Leo said.
The desert went quiet around the billboard. An owl crossed the moon like an eraser.
"That ain't fair," Corey said, low.
"I'm not doing fair. Fair's a menu item, there is no fair. Toad just told me—" Leo's voice went, and he had to stop and set it down and pick it up again, the way you do a heavy thing. "He said the alternative is he sells her schedule. The clinic. Days and hours. To men who collect people, Corey. He said it like he was reading me the weather. So you tell me about Mexicali. You tell me how far Mexico is from a dialysis chair on Belmont Avenue."
"He's bluffing."
"He is not bluffing, he's never bluffed in his life, that's the whole business model, the man has never once raised his voice in twenty years of ruining people—"
"Then we get money! We get money and we pay him, that's the whole— Leo, we get money, we had a plan for getting money—"
"The plan was the diner!" Leo shouted, and the shout cracked in the middle and fell apart, and he heard his stepfather in it and hated it and couldn't call it back. "The plan was the diner and the diner's over, Corey, the diner is the most famous room in America, we are the two most famous idiots in California, and there is no more plan, there is no arithmetic — do you get it? I did it. In the car, at the rest stop. I did the math all the way down and it comes out blank. It comes out Toad, or it comes out the sheriff. Those are the only two doors left in the whole world."
Corey stared at him. The moonlight made him look twelve — small, and loud, and terrified of being either.
"...So you pick the sheriff."
"I pick the sheriff," Leo said. "I walk in. I say the whole thing. My name, the gun, Toad — all of it, the loans, the calendar, the threat about Mom, everything I know about Jensen Avenue, going back three years. That's the coin I've got. That's the only coin. I give them Toad, and Toad gets so busy with the police that he can't sell anybody's schedule, and Mom gets detectives instead of collectors. And you—"
"And me what."
"You run the other way. You hear me? If I'm inside giving them the map, they're watching me, and you get small, Corey, you finally learn it, you get so small— there's a version where you get out of this with probation and a life. But it starts with you letting me walk in alone and say it was mine. The gun was mine. The plan was mine. You were the driver with a cut hand."
"It was my diner," Corey said, and his voice was a wreck. "It was my uncle's story, it was my map, I printed it at the library—"
"And I'm taking it. That's the gift. That's me paying you back for the floor all winter."
They stood in the wash in the enormous quiet. Somewhere a truck changed gears on the interstate, a sound like the world clearing its throat and moving on.
"You're gonna hear it in there," Corey said at last. "In the cells. You know that, right? You told me. The cup."
"Yeah."
"What's it gonna sound like?"
Leo thought about it with the whole of his attention, the way he'd been taught to listen to engines — for the fault, for the truth of the machine.
"Like a door," he said. "Closing on the right side of me."
Corey put his forehead against his cousin's shoulder then, the way he had when he was nine and the carport roof had turned out to be higher in the falling than in the jumping, and Leo held the back of his head and let him shake, and neither of them said anything else for a long time, because there was nothing in either of their vocabularies left that could hold it.
At dawn Corey walked south with forty dollars, a work shirt tied around his hand, and a name in El Centro he would never use.
At dawn Leo turned his face toward Barstow, eleven miles behind him, and started walking toward the sound.