The shotgun was never supposed to leave Richie Colton's closet, and Richie said so every time he loaned it, which was often, because Richie Colton's whole economy ran on loaning things and charging the world for the privilege of giving them back.
Richie had been two years ahead of Leo at school and five years ahead of him in every kind of trouble. He was a sunburned, grinning, ruinous young man who sold things that fell off trucks and knew people who knew people, and eight months before the night at Pioneer Wells, Leo had needed eight hundred dollars.
It embarrasses the record how small it was. Eight hundred. The room over Denise's garage had a deposit. His hours were cut, the math was simple, Richie was there, and Richie — sliding the money across a kitchen table with the ease of a man dealing cards — said they'd settle up Friday.
Leo missed the Friday. Not by much, not by malice — by dialysis schedules and a transmission shop that folded with his last two paychecks inside it. Richie shrugged like a saint. "We roll it," he said. "That's what friends do."
Rolling it, in Richie's world, was a verb with teeth. The eight hundred wore a service fee. The fee wore a friend fee. A month he was short came with a courtesy; a month he paid partial came with paperwork Richie invented on the spot, grinning, in pencil, changing. By autumn the eight hundred had become nineteen hundred. By winter, thirty-one. By spring, Richie stood in Denise's driveway doing the sum out loud for the neighborhood — "call it four, Danton, I'm a generous man" — four thousand dollars for an eight-hundred-dollar kindness, and Leo standing there doing the only math that mattered: Richie never forgot, Richie never forgave, and Richie knew where Leo slept.
"I need something to hold," Richie said that spring. "So I know you're serious. Serious people give collateral."
The something was a Mossberg 500 shotgun with a scratched receiver and a history Leo did not ask about, because asking about Richie's property was like asking about the weather inside a volcano. The arrangement — and Leo understood it fully only later, in a cell, with years to understand things in — was that the gun was never collateral for Leo's safety. It was collateral for Richie's. If the gun was ever used, ever found, ever traced, it would trace to hands that held it last, and Richie's hands were clean and waving from a distance.
"Hold onto it till we're square," Richie said. "Nothing happens to it, nothing happens to you. Clean arrangement."
"And when we're square I give it back."
"When we're square," Richie said, and smiled with all his teeth, "you'll beg me to take it back."
So the Mossberg lived in a blanket under the floor of the Neon, in the room's single closet, wherever Leo was that month, a cold iron secret he carried like a second spine. He hated it with a purity he rarely felt about anything. He wasn't a gun person. He was a hands person — engines, bolts, the honest resistance of metal that tells you exactly what it thinks of your plans. A gun, Leo thought the first night he held it, doesn't tell you anything. It just waits for you to decide wrong.
Once — only once — Leo took the Mossberg out of the blanket in the room above Denise's garage and broke it down on the bed, the way Richie had shown him, checking the action with a mechanic's reflex. It was clean. That was the obscenity of it: somebody maintained this thing. Somebody oiled it and kept it ready the way Leo kept other men's engines ready, and handling it, Leo felt the whole rotten kinship of the arrangement — two men who knew machines, passing a piece of death back and forth across a debt, each pretending the other's hands were the dirty ones.
He told Corey about it exactly once, in a moment of weakness and Wild Turkey, and Corey lit up in that way Leo had learned to fear and rely on in equal measure.
"We're not using it," Leo said. "It's not ours to use. It's a debt with a trigger."
"I'm just saying it exists," Corey said.
"Corey."
"I'm just saying."
Three weeks before the desert, when Toad turned the calendar around and showed him FRIDAY, Leo lay awake all night doing sums that came out the same in every direction, and underneath the sums, like a bass note under a song, the shotgun sat in the closet and waited with the patience of a thing that knows it will eventually be needed.
He took it out on Wednesday. He told himself it was only for show. He told himself nobody gets hurt by a gun that never fires, that the gun was a sentence you say, not a thing you do — give me the money said in iron so a scared twenty-three-year-old and a desperate twenty-six-year-old could walk out of an empty diner and into Friday with their fingers still attached.
He wrapped it in the blanket. His hands were steady. That frightened him more than shaking would have.
"Just for show," he said to the empty room.
The shotgun, being a shotgun, said nothing at all.