Corey Baxter wanted, more than he had ever wanted money, women, or daylight, to be feared.
He would have sold his soul for it in installments and bragged about the rate. Leo understood this about his cousin the way you understand weather in a place you've always lived: Corey had been small for his age until he was fourteen — small and loud being the two most punished qualities a boy can carry — and he had learned before he could drive that the world offered a kid like him two postures. You could be the joke, or you could be the reason the joke stopped. Corey chose, every day, at volume.
By twenty-three he had built the whole cathedral of himself out of that choice. The lifted voice. The stories that grew a new room every time he told them. The rusty .38 revolver — a Smith & Wesson so old and so poorly kept that a gunsmith would have crossed himself — that he carried like a title. He had never shot a man. He had shot at a stop sign, once, and missed the sign and hit the pole, and told the story for years as if the pole had ducked.
And yet. Leo loved him with the exhausted completeness of a brother, because underneath the cathedral there was the other Corey, the one only Leo got: the nine-year-old who shared his carport-roof summers; the teenager who sat up all night in a hospital corridor when Carla was first diagnosed, fetching ice chips and lying to her that Leo was on his way when Leo was already there, asleep, upright, done in; the man who, this past winter, had given Leo the bed and taken the floor for six weeks without once making it a story. Corey Baxter's loyalty was the only fully paid-up thing in either of their lives. It was also, Leo knew, going to get Corey killed one day, because Corey could not distinguish between loyalty and a running start.
"A diner," Corey said, that last Tuesday, in the room over Denise's garage, with a map open on the bed that he'd printed at the library like a general. "I'm telling you, I did the research."
"You watched a YouTube video about diners."
"I did research. Uncle Ray—"
"Stepdad Ray."
"—stopped there in like 2019, coming back from Laughlin. One old broad works nights. One cook. It's eleven miles from anywhere, Leo. The register, the little safe under the counter — truckers pay cash, Leo, it's all cash out there — we'd be in and out in three minutes and nobody even sees us. No cameras. One door. It's not even really a crime, it's like — it's like a withdrawal from a bank that doesn't know it's a bank."
"That's the definition of a crime, Corey."
"You're thinking like a victim."
"I'm thinking like a guy who doesn't want to die in the desert."
Corey went quiet then, in the specific way that meant he'd found the argument that actually worked, and Leo felt the whole conversation tilt, the way it had tilted since they were kids, toward the roof edge.
"Friday," Corey said. "Sun's up, Toad takes the car. Takes the room — Denise's place, man, her name's on the conversation now. And then he takes—" Corey held up his own hand and folded one finger down, gently, like a man closing a doll's eye. "You gonna rebuild engines with nine? You gonna drive your mama to dialysis with nine? I ain't watching that. I'd rather go to prison. Prison's got food. Prison nobody takes your fingers."
There it was. The brick arcing over the fence at twelve years old. Corey would rather be hurt than watch Leo be small.
Leo looked at the map. Eleven miles past Barstow. One door. No cameras. Three minutes.
He thought about his mother's hands, thin as paper birds, folding a clinic bill into smaller and smaller squares.
"Three minutes," Leo said. "Nobody gets hurt. We say it, we take it, we're gone. The money goes to Toad Friday when the sun's up and this whole year never happened. Swear it to me. Nobody gets hurt."
Corey's face opened like a struck match. "Swear it," he said. "On my mama's plant job. On the carport roof."
Leo nodded, and hated himself with a clean, bright hatred that felt almost like relief, because at least the deciding was over.
Later he would learn that the diner had a camera — had had a camera for six months, half paid for by the night waitress herself. Later he would learn everything. That night there was only the map, the plan, the borrowed shotgun in its blanket, and Corey's voice going over the timing again and again, happy as a kid describing Christmas:
"Two a.m., Leo. Whole desert asleep. Easiest money in California."
The desert, of course, was not asleep.
The desert was in booth nine, drinking coffee.