The car was a 2003 Dodge Neon with two hundred and eleven thousand miles, a passenger door that only opened from the inside, and an engine that had been making a sound for three weeks that Leo, who knew engines the way priests know scripture, described to no one as expensive.
They left Fresno at nine in the evening, because the plan — Corey's plan, laminated in confidence — required the desert at two a.m., and Leo had done the drive-time math with the hopeless precision of a man measuring the rope.
Corey drove. Corey always drove when he was excited; Leo's job, as it had been his job since childhood, was to ride shotgun — a phrase that sat in the car between them all evening like a third passenger, because the actual shotgun was in the back seat under the blanket, and neither of them said the phrase out loud for two hundred miles.
They stopped in Bakersfield for gas and gas-station coffee that tasted like it had been filtered through a coin. Corey was on — bouncing on his heels at the pump, rehearsing.
"Okay. Run it again. I go in first, I'm the voice—"
"You're not the voice. Your voice cracks."
"My voice does not—" Corey stopped. Restarted, deeper, absurd. "I'm the presence. You're the voice. I stand where they can see the—" he patted his waistband, where the .38 rode like a rumor, "—and you say the words and the lady gives you the drawer and we're gone, Leo. Three minutes. It's practically already Friday."
"Don't say Friday."
"Why not?"
"Because Friday's the thing we're trying not to have."
The Neon rattled east into the Tehachapis and the night got bigger around them, the way it only does in the high desert — the sky lowering its stars down to the dashboard, the mountains standing off in the dark like furniture in a house nobody lives in anymore. Somewhere past Mojave, Leo made Corey pull over at a rest stop because there was a thing that had to be said with the engine off, man to man, in the cold.
"Listen to me," Leo said. "This is the whole deal. We are not heroes and we are not badasses. We're two guys who owe money. We go in, we say the words, we take what's in the drawer — the drawer, Corey, not some movie safe, there is no safe, if there's no money we leave, you understand me? We leave with nothing and we figure something else out. And nobody — nobody — gets pointed at longer than it takes to say it. The second it feels wrong, we walk. The second it feels wrong."
"It won't feel wrong."
"It felt wrong just now, saying it."
Corey looked at him across the dark car, and for one second the cathedral of him went quiet, and Leo saw the nine-year-old who had fetched ice chips in a hospital corridor and lied, kindly, about everything being fine.
"Hey," Corey said. "I know what this is. This is you saving your hands. I know, Leo. That's why I'm in the car. You think I like diners? I'm doing this because it's you."
Leo couldn't look at him. "I know you are. That's the worst part of it."
They drove on. Barstow slid past in a wash of truck-stop neon and closed storefronts, and Leo counted the miles down the way he'd counted them on the map: eleven. The diner appeared first as a glow, then as a sign, then as a low white building standing in its own pool of light with a gravel lot in front — and four motorcycles parked in a row by the side wall, big and black and gleaming under the lot lights.
Corey slowed. "Huh."
"What?"
"Nothing. Bikes."
"Corey."
"It's eleven miles from anywhere, Leo, bikes stop for coffee. They're probably inside eating pie, they'll be gone—" The Neon's headlights swept the lot as Corey swung wide, the way they'd planned, to park with the nose pointed out. "See? Windows. One old broad at the counter. There's a guy asleep in a booth. It's fine. It's exactly like I said."
Leo looked at the windows. He saw the woman at the counter. He saw, in the far corner booth, shapes he couldn't quite make out through the glass and the glare — men, maybe; sitting very still, the way furniture sits.
An engine ticked somewhere in the cold. A dog barked once, far away, and thought better of it.
"It's quiet," Leo said.
"Course it's quiet." Corey killed the engine and grinned in the dark, and the grin had the roof edge in it, the brick arcing, the whole short history of Corey Baxter deciding that loud was the same as brave. "Quiet's what we came for."
They sat one more minute. Then Leo reached into the back seat, and unwrapped the blanket, and took up Richie Colton's shotgun with hands that had rebuilt a hundred engines and had never once, in twenty-six years, held anything that frightened him this much.
"Three minutes," he said.
And they got out of the car.