Corey blinked. "No." "No cops." Mike repeated and there was a firmness in it that closed the subject completely. "That's not how this gets handled." He looked at Bobby. "Get Sully on the phone." Bobby was already dialing.
"Who's Sully?" Leo said. "A man who knows Velasquez." Mike said. "A man who has in the past delivered messages in ways that Velasquez remembers." Corey leaned forward. "Are you going to see uh He stopped, rethought his phrasing.
Is something going to happen to Velasquez?" Mike looked at him with those gray eyes and said nothing for a beat. And in that beat, the full weight of who Mike Callahan was and what the patches on his jacket represented settled over the room like weather. "What's going to happen," Mike said finally, "is a conversation. Conversations have outcomes.
The outcome of this one will be that your debt disappears." The word disappeared sat in the air. Leo stared. "Disappears?" "Disappears? You can't just" Leo stopped, looked at the table, looked back up.
"People like Toad don't just let go of $6,000." "You're right," Mike said. "They don't let go voluntarily." He said it the way you'd say the sky is blue, not as a threat, not as a boast, just as a statement of available physics. "But they let go when the alternative costs more than $6,000." Bobby had the phone to his ear. He was speaking in a low voice, turned slightly away from the counter.
On the other side of the diner, Harold the cook had crept back to the kitchen doorway and was standing there with his arms folded, watching everything with the wide, calculating eyes of a man deciding whether to be terrified or fascinated. He had landed on fascinated. Dave Pelman under the counter had not yet moved. He had his phone in his hand and his thumb was hovering over the emergency call button, and it had been hovering there for the last four minutes.
And every time he almost pressed it, something in what he was hearing stopped him. He would replay this moment later, lying awake in a Victorville motel room, staring at the ceiling, and he would not be able to fully explain to himself why he didn't call 911, only that it had felt somehow like he would have been interrupting something important. Bobby lowered the phone from his ear. "Sully's in Barstow," he said, "twenty minutes." Mike nodded.
"Barstow," Corey said. "Sully was already in Barstow tonight." "Sully's often in Barstow," Bobby said in a tone that did not invite follow-up questions. Leo was quiet for a moment, turning something over. "Then why are you doing this?" Mike looked at him.