We owe Toad $6,000 by Friday morning or he takes the car, the apartment, and our fingers, in that order. You want to tell me a better idea?" Corey was quiet. "That's what I thought," Leo said. "Let's go." Here's what Leo did not know.
There was in fact a security camera. It was mounted inside above the counter, angled toward the door. It had been installed six months earlier after a vagrant had broken the back window and stolen two pies and a jar of tip money. Brenda Kowalski, the night shift waitress who had worked at Pioneer Wells for eleven years, had paid for half of it herself.
Here's the second thing Leo did not know. Booth nine, the last booth along the far wall, the one half swallowed by shadow because the overhead fluorescent had been flickering for two weeks and nobody had gotten around to replacing the bulb. Booth nine was occupied. Four men eating quietly.
Mike Callahan had ordered the patty melt and a black coffee. He was 48 years old with hands that looked like they'd been carved from something harder than wood and eyes that were the particular shade of gray that exists just before a storm makes up its mind. He was the charter president of a Hells Angels chapter out of San Bernardino and he had ridden through three states in the last four days, sleeping when he could, eating when he remembered to and thinking as he had been thinking for several months now about a younger version of himself who had made choices he couldn't always justify and somehow still woke up breathing every morning. He did not consider himself a good man.
He considered himself an honest one, which he knew was not the same thing. But he had a code and the code was old and it was simple and it had kept him alive and mostly whole for nearly three decades. Bobby Gallagher sat across from him eating scrambled eggs that had gone slightly cold reading a trucking magazine he'd found on the seat when they walked in. Bobby was the sergeant-at-arms, which meant he was responsible for the physical security of the chapter and which meant in practical terms that he was the first one who noticed when something was wrong.
He noticed things the way other people breathed automatically without effort, without even being fully conscious of it. He had noticed, for example, that the gravel outside had crunched differently twice in the last seven minutes. Not the way it crunched when a semi rolled through. The way it crunched when someone was trying not to make noise.
He didn't say anything. He set down the trucking magazine. He picked up his coffee. Declan Reed was the one who scared people most, though he rarely spoke.
He was ex-military, three tours, two of which he never discussed, one of which he could not legally discuss, and he carried his silence the way other men carried weapons with total deliberateness and full awareness of its effect. He was 41 years old and he still moved like someone who expected the ground beneath him to explode at any moment. Not with fear, with readiness. There was a difference and it was everything.