Javi looks at the hammer.Looks at his hand.The one I already broke.The one that will never roll a joint right again.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” I say.“You’re going to call Sal and the tall one and whoever else you’ve got running errands for you and you’re going to tell them it’s done.Not paused.Not on hold.Done.They don’t drive down that road.They don’t look for my truck.They don’t go near the house or the woman who lives there—you don’t sell in this town.”
“And if I don’t?”
I pick up the hammer.Turn it over in my hand.Not a threat.A reminder.The weight of it is the same.The sound it makes is the same.Some things you only need to learn once.Some things take twice.
“You already know what happens,” I say.“You felt it.Weeks in a splint wondering if you’d ever hold a needle again.That was for a girl you didn’t know.Imagine what I’d do for someone I?—”
I stop.Set the hammer down.
“Just make the call, Javi.”
He looks at me.I look at him.Two men in a back room with a hammer between them and a history that started with dead kids and bad pills and an old woman who cried in pieces over a fence.
He picks up his phone.Left hand.Dials.I listen to him say the words—short, flat, final.The kind of words a man says when he’s done the math and the numbers don’t work anymore.
He hangs up.
“Get out of my shop,” he says.
“Are we done?”
“We’re done.”
I pick up the hammer.Put it back in my jacket.Walk to the door.The bell rings on my way out.Same bell.Same sound.
In the truck, I sit for a minute.Hands on the wheel.Steady.The hammer is in the passenger seat.Clean.Didn’t need it this time.Just needed him to remember what it sounded like the first time.
My phone rings.
Marin.
“Come over.”
I look at the phone.Look at the hammer.Look at the tattoo parlor in the rearview—the neon, the brick, the door that just closed on something that should have ended a long time ago.
I start the engine.
Some things you fix once and they hold.Some things you have to come back for.
I pull onto Route 9 and drive.
52
Marin
Luke walks in and I see it before he says a word.
The cut above his left eye, held together with gas station paper towels and stubbornness.His jaw swollen on one side.The way he’s holding his left arm against his ribs like he’s keeping something together that wants to come apart.
“What happened to you?”
“Nothing.”
“Luke.”
“It’s handled.”
