“Yeah.”
Letting go of my hand, he swings onto his bike and leads his club out of the lot and back toward the highway. The sound of them fades slowly into the Nevada morning, five bikes becoming one sound, that sound becoming a low hum, that hum becoming nothing, becoming desert silence, open road, and the work still ahead of us.
Standing there until I can’t hear them anymore, I think about Tracker, Lawrence in that hacienda, Rhyder’s face at the church table, and the promise I’d made at the edge of the lot.
Then I go inside.
Chapter Nineteen
RYAN
Nuevo Laredo smells like heat, exhaust, and something frying in oil somewhere close.
It hits me the moment I step off the plane, that assault of a border city in summer, the air sitting heavy and immediate against my skin, and the sun already doing serious work even at this hour. Standing on the tarmac for just a second, I let it settle over me.
Marco Reyes would know this heat. Would have grown up between versions of it, Colombian summers, American summers, the knowledge of a man who had never belonged entirely to one climate or one world.
I pick up the bag and walk.
The safe house the Bureau arranged is a single-story property on a quiet street in the south of the city, unremarkable from the outside, clean and functional within. There’s a kitchen, bedroom, and ceiling fan that works most of the time. It’s the kind of place that asks nothing of you and gives you exactly what you need to disappear into.
I set the bag down and check the room the way I always check rooms—exits, sightlines, weak points.
An old habit.
One that has kept me alive long enough to be standing here.
Then I sit on the edge of the bed and wait.
***
Diego finds me fifty minutes after I land.
He comes through the door of the café two blocks from the safe house, a small, ordinary place with plastic chairs and a television mounted too high on the wall, and I know himimmediately. Not from a photograph, but from the energy of a man who is performing casually so hard it has become its own kind of tell.
Hawaiian shirt, linen pants, and dark hair slicked back tight against his head, eyes that move too fast around the room before they find me. A piece of gum is working steadily in his jaw.
He crosses to my table and sits without being invited. “Marco.” Warm, like we are old friends.
“Diego.”
Up close, the energy coming off him is slightly elevated, the hum of someone running a little hotter than the situation requires. I clock it immediately and file it away.Cocaine probably.The kind of use that has gone from recreational to functional, without the user fully noticing the transition.
A liability.
But not my problem to manage right now.
He orders coffee without looking at the menu and leans back in his chair with the studied ease of a man who wants to appear completely relaxed and has therefore achieved the opposite.
“Good flight?”
“Fine.”
“You eat?”
“On the plane.”
He nods, gum working, eyes doing another quick circuit of the room. I let him settle, or try to, and look at my coffee and wait.
