Chapter 51
Luke
The tattoo parlor hasn’t changed. Same brick front. Same neon sign buzzing in daylight. Same bell on the door.
I park out front this time. Not two blocks down. I’m not walking far. I want him to see the truck. The bullet hole. The window I had replaced. I want him to know who’s here and why before the bell stops ringing.
Inside, it smells the same. Disinfectant, ink, and something sweet trying to cover poor decisions. The purple-haired girl looks up from behind the counter. She sees me. She remembers.
She’s gone before I reach the back hallway.
Smart girl.
Last door on the left. Past EMPLOYEES ONLY. Past the bathroom that still hasn’t seen bleach. I open the door.
Javi is sitting at the same stainless-steel table.
Not counting pills this time. The hand I broke is out of the splint but it’s not right—the fingers sit wrong, curled in a way that says they’ll never straighten all the way.
He’s rolling a joint with his left hand.
Slowly. The way you do everything when your dominant hand is a memory.
He looks up. Doesn’t smile this time.
“You’ve got balls,” he says. “I’ll give you that.”
“You sent seven people after me, Javi. Two at the bar. Two with a gun. Three on the road.” I close the door behind me. “That’s a lot of friends to waste on a broken hand.”
“You cost me six weeks of work.”
“You killed a girl on the cheer team. I think we’re uneven.”
The room is small. Cold. The same cold from last time. The same fluorescent buzz. The same feeling of a space that was built for things that don’t belong in daylight.
“Where are they?” I say. “Sal. The tall one. The other one.”
“Not here.”
“Good.”
I pull the hammer from my jacket. Short handle. Good weight. My grandfather’s. I set it on the stainless-steel table the way you’d set down a coffee mug—casual, familiar, a thing that belongs in my hand.
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.