Chapter 2
ISAAK
Awoman has just thrown me out of a kitchen, and I'm smiling at the freeway like an idiot.
This is a problem. I run the morning down the way I take apart anything that doesn't sit right, looking for the angle, the leverage, the soft place where it gives.
There isn't one. She said no. She said it in front of her father, in front of the old foreman with the hat, said it with manure on her boots and her chin up.
Instead of the cold flat nothing I feel when a deal goes sideways, there's a warmth under my ribs I didn't earn and don't know how to give back. I keep checking my face in the side mirror to make sure it's behaving. It isn't.
Grigor drives. He's been with me nine years, long enough to learn that the back seat does its thinking in silence, so when he catches my eye in the rearview he looks away again. It's the most useful thing about him after the driving.
"Don't," I tell him.
"I said nothing."
"You were going to."
"I was going to ask whether the meeting with the Calloway girl went the way you wanted." He takes the on-ramp smooth as oil. "It appears it didn't. You seem very pleased."
He waits three miles before he tries again.
"The girl," he says. "Twenty-seven. Grew up on that ranch."
"Drive, Grigor."
"Did she say yes?"
"She threw me out of her kitchen."
"Ah." A pause. "Very good morning, then."
I don't give him the satisfaction of an answer.
The valley slides past, brown turning to gold turning to the gray haze that means the city is close.
Almond orchards run by in dead-straight rows, then gas stations, then the long ugly artery of the 5.
Three hours of it. I spend the first one trying not to think about her, and I lose.
By the time the orchards give way to West Hollywood, it's noon. I've replayed the way she looked at me about forty times, like I was something she'd scrape off her boot before dinner, and I have no plan worth the name. Grigor drops me at the club.
He catches my eye in the mirror one more time before I get out. "Good morning, then," he says.
"Drive home, Grigor."
"Driving home." He's smiling at the windshield when I shut the door, because I'm the one who has to walk into the rest of the day wearing whatever's on my face.
It doesn't open until ten, so at noon it belongs to me and nobody else.
That's how I like it. The main room still smells of last night.
Spilled vodka gone sweet, a lime somebody never swept up, the cold-iron breath of the air handlers I had installed when I bought the place.
The bottles behind the bar throw back the one working light in long amber rows.
The floor is sticky in the corner by the booths, where a girl in heels will lose her footing tonight and laugh about it.
My office sits up the back stair behind a door built to look like a supply closet.
Glass desk. Two chairs nobody sits in comfortably.
One wall is a window of mirrored glass that looks down on the floor, so I can watch the room without the room watching me.
A man in my position should always be the one doing the looking.
Four men are waiting when I come up. They all stand.
Not one of them quite finds my eye. This is the machine I built.
It runs because the men inside it are more afraid of me than of the people who would happily kill them.
I learned that lever young, from people who used it on me first. Nobody has ever given me cause to doubt it.
Lev stands at the window with his back to the room. He's holding a cup of the terrible break-room coffee like it insulted his mother.
"The Armenians moved the sit-down to Tuesday," he says, without turning. "Sarkis wants to do it himself. That's good news. He's reasonable. Reasonable is cheaper."
"Push it to Friday."
Now he turns. "Tuesday is reasonable. Friday is three extra days of Sarkis wondering what I'm hiding."
"Push it to Friday."
"Give me a reason I can repeat to him, or I'm guessing in front of armed Armenians."
I sit, pulling the stack of folders my assistant left squared on the blotter, and open the top one so I don't have to watch his face while I say it. "Tuesday I'll be in the valley."
The room goes quiet in the specific way a room goes quiet when several men decide at once to study their own shoes.
Lev sets the coffee down. He has run the back half of my life long enough to know the only thing in that valley I have any business with.
His face stays flat, his mouth a line, nothing moving but his eyes coming up to mine. On Lev that's horror.
"The girl said no," he says.
"She did."
"And you're going back anyway."
"It's the morning she works the new stock." I turn a page I am not reading. "I like to keep an eye on my investments."
"Your investment told you to get out of her house."
"She did say that."
"And we're moving Sarkis for it." He says it slow. "I want it on the record that I think this is a mistake. Not a moral one. I don't do those. A tactical one. You're handing four days to a man who counts everything, over a woman who's already told you there's no deal to be had."
"Noted."
"You're not going to do anything about it, but it's noted. What do I tell Sarkis?"
"Tell him I'm seeing a property in the valley. It's even true."
He looks at me for a long moment, weighing how much of my judgment he can still bank on.
Then he lets it go, because nowhere in our arrangement does it say he has to save me from myself.
Moving a meeting with armed men because a woman mucks stalls on Tuesdays is, in the end, my call to make and my throat to cut.
"Friday," he says, to the window.
"Friday." I almost smile again. I get it locked down in time. "What do we know about her?"
"She's twenty-seven. Vet tech at a rescue in Glendale. Mouth on her." A pause that, from Lev, counts as editorial. "Buries the bodies herself, I'd guess, if it came to it."
"Good," I say, and mean it more than he knows.
"You're going back on Tuesday," Lev says.
"I am."
"She said no."
"She did."
He looks at me for a long second, the coin going still in his hand. "Friday for Sarkis."
"Friday," I say, and I don't explain the Tuesday.
There's other business, because there's always other business. A man named Doran has been skimming the second club, three points off the top for half a year, hiding it in a vendor he invented. He's downstairs in the chair nobody sits in comfortably, sweating through a good shirt.
"He thinks he's going to die," Lev says. "He's been saying his goodbyes to the furniture."
"He's not going to die. Dead men don't pay back three points plus interest on my disappointment." I stand. "A body is paperwork."
I go down. I let him talk, because they always want to talk, and the talking tells me whether he's stupid or unlucky, which decides everything.
Doran is unlucky. His sister's husband got into the wrong people for the wrong amount, so Doran robbed the scariest creditor in the room to quiet the loudest one.
"You should have come to me," I tell him.
"I know." He can barely get it out. "I know, I'm sorry, I'll have it back, every dollar, I swear on my mother."
"Leave your mother out of it. You'll have it back, plus four, by the first. You'll do it out of your own pocket, not the till, so I'll be watching the till.
" I crouch so we're level, so he has to look at me.
"And the next time your family is drowning, Doran, you knock on my door before you put your hand in my pocket.
Because I'm reasonable when I'm asked. I'm a different animal when some sweating little shit robs me and bets I won't notice.
Do you understand the difference I'm drawing for you? "
He nods so fast it looks painful. He thanks me, wet-eyed, for not killing him. Grigor walks him out, and that is how it always goes. That is what fear gets you, every time. Loyalty you can hold at gunpoint and never mistake for the real thing.
Then I think about a woman in muddy boots who looked at the scariest creditor in her own kitchen and told him to leave. I can't make the two things sit in the same head.
Back upstairs, the folders are still squared on the blotter where I left them, waiting like everything in my life waits.
The Calloway file. It's my file now, because two years ago, on a handshake, I bought the paper on that ranch the way I buy the deed to a building, quietly and in full, with a smile the old man mistook for mercy.
I go through it because going through things is the closest I come to a habit I can't break.
Land survey. Water rights, which out there are worth more than the dirt they water.
Breeding records, decent bloodstock, a stallion line with two names in it that mean money to people who care about such things.
A man spends forty years building a thing like this with his hands, then one bad season takes it by the throat.
I respect that. I was also going to take it from him, right up until this morning rearranged my plans into a shape I don't have a clean word for.
Then I reach the books, and I stop.
Not the breeding books. The money books, the last two years of them, kept on cheap software by someone who didn't know what they were doing, or wanted very badly to look like they didn't. There is a column that doesn't add.
A note receivable that turns up in March and is gone by June with nothing behind it.
Money walking in the front door of a dying ranch, walking out the back, dressed up as feed, as fence wire, as farrier work. No ranch this size buys that much wire.