8. Wire #2
The table sorted itself as I came up on it.
The woman Ghost had almost decaffeinated sat directly across from him, and she was hard to look past, built like a bull through the shoulders, a black tank top doing nothing to hide it, a black braid thick as a wrist running down past the middle of her back.
She was mid-list, ticking items off on her fingers, her English clean and sure under a Latin Spanish accent that rolled every r.
"—the torque wrench that disappeared, a case of fork seals, brake lines for two of the client bikes, and the bearing press is still buried behind the quads, so I need two hands that are not mine to dig it out. Six bikes by Friday. Six."
"Take a van." The mountain across from her. I knew that voice. I'd sparred its owner into a sweat yesterday. Tank sat with a mug swallowed inside one fist. "Load the press once instead of making four trips on two wheels."
The man beside the braided woman gave a single nod at that, short dark hair, forearms crossed on the table with lines of sharp-edged geometric ink running up both of them, listening the way some men lift, no wasted motion.
And pressed in at Tank's side, close enough that their shoulders brushed and neither of them adjusted, a leaner guy, dark-haired, worked through a plate one-handed while his eyes ran down his phone screen with the focus of an audit.
I sat down next to Ghost. The bench was warm where the room had been at it all morning.
"You slept." He said it like an accusation and a victory at once, angled toward me, knee already bouncing under the table. "I can tell. You had the medical-bay face for three days, this is a different face, this is a face that got hours. How many? Six? Seven?"
"Eight."
"Eight." He turned to the table as if presenting evidence. "Eight hours. First night in the guest room."
"The mattress helped." I reached for the water pitcher. "So did getting thrown around by him." I nodded at Tank.
"You threw yourself around. I mostly supervised." Tank's mug tipped a fraction in my direction.
A kid had Ghost's other side, pressed in at his left while I took the right.
Nineteen, maybe twenty, younger than Liam.
He'd been talking at Ghost when I walked up, and now he sat with his fork stalled over his plate, and every few seconds his eyes cut past Ghost to me, quick passes, the way a fighter checks an opponent between rounds.
"So anyway, the carb," the kid pushed on, angling his shoulder to put me out of the frame. "You were going to show me the float adjustment. Today, you said. Before lunch."
"After breakfast, I've got you." Ghost didn't even turn his head, already reaching to slide the water pitcher closer to me.
"You said before lunch yesterday too."
Each time Ghost spoke to me, the kid rushed back in with something, anything, a question about a bike, a story from the shop, his words crowding into the gaps like he could box me out of the conversation with volume.
I read it in one pass. He didn't trust me, and there was something under the distrust with more heat in it, aimed at the space between Ghost and me.
I let him have the gaps. I'd been someone's older brother too long to take that personally.
An older woman came down the row with a coffee pot, filling mugs without asking, and when she reached me she looked at the fading bruise under my eye, then at my plate, which did not exist yet.
"Better." Aimed at my eye. Then, at the empty table in front of me: "Worse. Eat." She moved on before I could answer. Rosa. Three days of her marching in and out of the medical bay had taught me that arguing added time to the sentence.
Ghost was mid-ramble about the guest-room mattresses, where they'd bought them, a story involving Irish and a flipped truck, when he stopped dead in the middle of a sentence. His mouth stayed open a second. Then he smacked the table lightly with both palms.
"I haven't introduced anyone. You've been sitting here for five minutes and I just—okay.
" His hand started moving around the table like a tour guide's.
"Blade." The inked forearms. "Trenza." The braid.
I matched the name against the story he'd told me in the medical bay, the man's teeth on the concrete, six feet away, and the match came back clean.
"Tank you've met, at speed. That's Tyler glued to him, watch out, he sees everything.
" The lean man raised two fingers off his phone without looking up.
"Mateo." The kid gave me a nod with nothing in it.
Then Ghost's arm swung toward the kitchen line. "The loud one is Irish. The tall one in glasses is Nolan, and that's Declan on his neck. They're together."
I had the water halfway down my throat and it tried to come back up. I got the glass onto the table and coughed once into my fist.
"Together." I said it carefully.
"Together together. All three." Ghost delivered it with the exact weight he'd give a parts list, already moving on, arm swinging toward another table.
"Kai you know. That's Reaper next to him, our VP.
Down that side you've got Vega, Santos, Anima's the one with the sleeve, Valkyrie's on watch so you'll meet her at lunch?—"
"Ghost." Blade's voice came in low, without hurry. "Give him a break. He hasn't eaten and you're making him memorize a roster."
Ghost went pink from the neck up. It happened fast, the same flood I'd watched under the fluorescents on my first night.
"Right. Food. Plates are lining up, I saw them come off the—I'll grab two.
" He was up and moving before he'd finished the sentence, sliding through the tables toward the counter without touching a single chair.
The bench felt different with him gone. Colder on that side, though the room hadn't changed a degree. I put my attention on the table instead of on that fact.
The table put its attention on me.
"Twenty years of that footwork." Tank set his mug down. "Where'd it start?"
"A strip-mall gym. Taekwondo base, then whatever each new coach stacked on top. Judo for two years. Some boxing." I turned my glass a quarter turn on the wood. "The kicks stuck best."
"They stuck." He rubbed the thigh my shin had found yesterday, and something that wasn't quite a smile moved through his face.
Trenza leaned in on her forearms, and her eyes did a pass over my face, cheekbones, coloring, running some private math. "Where's your family from? You have something in you. Spanish? Italian? I had money on Cuban until you opened your mouth."
"Italian. My mother came over from Sicily." The word mother went over the table smooth and landed rough somewhere behind my sternum, one shower removed from having her in my head. "The other half is Nevada nothing. Sorry to cost you the bet."
"Sicily." She sat back, braid shifting across her shoulder, and pointed at me with her fork. "So you can actually cook, or it's only the blood?"
"I cook for a living."
Her eyebrows went up, and she opened her mouth on what was clearly going to be a follow-up with teeth in it, and my phone buzzed.
One buzz, and then the chime. A bright, clean chime that cut through the table talk.
I froze with my hand flat on the wood.
Two notification sounds existed on that phone, and I'd built it that way on my second day here, when Ghost had walked into the medical bay carrying a replacement handset and a look of enormous self-satisfaction, my old number already ported onto it.
My old phone was still in that warehouse, on a bench, and my car was still in the dirt lot outside it with the keys in my bag on that back-hall bench, all of it in his territory, which was a thought I kept in a drawer and didn't open.
On the new one I'd allowed exactly two things to make noise. The restaurant, and the hospital.
The restaurant was handled. I'd messaged my chef from the compound on the second day, sent him the photo of my face while the bruising was still doing its worst, told him I'd been jumped and was down for the count.
He'd called back inside a minute and yelled worried Italian at me for five, most of it saints' names, and ordered me to take two weeks minimum. That door was shut.
Which left the hospital.
I got the phone out. On the screen, one line.
Your current bill balance has been updated.
Updated. My stomach dropped through the bench. Updates only ever ran one direction. Another scan, another specialist reading, another week of the machine that breathed for him, the number always climbed, and I braced for the new total the way I braced for a body kick, and opened the app.
The balance had gone down.
I read it twice. Ninety-seven thousand and change, sitting where two hundred forty-seven thousand had been for so long the digits had a shape in my head, a weight I carried up and down stairs. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars was gone from the number.
Wrong. It had to be wrong. I hadn't paid anything. I'd left the pit without collecting, there'd been no four grand, no envelope, nothing. There was no payment that could exist.
In through the nose. Hold. Out through the mouth. My hands steadied on the second cycle.
An app error, then. A glitch, a decimal in the wrong place, and in an hour the number would snap back and I'd take the beating of losing that relief all over again. I opened the payment history to find the error.
There was no error. One entry sat at the top of the history, posted at 4:02 that morning.
Payment received: $150,000.00.
And under it, in the portal's note field, a message.
See you in the pit, Monk.
My eyes locked onto the little gray headstone and wouldn't come off it.
Monk. My pit name, the one only that world used.
A grave, from the man who wore one as a name.
See you, like a dinner invitation. And a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, dropped on a stranger's hospital bill the way other men drop a tip, because that was the whole message underneath the message: look what this costs me. Nothing. Look what it buys me. You.