Hotwired (A Mann's World #4)

CHAPTER 1 JORGE—WAITING

The cell is eight feet by ten. Jorge has measured it in push-ups, in pacing, in the number of times he can trace the crack in the ceiling before he stops giving a damn about the number.

Concrete holds cold even in summer. He's grateful for that much.

Trial's in six weeks. Maybe eight. Nobody tells you anything straight in here—not the PD, not the guards, not the calendar taped crooked to the wall by the last guy who called this rack home. Jorge doesn't ask twice. Asking twice makes you look like you're scared of the answer.

He's not scared. He's just done the math enough times that the number doesn't move anymore.

Aggravated assault. The kid's jaw wired shut for eight weeks, last Jorge heard.

Steel plate, maybe. He doesn't know the specifics and he doesn't want them, because specifics turn into a face, and a face turns into a person, and Jorge already knows exactly how good he is at making a person into an idea instead. He did it once already. Cost him.

The shop's been closed nine days.

He knows the number because he counts that too—same as the ceiling crack, same as the push-ups.

Delgado Hydraulics, roll gate down, lights off, the Regal up on the lift with its rear end still gutted from the last job.

Some kid he trusted enough to hand a key to is supposed to be checking on it.

Supposed to be. Jorge doesn't trust supposed-to anymore.

Trust is how his brother ended up in a parking lot at two in the morning looking for a car that wasn't worth what it cost.

That's the thought he doesn't let all the way in. Not here. Not with a roommate slot that could open any day and put some stranger's eyes on him while he does it.

He'd bragged about that car. Told half the block what he'd dropped into that lift kit, laughed about it over beers like the compressor whine was music.

Rubén had heard him. Everybody had heard him.

And somebody who wasn't supposed to be listening heard him too, and three weeks later Rubén was in a lot at two a.m. trying to do his little brother a favor, and two men who had nothing to do with any of it put a bullet in him over some other beef that had never touched Jorge's life at all.

Jorge didn't put that bullet there. He knows that the way he knows his own name.

He also knows the car wouldn't have been sitting in that lot if he'd kept his mouth shut.

Both things are true. Some nights that's the whole problem—there's no math that cancels one against the other, no number of push-ups that make the equation balance.

So the grief just sits there next to the guilt, roommates that don't get along, and Jorge's spent two years now handing that whole ugly weight to anybody who so much as looks like they'd steal a car.

The kid he put in the hospital wasn't Rubén's shooter. Wasn't anywhere near it. Jorge knew that walking up to him.

Didn't stop his hands.

Footsteps in the hall—measured, unhurried, a guard's gait, not an inmate's. Jorge doesn't sit up. Doesn't turn his head. Whatever's coming, coming faster won't change it, and he learned a long time ago that stillness reads as strength even when it's just exhaustion wearing strength's jacket.

The steps stop outside his door.

Keys.