CHAPTER 5 JORGE—THE QUESTION
Three more days of magazine pages and clipped small talk, and Jorge still hasn't asked.
Tells himself it doesn't matter. Tells himself a lot of things these days that don't hold up under any real weight.
Shawn's tracing a page he's looked at a dozen times already, finger moving along the lines of a lift kit like he's memorizing it for a test. Jorge watches him do it and feels something loosen in his chest that he doesn't trust.
"You gonna tell me what you're in for," Jorge says, "or am I supposed to guess."
Shawn goes still. Just for a second, but Jorge catches it, same way he catches everything.
"Would it matter?"
"Wouldn't ask if it didn't."
Shawn's quiet long enough that Jorge almost lets it go. Almost tells him forget it, not his business, keep the peace they've built over four days of car talk and half-answers.
"GTA," Shawn says finally. "Grand theft auto."
The words land like a fist Jorge didn't see coming.
Everything in the cell goes quiet different than it's been quiet before. Jorge's hands go still on his own book. His jaw sets.
"Say that again."
"You heard me."
Jorge doesn't answer. Doesn't trust his voice enough to try.
The shop, dark and empty. Rubén in a parking lot at two in the morning over a car that never should have mattered enough to die for.
Some kid's face he'd rearranged with his own hands because rage needed somewhere to land and a car thief was close enough to hit.
And now here's another one. Six feet away. Talking about lift kits like they're friends.
"How many?" Jorge says.
"Does it matter?"
"How many?"
Shawn doesn't answer that. Doesn't have to. Jorge already knows the kind of kid who ends up doing county time on a charge like that isn't a first-timer who got unlucky once.
"I don't buddy up to car thieves." Flat. Final. Like he's reciting something he's said to himself a hundred times before tonight. "Should've led with that instead of the magazine."
"Would it have changed anything?"
"Would've saved us both the conversation."
Shawn doesn't argue. Doesn't ask why it matters this much, though something in his face says he wants to.
Jorge grabs his book and turns away, back to the wall, tracing the same crack in the concrete he's traced a hundred times before Shawn ever walked through that door.
Doesn't look up again. Not when he hears the magazine slide back under the mattress, quiet, like it was never worth anything to begin with.
Not when the silence stretches long enough that it stops being silence and starts being something else.
This one's got teeth.