Chapter 2 THE DEAL

The diner sat off the highway outside Ely, the kind of place with a flickering OPEN sign and a parking lot full of gravel instead of asphalt. Anna had dropped Jason here, said she needed an hour, said she'd be back. He didn't ask why. He'd learned inside that some questions you don't ask until you already know the answer.

He took a booth by the window. Ordered coffee. Didn't touch it.

A woman slid into the seat across from him before the waitress even brought the cup back full.

"Jason De'Leon."

He looked at her. Mid thirties, maybe. Tired eyes that didn't match the rest of her, which was sharp, pressed, put together like she'd practiced looking unbothered in a mirror that morning. She had a manila folder under one arm and a badge she didn't bother showing yet.

"You've got the wrong table," Jason said.

"I've got the right table." She set the folder down between them, didn't open it. "Agent Sarah Walker. FBI."

"Congratulations."

"Three hours out of Ely and you're already making jokes. Guess prison didn't take all of it out of you."

"Took enough."

She studied him a second, the way people study something they've read a file on but never seen move. "Your father's dead. Your sister's living inside a club run by a man who had him killed and made it look like an accident. You walked into that truck this morning thinking you were just grieving. You're not. You're walking into a war."

Jason didn't say anything. He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer and watched her over the rim.

"I can help you," Walker said. "Or I can watch you get yourself killed trying to do this alone, which is what you're already planning to do. I'd rather not watch that."

"What's the offer."

"You go back. You let Victor think you're exactly what he wants you to be, a hothead who did his time and came home grateful for whatever scraps of the club he throws you. You get close. You get me names, dates, accounts, anything that ties him to trafficking, to your father's death, to anything I can take to a federal judge." She tapped the folder once. "In exchange, your record gets expunged. The manslaughter charge disappears like it never happened. And your sister gets protection, real protection, the kind that doesn't depend on Victor Kane's mood that day."

"You know a lot about my sister."

"I know enough to know she's not safe. I know enough to know neither are you, the second Victor decides you're more useful dead than alive."

Jason looked out the window. The lot outside was nearly empty, just his sister's borrowed truck and two other vehicles, an SUV he didn't recognize and a sedan with tinted windows pulled in close enough to keep an eye on the diner door without looking like that's what it was doing.

"How'd your partner die," he said. Not a question really. A test.

Something in Walker's face moved before she could stop it. Just a flicker, there and gone, but he caught it the way you catch a man's hand drifting toward his waistband before he knows he's done it.

"Car accident," she said. "Four years ago. Brakes failed on a mountain road."

The words landed and sat there.

"Funny," Jason said. "That's two accidents now. Yours and mine."

Walker's jaw tightened. "It wasn't an accident."

"No," Jason said. "I don't figure it was."

She recovered fast, smoothed her face back into the careful, professional thing she'd walked in wearing, but Jason had already seen underneath it, and he filed that away too. A federal agent with a dead partner and an old grudge wasn't just an ally. She was a woman with her own war running parallel to his, which made her useful and made her dangerous in exactly the same breath.

He glanced back at the window. The reflection in the glass gave him the parking lot in reverse, the sedan, and now two men standing near the back of it instead of sitting inside, both of them angled just slightly toward the diner door, both of them pretending to talk to each other while their eyes kept drifting back to Walker's booth.

He knew the build. Knew the patches, even folded under jackets. Iron Wolves muscle, low level, the kind Victor sent to watch and report, not to act unless told to.

Jason didn't change his expression. He reached into his jacket like he was checking the time, pulled his phone instead, and typed without looking down at it, fast, the kind of fast that comes from doing something so many times your hands don't need your eyes anymore.

Two on the agent outside Eddie's diner, Ely highway. Make them go away quiet. No marks back to me.

He sent it. Put the phone away. Looked back at Walker like nothing had happened.

"You're not selling me," he said.

"I'm not asking you to buy anything today. I'm asking you to think about it."

"I don't need to think about it."

"That's a yes?"

"That's a no." He stood, dug a few dollars out of his pocket for the coffee he hadn't touched, dropped them on the table. "For now."

Walker reached into her jacket, pulled a card, held it out. He almost left it on the table. Almost. Then he took it, turned it once between two fingers, and slid it into his back pocket instead of handing it back.

"You'll change your mind," she said.

"Maybe."

He was halfway to the door when he stopped, turned back, looked at her steady enough that she had to meet his eyes or look away first.

"What did he take from you," Jason said. "Your partner. What did Victor's people take, that's got you driving four hours out to a diner in the middle of nowhere to recruit a guy who just walked out of Ely."

Walker opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

The silence stretched a beat too long, long enough that it stopped being a pause and started being an answer all on its own, and Jason watched it land on her face, watched her decide not to lie and not to tell the truth either, just sit there in the space between the two.

He nodded once, like she'd said something out loud after all.

Then he walked out into the heat, past the sedan that now sat empty, no sign of the two men who'd been leaning against it five minutes before, and got into his sister's truck without looking back at the window where Walker still sat, alone, staring at a folder she hadn't opened.