Four days passed before Loco came to him with anything. Four days of packages and corners and the ordinary rhythms of a life Cale had been living so long it had taken on the quality of something geological, something laid down in strata rather than chosen, as though the repetition itself had compressed the time into a kind of rock that could not easily be broken except from the inside.
He went to Marta's Diner on two of those four nights. He ran two packages for King, who sent word through the usual channels, a note left at the stash house, a number to call, a time to show up and said nothing further about their last conversation, which Cale had expected and which meant either that King had decided to let the matter rest or that he was building toward something that required patience, and King Mosely, whatever his other qualities, was not a man noted for patience. The silence, therefore, felt provisional.
On the fourth day Loco appeared at the stash house in the early afternoon, which was unusual. Loco operated on nocturnal rhythms. He was a man whose best qualities, his alertness, his humor, his particular brand of cheerful catastrophic readiness, emerged in the dark hours and receded in the light the way certain flowers closed at dawn. To find him present and awake and purposeful at two in the afternoon meant he had not slept, which in turn meant whatever he had found had been significant enough to carry him all the way through the night without stopping.
He was not eating chicken. This too was a signal.
"Close the door," he said.
Cale closed it. The kitchen held its accumulated heat. The ceiling fan turned. The dog in the side yard was quiet.
"Celestino Reyes," Loco said.
Cale waited. The name was not immediately familiar, which meant it was either small enough to have escaped his notice or large enough to operate in a register he had not yet accessed.
"Cuban," Loco said. "Sixty-something. Has a restaurant on Calle Ocho — La Palma — that is, depending on who you ask, either a very successful restaurant or a place that launders money for at least three separate operations in Miami-Dade. Probably both. He financed the Ramos brothers' distribution network out of Little Havana before the Ramos brothers had their difficulty in eighty-six."
"What difficulty."
"The kind where two of them are in Raiford and one of them is in the ground and the network is operating under new management." Loco paused. "Management that answers to Reyes."
Cale sat down on the stool by the counter. He thought about this with the careful methodical attention he brought to information that had weight. Outside a car went past with the radio up, something percussive and bright, and then faded.
"King borrowed from Reyes," he said. It was not a question.
"King borrowed from Reyes. The number I heard was two hundred thousand, which in my experience means the real number is larger. Borrowed it eighteen months ago to cover a supply gap when his Colombian connection dried up for six weeks and he needed to keep his corners running or lose them to the competition on the east side. Paid the vig for a year. Stopped paying four months ago."
"Why'd he stop."
"Because he can't." Loco said it without particular drama, the way you said a thing that had been obvious to everyone except the person most directly implicated. "He borrowed enough to keep the corners but the vig ate his margin and now he's behind on the principal and he's been skinning the corners to try to make up the difference, which is the kind of decision that makes sense for about two weeks and then becomes the thing that kills you."
Cale was quiet for a moment. He turned the information over in his mind the way he turned the watch in his pocket, steadily and without urgency, feeling its weight and its edges.
"What does Reyes do when a man stops paying?" he said.
"What Reyes does," Loco said carefully, "is he sends a man named Edgar Matos to have a conversation. Edgar Matos is not a large man and he is not a violent man in any theatrical sense, but he has been having these conversations on Reyes's behalf for twelve years without ever needing to have the same conversation twice with the same person, which tells you something about the quality of the conversations."
"Has Edgar Matos had a conversation with King."
"Not yet. But I am told the conversation has been scheduled."
Another silence. The ceiling fan turned. Cale looked at his hands on his knees, his mother's hands, the fine-boned quick hands that had always looked like they belonged to someone with more choices than he'd had.
"How bad does King need the money," he said. Not a question he was asking Loco. A question he was asking himself, out loud, in Loco's presence, which was its own kind of thinking.
"Bad enough to skin corners for four months," Loco said. "Bad enough to absorb DeShawn's complaints and your questions and still not have a solution. Bad enough that he told you the question was above your station because what's above your station is the truth, which is that King Mosely is two hundred thousand dollars in the red to a man who has already done to the Ramos brothers what gravity does to anything that gets too far from solid ground."
Cale said nothing. He thought about the coral pink house and the Mercedes in the driveway and the potted palms that someone else watered. He thought about a man who spent what he did not have in order to maintain the appearance of having it, which was a particular kind of vanity he understood better than he would have liked to admit.
"The corners," he said at last. "If King can't pay Reyes, and Reyes sends Edgar Matos, and whatever Edgar Matos does happens, what becomes of the corners?"
Loco looked at him for a long time. When Loco looked at you for a long time without speaking it meant he was doing a calculation, and the calculation was not about the answer to the question you had asked but about the question underneath the question, the one you had not said aloud.
"That," Loco said finally, "is a very interesting thing to be thinking about."
"I'm not thinking anything. I'm asking."
"You're doing both. You're asking because you're thinking." A pause. "The corners would need someone. Someone the suppliers trusted enough to keep product moving and the Colombians trusted enough not to cut off and Reyes trusted enough not to have Edgar Matos come visit."
"Someone who had been reliable," Cale said.
"For three years," Loco said. "Give or take."
They sat with it. The kitchen held the afternoon heat and the smell of the mangoes from the yard next door and the particular dense silence of two men who have arrived, together, at a place that changes things and are each giving the other the courtesy of not being the first to say so.
"This could go wrong in a dozen ways," Cale said.
"More than a dozen."
"King finds out we've been asking."
"Already worried about that."
"Reyes decides he wants someone he knows."
"Also possible."
"Edgar Matos has the conversation and King somehow survives it and decides his problem is us."
"I'd put that one lower on the list," Loco said. "But it's on the list."
Cale stood. He went to the kitchen window and looked out at the side yard and the dog, who was lying in the shade of the fence with the boneless uncomplicated contentment of an animal that had never been asked to do anything difficult. He stood there for a moment with his hands at his sides.
"Loco," he said.
"Yeah."
"We are not doing anything. We are not planning anything. We are not making any moves of any kind until we understand what Edgar Matos's conversation with King produces." He paused. "Are we clear on that."
"We are clear," Loco said. But there was something in the way he said it, a quality of alignment, of a man who has been waiting for precisely this question and finds the answer satisfactory that told Cale they were clear on the words and equally clear on everything the words did not say.
He turned away from the window.
"Tell me everything you know about Celestino Reyes," he said. "From the beginning."