Chapter 6 THE FED

POV: Jason De'Leon

She slid into the booth across from him without asking permission, moving with the confidence of someone who had never needed to ask permission for anything and did not intend to start now. Up close she was sharper than she had looked from across the room, late thirties rather than mid, with the kind of face that got more interesting the longer you looked at it. Fine lines at the corners of her eyes that she had not tried to hide. A mouth set in a line that said she was here for business and intended to stay there.

She was very good at the business line. Jason could see exactly how much effort it was costing her.

"Jason De'Leon," she said. No question mark. Delivered like a verdict.

He exhaled smoke and looked at her across the table the way he had learned to look at men who wanted something from him, unhurried and complete, starting at the eyes and working down and back up again, the kind of assessment that stripped the professional surface off a person and looked at what was underneath. Her hands were soft, desk work rather than field work, but her posture carried the muscle memory of someone who had been in rooms where things went wrong fast and had not always left through the front door.

He let the look go on a beat longer than was comfortable.

Something moved across her face. The smallest thing. A shift in the set of her shoulders, a micro-adjustment in how she was sitting, her weight redistributing almost imperceptibly in her seat. Her eyes stayed on his but the hand she had rested on the table moved to her lap.

There it was.

"Lady," he said, voice carrying the gravel of a man who had spent three years talking through concrete and steel. "You're sitting awful close for a stranger."

She recovered fast, he would give her that. The professionalism came back down like a visor, smooth and practiced, and she reached into her jacket and produced a leather credential case that she opened and set on the table between them with the precise movement of someone who had done this ten thousand times.

"Agent Walker," she said. "Federal Bureau of Investigation."

Jason looked at the badge. He looked at her. He picked up his coffee and drank.

"Figures," he said. "What do you want, Fed?"

Walker put the credentials away and reached into her jacket again, this time producing a manila envelope that she set on the table without pushing it toward him. She left it there in the neutral territory between their coffee mugs, and the deliberateness of that told him she had thought carefully about how this conversation would go.

"You just got out," she said, her voice carrying the flat authority of a woman reading from a case file she had memorized. "Three years served on federal weapons charges. Illegal possession of automatic firearms with intent to distribute." A pause, precisely timed. "But we both know you were not the trigger man. You took the fall for someone inside the Iron Wolves who had more to lose than a twenty-five-year-old with a clean record."

Jason set his mug down. He looked at her with the particular patience he had developed for people who were getting to a point and taking the scenic route.

"You read my file," he said. "You want a cookie?"

Something flickered in Walker's eyes, quick and controlled. Not offense. Something closer to recalibration. She had expected anger, probably, or defensiveness, the standard responses of men who had just walked out of three years of federal custody and found a fed waiting in their breakfast. She had not expected this, the stillness, the faint amusement, the sense that he was watching her performance from a comfortable distance and finding it technically proficient.

She leaned forward. Elbows on the table, closing the distance between them by six inches, and Jason caught her perfume, something expensive and understated, the kind that was chosen to project authority rather than attract attention but ended up doing both.

He did not move back.

"Your father is dead," she said, and she kept her voice even when she said it, which told him she had practiced saying it that way. "Victor Kane runs the Iron Wolves now. And if you go after him the way you are planning, you will be dead before the week is out."

"You don't know what I'm planning."

"I know revenge when I see it." She held his gaze. "I also know a man who walks out of federal prison with nothing but a pack of cigarettes and a vendetta does not usually live long enough to see his next birthday."

Jason tapped ash and let the silence sit between them. He was watching her the way he watched everyone now, looking for the thing underneath the thing, the real motivation living behind the official one. She was good. She was very good. But she had been sitting across from him for four minutes and she had already given him two things she had not meant to.

The first was the squirm.

The second was the way she had said his father is dead. Not your father was killed, not Marcus De'Leon is deceased, but your father is dead, the kind of phrasing that came from someone who understood grief personally rather than professionally.

"You lost somebody," he said. It was not a question.

The business line held. But something behind her eyes went very still in the way that things went still when they were trying not to move.

"This is not about me," she said.

"Everything is about somebody," Jason said. "That is the only reason anybody does anything. You have a file on me and a speech prepared and a deal in your jacket pocket, and you drove out to a truck stop at five in the morning to deliver it personally instead of sending a junior agent, which means this one is yours. Which means Victor Kane took something from you too." He stubbed out the cigarette. "So what did he take?"

The silence that followed was the most honest thing she had done since she sat down.

Walker looked at him across the table and for one unguarded moment the professional surface was simply gone, stripped away by the directness of the question, and what was underneath it was something he recognized because he had seen it in the mirror every day for three years. The controlled burn of a person who had learned to make fuel out of something that should have destroyed them.

"My partner," she said. "Four years ago. Victor's people made it look like a car accident." Something moved across her face and was gone. "I know how that particular trick works."

The table was quiet for a moment. Outside, a trucker started his rig, the diesel engine turning over with a sound like distant thunder.

"I am sorry," Jason said, and he meant it.

Walker blinked. He suspected nobody said that to her very often in these conversations. She straightened slightly, pulling the professionalism back around her shoulders like a coat.

"The Bureau has been trying to build a case against the Iron Wolves for five years," she said, her voice back to the case file register, the personal moment folded away and filed. "Drug trafficking. Weapons running. Money laundering. Murder. We know what they are. We cannot prove it without someone on the inside." She slid the envelope across the table to his side. "Infiltrate his operation. Gather evidence. Feed us intelligence. In exchange, your federal record is expunged completely. Clean slate. A future that does not end with you bleeding out in the desert."

Jason laughed. The sound came out harsh and short, the kind of laugh that had nothing to do with anything being funny.

"A fed promising freedom," he said. "What is next, you going to tell me you are here to help?"

"I am offering you the one thing three years in federal prison could not give you." Walker leaned in again, her voice dropping to something that was no longer case file register, something lower and more direct and more real. "You want to tear Victor down? Help us do it properly. We will make sure he does not just bleed. He rots in a cell until the desert forgets his name."

Jason looked at her for a long moment. He thought about Anna's face in the prison parking lot. He thought about the photograph in his wallet that he still had not looked at directly. He thought about seventeen letters written to a dead man and a mountain road outside Las Vegas and brake lines cut clean through by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.

He thought about Dolores refilling his coffee without being asked and a woman named Dani who had asked him if he was going to be all right and the particular quality of the Nevada dark at five in the morning when the world was quiet enough to think in.

He thought about Victor Kane sleeping soundly in a bed built on Marcus De'Leon's grave.

Dolores appeared at the table with the coffee pot, refilling both mugs without comment, performing the small miracle of perfect timing that only came from thirty years of reading rooms. She disappeared again before either of them spoke.

"Let me guess," Jason said, wrapping his hands around the fresh mug. "I play rat for you, you get your headlines and your promotion, and I get a bullet in the back of my skull the moment Victor smells something off."

Walker's eyes held his without flinching. "You are already a dead man walking, De'Leon. Victor Kane does not forgive and he does not forget. The only difference is whether you die angry and useless, or whether you make it mean something."

He ate the last of his hash browns. He drank half the coffee. He let the silence do what silence did, which was reveal the shape of things.

"You think you know me," he said, setting the mug down with a quiet finality. "You read a file and you drove out here and you think that is knowing someone." His voice carried no heat. It never did when he meant it most. "I have been burned by the system before. I do not work for cops."

Walker stood, smooth and unhurried, straightening her jacket with two small precise movements. She reached into her breast pocket and produced a business card, plain white with black lettering, and set it on the table beside his mug without ceremony.

"When the bodies start dropping," she said, "and they will, remember who gave you a way out."

She turned toward the door.

Jason watched her walk across the diner, watched the straight spine and the measured step and the way she moved through the space like she owned it, and he thought about the moment when she had first found him across the room and something involuntary had moved through her before the training came back down.

He thought about what she had said about her partner.

His hand moved without any conscious instruction, the old practiced stealth of county lockup and three years of trading contraband in places where the cameras were always watching. Walker's business card disappeared into his jacket pocket between one breath and the next.

He picked up his coffee.

Outside, her taillights found the highway and shrank toward the horizon until the desert swallowed them whole, and the diner went back to the low rumble of truckers and the smell of bacon grease and the fluorescent flicker of lights that refused to die.

Jason sat in the back corner booth with his back to the wall and turned the card over in his pocket with his thumb, feeling the clean edges of it, the slight raised texture of the FBI seal printed in the corner.

In his pocket, the business card felt like a loaded gun. Dangerous, useful, and impossible to ignore.