Chapter 7 THE KEYS

POV:  Jason De'Leon

Anna's apartment was on the second floor of a building that had been optimistic once, back when the developer had put the stucco up and painted it a color that might have been called terracotta in the brochure and had since faded to something closer to the memory of a color. The parking lot was cracked and patched and cracked again, and a rusted gate at the bottom of the exterior staircase hung open on one hinge, propped against the railing like a drunk leaning on a friend.

Jason took the stairs slow, not from fatigue but from habit. You did not rush stairs in the joint. You moved through choke points with deliberate calm because a man who moved fast through choke points was a man who was either running from something or toward it, and either way he was advertising himself.

He knocked twice.

The pause before the door opened was long enough to tell him she had checked the peephole, then stood with her hand on the knob deciding something. When the door finally swung inward Anna was already turned away from it, walking back toward the kitchen, which was her version of an invitation.

The apartment was small and clean with the particular order of someone who did not have much and took meticulous care of what they had. A couch with a blanket folded over the arm. A small table with two chairs, one pushed in flush and one pulled out at an angle, the one she had been sitting in when he knocked. A mug of coffee going cold on the table next to a phone that was face down.

Jason closed the door behind him and stood in the small living room and looked at the space his sister had been living in for three years while he was in a cage and their father was in the ground.

It was clean and it was careful and it was the apartment of a woman who had learned to take up as little space as possible.

Something cold and hard settled in his chest.

Anna stood at the kitchen counter with her back to him, both hands flat on the surface, not doing anything, just standing there with her shoulders carrying the weight of whatever she had been thinking about while he walked back from the diner. She was still in the same clothes from the night before. He was not sure she had slept.

"There is coffee," she said.

"I am good."

The silence that followed was not comfortable and neither of them pretended it was. This was the silence that had been building since the prison parking lot, since the name Victor and the admission that the brake lines were cut and the three years of letters written to a dead man. They had driven four hours in a version of it, slept on opposite ends of it, and now it was here in the apartment with them taking up the space that conversation would have occupied if either of them had known how to have the conversation that needed to be had.

Jason looked at the back of his sister's head. The tight ponytail. The set of her shoulders.

"Anna."

"Don't," she said. Still not turning around.

"I am not going to argue with you."

"I know you are not." Her voice was very flat. "That is the problem. If you were going to argue with me I could argue back and maybe one of us would say something that changed something. But you are not going to argue. You are going to stand there and be completely decided and nothing I say is going to matter at all."

Jason said nothing.

Anna turned around. Her eyes were dry and her jaw was set and she looked at him the way she had looked at him across prison visiting room tables, with the particular expression of a woman who had spent three years preparing herself for exactly this moment and had discovered that preparation did not actually help.

"It is too soon," she said. "You walked out yesterday. You do not know what he has built out there. You do not know who is loyal to him and who is scared of him and which of those two things is going to get you killed faster. You do not know the layout of what he has changed. You do not know his schedule or his security or what kind of people the cartel sent to keep an eye on their investment." She stopped. Drew a breath. "You do not know enough yet."

Jason looked at her for a long moment.

"You are right," he said.

Something shifted in Anna's face, a flicker of surprised relief that died when he kept talking.

"I do not know enough yet," he said. "So I am going to go find out."

The relief left her face completely. What replaced it was not anger. It was something quieter and more exhausted than anger, the expression of a woman who had known exactly how this sentence was going to end and had asked the question anyway because she had needed to hear it out loud.

She reached into the pocket of her jeans and held out the keys.

She did not say anything when she held them out. She did not make a speech about being careful or coming back or what it would do to her if something happened to him. She just held the keys in the space between them with her arm perfectly steady and her eyes on his face.

Jason crossed the room and took them.

His fingers closed around the worn metal and he felt the weight of them, not heavy, a key and a fob and a small metal tag stamped with the Iron Wolves insignia that his father had carried on every set of keys he had ever owned. The tag was warm from Anna's pocket.

He looked down at it in his palm.

Anna had already turned back to the kitchen counter. Both hands flat on the surface again. Shoulders up near her ears.

"The garage is around the back," she said. "Blue door. Third bay."

He started toward the front door.

"Jason."

He stopped. Did not turn.

"He has people who will call him the second you come through that gate," she said. "He will know you are coming before you get there."

"Good," Jason said.

He closed the door behind him, and the sound of it was very quiet and very final, and he stood on the exterior landing for a moment in the early morning heat with his father's keys in his fist and the desert spreading out beyond the parking lot in every direction, flat and pale and enormous and utterly indifferent to whatever was about to happen next.

Then he went down the stairs.