Chapter 9: Tuco's Wrath
Tuco's anger didn't arrive like thunder. It arrived like humidity—everywhere, sticky, making breathing itself an effort. He called at strange hours and laughed like someone else was in the room egging him on. He sent different men to the same meet. He sent the same man to different places. He moved the goalposts so often the field became a maze.
Adam saw the pattern and recognized it as a prelude to something worse. You destabilize, then you strike. He braced, but bracing doesn't prevent a car crash; it merely reduces the damage.
The crash, in this case, was a kidnapping.
He pieced it together from two missed meets, one burner that rang forever, and the sudden absence of Walt's curt punctuation in text messages. Jesse had ghosted before—spun out, high, lost his phone—but Walt never vanished. He would rather text a semicolon than nothing.
Adam called a third number that should not exist. It rang twice and then a voice he didn't like hearing answered. "Who's this?"
Adam didn't give names. "You're looking for a Mr. White? I can pass a message."
"Tell him Tuco's got his time now," the voice said, and hung up.
Adam stared at the phone, then at the wall, then at the map he kept taped under the motel tablecloth like a conspiracy theorist with better handwriting. He plotted places Tuco would go—edges, voids, places where the city stopped pretending to watch itself. He couldn't race in like a hero; the story didn't allow it, and neither did physics. But he could apply pressure elsewhere.
He called Hank's tip line with a voice he used when he wanted to sound like a concerned neighbor who worked nights. He mentioned a truck, a property, some noise, the smell of volatile chemicals. He hung up and placed a second call to a man who owed him a favor from a looser border. "Your boys are getting sloppy," he said, and fed a rumor into the cartel's bloodstream that suggested Tuco had taken product without permission.
He sold guns.
Not to Tuco. To a middle layer that fancied itself cartel-adjacent and was, in fact, a cash machine with delusions of grandeur. He pushed 15 pieces through the ledger like a man sticking to his routine to stave off panic.
Sell 15 guns.
[Asset recognized: firearms, 15 units.]
[Confirm sale: $30,000?] Y/N
Y.
[Sale confirmed. Double-profit applied.]
[Proceeds: $60,000 credited.]
Balance: -$880,000
A small step toward solvency that felt like making a bed while the house burned. He did it anyway. Routines keep men sane.
He met a cartel scout in a parking lot that smelled like spilled beer and sun-baked trash. The man tried casual, tried charm, tried to corner him into acknowledging Tuco's sudden vacuum as an invitation. Adam let him talk. Then the man said, "You look like a man who'd survive a beating," and smiled too slow.
Adam stepped closer, so the man could count his pores. "I look like a man who'd make it not worth the effort," he said, voice a quiet thing. The 4x strength didn't need to be demonstrated. It broadcast in the economy of Adam's stance, in the way he didn't compensate for imagined attacks because he didn't imagine any; he planned for them, and that planning made his body simpler.
The scout nodded, saw not fear but cost, and retreated toward easier prey.
Adam went home. He stared at the ceiling. He let the anger skate fifteen laps around his skull and then put it in a jar. It would be useful later.
When the call finally came, it didn't come to him. It came to the city as a rumor that Hank had shot someone in the desert. The last piece clicked into its indifferent place. The crash had happened, and the airbags had deployed, and now there would be the awful stillness afterward where men decide what the wreck meant.
Adam took a shower that was more about noise than cleanliness. He dried off, looked at himself in the mirror, and saw a man who had chosen to be infrastructure. He nodded to that man. "Tomorrow," he said to him. "We go back to work."
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