Chapter 10: Escape from Tuco
Jesse would never forget the feel of the desert getting inside his mouth. It was like the air itself had grit, like the wind had teeth. Later, when the adrenaline metabolized into tremors, he would try to tell Adam what it sounded like when a man as loud as Tuco went quiet forever. The words would fail. Adam would not need them.
For now, Jesse sat in the passenger seat of Adam's car and shook like a machine with a loose screw. His lip was split again; his knuckles looked like he'd been boxing gravel. He held his hands out, studied them like they were extraordinary. "He's dead," he said, disbelief making the present tense a question. "Tuco's, like…he's dead-dead."
"Yeah," Adam said. He kept his eyes on the road, gave the kind of attention to lane changes men give when the thing they're really focused on would overwhelm them if they let it. "Hank shot him."
"Mr. White," Jesse said, voice breaking in two places at once. "He, like…faked—he's—we told this story and I think I lived it, man."
"You did," Adam said. "You're alive."
Jesse barked a laugh that didn't find joy. "For now."
They drove with the windows cracked, letting New Mexico try to blow the smell of fear out of the car. Adam's hands were steady on the wheel. In his head, the ledger clicked loudly. Chaos is a market condition. He sold into it.
Sell 10kg meth; Sell 20 guns.
[Assets recognized: drugs (methamphetamine), 10 kg; firearms, 20 units.]
[Confirm sale: $500,000 (meth) + $40,000 (guns)?] Y/N
Y.
[Sale confirmed. Double-profit applied.]
[Proceeds: $1,000,000 + $80,000 credited.]
Balance: $200,000
Strength: 4x
Liquidity again. Oxygen. Choices.
He parked outside a shabby apartment complex where paint peeled in the pattern of old maps. Jane stood in a doorway two floors up, black hair like an ink spill, eyes the color of worry. Jesse looked up and swallowed. Something in him arranged itself around that look the way iron filings line up under a magnet.
"Go," Adam said.
"What?" Jesse blinked, as if the world were too surprising to parse simple words.
"Go," Adam repeated. "Tell her you're okay. Then sleep. We'll talk tomorrow."
Jesse nodded three times too fast, opened the door, and nearly tripped getting out. He turned back at the last second, reached in, and gripped Adam's shoulder with a hand that forgot how to be cool. "Thanks," he said, and then added, because he had learned how to hedge sincerity with slang, "yo."
Adam watched him run. He watched Jane's hand close on Jesse's wrist and pull him inside. He let himself catalog the moment and then put it in the same jar as his anger: a thing to use, not drown in.
Hospitals have good coffee only if you grade on a curve. Adam walked into Walt's room with a bouquet of flowers so obviously fake they should have squeaked. "Get well, Heisenberg!" the attached card announced in a swirly font that had seen too many baby showers. Walt glared at the blooms like they were a math error. Skyler glared at Adam like he was a contagion.
"Not funny," Walt said, but the corner of his mouth tried to be.
Adam set the flowers on the windowsill; the suction cup on the vase squealed. "You're alive," he said, a statement more generous than "You didn't die doing something suicidal."
Walt didn't thank him. He rarely thanked anyone. He did look at Adam for a beat longer than polite. "We're fine," he said, which was a lie several layers thick and also a message: Do not ask me to confess.
Adam nodded. "I'll handle the outside. You handle the inside."
Skyler watched the exchange like a scientist observing two cells react. "Who are you?" she asked, brittle.
"A consultant," Adam said. He saw the way the word landed and didn't correct it. She would think whatever she needed to think to keep her world arranged into shapes that let her sleep.
He left the room to the family's choreography and stepped into a hallway that buzzed like a hive. Hank rolled past at high speed, a man repackaging trauma as a story he could live with by saying it many times. He spotted Adam and paused like a compass losing its true north for a second near a magnet.
"Hey," Hank said, faux-friendly. "You a friend of Walt's?"
"Work at the school," Adam lied. "Chemistry department."
Hank's eyes flicked down Adam's clothes and back up. "You guys down there exploding anything I should know about?"
"Only on paper," Adam said. They chuckled like men on either side of a thin line being polite.
Back on the street, Adam leaned against the building and watched a man smoke a cigarette like it was a sacrament. He considered the market again. Tuco's death created a vacuum; vacuums suck in debris and ambition. He would need to keep Walt and Jesse away from both. He would need to define their corner before someone else did.
He called three crews and ended two of those relationships with a quiet "we're done" that meant "I do not want the heat you carry." He kept one, the one that didn't brag, whose leader counted cash with a care that suggested he counted calories too. He sold them a smaller allotment and watched the way their eyes did not light up too much. Good. Understated greed is safer.
He drove by Jesse's place at dusk, not to check up but to confirm the light in the window existed. It did. He drove on.
At home, he sat on the bed and opened the ledger one more time.
Balance: $200,000
Strength: 4x
Stamina: 1x
Durability: improved
He considered Stamina 2x. He considered patience. He chose patience. Walt's fugue would create breathing room. Hank's attention on Tuco would create the illusion of solved problems. Illusions are useful.
He lay back. The ceiling pattern looked like a map again, but this time, the roads lined up. He let his eyes close.
The last thing he thought before sleep took him was not a plan but a promise: Keep them alive. Build the lab. Don't let pride write the checks this time—let the ledger.
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