Chapter 5: The Salamanca Snarl
The frantic, breathless call from Nacho Varga came through the burner phone like a knife's edge slicing through the midday quiet of Albuquerque. The city was under a bruised, heavy sky, the kind of weather that promised a downpour but delivered only a muggy, suffocating tension. Tim was sitting in the dingy, sun-faded interior of a fast-food joint, nursing a lukewarm soda, when the phone buzzed against the greasy plastic of the tabletop.
"It went bad," Nacho's voice was a tight, desperate rasp, barely audible over the static. "Real bad. I told them not to... a mess, man. A real mess."
Tim's cop instincts, the ones he thought were a million miles away, snapped back to attention. His spine straightened, his hand clenching around the styrofoam cup. He could hear the controlled panic in Nacho's voice, the sound of a man who lived on the edge finally losing his footing. "Where? Give me the location, now."
Nacho rattled off an address—a desolate, industrial part of town, all abandoned warehouses and forgotten overpasses. "Cops are on their way. You gotta be a phantom, man. Make it disappear."
Tim's stomach twisted. He'd barely made a dent in his debt, and the thought of it rising again, of the cold, impersonal system punishing him for something he didn't even cause, was a new kind of terror. He didn't waste time. He tossed the burner phone into a trash can full of crumpled wrappers and empty cups, the mundane act feeling like a silent promise to the old life he was trying to outrun. He ran to his beat-up car, a rusty, unidentifiable sedan the System had procured for him, the engine groaning to life with a sound like a dying animal, and sped toward the coordinates Nacho had given him.
The location was even worse than he'd imagined. A hulking concrete overpass, its supports scrawled with faded graffiti tags, loomed over a long-forgotten service road. The air was thick with the metallic tang of blood and the bitter, acrid scent of gunpowder. The overpass was a tomb of twisted metal and shattered glass, the aftermath of a violent, messy shootout. A couple of dark figures lay still on the asphalt, too still. The silence was unnerving, broken only by the distant, wailing promise of sirens, a sound that, for Tim, had always meant help was on the way. Now it meant the exact opposite.
He pulled up, his heart hammering against his ribs, and activated the [CLEAN-UP KIT] ability. He expected the usual cold, clinical confirmation from the System, the promise of a flawless, efficient cleanup. Instead, the System's voice was a flat, robotic murmur, the voice of a machine in its death throes.
"What?" What do you mean, manual override? You're the one that's supposed to do the work! The frustration was a hot, desperate wave. The System, his one-and-only lifeline in this new, terrifying world, had just severed itself. He was on his own. The irony was so bitter it almost made him laugh. His entire life had been about following rules, and now, when the stakes were life and death, the rules had been taken away.
I have to improvise.
He didn't have the luxury of panic. The sirens were getting closer, their wail a low, insistent hum in the distance. He fell back on his old police training, a lifetime of observing, of documenting, of cleaning up messes in a completely different way. He had to think like a criminal. He saw a spilled container of gasoline near a wrecked car—a sloppy attempt at a cover-up. He grabbed it, ignoring the way his hands trembled. He saw a pile of discarded clothes, soaked in blood. He stuffed them into the gas tank of the car. He created a diversion, a small fire, a smoky, attention-grabbing spectacle that would draw the first responders' eyes to one area and away from the evidence he couldn't move.
He worked with a desperate, frantic energy, the sun beating down on him with a merciless ferocity. He tossed a few spent shell casings into a storm drain, their tiny metallic clatter a loud report in the silence. He kicked a bloody piece of clothing under a pile of rubble. He was a phantom, moving through the carnage, erasing the evidence of the violent past.
As he was about to get back in his car, a familiar face appeared from behind a concrete pillar. It was a man, a weary, older version of a colleague he'd worked with back home. The man's face, etched with lines of fatigue and disillusionment, was instantly recognizable. Hank Schrader, DEA.
This can't be happening. The world felt like it was shrinking, the vast, empty desert of New Mexico suddenly feeling like a prison. He wasn't a phantom in a new world anymore. He was a phantom in the real world, and his past was catching up to him. Hank was looking not at Tim, but at the scene, a grim, weary expression on his face. He was an officer, a man who believed in a different kind of justice, and Tim knew with a chilling certainty that their worlds, his old one and his new one, were about to collide.
He had to get out. He couldn't be seen. He moved with a speed he didn't know he had, slipping away from the scene, his movements as quiet and unnoticed as a shadow. As the first sirens wailed, he was already miles away, the cold sweat on his brow a silent confirmation that his life was no longer about rules and regulations, but about survival and improvisation. The System's silent, ominous presence in his mind felt less like a lifeline and more like a ticking time bomb.
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