The neon buzz of Earl's Roadside Diner cut through the desert night like a tired heartbeat, casting sickly pink light across cracked asphalt and abandoned shopping carts. A few eighteen-wheelers sat parked outside like sleeping giants, their engines ticking as they cooled from the long haul across Nevada's wasteland. The smell of diesel fuel mixed with frying bacon and cigarette smoke hung in the air like a prayer nobody wanted to answer.
Jason pushed through the glass door, the bell overhead giving a weak jingle that sounded like it was dying. The interior was a time capsule from the Reagan era—cracked vinyl booths, a counter that had seen better decades, and fluorescent lights that flickered with the persistence of a dying insect. Everything was stained the color of old coffee and broken dreams.
He hadn't eaten real food in three years. Prison slop didn't count—gray meat that could have been anything, vegetables that tasted like punishment, bread that turned to paste in your mouth. Tonight, he wanted greasy eggs and black coffee. Something simple. Something that didn't taste like rust and despair.
The drive from the prison with Anna had taken four hours, mostly in silence. She'd dropped him off at the diner without a word, her knuckles white on the steering wheel as she'd watched him walk away. There'd been something in her eyes—relief, maybe, or fear. Probably both. Anna was scared of what he might do, and Jason couldn't blame her. He was scared of it too.
The waitress was a woman in her fifties with tired eyes and hands that had seen too much hard work. Her name tag read "Dolores" in faded letters, and she moved with the mechanical precision of someone who'd been pouring coffee for truckers and drifters since the Carter administration. She barely glanced at him as she poured coffee into a chipped mug that had probably held a thousand conversations about broken roads and broken lives.
"Menu's on the table, hon," she said without looking up, her voice carrying the smoker's rasp that came from thirty years of Marlboro Lights. "Kitchen closes in an hour."
Jason nodded, slid into a booth in the back corner where he could watch both the door and the kitchen, and lit a cigarette. He knew he shouldn't smoke inside—Nevada had laws about that sort of thing—but habits from the inside died hard, and no one in the diner was going to tell an ex-con with prison ink and three years of violence in his eyes to put it out. Not when he carried himself like a man who'd learned to solve problems with his fists.
The coffee was bitter as battery acid and twice as strong. Jason sipped it slowly, feeling the caffeine cut through the exhaustion that had been building since he'd walked out of federal custody. Through the window, he could see the highway stretching into darkness, lit by the occasional pair of headlights carrying someone toward or away from their problems.
He'd barely taken three sips when the bell chimed again. This time, Jason didn't look up immediately, but he felt her presence the way a rabbit feels a hawk circling overhead. Federal. The type that carried authority like a loaded weapon and knew how to use it.
She stood in the doorway for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the diner's dim lighting. Professional assessment—checking exits, counting civilians, cataloging threats. Then she spotted him, and Jason felt the weight of her attention like a sniper's scope finding its target.
She walked with a straight spine and shoes that cost more than most people's monthly rent. Her suit jacket was too crisp for this dusty pit stop, charcoal gray with sharp lines that said government salary and government power. Dark hair cut in a bob that framed a face made of sharp angles and sharper intelligence. Her eyes found him across the diner, and Jason saw the calculation there—predator recognizing predator.
She slid into the booth across from him without asking permission, moving with the confidence of someone who'd never heard the word "no" and wouldn't recognize it if she did.
"Jason De'Leon," she said. No question mark. No uncertainty. Statement of fact delivered like a judge reading a verdict.
Jason exhaled smoke and let his green eyes meet hers, taking his time with the assessment. Mid-thirties, probably a climber in the Bureau hierarchy, the kind of agent who'd stepped on necks to get where she was. Her hands were soft—desk work, not street work—but there was a hardness in her posture that said she'd seen violence up close and hadn't flinched.
"Lady, you're sitting awful close for a stranger," he said, voice carrying the gravel that came from years of talking through concrete walls and steel doors.
"Agent Walker," she replied, pulling out a leather credential case and flashing her FBI shield like a magic trick. "Federal Bureau of Investigation."
Jason smirked, the expression bitter as the coffee cooling in his mug. "Figures. What do you want, Fed?"
Walker didn't waste time with small talk or pleasantries. She reached into her jacket and placed a small manila envelope on the table between them, the paper yellowed at the edges like it had been sitting in a filing cabinet for years. She didn't push it toward him, just left it there like bait in a trap.
"You just got out," she said, her voice carrying the flat authority of someone reading from a case file. "Three years served on federal weapons charges. Illegal possession of automatic firearms with intent to distribute. That's the official story."
Her eyes flicked to the tattoos covering his forearms—crude prison ink that told the story of survival in a place where weakness meant death. Then to the scar above his left eyebrow, a souvenir from a fight in the yard that had left another man needing reconstructive surgery.
"But we both know you weren't the trigger man," Walker continued. "You took the fall for someone else. Someone in the Iron Wolves who had more to lose than a twenty-five-year-old with a clean record."
Jason sipped his coffee, keeping his face unreadable the way he'd learned to in county lockup when the prosecutors were trying to flip him. "Congratulations. You read my file. Want a cookie?"
Walker leaned forward, elbows on the table, and Jason caught a whiff of her perfume—something expensive that smelled like power and ambition. "Your father's dead. Victor Kane runs the Iron Wolves now. And if you go after him like you're planning, you'll be dead before the week is out."
Jason's jaw tightened, but he didn't give her the satisfaction of a flinch. Prison had taught him to keep his reactions locked down, to never let the enemy see what they'd hit. "You don't know what I'm planning."
"I know revenge when I see it," Walker said, her voice carrying the calm certainty of someone who'd seen this movie before and knew how it ended. "I also know a man who walks out of federal prison with nothing but a pack of cigarettes and a vendetta doesn't usually live long enough to see his next birthday."
Jason tapped ash into the plastic tray, his voice dropping to the dangerous quiet that made hardened killers step aside in the chow line. "Then maybe I don't plan on living long."
Walker's lips curved upward—not a smile, more like the expression of a poker player who'd just seen their opponent's tell. She slid the envelope closer to his side of the table, the movement deliberate and precise.
"Or you could live smart," she said. "You want Victor Kane? So do we. The Bureau's been trying to build a case against the Iron Wolves for five years. Drug trafficking, weapons running, money laundering, murder—we know they're dirty, but we can't prove it. Not without someone on the inside."
She paused, letting the words sink in like poison into an open wound.
"Infiltrate his operation. Gather evidence. Feed us intelligence. In exchange, you'll have your federal record expunged completely. Clean slate. Freedom. A future that doesn't end with you bleeding out in the desert."
Jason laughed, the sound harsh and humorless as breaking glass. "A fed promising freedom. That's rich. What's next, you going to tell me you're here to help?"
Walker's gaze didn't waver, didn't show even a flicker of uncertainty. "I'm offering you the one thing three years in federal prison couldn't give you: purpose. You want to tear Victor down? Help us do it the right way. We'll make sure he doesn't just bleed—he rots in a cell until the desert sand forgets his name."
Jason stared at her for a long moment, his cigarette burning down to the filter between his fingers. He thought about Anna's face when she'd told him Victor killed their father—the fear there, the guilt, the way she'd flinched when he'd raised his voice. He thought about the compound he'd grown up on, the men who used to call him brother now bending the knee to a traitor who'd murdered the only father figure most of them had ever known.
Dolores swung by with a plate of eggs over easy and hash browns that looked like they'd been cooked in motor oil, setting it down without a word before disappearing back behind the counter. The smell of grease and salt made Jason's stomach clench—real food, the kind that came from actual kitchens instead of industrial processors.
"Let me guess," Jason said finally, cutting into the eggs and watching the yolk run yellow across the plate. "I play rat for you, you get your headlines and your promotion, and I get a bullet in the back of my skull the second Victor smells something off."
Walker leaned in closer, her voice dropping to a razor edge that could cut steel. "You're already a dead man walking, De'Leon. Victor Kane doesn't forgive, and he doesn't forget. The only difference is whether you die angry and useless, or whether you make it mean something."
The eggs tasted like salvation—real food, real flavor, the kind of simple pleasure that prison had stolen from him. Jason chewed slowly, his eyes never leaving Walker's face, reading the micro-expressions that would tell him whether she was lying.
"You think you know me," he said around the food, his voice carrying three years of institutional cynicism. "But you don't. I've been burned by the system before. I don't work for cops."
Walker reached into her jacket again and slid a business card across the table. Plain white cardstock with black lettering—her name, a phone number, and the FBI logo that carried the weight of federal authority.
"Keep it anyway," she said, standing up with the fluid grace of someone who'd gotten what she came for. "When the bodies start dropping—and they will—remember who gave you a way out."
Jason finished his coffee in three long swallows, the bitter dregs coating his throat like liquid regret. He tossed a few crumpled bills onto the table—money Anna had given him from God knew where—and stood up. The federal agent was already halfway to the door, but she stopped when she heard his boots on the linoleum.
He towered over her, shadows stretching under the diner's buzzing neon lights. The fluorescents made everything look sickly and unreal, like they were actors in a play about the end of the world. He leaned down, close enough for her to smell the prison smoke on his breath and see the violence that lived behind his green eyes.
"I don't work for cops," he spat, the words carrying all the venom of a man who'd learned not to trust anyone with a badge.
But even as the words left his mouth, his hand moved with the practiced stealth of someone who'd learned to steal in county lockup. Walker's business card disappeared into his jacket pocket like it had never existed.
Outside, a semi horn blared as a trucker pulled back onto the highway, carrying his load toward Vegas or LA or wherever the road led. The sound faded into the desert night, leaving only the buzz of neon and the whisper of wind across sand.
Jason stood in the doorway, watching Agent Walker's taillights disappear into the darkness. In his pocket, the business card felt like a loaded gun—dangerous, useful, and impossible to ignore.