CHAPTER 7

"I said WHO gave you permission to fix that machine?!"

Mr. Briggs exploded, standing in the middle of the yard with his face the color of an overripe tomato,

Leo straightened up slowly from the machine and turned around. "It was jammed. It's been jammed for three days. I fixed it."

"I did NOT ask you if it was jammed boy! I asked who gave you PERMISSION!"

"Nobody," Leo said calmly. "I did it because it needed to be done."

"Oh you did it because it needed to be done," Briggs repeated, his voice dropping into that dangerous mock-pleasant register that meant he was about to say something designed to draw blood. He took a step closer. "You think this is YOUR yard? You think because you can fiddle with a machine you have the right to touch things without being told to?"

Leo held his gaze steadily. "The machine wasn't working. Now it is. That's good for the yard."

"What's good for THIS yard is what I DECIDE is good for it!" Briggs jabbed a thick finger in Leo's direction. "You work when I tell you to work. You fix what I tell you to fix. You breathe when I tell you to breathe. Are we clear?"

The yard was completely silent now. Every worker had stopped. Some were looking. Most were looking away, the particular practiced art of people who have learned that witnessing something like this too directly makes you part of it.

Leo looked at Briggs for a long moment.

"Are we CLEAR?" Briggs said again. Louder this time. The kind of loud that wanted an audience.

"Yes," Leo said quietly. "We're clear."

Briggs held his stare for another second, searching for something in Leo's face. Defiance maybe. Anger. Something he could use. He found nothing. Leo's face gave him absolutely nothing.

He snorted and walked away.

Junior appeared at Leo's side thirty seconds later with the expression of a man who has bitten his tongue so hard it should be bleeding. "One day," he said through his teeth.

"You say that every time," Leo said and picked up his tools.

"Because every time I mean it more than the last time."

Leo almost smiled. But underneath the stillness of his face something was burning quietly, not at Briggs specifically, not anymore. Briggs was just the latest in a very long line of people who had stood in front of Leo and used whatever power they had to remind him of his place. He had stopped being surprised by it years ago. What burned was something older and deeper than surprise.

It was the knowledge that this, THIS, was not where his story ended, it could not just be.

It was a Saturday and Leo was at the yard because Saturdays were double shifts when Briggs allowed it and Leo needed every cent he could collect before the next term's fees came due. He had been at it since six in the morning and by two in the afternoon his back was telling him a story he didn't want to hear.

He was taking a five minute break at the water tap when he heard footsteps on the gravel behind him and turned around and stopped.

It was Elena was standing at the yard gate.

Not in a Mercedes this time. She had walked, her hair down, wearing jeans and a simple light blue top, carrying a small bag over one shoulder. She looked completely different from how she looked in school uniform and yet completely the same in the way that mattered, that openness in her face, that absence of pretense.

She saw him and raised her hand in a small wave.

Leo walked to the gate slowly. "Elena” he said with a face full of surprise, “what are you doing here?”

"Hi." She looked slightly uncertain, not in an anxious way but in the way of someone who has done something and is now seeing how it lands. "I know this is, I know you're working. I was nearby and I…" She stopped and smiled a little. Started again more honestly. "That's not true. I wasn't nearby. I looked up where Hartwell Supplies was and I remembered you said you worked two streets from there and I…"

"You came here on purpose," Leo said.

"Yes," she admitted. "I came here on purpose."

He looked at her through the gate bars. "Why?"

She reached into her bag and pulled something out. She held it up. It was a book, thick, dark green cover, gold lettering. Advanced Business Strategy and Market Development. Leo's eyes went to it immediately before he could stop himself, the title alone reaching into some part of his brain and grabbing it.

"My dad had two copies," Elena said. "He won't miss one. I thought…" She looked at him carefully. "I thought you might want it. Based on what you were writing in your notebook."

Leo looked at the book. Then at her. Something was moving in his chest that he was actively trying to keep from showing on his face.

"Elena…"

"It's just a book Leo. You don't have to make it into something complicated."

He pushed the gate open slightly and she passed it through the gap. His fingers touched the cover and something about holding it, the weight of it, the realness of it, hit him somewhere quiet and deep. He had seen this exact book at the library. Had sat with it for two hours one afternoon and then had to leave it there because you couldn't take reference books home.

"Thank you," he said. And he meant it in a way that went several layers deeper than the two words could carry.

She smiled. "Don't thank me. Just read it."

He nodded. Then, because he was Leo and Leo noticed everything, he noticed the way she was standing. Like she had more to say but wasn't sure if she should say it.

"What," he said.

"What do you mean what?"

"You have something else to say."

She looked at him with slight surprise, caught by the accuracy of it. Then she sighed. "Elvano knows we've been talking."

Leo was very still. "How?"

"He has people everywhere in that school. Someone told him we sat together at the east wall bench on Thursday." She met his eyes directly. "He came to me yesterday after school. He was, calm about it. Which was honestly more unsettling than if he had been angry." She paused. "He told me you were not who I thought you were. That I should ask around about you before getting too close."

Leo felt something cold and specific move through him. "What did you say?"

"I told him who I spent time with was my own business and nobody else's." She said it simply, without drama, like it was just the obvious response to an obvious overreach. "He didn't like that."

"No," Leo said. "He wouldn't."

She looked at him carefully. "Leo, is there something I should know? About you and Elvano? Because the way he spoke about you, it wasn't like someone who is just jealous. It was more personal than that."

Leo looked at her steadily. The newspaper clipping sat in his pocket exactly where it always sat. Route 9. The second vehicle. The investigation that had been ongoing for twelve years without a conclusion.

Richard Reyes on the fourteenth floor saying we have a problem.

He didn't know enough yet. He had pieces but not a picture and until he had a picture he couldn't say anything to anyone, not even Damon. Not even Elena. Because the moment he said it out loud it became something he couldn't take back.

"There's nothing to know," he said. "He just doesn't like that I'm in his school."

Elena studied his face for a moment with eyes that were sharper than her gentle manner suggested. She didn't fully believe him, he could see that. She was smart enough to feel the shape of the thing he wasn't saying even if she couldn't see the thing itself.

But she let it go.

"Okay," she said softly. "Just, be careful yeah?"

"I'm always careful," Leo said.

She looked at him for one more second. Then that smile again, warm, unguarded, completely unconscious of what it did to the air around it. "Read the book," she said. "Chapter nine is insane."

She turned and walked back down the road.

Leo stood at the gate and watched her go with the book in his hands and something in his chest that he was running out of walls to contain.

He heard Junior before he saw him.

"Don't even say it," Leo said without turning around.

"I wasn't going to say anything," Junior said.

"Good."

"I was just going to mention that she walked all the way here on purpose to bring you a book and is now walking all the way back and the smile on your face right now is the first real smile I have seen on you in the entire time I have known you."

Leo walked back into the yard.

"And THAT," Junior called after him, "is all I was going to say."

He read four chapters of the book that night at his small table under his single bulb. It was even better than he had expected, dense with real world strategy models and case studies of businesses that had started from nothing and become something extraordinary. He read with his notebook open beside him, writing as he went, pulling out the ideas that connected with things he had already been thinking about and building on them in ways that the book itself hadn't considered.

He was on the fifth chapter when he heard something outside his window.

He stopped writing. The building was never completely silent at night, there was always some noise from other floors, from the street below. But this was different. This was the specific sound of something that didn't belong, a deliberate sound trying to sound accidental. Leo got up slowly and moved to the window, he looked down at the street three floors below.

It was dark. The streetlight on Caldwell Street had been broken for two weeks. He stared at the darkness for a moment, eyes adjusting.

Then he saw it.

The black car.

Parked directly outside his building. Same car. Same tinted windows. Same stillness that wasn't really stillness, the particular quality of something that is watching while pretending to simply be there.

Leo stared at it for a long time.

Then the window on the driver's side came down, slowly, just an inch. Just enough for whoever was inside to see him more clearly at the window.

Leo didn't move. Didn't step back. He stood at his window and looked directly at the car and let whoever was inside know that he saw them. That he had always seen them. That being watched was not the same thing as being afraid.

After a moment the window went back up but the car stayed.

Leo went back to his table and picked up his pen, but his hand stayed still on the page.

And the question that had been living in the back of his mind since the first day he had noticed the black car on Delaney Road was louder now than it had ever been before,

Who are you?

And what do you know about Route 9?