Chapter 11: Expanding the Game
Albuquerque healed from Tuco's tantrum the way desert plants heal after a storm—quietly, without announcing the new growth. The graffiti faded, not because anyone painted over it, but because attention drifted. The streets returned to their regular lies. In that lull, Adam moved.
He began his day early, because the hours before people start making mistakes are the best hours to rearrange a city. The motel's air conditioner rattled like a smoker's laugh; the carpet under his bare feet felt like a map textured with old decisions. He showered, dressed in a shirt that could pass for "respectable" in any lobby under an hour, and reviewed the ledger with eyes closed.
Balance: $200,000
Strength: 4x
Stamina: 1x
Durability: improved
Today's goal: liquidity and cover. Walt's fake recovery gave them a window to breathe; Hank's pride after the desert shooting made him louder, not slower. Loud men make patterns you can plan around.
Adam drove first to the car wash. At 8 a.m., hoses flapped like lazy snakes and the smell of detergent cut through the leftover cool. The facade wore weariness; the tiled office held the residue of a thousand quarters. He stood on the edge of the lot with coffee that tasted like its own apology and watched the flow: cars in, cars out, cash counted, no questions asked. A front in waiting.
Skyler's sedan pulled in with a squeal of brakes that sounded more stressed than mechanical. She got out with a clipboard and a mouth set to "solve," her posture as precise as the lines on the paper she held. She glanced at Adam in the way people glance at men who might be customers or might be problems and chose the former. "We're not open yet," she said, but politely.
"I'm just watching the water work," Adam said, and nodded toward the hoses. "It's soothing."
She smiled like someone trying to be kind to a man with a visible eccentricity and went inside. Walt's world would come to hide in a place like this, Adam thought, and took another sip of coffee that might as well have been hot water with a rumor of bean.
He left when the first wave of dusty sedans rolled in and crossed town toward Jesse's new neighborhood. If the duplex had smelled like sadness and neglect, the little house smelled like drywall and possibility. The yard needed attention; the porch needed paint; the bones were good.
Jesse paced the small living room like a dog who hadn't decided which corner to claim. He wore a T-shirt with a faded logo and jeans that bore the history of a thousand couches. "Yo," he said, rehearsed nonchalance cracking into a grin that belonged to a kid at Christmas. "Check it. My house."
"Our paper trail is a rumor," Adam said, stepping over a paint tray with the detachment of a man used to hovering over messes. "Ownership's in a friendly name. You make payments to a PO box I control; I common-law it later. The mortgage company never hears your voice."
Jesse nodded as if any of that made intuitive sense. "I can hang a poster anywhere," he said, eyes darting to a blank wall. "No landlord."
"No eviction," Adam said. "If you follow the rules."
Jesse threw his arms wide. "Rules, rules. I got this."
Adam looked at him and saw the wheel of Jesse's moods turning on a better axle than last month. "Good," he said, and let a sliver of warmth into his voice that Jesse, tuned as he was to any hint of disappointment, drank like water.
They loaded the trunk with small boxes: scales, plastic bins, a label-maker Jesse treated like a toy until Adam made him label the label-maker. "Yo, that's meta," Jesse said, and smiled like he'd made a joke that would last.
Labor suited Adam's new strength. He carried two crates at a time without making it obvious, controlled every motion so quietly that Jesse only noticed when he tried to help and realized he'd chosen the lighter box without knowing why. "You're like a forklift," Jesse said, admiring. "Do you eat, like, steak all day?"
"Black coffee," Adam said. "And rules."
"Boring," Jesse said, but he was smiling, and boredom smelled like safety for once.
Midday, Adam made his small rounds to small crews. He didn't go to the ones that flashed; he went to the ones that considered their own shadows. They met in backrooms that had once been used for birthday cakes and now held things that didn't celebrate anything. Adam took their small quantities, checked their weights with the speed of muscle memory, and left with bags that looked like they held flour. He said little. He wrote nothing.
Sell 8kg meth.
[Asset recognized: drugs (methamphetamine), 8 kg.]
[Confirm sale for $400,000?] Y/N
Y.
[Sale confirmed. Double-profit applied.]
[Proceeds: $800,000 credited.]
Balance: $1,000,000
Strength: 4x
The mental click soothed him the way numbers soothe engineers. He didn't whoop or pump a fist; he simply let his shoulders drop a quarter inch. A million gave him the option to buy more safety; he would wait, though. He wanted to feel the city's pulse at this new tempo before he tuned the instrument further.
That afternoon, Walt staged his return to normalcy with Skyler as audience and judge. Adam didn't intrude; he observed from his car across the street. The Whites stepped into their house like stepping onto a stage, their lines rehearsed imperfectly. Walt Jr. hovered with the energy of a boy whose loyalty far outstrips his understanding. Skyler touched Walt's arm like it was a ghost she was testing for solidity.
Adam cataloged the day's scenes as data. Routine is armor. He thought briefly about how to layer a front of "school duty" over Walt's schedule to keep Heisenberg's hours from touching Father-and-Husband's hours too directly. He texted Jesse: Don't call Walt during dinner.
Jesse sent back a string of emojis that translated to: Fine, Dad.
At dusk, when the sky moved through its blue into a bruised lilac, Adam swung by Jesse's house for one last ritual: the prank. He slipped Jesse's key ring from the coffee table while Jesse argued with a cable company representative about a fee and replaced it with a toy car key fob that chirped pleasantly when you pressed a plastic steering wheel. He left the real keys looped over the inside doorknob.
"Yo!" Jesse's annoyed yelp came a beat later. "My keys! …New ride, yo?" He looked up to see Adam's deadpan, and then he laughed, relieved. "Stop messing with me!"
"Consider it a test," Adam said. "You passed."
"Barely," Jesse said, but his smile said: Thanks for making my life feel like a joke sometimes and not just the punchline.
Adam stepped out into the cooling air. The ledger hummed behind his eyes like the sound a fridge makes that you only notice when it stops. Liquidity in place. Cover options mapped. Small crews stabilized. A house for Jesse, four walls that might keep some ghosts out and teach others to behave.
He drove into a night that felt like a friend again.
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