Pt. 2
Jamie Riley

Once they were done, Tino took the shower first. Jamie followed soon after and by the time he was toweling off and pulling his clothes back on, Tino was already dressed and sitting on one of the beds, waiting for him.

“You done with your power trip?”

“Power trip?”

“Fine,” Tino said. “Motivational speech.”

The sex never existed outside the act itself. When it was over, they always put the whole thing away like a tool. Wipe it down and close the drawer until next time. So Tino naming it now struck a nerve. Jamie almost ignored it, but curiosity cut through. Was Tino testing him? Asking to be seen? Or just seeing if Jamie would flinch?

He reached into his jacket draped over the chair and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He thumbed one loose and held it out for Tino to take it. The lighter clicked when Jamie lit it for him, flame catching on the first try. He slid the pack back into his pocket without taking one for himself.

“If it got you wherever you need to be, call it whatever you want.”

He glanced at the cigarette as Tino worked through it, drag after drag.

“Are you high?” he asked finally. His tone was stripped of accusation.

Tino’s mouth twitched like he might lie out of habit, then he didn’t. “A little. Not fucked up though.”

“I’m not running you if you’re half-conscious.”

“I ain’t.”

Jamie studied him, and then decided to believe him. “Good. We need to head out.”

“Yeah?” Tino grinned, but his eyes stayed flat. “Don’t wanna take a walk down Depression Street? Say hi to your dad, or Marco, or Joey’s ghost?”

Jamie reached for his jacket again. “I'll pass. Don’t need to be here longer than we have to.”

He felt better by the time they got back into the car. Not because the place itself suddenly offered anything good but because with Tino beside him, he wasn't alone in it. Shared ground meant shared history, and though Jamie couldn’t picture many good memories rising in Tino’s mind, he wanted to believe some still did. Not the apartment. Not the people in it or what they’d done to him. He wanted to think that as recognition moved across Tino’s face in quiet flashes as they drove, he remembered the rooftops where they’d stayed until dawn with Joey and Nils, passing joints and watching the city bleed from black to blue. That when his gaze followed a row of buildings until they were out of sight, the memory resurfacing was of corner stores they’d knocked over with Karim, cash gone before the night was. Or the blur of music and sweat at Ren’s parties where the air felt too thick to breathe. Even juvie, where they first crossed paths with Remy and Thiago. Faces and names scattered now, some in the ground, some chasing highs on the same streets they once ran, and only a handful who’d slipped free.

Watching Tino, Jamie took some small, hard comfort in knowing they were moving through the same map.

It was past midnight when Jamie pulled into the far corner of a 24-hour convenience lot and let the engine idle. He’d stopped to get organized, not for a single job, but for Redham Vale as a whole. The work had to start wide. First came the map in quarters: Halston, Allwick Crescent, the retail belt along the avenue, and the river blocks where estates pressed against warehouses. Each zone needed entries and exits, its own rules. Primary corridors for speed, secondary cut-throughs for discretion, and no-go pockets where one stalled car could box them in. Choke points, cul-de-sacs. Everything went on the list.

Timing was next. Passes at school let-out, bar close, first shift, last bus. Different crowds meant different cover. They’d have to track patrol cycles, log ANPR cameras, note CCTV stacking corners, misaligned motion lights. Match days, market days, roadworks, bin runs at 04:00, anything that changed the flow.

They needed infrastructure too. Neutral places to pause, laundromats, late cafés, self-serve car washes, a storage unit with no attendant. Stash options above ground, roof voids, stairwell cabinets, pallet stacks, one deep drop only they used. A loading dock with a blind corner could be a handoff, a shop owner who never looked away meant shifting a block over. No arguments with locals, no new stories to remember.

Redham Vale wouldn’t be won in one pass. It would be layered, the kind of slow build that didn’t make headlines and didn’t leave footprints. With Tino seeing the same corners he did, the plan felt like something they could lift in quiet increments.

They stayed put for a minute to line up the first passes. The windows were down, smoke pulled thin by the night air, ash tapping off into the breeze. Street noise came in pieces, distant bass from a bar, a scooter whining somewhere. Jamie talked through the order while Tino watched the mirrors and flicked his ash out over the door.

That was when she stepped out of the shadow line and angled toward the passenger side, thin elbows resting on the edge of the open window as she leaned in enough to catch the smoke and their eyes at the same time.

“You boys waiting on someone or you want a warm seat?”  

The first thing Jamie recognized was her voice. English pulled through the shape of Spanish, consonants brushing past each other, vowels warm and round, swaying as if the words were half-sung. Then the eyes, bright and empty in the same breath. Recognition pulled whole rooms back into his head; kitchen lights at the wrong hour, a bottle pressed into a nine-year-old’s hand with a laugh that said, go on, be fun. Her, spinning in a faded dress to a song only she could hear. The same voice, frayed and mean, as she yelled at them to get the fuck out now. The bedroom door open, her lying there, shouting and crying, like sound alone could split the ceiling. The way the apartment smelled when she finally came back after she’d vanished for days.

Up close it was almost impossible to separate her from what the years had carved into her. Skin pulled tight over bone, cheeks hollowed, arms thin enough to snap. But beneath it, if you held your stare long enough, Jamie saw the familiar angles he knew from another face. In the slant of her nose, the exact shape of her mouth when it curled. Strip away the wreckage, the years of powder and pipe, and you could see the boy underneath her face, the son she’d spit out and left behind. It was worse, Jamie thought, that the resemblance needed no imagination. It hadn’t been erased by time or by the drugs; it was still intact, just buried under the weight of decay. 

The words to tell her to step back from the car stuck somewhere behind his teeth. His gaze slid to Tino, and the sight knocked the air out of him. 

Panic had come fast and absolute, not the functional kind Jamie knew Tino was used to, but the kind that left no instructions. Tino looked smaller. Not physically, he still sat there, long limbs folded into the passenger seat, but as if something had peeled ten years away from him in an instant. His shoulders were caved, his spine pressed hard into the seatback, as though distance could be carved out of inches. A cigarette lay on the floor by his feet dropped, a thin wisp of smoke curling upward like it was afraid to rise. His eyes were wide, fixed on her, and there was a kind of fear in them Jamie had never seen before, not in alleys, not under gun barrels, not even in the middle of jobs gone bad. He was stripped of fight, and Jamie knew it wasn’t the fear of what she might do, but the fear of what she’d already done. Resurfacing all at once, uninvited, in the space between a heartbeat. Jamie could feel it spilling into the car.

He found his voice the way you find a light switch in the dark. “Get off the car.” 

She smiled like the request amused her, fingers flattening on the door as if testing its skin. “Relax, papi. I’m not scratching your toy.” She clicked her tongue in a disturbingly familiar way and pushed away from the window with her palm. She started to drift back to the curb. 

The ember from Tino’s dropped cigarette had burned a black kiss into the floor mat and gone out. 

“Tino. Hey.” 

No answer. Tino’s breath stayed high and small, eyes fixed where she’d been, like he was bracing for impact that never arrived. Jamie said his name again, softer. “Tino. We’re in the car. It’s just us. Look at me.”

It was like talking through a wall. His words went in and came back thinner. Tino’s hands were open on his thighs, fingers pale at the tips, and for a moment Jamie had the useless impulse to cover them, to weigh them down. He counted Tino’s breaths instead, each one winding his panic tighter. 

He tried once more, careful with the words, as if gentler syllables might thread the needle where force could not. “Hey, it's alright.”

The door latch clicked and the night rushed in where Tino's silence had been. He was out of the car before Jamie could find the next line. A dozen outcomes Jamie knew how to navigate, tears, a fight, a scream, stood ready in him, and none of them matched what happened.

He followed, boots hitting the asphalt, and he opened his mouth to say Tino’s name but stopped, because the posture told him first. The right shoulder set, the elbow locked, the hand extended. Jamie didn’t need to see metal to know what was there, the geometry of it was enough, a line drawn straight out from a body that had run out of softer choices. Whatever room Tino had fallen into, the gun was the door he’d chosen to mark.

Shock came quiet. Every old lesson stacked in the space where his voice should be. Don’t crowd. Don’t grab. Don’t startle the hand that’s already decided. 

Jamie wasn’t trying to protect her, but they were exposed, open sightlines, no car between them and anyone who wanted a piece. If she was working a corner, someone was taking a cut, and men who take cuts don’t stand far. A shout turns into three more bodies, a scuffle turns into a siren, and then it’s statements, cameras, names he can’t unsay. It wasn’t worth it. Not for her. 

“Anthony!” Jamie used his full voice, with the tone that Tino had always responded to. 

He knew the ground they stood on, knew that Tino trusted his judgment in ways he never trusted anyone else’s. He’d always had the power to still Tino’s impulse, to redirect it before it burned them both. That was what made them great together, Vic had said once, despite never having liked Tino. Vic saw Tino as fearless, and that part was true. Vic liked that Tino didn’t ask questions when told to move. But in the same breath, Vic dismissed him as stupid, too quick to act without thinking. Jamie never bought that. Impulsive, yes, but not stupid. Tino was sharp in his own way, in the places Vic never bothered to look. Jamie knew the value of that kind of mind.

He could cross that distance, stretch out his arm and lay a hand on Tino’s shoulder, find the thread and pull him back.

“Antho—” Jamie began again, but his voice was swallowed by the sudden, tearing crack of gunfire, and his hand went still mid-reach. 

One. Two. Three. Four. 

Her body jolted once, twice, then folded, knees buckling first, the rest following until she was just a dark figure against the pale slab of concrete.

The sound went on ringing, but the moment was already over, finished without him. His mouth was open on the syllable he hadn’t finished, the one that was supposed to stop this, and the knowledge that he hadn’t—couldn’t—struck with a finality that froze him where he stood.

His eyes stayed on the outline of her on the pavement, as if staring might undo the last five seconds. But Tino’s mother lay completely still as the air between them filled with the raw metal scent of gunpowder.