Chapter 4: Crossing the Line
The plate Walt carried down the basement steps shook just enough to make the fork chatter against the ceramic. The house smelled like onions and fear. Adam stood in the doorway of the kitchen and did not go down. He stared at the wall where a family calendar tutted quietly about appointments and homework due. The banal list of obligations next to the reality beneath the floor made a kind of sick symmetry.
He slipped a burner into Walt's jacket pocket without looking, a motion practiced on pickpockets and friends alike. "In case your phone becomes a problem," he murmured as Walt passed on his way up again, face hollow.
Walt flinched like the kindness cut. He opened his mouth like he might say thank you or tell Adam to leave. Then he closed it, swallowed, and nodded once, eyes elsewhere. A moment later, the basement door hissed shut and left the house to breathe wrong.
"Skyler's going to notice," Adam said, to the room.
Skyler was already noticing a dozen things at once. She watched the kitchen like it had acquired a fox. "Who are you?" she asked, words a knife's careful edge.
"Consultant," Adam said with a smile so bland it squeaked.
She didn't buy it, but she also had a baby to grow and a husband unraveling in algorithmic increments. She filed him under "trouble later," and Adam read it happen.
He left. He had other errands, and one of them involved intimidation. The gun dealer in question ran his business out of a garage where the oil stains were older than the tools. His beard was the color of chain grease; his knuckles were scarred the way some men's knuckles tell stories they wish they'd never had to learn.
"I don't do bulk," the man said. "I do 'what's in the drawer.'"
"You do five," Adam said. "Today."
The man bristled. "Says who?"
"Me," Adam said, and stepped closer. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. The new line of strength ran through him like an underline. He reached past the man, plucked a wrench off the pegboard, and bent it just enough that the squeal of metal spoke a language all mammals understand.
The man's eyes widened. Adam set the wrench back on the hook with a neat click. "Five," he repeated.
"Fine," the man said, sullen as a kid told to clean his room. "Cash."
"Of course," Adam said. He didn't grin until he was back in the car, because theatrics are best savored in private.
He sold them the same afternoon.
Sell 2kg meth. Sell 5 guns.
[Assets recognized: drugs (methamphetamine), 2 kg; firearms, 5 units.]
[Confirm sale: $100,000 (meth) + $10,000 (guns)?] Y/N
Y.
[Sale confirmed. Double-profit applied.]
[Proceeds: $200,000 + $20,000 credited.]
Balance: -$180,000
Getting closer to air again. He rolled his shoulder, aware of the way his body now absorbed strain like a hall that had been properly braced. The ledger ticked over and he let the rush pass without letting it change his expression. The world didn't need to know when you had money.
Back at Jesse's, he found the kid collapsing into the couch like it might catch him. "Here," Adam said, handing him a paper cup. "Drink up, champ."
Jesse gulped, grimaced. "Why am I so tired?" he asked twenty minutes later, as if the question existed in a fishbowl three seconds behind his thoughts.
"Because you never sleep," Adam said, deadpan. He didn't mention the decaf swap. Some pranks existed as gentle kindness, a pause button pressed for a friend who didn't know where it was.
The news murmured from the TV, and kept murmuring when the screen cut to a commercial for a hardware store. Jesse's eyelids drooped. Adam sat in the chair and watched the light tick down the blinds and up the walls. He thought about the basement across town and the quiet mechanics of a murder that would turn a man from one thing into another.
When his phone buzzed, it was a simple message from Walt's number, as if a part of him had refused to use the burner despite everything: We need to talk.
Adam stared at the words and felt the shape of the day click into place. He texted back: Tomorrow. Clean up. Then rest.
Skyler's suspicion grew teeth while the city's lights came on. Adam saw her at the grocery store by accident, picking up pre-natal vitamins and staring at the expiration date like she could check the date on her marriage in the same breath. He passed her in the aisle and nodded; she glanced at his face, filed a sharper note. He didn't mind. She kept Walt honest by accident, and he would use that gravity to steer.
He went home to his motel and wrote three drop points on a pad he would burn later. He placed a burner next to each line like a bead on an abacus. The ledger hummed in his bones.
Balance: -$180,000
Strength: 2x
Stamina: 1x
Durability: minor boost
He slept, and somewhere, a plate shattered on a basement floor like a cosmology coming apart.