Oscar spooky diaz's Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

Oscar Diaz counted the money at the back table of the Santos headquarters, and none of it was clean. The men called him Spooky. He never raised his voice. He didn't need to. Tonight the cash felt like a rope around his wrist. He wanted a restaurant. A small place with his name on it, where the only thing he sold was food. But every bill in his hands came from the gang. If he opened his doors with this money, he'd never really leave. He'd counted eleven thousand dollars three times. It was enough to start. It was also poison. A lease officer would ask where the money came from. So would the state. He had the food handler's license in his jacket, crisp and clean and pointless. Clean paper on dirty cash proved nothing. A stray cat slipped through the broken door. Lean, striped, watching him with green eyes. Oscar tore a piece of jerky and set it down. The cat ate fast, ready to run. Oscar understood it. You take what keeps you alive, then you look for the exit. His phone buzzed. His abuela. She never called this late. "Come," she said. "Now. Before I change my mind." He found her at her kitchen table under one bare bulb. Her hands were folded over a small cloth. She'd raised him and Cesar after their mother left. She knew what he did. She had never once pretended otherwise. "You think I don't hear you at night," she said. "Dreaming about your little kitchen." Oscar said nothing. She unfolded the cloth. Inside sat a gold wedding ring, the band worn smooth from fifty years on her finger. "Your grandfather bought this with honest work," she said. "Every dollar of it clean. Sell it. Start your place. Not with Santos money. With ours." Oscar didn't move. The ring caught the light. It was worth far less than eleven thousand. Maybe two, if a pawnbroker was kind. It would not cover a lease. "Abuela, this isn't enough." "It's the first clean dollar," she said. "You can only build on clean. The rest you earn slow. Or you stay Spooky forever." He picked up the ring. It was warm from her hands. He thought of the cat at the door, always ready to run and never leaving. He'd been that cat for years. Oscar closed his fist around the ring. "I'll sell it," he said. "But I put the Santos money back tonight. All of it." Her eyes shone. "Then you begin." He drove back to the headquarters and set the eleven thousand on the boss's desk. He walked out with two hundred dollars of his own honest pay and a gold ring in his pocket. It was almost nothing. But now every dollar he carried was his. The problem wasn't dirty money anymore. The problem was that clean money was slow, and the Santos would want to know why he'd given theirs back.