Chương 65: Muamar Reyes II

He was shorter than Santi had expected. Maybe five-foot-eight, with a stocky and compact build, dressed in a purple synth-leather jacket. His hair was cut in a deliberate bowl cut that sat on his head like a bad decision he had made with zero regerts, and his face carried a weathered and sharp-eyed expression.

AN: (Yes, that was intentional, and before y'all pull out y'all's pitchforks, I know he doesn't have a bowl cut in the game, but this is Pre-Fixer Muamar Reyes) Santi raised an eyebrow, thinking to himself,'The bowl cut was certainly a choice.' The man in the purple jacket stepped into the warehouse, his eyes sweeping the ground floor with a quick assessment.

He took in the sealed concrete, the industrial lighting, the mezzanine catwalks, the cargo lift, and then his gaze tracked past Santi and stopped on the Mustang. The stripped-down, rusted husk of the 1970 Ford Boss 429 sat under the overhead lights, its bare chassis and missing panels exposing the empty engine bay and the corroded frame. It looked, in the morning light, like the skeleton of something that had once been fast and beautiful, that was patiently waiting for its promised resurrection.

El Capitan stared at it with his mouth slightly open.

"Jesus Christ," he said.

"Is that a 1970s Mustang?"

"What's left of one," Santi said.

"What's left of one," El Capitan repeated, shaking his head slowly as a grin spread across his face.

"At, where are my manners, choom? I have to say, holy shit, you're taller than I expected, by the way. I had you pegged at like five-eleven, tops."

"I get that a lot," Santi said.

"Yeah, I bet you do." El Capitan extended his hand, his grin settling into something more composed while retaining his warm energy.

"I only give my real name to face-to-face clients. Muamar Reyes." Santi was a bit surprised to hear that they shared the same last name, but he took the man's hand and shook it.

"Good to meet you," Santi said.

"Where do you want us to set up?" Mauamar asked as he scanned the ground floor again, this time assessing load capacity, ceiling clearance, and power infrastructure. Santi pointed toward the back wall, where the open floor space between the cargo lift and the transformer room offered roughly fifteen hundred square feet of unoccupied concrete with direct access to the building's industrial power supply.

"Back wall," Santi said.

"The transformer room's behind that door, pushing seventeen hundred amps." Muamar's eyebrows climbed a fraction.

"You've got seventeen hundred amps in this building?"

"I've got needs for things that draw a significant amount of power," Santi said.

"The electrical was the first thing I upgraded."

"Smart," Muamar said. He then turned to his crew and clapped his hands twice.

"Alright, listen up! Equipment goes against the back wall, left to right. CNC first, then the furnace, then the gear cutter, glass press, and scrap-fab. Use the cargo lift for anything over five hundred. And if anyone so much as breathes on the Mustang wrong, I will personally see to it that your next career opportunity involves a mop and a bucket in the paused Pacifica project." The crew moved with efficiency and coordination. They had clearly understood that Muamar's instructions only needed to be delivered once.

The CNC machine came off the Bratsk's cargo bed first, lowered onto a reinforced pallet by a hydraulic crane arm mounted to the truck's rear frame, and wheeled across the ground floor toward the back wall on industrial casters the crew had brought for the purpose. It was a massive piece of hardware, weighing close to four thousand pounds, with precision machining capability housed in a grey housing.

The furnace assembly followed, its insulated housing still carrying the faint smell of refractory cement and high-temperature ceramic lining. Then the gear cutter, its cutting head gleaming with fresh lubricant that had probably been applied before transit. Then was the glass press, its hydraulic ram assembly retracted and locked in the travel position, and finally the scrap-fab unit was brought up the rear, settling into the last station with a solid thud that was absorbed by the concrete.

Santi watched from beside the Mustang, his arms crossed as he logged serial numbers, manufacturer stamps, visible wear patterns, and operational condition indicators. Muamar walked over and stood beside him, watching his crew work. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"You better give me a ride in that thing once it's done," Muamar said, nodding toward the Mustang. Santi looked down at the shorter man and shrugged.

"I'll consider it."

"Consider it?" Muamar placed a hand on his chest.

"I just sold you three hundred and fifty thousand eddies worth of precision fab equipment at a bulk discount that I will regret for the rest of my natural life, and you'll consider it?"

"You make a fair point," Santi said.

"Fuck I do. I make an excellent point," Muamar said as his grin returned.

"Seriously though, Ghost. That engine bay? Once you drop a custom block in there, bored and stroked to whatever spec you want, running on a fuel-injection system you fabricated yourself? That car is going to be the only one of its kind on the entire planet. A one-of-one built from raw stock by the guy who found the corpse and decided to give it a second life."

"That's the plan," Santi said.

"Good plan," Muamar said as he leaned against the bay door frame, crossing his arms in a mirror of Santi's posture, watching the CNC being wheeled into its final position.

"So let me ask you something, Ghost. Purely personal question. Speculative even."

"Go ahead," Santi said.

"What else are you good at?" Muamar let the question sit for a second before continuing.

"Beyond the Net, beyond whatever it is you do that's made your handle pop up more and more on the boards over the past year. You're clearly not just some runner cracking subnets from a rented closet in Kabuki. You've got a fabrication shop now. You've got a building that's wired like a forward operating base, and you just dropped three-fifty on industrial equipment that most established outfits in this city couldn't touch without a loan from a very unfriendly bank."

He looked up at Santi with the curiosity of a man sizing up a potential long-term investment.

"I'm asking because I've been thinking about making some changes. The corpo world and I have been in a slow and ugly divorce for a while now, and I figure in another year or two, I might stop fighting over the house and just walk out the door." Santi studied his body language and microexpressions, searching for the involuntary tells that separated genuine disclosure from a sales pitch. But he couldn't really get a read on the man, which meant that he was telling the truth, or at least the version of it.

"What did you have in mind?" Santi asked.

"I don't know. Some Automotive shit," Muamar said.

"Customs. Builds. Restorations. There's a market for it in this city that nobody's serving properly because everyone's too busy pushing combat chrome and mil-spec hardware to notice that people still love their cars. I've been running the BD side hustle for a little over a year, selling driving experiences to corpos and trust-fund kids who can't afford the real thing, and it's shown me exactly how much untapped demand there is for automotive work."

He pushed himself off the door frame, gesturing with one hand as the enthusiasm in his voice picked up speed.

"There are some passionate people in Night City, Ghost. Serious people with serious scratch, who would pay six figures for a ground-up custom build done by someone who actually knows what the hell they're assembling. Not some chop-shop gonk bolting aftermarket panels onto a stock frame and calling it bespoke, but real fab-work. The kind of build where the customer gets to say every component in this car was made for this car, and they're not lying."

"And you're telling me this because you want to use my shop," Santi said.

"I'm telling you this because I want to know if the guy who just bought three-fifty in fab equipment is interested in having a conversation about what happens after the Mustang's done," Muamar said.

"Because those machines aren't going to sit idle once the build wraps. And I know people who would pay premium rates for custom blocks, body panels, and precision-machined drivetrain components, but aren't willing to trust some gonk out in the badlands." Santi was quiet for a moment, watching the crew positioning the scrap-fab unit into its spot against the back wall. The idea was not new to him. It was the same thought that had been sitting in the back of his mind since the day he agreed to buy the equipment.

He understood that the machines' value extended far beyond a single car, into a sustained revenue stream that could fund his operations for years.

"I'm interested in the conversation," Santi said.

"But not today. I want to finish my build first, and then I'll be in the mindspace to chat shop about what comes next." Muamar nodded with a widening grin. He had gotten exactly the answer he expected and was satisfied.

"Fair enough," he said, and extended his hand.

"You've got my number. Use it when you're ready." Santi nodded and shook it. The crew finished the installation in just under two hours, positioning the five machines along the back wall in the sequence Muamar had specified and connecting the primary power feeds to the transformer room's industrial distribution panel under Santi's direct supervision.

They did some tests to ensure everything had been installed correctly, and by the time the last cable was seated and the last housing panel bolted down, the back wall of the ground floor had been transformed from empty concrete into a fabrication line. Santi transferred the remaining 340, 000 eddies to Muamar's bearer account as the crew loaded their tools back into the vehicles. Transfer authenticated: 340, 000 eddies. Remaining balance: 27, 289 eddies.

The convoy pulled out of the lot at 12: 07 pm, the Bratsk leading the way with Muamar behind the wheel. Santi closed the bay doors, and the hydraulic panels descended in sequence, sealing the building back up, and the warehouse floor settled into silence. He turned and looked at the machines standing against the back wall, then at the Mustang with its empty engine bay and its rusted frame.

With twenty-seven thousand eddies in his wallet, he walked to the Mustang, placed his palm flat against the driver's side door, and felt the rough, oxidized texture of ninety-nine-year-old American steel beneath his skin. He stood there for a moment in the quiet of his own building.

"Alright," he said to the car.

"Time to source some materials."