Chapter 14
ANGEL
Iget one boot laced before she stirs.
Up, dressed, no lying there taking a morning that wasn’t offered.
Two nights ago she was afraid of the dark.
Last night was a different country. A man could come home from a night like that thinking he holds a passport now.
He doesn’t. Every door in her still opens from her side, and I mean to keep it that way.
The second boot’s in my hand when the blanket shifts.
“You’re sneaking.”
“I’m dressing. Sneaking’s quieter.”
She sits up in one of my tee shirts, hair pressed to one side, her mother’s ring out of her collar where the night worked it loose.
“What time is it?”
“Church time. Quinlans.” I pull the lace tight. “You get a say in how much of it lands on you. You want the plan before, after, or not at all?”
She weighs it like a real question, because it is one. “After. All of it. Don’t sand the edges.”
“Never do.”
Her eyes hold on me another second and her hand comes up over the ring while I finish with my boots.
At the door she says, “Angel. Whatever the answer is, come tell me yourself.”
“Deal.”
Bishop’s gavel is down before the chairs stop moving. Smoke holds the wall, arms crossed. Compass tips his chair onto two legs. Cash opens the laptop and Glitch is already inside it, wearing yesterday’s clothes.
“Day’s up,” Bishop says. “Spend it.”
“Spent it well.” Glitch leans into his camera.
“The Quinlans run out of Chicago. The elder brother holds the chair, has for fifteen years, since a stroke took the old man out of it. Everything I can pull on him reads disciplined. He settles beefs in back rooms, not in headlines. Cops out there hate him because he’s never once been made to look stupid in public.
No bodies he didn’t need. No mess he didn’t clean. ”
“A pro,” Smoke says.
“A careful one. Which is the point, because now look at Ian.” Glitch flicks a photo onto Cash’s screen, Durey younger, Chicago behind him.
“Ian burned his hometown before he ever saw Seattle. Debts worked ugly. A personal beef with the elder brother nobody will name for me. The family shipped him west with one last chance in his pocket.”
“Why does a careful man hand his worst relative a last chance?” Bishop asks.
“Because Ian’s mother is the old man’s little sister, and the old man insisted,” Cash says.
“Nobody back east believed he’d make it,” Glitch goes on, “and the paper agrees with them. Every vehicle Ian built out here is dressed for inspection. The pitch he sold his cousins was clean. Passive money, Pacific Northwest development, returns that survive daylight. That’s what the brothers bought.
Now hold Brightmoor next to it. Forced guardianships ... ”
Compass spends his sentence. “Sold them a bank, ran a dogfight in the vault.”
Smoke starts pacing. “Or they knew. Cousins talk. Money that size doesn’t move without the chair hearing the legs scrape. Until I hold proof they didn’t know, I’ll consider they knew. That’s the only version that doesn’t get brothers killed. Harden the gate, assume the worst, get ready.”
“The gate’s already hard,” Bishop says. “Both of you can be right at once. The family blessed a clean investment. Ian dug his own sewer under it. The question is what the chair does the day he smells it.” He turns to me. “You’re quiet, VP.”
The room runs on honesty, so I give it mine. “If it were up to me they would both be dead, Ian who priced her and Victor who set the terms.”
Smoke studies me the length of a breath. Whatever he’s checking for, he finds. He sits.
“Now the conduit,” Glitch says. “There’s a man in Chicago, Feeney, runs the family’s boring money, the legal side. Twenty years, never sloppy, never burned. He owes me a favor he’d pay double to stop owing. He can put an envelope on the elder brother’s desk without his cousin catching wind.”
“We know what we put in the envelope,” Bishop says.
Cash ticks them off his pad. “What we listed yesterday plus a one-paragraph note on the collateral demand, no names in it, hers or ours.”
“The words?”
Cash reads it flat. “Your man in Seattle used your name in an operation that will not survive daylight. Proof enclosed. We are not looking for a war. If Brightmoor is yours, say so and we will proceed accordingly. If it is his, meet us before he burns all of us.”
Nobody improves it.
“Send it.” Bishop lifts the gavel. “Proof before bullets. Bullets stay loaded. If the answer’s wrong, the fence is what stands between it and everybody sleeping in here.” The gavel comes down. “Church out.”
Chairs scrape. I’m the last one out of my chair, same as Tuesday. If the elder brother blessed Brightmoor, we’ve told the enemy our address. If he didn’t, the family cleans its own kennel and Ian learns what a last chance was for. Either road, Ian Durey and Victor Hale are running out of map.
Ifind her on the back steps with her mother’s cookbook open on her knees, and this time I’m the one carrying the mugs. Hers, cream, no sugar. She takes it, checks the color, slides over, cookbook and all. An invitation. I sit.
“It went out an hour ago. Through a Chicago channel Ian can’t read. Proof his cousins’ money got dirty in his hands, nothing with your name on it. Now we wait.” I turn the mug once.
She reads me over the rim, then closes the cookbook on her thumb.
“One detail I remembered. Whenever Victor wondered out loud if a cousin needed to sign off, Ian would shrink a foot, then spend ten minutes proving he answered to nobody.”
I sit with that. A resentful cousin, three time zones from supervision, out to prove he could do everything by himself. It fits Glitch and Cash’s intel perfectly.
“That’s good intel,” I tell her before we go for breakfast in the common room.
Waiting is its own kind of work, and the club does it the way it does everything, loudly and over cards. Compass deals her in without asking.
Twenty minutes later she has most of the table’s cash in front of her and Maverick is accusing her of counting.
“I’m not counting.” She stacks his money like she’s done it professionally, which I guess she has, just never for herself.
“You check your cards twice when you’re bluffing.
Bones looks at the pot when he hits. Compass …
” she tips her chin at him … “gives nothing away. That’s why I fold when he raises. ”
Compass smiles. From Compass that’s a parade.
Ten years reading the most dishonest room in Seattle. My Doll came out of it fluent, and this is the first table that’s ever paid her for it.
The radio on Smoke’s hip cracks mid-afternoon. Gate. A box truck on rental plates, a driver with a clipboard and a company name Glitch can’t find a company for. Asking whether a Miss Hale needs to sign for a delivery.
Her name. In a stranger’s mouth. At our gate.
By the time Smoke and I get down there the truck is idling and the driver is sticking to a script somebody paid him to hold. We don’t touch him. We stand where his dashboard camera can watch us not touching him. I take the clipboard, read the form with nothing on it, and hand it back.
“No Miss Hale here,” I say. “Drive careful.”
Glitch owns the plate before the truck clears the corner. Rented Tuesday, cash card, and the card runs back through one of Ian Durey’s shells.
So. He knows where she is, he’s known for days, and today he sent her name to our gate to hear what happened to it.
Letting that truck drive away costs me but proof before bullets, all the way to the meet.
The answer comes back before the yard lights come on. Fast.
Cash finds me at the gate with his phone already out, Glitch on the line, and reads it to both of us off Feeney’s message. No greeting. No signature. Terms.
He will meet. Neutral ground, he picks from three we offer. Six men a side. No police, no recordings, no surprises. And a condition of his own. Ian does not know. If Ian learns of the meet before it happens, there is no meet, and he will treat the leak as ours.
“Friendly,” Cash says.
“It’s better than friendly,” Glitch says in the speaker. “It’s controlled. Friendly you can fake.”
I read it twice more. A man who wanted us dead answers with silence or with company. A man who blessed Brightmoor doesn’t fence his own cousin out of the room. This reads like a chair who got an envelope, opened it, and started adding up what his aunt’s boy has cost him.
Or it reads like bait with good grammar. We’ll load for both.
The smart play got a yes out of Chicago. I’ll hold to it through the meet, Bishop’s rules the whole distance.
I go back to her room to keep my word.
Her door is open.