Chapter 43
HIS WORDS ARE met with laughter.
“And I’m the Easter Bunny,” Zach says once he’s done wheezing. “Seriously, buddy, you were so stupid in high school you needed tutoring just to graduate. You expect me to believe you’re keeping the Lions’ books? That you cracked ours?”
“As if your books are hard to crack? Internet Explorer’s got better security.”
Snake Tattoo wrenches him forward by the hoodie, but Zach holds a hand up.
“Don’t.”
With a frustrated sigh, Snake Tattoo shoves him back. Rajan steadies himself. Why does Zach keep defending him? The dude should be first in line to rock his shit.
“Your bookkeeper must be pretty important,” Zach says. “For you to protect them like this.”
“The only reason I’m telling you now is for Kat,” Rajan retorts.
“She’s a shit PO, but that doesn’t mean I want her dead.
” But he can tell they’re growing restless.
Time to change tactics. But how? He can’t even sell it to himself.
How many times did he sit in the Northridge library, watching Simran command numbers into order and privately wishing he could do the same?
She so easily dismantled equations into simple parts and, just as easily, combined them into something more complicated.
Even now it’s as frustrating as it is awe-inspiring.
Math is a whole different language, and if you miss even one part, you’re lost.. .
“I can prove I’m the bookkeeper,” Rajan says after a moment.
Zach scoffs. “How?”
He nods at the ledgers in Zach’s hands and channels Simran. “Give me a pen.”
“He can’t be far,” Nick says once Simran explains her suspicions. “If you just saw him, we have a radius.”
“How many people can you get on the search?”
“Dunno.” He’s zipping things in the background. Loading a gun. “Most people looking for him want the reward for killing him.”
Simran swallows. “But Rajan has the ledgers. Doesn’t Manny want those back?”
“If you’re right, the ledgers are already in Ace hands. They’ll just spray the scene with bullets, and Rajan, too. If he’s still alive.”
“Of course he’s alive.” TJ leans in, clearly hanging on to every word, but Simran doesn’t care. “They kept him this long. He’s valuable.”
A pause. “Simran,” Nick says softly, “I need you to prepare yourself. If we’re too late...well, the Aces can be—”
“No.” Simran hangs up. Not no in the sense that she’s denying Nick’s claim. Not an answer to anything he said. Just a refusal to listen to more. She doesn’t like feeling helpless.
She pushes through the washroom door and heads to the main lobby in search of her mom. She needs the car keys. Stupidly, she didn’t bring her own truck.
TJ trots after her. “What was that about? Rajan was just here. And who’re the Aces? Like, the Silver Aces? The gang?” She laughs.
Simran marches for the doorway back into the banquet hall. Is it her imagination, or are the people in the lobby giving her strange looks?
“Simran,” TJ says.
“What.”
“I...don’t think I was the only one who saw you in the hallway.”
Simran focuses on the phone screen TJ is holding up. A text from Kiran. You didn’t know about her and Rajan. Right??
Simran now looks more closely at the people watching her. Their gazes are wary. A few girls her age whisper around their hands.
She reaches for her own phone. There are several messages and missed calls. The first she sees is Kiran’s text: WHERE ARE YOU??
Despite her worst-case scenario coming to pass, Simran feels very little. She feels calmer, actually. The secrets are all out. But she can’t go back into the banquet hall. If she does, she’ll never leave. This situation is going nuclear, and she doesn’t have time for it.
She spins back for the parking lot. “Give me your keys.”
“Are you serious?” TJ huffs. “I don’t even know what’s going on—”
“Give them to me!”
TJ flinches.
Simran takes several deep breaths. Every second spent here is a wasted one. “TJ,” she says more calmly. “Either help me, or get out of my way.”
TJ stares at her like she’s never seen her before.
“I’m not giving you my keys,” she says slowly. “I’m coming with you.”
The room is silent as Rajan is handed a pen and the ledger. For a second, his brain stalls, like he’s taking a math test and a teacher is watching him work.
The muzzle of a gun juts into his forehead. “I’m waiting,” Zach says.
Rajan bats it away. “I’m trying to remember. It’s been a while.”
He’s not lying. He is trying to remember something. How many times has he seen Simran work on the ledgers? The times she explained what she was doing?
The room falls silent again, but this time, he imagines a different kind of silence. Silence like the Northridge library, or an empty classroom with Simran. She never made him nervous when she watched. She’d already seen him screw up in the worst ways possible. There was nothing more to hide.
He puts pen to paper.
Simran’s voice echoes in his head as he explains what he’s writing.
“Like I said, your books are easy. The Caesar cipher of i is i plus three. The most frequent number translates into the most common letter in the alphabet, e. The rest comes from there.” He circles the end formula and throws in a few confusing buzzwords.
“The inverse of the function is how you decrypt it.”
This is the hard part. Using the formula to translate the numbers into letters. He plugs it in. Double-checks his work. He scrawls the message he’s decoded across the page. It’s an inventory of supplies—outdated, but correct.
Everyone peers over his work. He can tell by their blank stares they’re not following his thought process. Thank god math is so confusing.
But, it seems to sway Snake Tattoo. He cracks his knuckles.
“It’s our lucky day.”
Zach, however, shakes his head. “I’m not buying it.”
Rajan twirls the pen between his fingers. “You want me to decode your whole ledger to prove even I could do it? Are you sure you wanna go through that kind of embarrassment?”
Zach doesn’t answer. Instead, he sorts through the ledgers. “There’s one thing I’d like to know.” He comes back with a piece of paper. “How you decoded this.”
Rajan recognizes it immediately. It’s an exact copy of the message Simran had found in the Aces’ book.
Confusing, convoluted, and mind-numbing is what he’d call that decryption process, but not to Simran. It so clearly thrilled her. So much that, despite himself, he had to know why.
He’s glad he paid attention during that dinner conversation now.
He takes the note from Zach. “It took a while to realize these were coordinates,” he begins, and then starts drawing out the process as best he can remember.
The grid. The sentence at the top being the password to decode it.
The transposition of letters...Ironically, it was easier to understand than the other ciphers Simran cracked.
This one didn’t require fancy equations or formulas, x or y, the sorts of things that mess with his brain.
No, this was math only in its purest form: a creative way of looking at numbers.
And when he thought of it like that, for just a moment he understood why Simran loved it.
He’s halfway through the last grid when Zach rubs his face. “Shut up.”
Rajan falls silent. Thank god—he barely remembers any of the other ciphers.
“It’s him,” Zach mutters, almost to himself. “Shit, it’s really him.”
“Can we off him now?” Hat Stealer asks. Dude knows his priorities.
“No,” Zach snaps. “We have to bring him to our people first. They have to hear it from him. They’re not going to believe us if we just kill him here.”
Hat Stealer frowns. So does Rajan, but thankfully nobody’s looking at him.
This is the tricky part. He cannot, under any circumstances, let these clowns take him to the Aces’ godfathers.
Because those guys will really cross-fucking-examine him on the bookkeeping, and his entire ruse will fall apart.
He can’t afford that. No, Zach and his friends have to go back to their superiors with Rajan’s body in a bag.
They’ll have to accept the story at face value—and the search for the bookkeeper will end.
Zach is the leader. Zach is the person Rajan has to convince to kill him.
“If we try to take him anywhere, that’s another chance for him to try to escape,” Snake Tattoo argues. “He almost lost us back there. They’ll have to believe us at our word. We’ll bring those calculations he did for us.”
Finally, someone on Rajan’s side. But Zach shakes his head.
“We’ll keep an eye on him. We’re so close.”
Rajan speaks up. “Close to what? Getting shot? Because that’s what’ll happen when your godfathers realize you tried to pull this operation without their green light.”
Snake Tattoo prowls closer. “Nobody will care about that. They only care about results. And we’ll have ’em.”
“Hate to break it to you, but they’ll take all the credit and leave you losers fighting over scraps.”
The others shift, as if that hadn’t occurred to them. Zach, however, doesn’t. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Bring the truck around,” he tells one of his buddies, who disappears from the room.
Zach’s way too calm right now. New strategy, then. Rajan takes a deep breath and recalls what he remembers from when he was fourteen, reading Zach’s personal files on the principal’s desk. It’s a nasty play, what he’s about to do. But fuck it.
“I hope for your sake it works, Zach,” he says. “Still not a full member after all these years, huh? Kind of stunning.”
“Run your mouth, it won’t save you,” Zach says, bored. Rajan is undeterred.
“I guess, knowing your background, they don’t trust you to handle a lot of money.”
Zach goes still.