Chapter 2 #2
She studied him for a long moment, pen still, notepad forgotten on her knee. "Most people give me the tidy answer because they think it's what I want to hear."
"I gave you the true one because you'd know the difference. You strike me as someone who's heard a lot of tidy lies in her life and gotten very good at spotting them."
Something crossed her face then — quick, unguarded, gone before he could name it. "That's an uncomfortably accurate guess for someone who's known me a week."
"I'm a patient observer. Comes with the road name."
"Bishop. Right. Why chess, specifically? Why not something more—" she gestured vaguely, "—biker."
"Because chess is the only game where the person who wins is usually the one who was willing to wait the longest and see the furthest ahead. Everything else in my life moved fast and broke things. I liked having one thing that rewarded patience instead."
"That's either the most honest thing you've said all week, or the best-rehearsed line I've ever heard."
"Ask Knox. He'll tell you I've been saying some version of that since I was nineteen and it's never once changed."
She wrote something down — he suspected it wasn't actually related to the case — and for a moment neither of them said anything, the silence comfortable in a way silences with strangers weren't supposed to be.
"You're a strange man, Elliot Rourke," she said finally.
"You're not the first person to say so. You are the first person to say it like it wasn't an insult."
"Don't get used to it," she said, but there was no heat in it, and when she left twenty minutes later, notebook full of financial notations and at least one line that had nothing to do with the case, Elliot sat at his desk for a long while after, doing something he hadn't done in years.
He was smiling at nothing at all.
Knox caught him at it on the way out, leaning against the doorframe with the specific look of a man who'd known Elliot for fifteen years and had never once seen that particular expression on his face.
"You want to tell me what that's about," Knox said, "or should I guess."
"Nothing to tell."
"Uh huh." Knox pushed off the doorframe and fell into step beside him. "Bishop, I've watched you talk half this club into things they didn't want to do for a decade. I've never once seen you look like you just lost an argument you were happy to lose."
"I didn't lose anything. It was a conversation."
"Sure it was." Knox clapped him once on the shoulder, not unkindly. "Just remember whose neck's on the line if this goes sideways. Not just yours. Dominic's got the most riding on this staying professional, and half the newer prospects are already nervous having a cop in the building at all."
"I know exactly whose neck is on the line, Knox. I've known since the day I proposed we go legitimate. I'm not going to forget it now."
"I didn't think you would," Knox said. "Just wanted to hear you say it."
"Said it."
"Good." Knox studied him a second longer, something almost sympathetic in it. "For what it's worth, Bishop — if she's half as sharp as she looks, she's going to see right through you eventually. Might want to figure out what you're going to do about that before she does."
Elliot didn't have an answer for that. He turned it over on the drive home, and then again that night at the grove, alone under the trees with a beer going warm in his hand, watching the sky do its slow gold-to-navy thing without a single detective in sight to distract him from thinking clearly.
He didn't reach any conclusions. He rarely did on the first pass — that wasn't how his mind worked.
But he sat there a long while, turning the day over the way he'd turn over a chess position, looking for the move that let him keep the club safe, keep his own conscience clean, and somehow, impossibly, keep whatever this was with Simone Adler from becoming the one mistake his patience couldn't undo.
He didn't find it that night. He had a feeling it was going to take a while.
He was, for possibly the first time in his very patient life, looking forward to being interrogated.
That evening, back at the clubhouse, Diesel cornered him by the pool table with the particular grin of a man who'd noticed something and intended to make Elliot's life difficult about it.
"So," Diesel said. "The detective."
"What about her."
"You've been smiling at ledgers all week. Nobody smiles at ledgers, Bishop. Not even you."
"I'm pleased the audit is going smoothly."
"Sure you are." Diesel racked the balls with more force than strictly necessary. "You do remember she's a cop, right? Actively investigating us? As in, her whole job right now is finding out if we're lying?"
"I'm aware of her job description, Diesel."
"Just checking. Because you've got a look."
"I don't have a look."
"You've got a look." Diesel took his shot, missed spectacularly, and straightened up, unbothered. "Knox's got a theory, you know."
"I don't want to hear Knox's theory."
"Knox's theory is that you volunteered to be her liaison because you like a challenge. I've got a competing theory."
"I'm sure I don't want to hear that one either."
"My theory," Diesel said, entirely too pleased with himself, "is that you took one look at a woman who plays by the rules harder than you do, and your whole chess-loving brain short-circuited."
Elliot took his own shot, sank it clean, and didn't dignify that with a response, which Diesel seemed to take as confirmation rather than the diplomatic silence it was intended to be.
"Just be careful," Diesel added, more serious now. "Dominic's got the most riding on this. If it goes bad—"
"It's not going to go bad."
"You don't know that yet."
"No," Elliot admitted. "I don't. But I know how to be careful. I've been careful for ten years so this club could survive scrutiny. I'm not going to stop now."
Diesel studied him a moment longer, then shrugged and racked the balls again. "Just saying. Watch yourself, Bishop. For all our sakes."
"Noted," Elliot said, and meant it, even as some quieter, less disciplined part of him was already looking forward to the next morning's ledger session more than any sane man conducting a federal-adjacent financial audit had any right to.