Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Rooster
Amara catches me in the garage after dinner and doesn't come in. She stands in the door with her arms crossed and waits for me to notice her, which I already have.
"You know accounting?" she says.
"No."
"Imani does. You know Ironwood." She tips her head toward the main room. "She's been in that ledger since this afternoon, and she's hit the top of what she can do without somebody who knows how these people talk to each other. That's you. Go sit with her and sort it out."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And Rooster." She doesn't move out of the doorway. "This is the spending I told you about. You don't get to be sorry in a corner. You get to be useful. Those are the two doors and only one of them's open."
She's gone before I can answer, which is how she does it, so you can't say yes and make it a conversation.
I head into the main room and Imani's got the whole table.
The notebook's in the middle and she's built something around it—the legal pad covered top to bottom in columns, a laptop with a spreadsheet on it, a coffee gone cold at her elbow.
Mila's not here. I realize that in the first second and make myself not ask.
"She's asleep," Imani says, not looking up. "First real sleep since she got here, Lashes says, so we're not waking her for this. Sit down."
I sit.
"What am I looking at?"
"Eleven people who don't pay for something everybody else pays a fortune for.
" She turns the legal pad toward me. "Initials.
They repeat. This one." She taps it. "WT.
Almost every page, ten years back, and half the time there's a note by it that says comp.
Comped. Free. You don't comp a customer for a decade. You comp an owner."
I look at the letters.
WT.
The back of my neck goes cold and I keep my face where it is, because it can't be, because the odds of it are a number I can't hold in my head, so I put my eyes back on the page and I make myself read the rest before I let it come forward.
"These other ten," I say. "They pay?"
"They pay. But they're regulars, they're protected somehow, and a couple have the same note next to different dates, which reads like a hierarchy to me.
Somebody at the top who's comped. A ring under him who gets taken care of.
Everybody else pays full and never comes back.
" She takes her glasses off. "That's not a business that sells to the public, Rooster.
That's a business that belongs to a man and lets his friends use it. "
"His friends."
"His organization." She says it plain. "You'd know better than me what that looks like."
I know exactly what it looks like.
I watched it my whole childhood.
A man at the top who doesn't pay for anything because it's already his, a layer under him who gets comped as a reward and a leash both, and the whole thing running on one fuel.
You take care of the men who took care of you, and you never write the boss's name down anywhere a stranger could read it.
You put his initials. You comp it. Everybody who matters knows exactly who WT is.
"Read me the ten," I say.
She reads them.
Most of them are nothing to me. Initials aren't much and ten years is a long time.
I was gone before half these men would've come up. But two of them stop me.
Two sets of letters that go with two faces I grew up around—two men who sat at my father's table, two men who'd have gone looking for my grandmother's birthplace because they were the kind who went looking.
"You've got something," Imani says. She's watching me. "Where'd you go?"
"These two." I put my finger on them. "I know these two."
"Ironwood?"
"Ironwood."
She sits back.
"Then you've got your answer on WT," she says, low. "You don't have to say it. I can see you already got there."
I got there the second she said comp.
I've been shoving it back for four minutes because it's too clean and too cruel to be real—that the place they kept Mila is his, that the eleven doors she walked past sit inside a building that belongs to the man who put my mother in a ditch on 92.
WT.
Wendell Trask.
* * *
I don't sleep.
I sit on the roof, which is Doom and Brick's spot, and nobody comes up to tell me I can't, so I stay.
It's cold enough that my hands quit reporting after twenty minutes and I keep them on the ledge anyway.
I run it around and around until the edges wear smooth.
My father would know.
It won't let go of me.
Nineteen years inside Ironwood, and a man doesn't do nineteen years in a thing like that without knowing where the men go to do what they can't do at home.
If Trask owns a property in Cochise County where his people get comped, my father knew it was there. Maybe not what it was. But that it existed.
And he never said one word.
I tell myself he didn't know what it was, that a man in the program doesn't volunteer things that get him moved somewhere worse, that he had a son on the outside, and silence was the only thing keeping either of us alive.
I say all of it to the dark and none of it lays a finger on the other part, which is that Mila was down there and my father knew the building she was in.
I don’t think about it too much.
There's a place at the bottom of it I can't make myself look at, so I stop at the lip, and I sit on a cold roof until the sky goes from black to the color of dishwater.
Then I go find Amara, because a call to a man in WITSEC isn't something a prospect sets up on his own.
It takes four days and it happens in Amara's office with the door shut.
There are rules.
A marshal named Petrowski gave them to me over the phone in a flat Midwestern voice that laid it out like a form he'd read a thousand times: fifteen minutes, monitored and recorded, and if the talk goes anywhere it's not supposed to, he ends it with no warning.
No locations. Nothing specific about anybody's situation. Family contact. I get to talk to my father the way a man talks to his father and not one inch past it.
Amara sets the phone on the desk on speaker, steps back against the wall, folds her arms, and stays. She's not going to leave and I don't ask her to.
It rings twice.
"Finn." My father's voice, older than the last one, thinner through the wire. "Son."
Ten years, and my throat shuts on nothing.
"Hey, Dad."
"They told me you called. I about didn't believe them." A breath. "You okay? You in trouble?"
"I'm okay."
"You don't sound okay."
"I'm okay, Dad." I flatten my hands on Amara's desk. "I’m somewhere good. I've got people. People who actually give a shit about me."
The line holds, and I can hear him work out what it means, that his boy who's had nobody for a decade is calling to tell him he's got people.
"Good." His breath goes ragged for a second and comes back. "That's good, Finn. That's real good."
Neither of us says anything and the recording runs, and Petrowski's out there somewhere with headphones on.
I've burned two minutes out of fifteen and I don't know how to do this.
So I go sideways.
"I've been thinking about home," I say.
"Yeah?"
"The old crowd. The guys who used to—" I pick the words up like they're hot off a stove. "The guys who used to go out to that place in the county. Weekends. You remember?"
The line goes silent.
Not phone-silent. My father's got a specific way of not talking and I've known it my whole life, and this is that—the sound of a man who heard every word I didn't say and is holding very still around it.
"Finn." Careful. "That's a long time ago."
"I know."
"That's not something I can—" He stops. Comes at it again. "There's a man on this line, son."
"I know there is."
"Then you know what I can and can't say."
"I know." My fingers dig into the desk. "I'm not asking you to say anything. I'm asking if you remember."
The silence comes back, and inside it I can hear him decide.
"I remember," he says.
Two words.
"I remember all of it. Every name that ever went out there, every one of them.
" His voice drops and goes to gravel, and I can hear the wet in it.
"And I've laid awake a lot of nights in here wishing I didn't, because a man who remembers a place like that and can't do one damn thing about it, that's its own cell, son.
That's the real one. The bars are the easy part. "
Amara comes off the wall.
"Dad—"
"I don't know how much of this you can hear.
" He's talking faster now, right up against the wire he can't cross, walking the top of it.
"But if you've got people, and those people ever wanted to know about the old crowd, about the county, about who went out and how it got paid for—your old man remembers.
All of it. And I've got nothing in here but time to remember it.
There are ways to ask a man like me things.
Legal ways, on paper. Your people would know them. "
"Thirty seconds," Petrowski says, flat.
"Dad."
"I love you, Finn." All at once, ten years of it coming through the wire. "I did the best I knew and it wasn't enough, I know it wasn't, and I think about your mother every day, every single—"
"I love you too, Dad."
"—and if there's a thing I can do from in here that helps you or helps anybody, you find the way to ask me. You hear me? You find the way."
"I hear you."
"Good." His voice breaks clean in half. "That's my boy. That's my—"
The line dies.
Amara doesn't say anything for a while.
I'm at her desk with my hands still flat on it, the dead phone in front of me, and there's water on my face.
I'm not doing anything about it, and she's not making me.
"He knows every name," she says finally.
"Yeah."
"And there's a legal way to pull it out of a man in the program. He said it twice." She comes around and sits on the edge of the desk. "Imani will know what it is. A deposition, a sworn statement, something a lawyer files under seal. Slow. But real, and it'd hold up."
"Yeah."
She looks at me.
"You did good. That was hard and you did it right. You got us a door nobody else in this club could've opened."
I nod because my voice won't work.
He's been in it for years, knowing a building existed.
Mila was inside that building the whole time.
Neither of us knew, and neither of us gets absolved for the not-knowing, even though the not-knowing was never a thing we chose.
I don't say any of that to Amara.
I get up, I thank my president, and I go find something to fix.