Page 67 of Filthy Little Lies

“And Tony?”

Her face falls. “He was okay with working with someone, but he couldn’t go out and do it on his own. Like he could help Cassie hustle a card game, but he wouldn’t be able to sit at a table to clean up on his own.”

“Would he have been able to hustle that pool game with you?”

She laughs. “No. He can’t hit a pool ball with a baseball bat. But that’s what I mean, he just wasn’t great at the stuff. So, he wasn’t much help bringing in any money. So he hooked up with a dealer in the neighborhood…” She sighs and lifts a shoulder, letting me fill in the blanks.

“But he started using the supply he was supposed to be selling.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you and Cassie get on him about the drugs; is that what pissed him off?” I lift her leg, and drape it over my lap, resting my hand on her calf.

She leans against the back of the couch.

“No. He wanted to pull a job, but Cassie’s leaving tomorrow for St. Louis, and if I did what he wants it would be breaking your no working with other people rule.” She mimics my tone with the last bit, but I forgive the snark.

“What’s the job?” There’s a lot to unpack there. Her saying no, Cassie getting ready to move, and whatever else Tony asked of her. Taking things slow and not just demanding everything at once would annoy a weaker man.

I’m not patient, but I’m not weak, either.

“The poker tables at Inferno,” she says after a long pause. “It’s an open house night or something. He wants me to get him paystubs so he can get one of those payday loans for the buy-in, and Cassie to sit at the tables with him.” The weight visibly lifts from her as she confesses his plan.

“Which place?”

She blinks. “What?”

“The loan. Which one is he going to?”

“He didn’t say, just that he can use the stubs to get the loan approved without any credit pull. But the paystubs have to look perfect.”

Something doesn’t sit right. “No credit pull? A payday place will always check the score, that’s how they come up with the insane rates they charge. Even the shitty ones will check.”

Her brow furrows, and I watch her turn it over the way she does when she’s working out a lie or building one.

“The place he’s talking about isn’t an actual loan place,” she says slowly. “It’s most likely a wash.”

“Explain.”

“A real lender wants your ID, your social security number, something that ties back to a real person, because they need to be able to collect. A place that doesn’t check that stuff isn’t lending money, it’s moving it. You don’t walk in off the street for one of those, someone vouches for you.” She pauses, like she’s weighing whether or not to tell me something. “And of the washers I’m aware of that would do something like this for Tony, Vincent Ricci runs a few of them.”

I’m silent, letting the information sink in. He wants her to scam one of my clubs.

“Do you think he’s going to try to go through with it on his own?”

“I don’t think he can. The last time he tried to pull a con on his own, he almost got caught.” There’s something in the undertone here that catches my attention.

“When did that happen?”

She frowns and stares at me like she doesn’t want to answer me, which tells me my suspicion is right.

“He almost got caught, because you took the fall,” I say running my hand over her calves, more to keep my hands from calling Lucian and asking if he’d like to let out some anger on this kid’s face.

“He was older, almost eighteen. They would have sent him to prison. I had a better shot of walking away with a slap on the wrist.”

“But you didn’t. They put you in juvie. He let you go to jail for something he did.” Saying it outright like that makes it even harder not to reach for my phone.

“It was only a few months,” she qualifies. “He could have gone to prison for a year or more.”