Page 20 of Angel’s Doll

Cash looks at me for a long second, and then at Angel. “The club will need all you know. You’re an asset.”

“She’s not an asset,” Angel says.

“I disagree. I’m an excellent asset.” It comes out with a laugh in it. “Now go do your thing.”

They go to Bishop with their new theory, and I return to my room where I loop the shoelace over my head. My mother’s ring settles under my shirt, flat against my breastbone, warm in a second.

For ten years Victor made me carry his whole life.

From now on, I’ll only carry mine.

11

ANGEL

Cash carries his laptop into church. I carry the number.

Three hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars. Ten years old. And a girl who spent every one of those years being told she was a favor.

Bishop’s at the head of the table with the gavel in front of him, Smoke’s already working the wall. Compass sits with his boots crossed at the ankle, missing nothing. Cash opens the laptop at the near end and Glitch comes up on it.

Bishop raps once.

“Small piece first,” Cash says. “Doll’s parents left her at least three hundred and eighty-seven grand in a joint account. Victor told a twelve-year-old they left debts.”

“Ten years is nothing,” Glitch says through the speaker. “Give me one day, I’ll let you know what happened to it.”

Bishop shakes his head. “This isn’t club business.”

“It’s mine.”

“Noted.” He nods at me and looks at Cash. “Big piece now.”

Cash lays both hands flat. “Ian Durey didn’t build those shells to hide from his cousins.”

“Explain, in plain English too,” Bishop says.

“It all starts with squeaky clean money. Every structure Glitch cracked reads like it was made to be walked through by an investor with a lawyer on his arm.”

Compass spends a sentence. “Or examined by a D.A.?”

“That too,” Cash says. “I can tell from the setup that the cousins wanted to invest that money in a perfectly legitimate business to generate income or even profits that were scrutiny-proof.”

“And their cousin invested it in the coastal project, which started as perfectly above board,” I say, the picture assembling as I talk.

Smoke comes off the wall. “Then explain Brightmoor.”

“Brightmoor doesn’t make sense,” Cash agrees. “No one wants a dirty operation bolted onto clean money.”

From inside Cash’s laptop, Glitch’s voice comes out and makes it sound simple. “Option 1, Ian’s a cousin who took clean family money and dirtied it. In that case, his family will want him more than we do. Option 2, he acted with his family’s blessing and then we’re not facing a rogue asshole, we’re facing a fucking Irish mobster family.”

“There’s a third,” I say. “The family blessed the coastal project and never signed off on strong-arming owners into selling. Their money, his methods.”

“Three flavors of the same problem,” Bishop says. “We don’t know where the Quinlans stand, and we can’t walk up and ask.”

“Actually, we could. Reach out, show them what their cousin’s been doing with their name, see if they take care of him for us. But it’s a gamble. If they’ve been backing Durey, we’ll have told the enemy we’re coming and given them time to get here first.”

“And the alternative is we quietly liquidate the Durey issue, either financially or more permanently, and possibly start an Irish war we’ll need help from other chapters to survive,” Cash says.