I Set the Sheets on Fire, Then the Clubhouse novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Count of Hands

Nobody raised a hand yet.

Boone looked down the table at me, and I knew he was waiting for me to tell him to fight.

I didn't.

"Before anyone votes," I said, "I have terms."

Dario spread his fingers on the book.

"You're not a patch, Becky. You don't make terms."

"I'm the blood of the man you're trying to unseat," I said. "Under your own page, that gets me a voice. Read the next line."

He didn't look down.

Boone knew the line by heart, and he almost smiled, and then he stopped.

"The blood speaks once," Boone said. "She's right."

I turned to face the chairs.

"Here's my term," I said. "Until this table has voted on every man who knew, nobody touches the club's books, and nobody touches my name. No papers signed for me. No money moved in my name. Not by Dario, not by Boone, not by anyone."

"That's all?" said Dario.

"That's all."

"Fine," he said, and smiled. "Your name's safe with me."

"I want the table to say it."

"The table says it," a voice called from the middle, and then another, and then most of them.

Boone struck the gavel once.

"Terms stand," he said. "Hands, then. Who says my gavel was never lawful?"

Dario's hand went up first.

Then a young patch in the middle chair, his eyes on his lap.

Then three of the eleven who had stood on Friday, one after another.

I watched the hands go up, and my stomach turned to stone.

Twenty-two.

The gray-bearded patch kept his arm folded across his chest.

"Seventeen against," said the man next to him.

"Boone doesn't vote," said Dario. "Twenty-two to seventeen."

The wives made a sound.

Boone laid the wrench handle on the table, quietly.

He took the president's patch off his cut with a pocketknife.

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