Money, Guns, and a Merry Christmas novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Range

I didn't sleep after that.

At six in the morning I was standing in my own lobby in Lawrenceville with the Christmas party streamers still taped to the ceiling.

Spence's two dozen roses were dead on the reception desk.

I threw them in the trash myself.

My whole crew came in.

Nobody had asked them to.

It was the day after Christmas and every one of them was there by seven, in their Lawler fleeces, standing around the coffee machine not saying much.

My foreman handed me a cup.

"We saw the video," he said.

"I know."

"My nephew's in the Guard. He uses our glass." His jaw was tight. "Anybody calls us killers, they can say it to my face."

Bennet came in at seven-thirty in the navy coat with a box of donuts from the bakery on Butler Street.

The crew looked at him.

"Who's this?" somebody muttered.

"The husband," my receptionist whispered. "The bench guy."

"I thought he was a salesman."

"He brought donuts. Be nice."

The Ironvale inspectors arrived at eight sharp.

There were three of them, in grey jackets, with hard cases.

The lead inspector was a woman in her sixties with a grey crew cut and reading glasses pushed up on her head.

She shook my hand once, hard.

"Ms. Lawler. We'll pull twelve units at random off your finished shelf. We mount them, we zero them, we shoot them, we drop them, we shoot them again."

"Pull twenty," I said.

She looked at me over her glasses.

"Twenty," she said, and nodded.

Spence arrived at eight-fifteen.

Celine was with him, phone already up, and she was live.

I could see the little red LIVE in the corner of her screen and the hearts floating up.

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