Chapter 19: The Lake House

At four in the morning, the kid with the laptop opened Russell's phone at my kitchen table.

He was eating Finn's cereal out of the box.

He was nineteen at most, in a hoodie, and he called Abe "sir."

"It's in," he said. "Everything he sends from now on comes to me too."

"Answer it," Abe said. "As him."

The kid typed back.

"Confirmed."

By noon the rest had come.

Russell texted Abe's cheap phone: "Come up tonight, brother. Just us. I'll have the fire going."

Russell texted Brooke, in her room with two men on the door: "Lake house at nine. I'll explain everything. Come alone, sweetheart."

And Russell's own calendar, through the kid's laptop, said he'd be at a Cruger board dinner in the city from eight until midnight.

Forty witnesses.

"He's not even going to be there," I said.

"He never is," Abe said. "That's the point of him."

He'd already decided.

"I go up at nine. In my own car, alone, like he wants. My men in the trees."

"And he shoots you on the dock before your men get out of the trees."

"Then they'll have him."

"And Finn gets a father for one week and a grave to visit."

He looked at me.

"Brooke goes in first," I said. "That's his order. Her, then you. So Brooke goes in first."

"Brooke's not going anywhere near that house."

"No," I said. "I am."

Hank was out of the hospital by four, against the advice of everyone in a white coat.

He arrived in my kitchen with his arm in a sling and a shotgun case under the other one.

"I heard there's a party," he said.

"You were shot on Monday," I said.

"And I'd like to meet the fella who did it."

He set the case on my counter. "Wife says if I don't come home, she's selling my truck."

"Then come home."

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