They Made Me Run On a Broken Leg. Don Had My Back novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Second Set

Colleen sat at the kitchen table with both hands around a mug and did not drink from it.

She was Eamon's younger sister, twenty-seven, and she had done the Hourigan payroll since she was nineteen.

I had eaten dinner with her every Sunday for fourteen months.

I had never once heard her disagree with her mother.

"I knew about the transfers," she said.

Luca, leaning on the counter, said nothing.

Damiano stood by the window with his bandaged hand.

"I saw your login on them in the spring," Colleen said. "I told myself it was a system thing. Then you were in the hospital and they kept coming and I couldn't tell myself that anymore."

"But you said nothing," I said.

"No."

"For months."

"I'm not asking you to forgive it." She pushed the flash drive across the table. "I'm asking you to take this."

"What is it?"

"Mom keeps two sets of books. The one the bank sees and the real one. I copied the real one on Sunday night when she was at Mass."

Luca came off the counter and took it.

"Real one, meaning the stolen cargo?"

"Every container, every buyer, every cut." Her voice shook. "Eamon's name is on half of it. So is mine, as the person who cut the checks. I'll sign anything you want."

"Why now?" I said.

She looked at me.

Her cuffs were pulled all the way over her hands.

"Because you walked onto that dock on a boot and said it out loud to forty men," she said. "I've been scared of my mother for twenty-seven years. I watched you do it with a cane."

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