They Made Me Run On a Broken Leg. Don Had My Back novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Keys to Astoria

Luca put the watch down on the kitchen table next to my toast.

"Sunnyside, forty minutes ago," he said. "The man wanted four hundred dollars. I gave him four hundred and an explanation."

I didn't pick it up.

It was my father's, a plain steel Timex with a scratched crystal and a worn leather strap.

The hands had stopped at ten past four, the afternoon he died.

I touched it with one finger.

The metal was cold, and then it wasn't.

"I looked inside," Luca said. "It needs a battery. I can fix it today."

"Don't."

"No?"

"Leave it as it is." I closed my hand around it. "It says what time he stopped. I want to know."

Colleen put a plate of eggs down in front of me.

She had burned them again, and she did not apologize.

"I start Monday," she said. "Keane Haulage. The drivers voted last night. I run payroll, and every check gets read out loud to the room before it's cut."

"That's a good rule."

"It was the gray-haired one's idea." She grinned, and it was the first full grin I'd seen on her. "I'm told I can have a desk by the window."

Luca raised his coffee.

"To honest payroll."

"And to eggs that are only a little burned," she said, and clinked her mug against his.

The rest of the news came in pieces over those two weeks.

Bernadette and Eamon were held without bail, arraigned in the same room on the same morning, and neither of them looked at the other.

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