They Sold Me for Five Million, So I Collected It Myself novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Garage

Dane's POV

I woke alone on the floor with feathers in my hair and her smell on the quilt.

For a moment I was the happiest I had ever been.

Then I looked at the open door, and the destroyed living room beyond it, and I remembered whose fault it was.

Not Roland's.

Mine.

Tamar had left a note on the desk in her small straight handwriting.

Class at nine. Rebuilding the work from memory. Don't be nice to me today, I'll cry. T.

I read it three times.

Then I put on my clothes and skipped crew practice for the first time in two years and borrowed the club hatchback.

Brubaker Body & Paint sat on Route 9 behind a gravel lot, a long metal garage with a hand-painted sign and six cars up on lifts.

It smelled of primer and cigarette smoke.

Roland was in the paint bay in a respirator pushed up on his forehead.

He saw me through the open bay door and did not look surprised.

"The husband," he said. "Come to settle up?"

"I came for the notebooks."

"Well, well."

He took his time wiping his hands on a rag.

At the front desk, through the office window, Noreen looked up from a stack of invoices.

She was wearing the locket.

I let my eyes rest on it a moment, and then I looked away.

"I don't know a thing about any notebooks," Roland said.

"Then you won't mind if I ask the police to search the shop." I said.

"They'd need a warrant." Roland said.

"They'd get one."

"On what? Her word?" He grinned. "Sit down, son."

"I'll stand."

"Suit yourself." He leaned on a lift. "I'll tell you what I'd do, if I were a man with a rich grandfather and a wife with a head full of numbers. I'd say two hundred thousand dollars. For the paper. Cash. Nobody gets hurt, everybody goes home."

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