Chapter 12: Easy

At six that evening, I walked out of the building with Kayla and found Brody on the front steps.

He was sitting on the bottom stair with a bottle in a paper bag.

His velvet jacket was wrinkled, and his glasses were crooked.

Forty or fifty employees were leaving at the same time, and every one of them slowed down.

"There he is," Brody said, standing up. "The new king."

"Go home, Brody."

"I don't have one. The bank has it."

He laughed, and it came out wrong.

"I've been calling her all day. Allison. She won't pick up."

"Because of you."

"Because of her choices."

"She's gone soft," he said. "She's giving away money to a hospital. Did you hear that?"

"A hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to a dead woman's name."

A loader near the steps stopped walking and turned around.

"Don't talk about my mother," I said.

"Why not? She cost me everything."

"I did my homework. Three weeks of dinners. Two staged photos. Two matching rings."

"I was one signature away from a four-hundred-thousand-dollar loan, and she stopped answering."

"And now," he said, pointing at me, "you want to be a saint."

Kayla pulled out her phone.

Two drivers had already pulled out theirs.

I did not tell Brody to stop.

"What was the loan for?" I asked.

"What do you think? My father's showrooms."

"Hartnell Home Furnishings is eleven weeks from foreclosure."

"He told me to find a woman with money and a weak spot."

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