They Made Me Run On a Broken Leg. Don Had My Back novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Her Login

Moira reads the Corvino books and finds the edits came from Bernadette's laptop; two detectives arrive with Eamon's missing-person report.

I didn't sleep.

The guest room had a bed with a quilt on it and a window that looked at a neighbor's tomato plants.

I lay with my leg on three pillows and went through the transfer page in my head, one line at a time.

N. Keane.

It was my name.

It was my login, my password and the account number I typed forty times a week.

I had not made that transfer.

At six in the morning I heard a knock, and Damiano said through the door, "You asked for the books."

"I did."

"I'm not coming in. The car's outside."

He drove me to the docks himself.

The Corvino office was a brick building over a loading yard, two flights up, with a window unit rattling in the wall and a view of cranes.

He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked at the crutches, and then at me.

"Don't," I said.

"It's forty steps."

"I've done worse."

"On what, a flat road?"

I opened my mouth, and he bent and picked me up again.

This time I knew it was coming.

His left arm went under my back, and his right hand went under my thigh, above the frame, where there was nothing but skin.

His palm was hot and rough, and it stayed exactly where it was all the way up.

I stared straight ahead so I wouldn't think about it.

At the top he set me down in a chair and took a second to straighten up.

His jaw was tight.

I decided it was the stairs.

The family's accountant, a thin man at the next desk, opened a laptop and slid it across.

"Everything under the Hourigan contract, six years," he said. "Every transfer out of the account they bill against."

I read for four hours.

Damiano didn't hover.

He took calls at the window in a low voice and let me sit.

At ten I found the first one.

A ninety-thousand-dollar transfer, authorized N. Keane, timestamped 2:14 in the morning.

The date was the night I'd had my leg set.

I had been under anesthesia for six hours that night, and then in a recovery bay with a nurse pressing a button for me.

I scrolled and found another.

Forty thousand, at 11 p.m., three days after surgery.

I had been asleep in a ward with a morphine drip and a plastic bracelet on my wrist.

And another, on the day I came home from the hospital.

I sat back.

"There's a line here," I said. "Device name. Every one of these says HOURIGAN-FRONT."

Damiano turned from the window.

"Is that a laptop?"

"It's the desktop in Bernadette's office." My voice sounded strange. "The glass one, by the dispatch floor. She doesn't let anyone else touch it."

"Not even you."

"Especially not me."

He crossed the room.

He stood behind my chair and looked at the screen over my shoulder, and I could feel the warmth of him through the back of the chair.

"Five transfers since your leg," he said. "Five that you couldn't have made."

"Four were while I was in the hospital."

"And the fifth?"

"I was home, in bed. Eamon had my phone because I couldn't hold it."

I heard myself say it.

I heard what I'd just said.

I put my hand flat on the desk.

"He had my phone and my password," I said. "He's the one who set up my banking when I started, and he knew it all."

"I know."

"You knew before I did."

"I suspected." He didn't touch me. "I wanted you to read it yourself."

I felt it then, all of it, the whole shape of the thing.

Bernadette had held my arm in the road.

Eamon had kissed my forehead that morning and told me nothing would touch me.

They hadn't pushed me out of that car because they were scared.

They had done it because they had already decided what I was worth.

I wasn't crying, and I wanted that noted.

"Make me a copy," I said. "Every page that has my name on it and every page that has hers."

"Done."

"I want them to stand in front of people and say it."

He looked at me for a second, his expression unreadable.

Then his phone buzzed on the desk.

He glanced down at it, and I watched the color change in his face for the first time.

"Luca," he said into it. "Say again."

He listened.

"How many?"

Then he hung up and looked at me.

"Two detectives are at the house in Bay Ridge," he said. "They have a report from your fiancé that you've been taken."

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