Of All the Fake Heiresses I've Met, You're the Stupidest novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Pilot's Hands

The house doctor drew my blood at seven the next morning.

Sean Kearney stood at the foot of the bed and watched every drop go into the tube.

Ronan wrote my name on the label himself, sealed the box and carried it to the lab in his own car.

He came back inside the hour.

"Nobody touched it," he said. "I stood behind the technician the whole time."

Sean did not look at me.

He kept looking at the door where Savannah had gone.

"Take Erin down to the cellar," he said at last. "The man from the crane is talking."

The cellar smelled of oil and cold stone.

The sniper sat on a wooden chair with his good wrist cuffed to a pipe and his bad one wrapped in a towel.

He was thin and gray-faced and not very old.

He looked up at me and swallowed.

"You're the one who shot my gun," he said.

"Yes."

"Nobody does that. People shoot the man."

"The man was not the problem," I said. "Who hired you?"

"A voice on a phone."

Ronan leaned against the wall with his arms folded.

"Try again," he said.

"I swear. He said where to be and when. He paid half in cash, in a bait cooler under the east quay. Then he came to see my setup, once, and I was told never to look at his face."

"You looked at his hands," I said.

The sniper stared at me.

"Everybody looks at hands," he said. "You told me to look away, I look at the hands."

"What were they like?"

"Big knuckles. Flat nails." He turned his own good hand over. "A rope scar across the thumb, here. A tow line, maybe. A pilot's hands."

I did not move.

Chester had a rope scar across the left thumb.

He had told me once that a tow line took the skin off him the year he was nineteen.

I did not say it.

Ronan watched my face.

"What was the plan?" he asked the sniper.

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