My mother took another step into the room.
“You drag us into a criminal conspiracy, fail to deliver a dollar, humiliate me in front of half of Great Falls, and now you think you’re walking out with cash?”
Derek’s face turned strange then—drawn, wild, done pretending.
“The cartel is coming for me,” he said.
The room went dead quiet.
Briana blinked.
“What?”
“I said they’re coming for me.”
My mother actually paled.
“Stop being dramatic.”
“I am not being dramatic.”
He slammed the money onto the desk.
“They were never bookies. They were never side debts. They were men I should never have owed. And because Allison is still alive, because the trust is locked, because every account is freezing around me, I have hours at best.”
Briana whispered, “Oh my God.”
That might have been the moment she finally understood she had not been circling easy money.
She had been orbiting a sinkhole.
Then a third figure appeared in the doorway.
Jamal.
He looked worse up close than he had at the shipping yard feed. His hair was damp with sweat, his jaw unshaven, his sleeve dark and stiff with dried blood. He held a gun low in his right hand.
No one in the observation van spoke.
The home office camera caught everything.
Derek spun.
Jamal lifted the gun.
“Put the cash down.”
Briana gasped and moved behind my mother.
“Jamal—”
He did not look at her.
He looked only at Derek.
“You set me up at the pier. You sent me after your wife, and then you tried to feed me to the people you owe.”
Derek backed toward the bookshelf.
“That’s not what happened.”
“It is exactly what happened.”
My mother, incredibly, found her voice first.
“If anyone is taking money out of this house tonight, it will be my daughter and me.”
Jamal’s laugh was all exhaustion and contempt.
“There is no money big enough to fix what’s coming.”
Briana started crying again.
“We need a lawyer.”
“No,” Jamal said without emotion. “You needed one yesterday.”
Derek’s breathing had gone shallow.
The four of them stood in that room—the husband, the mother, the sister, the hired hand—and for the first time they looked exactly like what they were.
Not a family.
A failed conspiracy.
On the lawn outside, dark vehicles rolled into final position.
Agent Cole adjusted his earpiece and looked at me.
“We go now.”
I should tell you that when the tactical teams moved onto my front lawn, I felt triumph.
I didn’t.
I felt tired.
Not motel-room tired.
Not stayed-up-too-long tired.
Bone tired. Soul tired. Thirty-four years tired.
