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“Listen.” I lowered my voice. “I’m worried these guys’ll come after you. Can you go to her parents’ in Jersey for a few days?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I have to work.”
“Can you send her and Connor there?”
“Probably.”
“Do you have a gun?”
“No. Do you?”
“No, I can’t, on parole. How about a baseball bat? Your old one?”
“I think so.”
“Keep it under the bed. Put on the burglar alarm, too. Maybe don’t go to meetings for a few days. Stay at the office.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Thanks?I felt touched, since John wasn’t big on please-and-thank-you. “You’re never getting that two grand now, bro. You made me an accessory-after-the-fact.”
“Oh yeah? I’ll sue you for it.”
Ouch.
“See you tomorrow, TJ.”
“Okay, bye.” I hung up.
I exhaled, blowing off steam. I loved my brother and wished it weren’t so hard with us. I knew he was angry at me because I’d done so many stupid things when we were growing up, mostly when I was drinking. I’d started in middle school, sneaking Miller Lite from my father’s supply in the basement, delivered by the distributor as a standing order. We had the biggest house on the street, and myparents loved to entertain, so everybody knew the Devlins’ was the party house. Nobody kept track of the basement beer supply.
Except me.
I remembered being down there before John’s high school graduation, drinking in the dark while they all ran around upstairs getting ready. I was drunk by the time we left for the ceremony, held outside on the school’s football field.
You did what, TJ?
It was my mother, furious because I’d called Bravo Pizza on my flip phone and ordered five pies to be delivered to the stands—during the ceremony. The other families had burst into laughter at the remarkable sight of a pizza deliveryman climbing the metal bleachers with a stack of aromatic boxes. The bleachers erupted in an impromptu pizza party just as the valedictorian began to speak.
John was the valedictorian.
Thinking back, I felt a wave of guilt. I owed my brother whatever I could do for him now.
I headed for the next stop.
Chapter Six
I pulled into the Brandywine Corporate Center, a complex of octagon-shaped buildings, one of which contained Devlin & Devlin, a medical supply company, an insurance company, and a reinsurance company. I didn’t know what reinsurance was, but I guessed it was another layer of people who deny payment on valid claims.
I got out of the car and hurried past a mulched bed of corporate flowers to the entrance. I card-swiped at the door and went inside. The building had smoked glass windows, and the only lights on were in the hallway, which meant the cleaning crew was here somewhere. The walls were white and the carpet gray, a generic entrance that neither appealed nor offended, like décor for capitalists.
I made a beeline for our office, with its plaque in fake-Gothic font. Devlin & Devlin referred to my father and mother, and my mother claimed that first Devlin was her. They started the firm together, my father practicing business law and my mother family law, though she mostly represented husbands, a reverse-psychology switcheroo that proved surprisingly lucrative.
I unlocked the office door and entered the Merrie Olde England of my father’s dreams, since no one could constrain his Anglophilia.The walls were painted a Farrow & Ball color called Incarnadine, which I’m pretty sure meant Blood. The couches and side chairs were covered with shiny red tartan, and the reception desk was polished mahogany, matching the end tables. Gilt frames encased fox-hunting scenes next to laminated articles about every Devlin but me. Nobody was framing a mug shot.
