“Nah, just straight bets today. The missus likes to play it safe.” Elliot slung an arm around Lainey’s neck. This was payback for Pottery Barn.
The older man scoffed. “You married a Davis girl?”
This asshole knewexactlywho her grandmother was.
He shook his full head of gray hair in disbelief. “You either have the best luck in the world or the worst, son. I’ll let you find out tonight.” He slyly turned his palm up on top of his knee.
“Don’t worry, babe. I’ve got it.” With the arm that wasn’t sliding lower down her shoulder, Elliot reached into his back pocket and passed the man a thin stack of crisp bills the way one would a tissue, casual and purposeful. Nothing to see here. Just two people talking. Meanwhile, Lainey wondered, for no particular reason, if it was possible for a person to spontaneously combust into a sea of confetti.
“Careful with that one. Davis women will eat you alive.” The man folded the bills into his pocket. “And you, missy, can tell your grandmother Iknowshe didn’t move to Tibet. I saw her inthe Wisconsin Dells two months after she ended things. On a duck boat and everything.” And with his head held high, the silver fox disappeared into the crowd.
Lainey snorted and tugged Elliot to the side of the bar to watch the races.
“I’m sorry, ‘straight bets, no combos,’ ” she parroted. “When were you going to tell me that I’m married to Adam Sandler’s character inUncut Gems? How did you know all of that?”
“I don’t know.” He shriveled a little under her scrutiny. “Probably from movies or whatever.”
She could tell she’d found a tender spot, and as much as she wanted to poke harder, she forced herself to back off. “Quick thinking with your uncle Gil, by the way.” It was the closest she could bring herself to thanking him when she’d been two seconds from pulling the emergency rip cord.
“Yeah, I think that guy’s run-in with your grandmother is a bit too fresh.”
She nodded. “Makes sense. Gran’s broken a fair number of hearts.”
“Sounds like you have, too.” Elliot was staring blank-faced at the turtles.
“There’s another Davis woman that his little comment might’ve been directed at.”
She could feel Elliot turn to look at her, but now she was the one looking at the turtles.
“So what’s the plan now?” he asked, and she was grateful he was moving off that particular emotional landmine.
“Now we watch turtle racing,” she told him, gesturing around the rowdy room. “Everyone saw us talking to the money guy. The sketchy people will find their way over to us. We waituntil we find someone who looks like he could’ve been friends with Uncle Gil. They’ll probably be in a ripped muscle tank. Just, statistically speaking.”
Their plan to manifest unsavory characters didn’t take long to materialize. A middle-aged gentleman who seemed to bear no qualms about leaving his house in a flannel robe approached the two of them almost immediately, followed by a woman in a crocodile leather vest and brushed-out blond curls.
Finally, a man wearing white jorts and a live snake as a shirt asked them the million-dollar question: “So, you know what you’re doing with Gil’s turtles yet?”
Lainey’s pulse accelerated as a ten-year-old boy wearing a backward neon snapback and carrying a full pitcher of foamy beer tried to offer them a fill-up. “We have some plans,” she answered Snake Man airily. “Why? You got ideas?”
He grinned widely, exposing an unexpected number of teeth. “I might be looking.”
He beckoned them into a back room “to talk business.” It was an ordinary office—a cluttered desk, a roller chair held together with duct tape, gray filing cabinets that she guessed housed either responsibly maintained tax records or envelopes of expired coupons and loose Skittles. The room was unremarkable, aside from the mammoth-sized aquarium tank that took up nearly half the floor space.
“I’ll give you twenty bucks a turtle,” the man said, adjusting the position of his snake on his chest to cover his nipple. Apparently, areolas had no place in an off-the-books deal for tiny turtles.
“Wish we could do it for twenty,” Lainey responded apologetically. She eyed Elliot, attempting to telepathically send the numberthirtyinto his psyche.
He looked back at her, tilting his head in an imperceptible micro-nod.
With a confident voice, Elliot countered the man. “Fifty.”
Lainey stopped breathing. People didn’t counter men wielding boas by more than double. They were alone in an office with this man, and even if someone walked in, she knew the Shell Station crowd, and one thing these people were not were snitches.
“Fifty is a lot of money, son.”
There was something undeniably sinister about the man’s use ofson.
To her surprise, Elliot held firm. His earlier anxiety had been covered by a sexy self-assuredness that she had to guess lived harmoniously within him. It reminded her of the take-charge version of him who’d asked for her number, who wasn’t afraid to demand what he wanted, even when it was her.Especiallywhen it was her.
