CHAPTER NINE
Rooster
Amara catches me in the garage after dinner and doesn't come in. She stands in the door with her arms crossed and waits for me to notice her, which I already have.
"You know accounting?" she says.
"No."
"Imani does. You know Ironwood." She tips her head toward the main room. "She's been in that ledger since this afternoon, and she's hit the top of what she can do without somebody who knows how these people talk to each other. That's you. Go sit with her and sort it out."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And Rooster." She doesn't move out of the doorway. "This is the spending I told you about. You don't get to be sorry in a corner. You get to be useful. Those are the two doors and only one of them's open."
She's gone before I can answer, which is how she does it, so you can't say yes and make it a conversation.
I head into the main room and Imani's got the whole table.
The notebook's in the middle and she's built something around it—the legal pad covered top to bottom in columns, a laptop with a spreadsheet on it, a coffee gone cold at her elbow.
Mila's not here. I realize that in the first second and make myself not ask.
"She's asleep," Imani says, not looking up. "First real sleep since she got here, Lashes says, so we're not waking her for this. Sit down."
I sit.
"What am I looking at?"
"Eleven people who don't pay for something everybody else pays a fortune for." She turns the legal pad toward me. "Initials. They repeat. This one." She taps it. "WT. Almost every page, ten years back, and half the time there's a note by it that says comp. Comped. Free. You don't comp a customer for a decade. You comp an owner."
I look at the letters.
WT.
The back of my neck goes cold and I keep my face where it is, because it can't be, because the odds of it are a number I can't hold in my head, so I put my eyes back on the page and I make myself read the rest before I let it come forward.
"These other ten," I say. "They pay?"
"They pay. But they're regulars, they're protected somehow, and a couple have the same note next to different dates, which reads like a hierarchy to me. Somebody at the top who's comped. A ring under him who gets taken care of. Everybody else pays full and never comes back." She takes her glasses off. "That's not a business that sells to the public, Rooster. That's a business that belongs to a man and lets his friends use it."
"His friends."
"His organization." She says it plain. "You'd know better than me what that looks like."
I know exactly what it looks like.
I watched it my whole childhood.
A man at the top who doesn't pay for anything because it's already his, a layer under him who gets comped as a reward and a leash both, and the whole thing running on one fuel.
You take care of the men who took care of you, and you never write the boss's name down anywhere a stranger could read it.
You put his initials. You comp it. Everybody who matters knows exactly who WT is.
"Read me the ten," I say.
She reads them.
