Page 81 of Thin Ice

The loft looked the same as it had a month ago. Wes was already there when I arrived with Elias at my side. Brick brought Maddie's contribution in a bakery box.

Misha held out the bowl, and this time Elias dropped his phone in with everyone else's.

The cards were both perfect and terrible. Wes was up thirty dollars inside of an hour and apologized for it, which meant Brick spent the next hour trying to bankrupt him on principle. Elias played the same tight, forgettable game as before, folding early and tracking everything. Then he pushed a bluff all the way through and won the pot.

Brick threw his cards down and pointed at him. "The license," he said. "I knew it covered bluffing."

"Parking," Elias insisted as he stacked his chips. "It only covers parking."

Jamie won the last big hand of the night, sitting slouched and loose, with a head full of tousled hair framing a perfect poker face. When he turned over a full house, Misha put both palms flat on the monastery table.

"Who taught you this?" Misha asked.

"You did." Jamie raked the pot in. "You said my eyes are too honest, so I practiced making them questionable."

"Worst thing I could have done for this team," Misha said.

Near midnight, with Wes gone home to his kids and Brick counting Jamie's money with him at the door, I ended up in the little kitchen while Misha put the kettle on. He took down the glass in its metal holder and squared it to the edge of the counter.

The kettle steamed. He took it off before it whistled and poured.

"Body is talking, Mercer," he said. He picked up the glass and drank. "You know what it says now?"

"Tell me."

"Says thank you." He looked at me over the rim, and for one second I thought I saw a smile. "Whole summer, no games. Let it talk. Listen this time." He set the glass down and squared it again. "Okay."

***

We had news from Seattle this morning. It came through Elias's phone, set on speaker.

The man who attacked Elias was dead. He'd been fatally injured in the arena, by the ice plant, in the sixty seconds after Doyle's men burst through the doors behind him. They gave him warnings—drop it, hands down. Instead, he lunged for Elias one last time, and a veteran member of Doyle's crew shot him twice. He lingered in the hospital but never woke up .

Diane Rourke from Tarn had lawyers already—three firms, Michael said, retained across three states before they'd swept the confetti. She'd never put anything in writing. The one instruction she'd made findable was the opposite of an order: after Forest Park failed and Frey came apart, she'd told her contractor to pull everyone out. Stand down, cut the losses, go quiet. That message existed. She'd made sure it existed.

The man who went into the building to attack Elias had done it against her orders. She'd called the retreat, and he went anyway.

"She'll hand a jury the stand-down and it'll be true," Michael said. "She called it off. It happened without her."

"She'll keep most of the money," Michael said. "She'll sit for depositions and be excellent at them. In three or four years she'll be somewhere else with a different title, doing this for someone new."

"And Reis?"

"He's cooperating with the investigation," Mac said. "It won't save him. Ty's death is still out there with a raft of evidence. Reis can't seem to stop talking. His counsel keeps trying to slow him down, but he won't. Reis thinks it's part of his healing process." A pause. "He's finished as a businessman, Nolan. Whether they pin a murder conviction on him is hard to tell, but his days of bestselling books and getting invited to give commencement speeches are over."

"And what about the hip? Do you know what they gave us? Is it normal?"

"We've got the best people on that Nolan," Mac said. "Nothing conclusive yet."

Before they hung up, Mac's voice changed registers, and I watched Elias sit up straight.

"Elias. Two weeks from Friday, Seattle. Eamon's cleared his calendar."

"I'll be there," Elias said.

"Yes, you will." The line went dead.

Elias looked at the phone for a moment, then at me. "That's going to be hard."