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“You did good, kid,” Fitz said and slapped his back. “Goddamn.”
Dex was still staring at him, and Jay’s eyeballs wouldn’t look anywhere else.
“What?” he finally asked and prepared himself to hear how he’d fucked up this time.
Dex actually smiled. “Fitz is right. You did good. This could’ve been a bloodbath in front of fifty witnesses. We could’ve had civilian casualties.” He squeezed Jay’s shoulder. “I don’t know if I would have been that chill about somebody coming up on me like that.”
Simon responded to that with a wry chuckle. “You wouldn’t have. You’re strung way to tight for that.” He smiled at Jay. “You did great, JJ.”
Jay felt his cheeks heating. He was just about a hundred percent sure nobody in the club had ever praised him like this before. It was so unusual it almost felt wrong, and he didn’t know how to react.
“Okay,” he finally said. “Good.”
“We cleared out the joint, though,” Fitz said, nodding at the line of vehicles that was forming at the road. “We should pay these guys for killing their afternoon.”
Jay looked around and saw that almost everybody had left.
“Yep,” Dex agreed. “Let’s order, brothers. And load up. Make it worth their trouble.” He gave Jay’s shoulder one more squeeze and turned him around to face the order window. “I got yours.”
Buffeted by a swirling gale of strange emotions, Jay stood numbly at Dex’s side. Had he just finally earned his brothers’—at least these brothers’—respect?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Petra followed herfather and his attorney into a small conference room in the district attorney’s office. The man ushering them into the room was not the DA but the assistant district attorney assigned to her father’s case, Eliot Richardson.
Richardson was about Petra’s age, maybe a little older, and had the particular kind of moneyed look one often saw in Oklahoma and Texas. She thought of it as ‘Oil Scion’: deep golfer’s tan, thick mane of hair brushed back from his face and a little longer than one might find in an East Coast boardroom. Crisp white designer dress shirt, thickly knotted silk tie, and a custom designer suit. Probably Tom Ford. Under it all was a pair of shiny black ostrich-skin cowboy boots. And an aggressively bright, white, ready smile that seemed friendly at first but really was about sixty-percent predator’s snarl.
Nothing about him eased her mind coming into this meeting, which was supposedly about Richardson’s ‘final offer’ for a deal. That he sat entirely opposite them at the oblong table seemed ominous, too. Even the fact that he hadn’t brought anything into the room with him—not her father’s case file, not a tablet or an actual notepad, not even a cup of coffee—seemed like bad news.
An administrative assistant had offered them coffee while they’d waited, so Petra, her father, and Mr. Vermeyer each had a disposable cup of middling brew. Mr. Vermeyer had a stack of papers and files, but he left them in the stack, sitting before him on the polished wood table.
“Well, let’s get to it,” Richardson said. “Mr. Maros, your court date is next week. We’re prepared here to prosecute a full trial and win a conviction. But trials are expensive for everyone, and you and your attorney are very clearly interested in a plea agreement. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to come to terms on that agreement. Today is our last attempt. Before I make my final offer, I want to lay out some details.”
He pressed a button on a console in the middle of the table, and two legal assistants, both young women, came in. Each one was carrying a banker’s box with MAROS and Dad’s case number typed on a label at the end.
Petra’s stomach cramped like a hand had reached into her and wadded it up. If those boxes were full ...
Her father dropped his hands to his lap and clutched them together. They all sat quietly while the assistants laid out the contents of those boxes. It was all papers. Some looked like spreadsheets, some were letters, others were forms and reports. And photographs. A stack of them, neatly arranged at Richardson’s elbow.
Then the assistants set the boxes on the floor against the wall and filed out.
The whole thing was so blatantly theatrical, Petra felt sure they’d rehearsed it beforehand.
When the door closed again, nobody spoke. Richardson, obviously still in his moment, let the silence go on for what seemed like an hour. Probably it was less than a minute.
