I head downstairs and do one last thing: I walk through to the back of the house where Charlie’s study is located. His safe, a huge fucking thing cemented into the ground, is hidden underneath a Persian rug. I flip it back and I don’t hesitate—I enter my mother’s date of birth, Christmas day, into the keypad, and the fucking thing clicks open. I feel fucking sick. He said he hated her after she refused him, but he obviously clearly loved her, too. Sick, delusional fuck.
I take every last bundle of cash from Charlie Holsan’s safe, stuffing it into carryalls, and then I leave the house. I give myself permission to leave behind the stress and trauma of everything that happened here, too. Outside, I strike a match and toss it, watching to make sure it hits the puddled fuel on the tiles inside the hall.
Flames rise like fingers from the floor, orange and yellow and blue, and then the house is claimed. I turn away, hearing the subtle whoompf as the fire spreads, and I do not look back.
******
Lacey used to launder money for me. Back before all this shit went down and Sloane came back into my life, Charlie actually used to pay me pretty fucking well, and Lacey used to clean the money for me. She’d gamble with it—surprisingly good at that—or she’d make large purchases and return them, essentially, just trading my money for someone else’s. That didn’t necessarily give me a solid paper trail to prove where the money came from, but it was enough for me. And sometimes, when there was just too much to handle at once, the two of us would head out together and bury stashes of money. I’ve never dealt with a bank. I’ve never had anything so administrative as a checking account. Cash was always king in Charlie Holsan’s world, and I was very much a part of Charlie’s world. But now I’m making my own world, and things have got to change.
I need a way to make the stacks of my own money I have hidden behind a brick wall beneath the warehouse legitimate, and I have a very good idea how to do that. There’s just one thing I need to do first. I make a brief phone call to Rebel, and then I set things in motion.
I find Agent Lowell in a coffee shop across the road from the address Sloane gave me in Everett. By the looks of her, she’s on her fourth cup of coffee for the day. It doesn’t make it to her mouth, though. She spits most of it onto the floorboards when she lays eyes on me.
“What the fuck?” she gasps. “You’re fucking…you’re fucking crazy.”
I glare at her, wishing I felt differently about hitting women. “I’m fucking tired,” I correct her. I’m also sore, battered and significantly bruised from nearly being blown up and being shocked with a Taser. “It’s time we end this shit once and for all.”
“You realize I’m going to arrest you right now, don’t you?”
I just raise an eyebrow at her.
“Well, alright then. Do I need to cuff you, or are you gonna walk across the road with me like a civilized human being?”
“There’s only one woman on the face of this planet who I’d let fucking cuff me. And you are not her.”
Lowell leads the way out of the coffee shop; I can tell by the way her hand’s trembling as we head toward the liquor store on the other side of the road that she’s on the back foot and freaking the fuck out. Hopefully that’s gonna work in my favor. She guides me up a metal fire escape that runs up the building behind the liquor store, and then she’s punching a code into a keypad by a reinforced steel door. We move down a winding corridor, through another access door, and then into a vast, open-plan room, filled with cops. A stunned silence falls over the room. About eighteen pairs of eyes all watch with unveiled surprise as Lowell leads me through their midst and into a cold, sterile interview room. There are three chairs and a table inside and nothing else.
“Sit down,” Lowell commands. So I do. “Get comfortable,” she advises me, and then leaves me alone in the room. The door locks behind her when she goes.
This may be the most foolish thing I’ve ever done, but I’m fucking over all of this now. I’m over all of it. I did a lot of thinking last night, Ernie’s little head resting on my knee until the sun came up, and I realized this isn’t the life I should be living. Not because it wouldn’t have been easy for me to slip right into Charlie’s shoes and claim Seattle. But because my sister died yesterday. I watched her die, and then I had to bury her. Because the woman I can’t live without is inherently good, and deserves someone better than me. Because Sloane deserves everything, and I want to give it to her.
Lowell leaves me locked in the interview room for half an hour before she returns—a common, frankly transparent move on her part, designed to make me work up a sweat. The woman is a fucking moron. I’m not going to sweat; I handed myself in, for fuck’s sake. She’s towing a fucking giant in a suit behind her when she enters the room, her shoulders stiff with her own importance. She undoubtedly made good use of the thirty minutes she left me in here, calling her superiors and telling them the good news—I did it. I fucking caught the bastard. I know, I know. You can promote me later.