Page 33 of Open Road

Roam got it right on the first try.

‘Don’t read into it,’ Craig’s voice says from somewhere at the back of my head, smooth and certain. ‘You’re embarrassing yourself.’

Rose reaches up and pats Roam’s hand. “Night, Roam.”

“Night, Rose.”

She rolls toward Mr. Rabbit and closes her eyes with the finality of someone who has completed everything on her list. Out in thirty seconds, the way she always goes, total commitment, no half measures.

Roam stands. He looks at her for a moment in the low light, and his face does something I don’t have a name for yet.

When his gaze shifts to me, he tips his head toward the hall and drops his voice.

“Need to talk to you… privately.” He takes me upstairs.

The staircase at this end of the compound is narrow, the kind that’s been painted over enough times that the corners have gone soft. At the top is a hall with several doors. He stops at one on the right, pushes it open, and stands aside.

The room is bigger than the one downstairs, with its own bathroom, the door half open, and a window that looks out over the side yard. There’s a desk along one wall with a laptop sitting open on it, screen dimmed to a low glow. Near the door, a bag, the kind built for a man who lives out of one, worn at the corners, buckles that know their own weight.

Roam crosses to the desk and pulls out the chair. “Sit.”

Not a request but not unkind either. Roam doesn’t seem to do unkind, but there’s no question about what he means. My heart is doing something loud and unhelpful against my ribs. The door is still open behind me, and the open door is the only reason I’m not more afraid of the situation than I already am.

Then he closes it.

My eyes go to the bag.

“Whose room is this?”

“Mine.” He leans against the desk, arms crossed, looking at me steadily. “Creed offered it. I’m taking it.”

“You weren’t before?”

“Didn’t have a reason to stay put before.”

He says it the way he says most things—flat, factual, no performance around it. I look at the bag again. The wear on it. The way it sits near the door is like something that’s always been ready to leave, but hasn’t decided yet whether that’s still true.

“Permanently?” I ask.

“Probably.”

I sit.

He opens the laptop and turns it toward me. “The drive you gave Winchester this morning.” He watches my face. “There were two directories on it.”

“The property records—”

“The first directory was the property records.” His voice is even. “The second was password-protected. Fingers got into it…” A pause. “You need to look at what’s in it.”

He lets me read.

The property names in the first directory are familiar, addresses I’ve seen on paperwork Craig brought home, on documents I filed, typed, or watched him sign. Standard real estate holdings, the kind of transactions I understood. The kind I thought I understood.

Then the second directory opens and everything changes.

Pure Ventures LLC. A transaction ledger, two years of it, dates, figures, and reference codes that look like real estate at a glance and aren’t. It takes me less time than it should to understand what I’m looking at. Four years of living inside Craig’s system, filing things without being told what they meant, watching money move in directions that didn’t quite add up if you looked at the shape of it. I looked, but I stopped asking because asking cost too much.

Craig has been laundering money for a gun operation.