Page 6 of Havoc

“I know it wasn’t. Who are they, Bolton?”

“They work for a woman named Inés Cordero, I think. She wants to run four thousand dollars a week through my register.” She swallowed. “She knows things about me, Havoc. She knows what I mail my mother every month, to the dollar.”

“She’s trying to launder cartel money,” I replied, looking down the street in the direction the Charger had gone.

“I told her no. That’s when it started. The window smashed. A man sitting in my shop all afternoon intimidating anyone who came in. Bleach in every machine I own, and tonight my tires.” Her voice cracked. “She’s coming back for her answer a week from today.”

She’d carried that by herself since Tuesday and told the sheriff, my sister and me it was kids. Three fucking days of it.

“They want to launder money,” I said. “In a laundromat. They get zero out of ten for creativity.” I shook my head.

I wanted to put my hands on her. I wanted to pull her in against my chest and hold on until she quit shaking. I shoved them in my pockets instead.

“I said no to her,” she said. “I want you to know that. I said no right away.”

“I know you did.”

“How?”

“Because I know you. I know the kind of person you are.”

She made a sound that was half a laugh, and then she was crying. She turned her face away to do it. I looked down the empty street and gave her a minute.

When she was done I got back on the bike and started it.

“Get on.”

She stared at the seat behind me. She’d asked me for a ride once, when she was sixteen and I had my first Harley, and I’d told her no.

“It’s two blocks,” she said.

“Get on the bike, Bolton.”

She climbed on. Her hands hovered at my sides.

“Hold on to me. Tight.”

Her arms came around my waist. Her chest pressed against my back and her thighs settled along the outside of mine, and I felt her breath on the back of my neck.

All that time I’d kept her at arm’s length. Now she was wrapped around me, and it was every bit as bad as I’d known it would be.

I rode those two blocks slow. I wasn’t rushing this feeling.

Her house was a small stucco place with the porch light on. She unlocked the front door.

“Wait here,” I said, and went in first.

The front room was empty. I got as far as the kitchen doorway and stopped.

There was money on her kitchen table. Four bundles of twenties, stacked up neat. On top of them was a pink slip of paper. It was one of her own alteration tickets, in her own handwriting. Cordero, hem, twenty dollars, Friday.

“Havoc.”

She was right behind me. So much for waiting on the porch.

“Stay with me,” I said.

I checked the rest of the house with her on my heels. The bathroom, the bedroom, the closet, the back door. Every lock was good and every window was latched. They’d let themselves in while she was at work, left four thousand dollars where she ate her breakfast and left again without leaving anything else or damaging the property.