Ramón opened the passenger door and leaned into the car. He dug a finger into the back of the headrest and dragged out a bullet. His jaw was hard-set as he tossed it to me. “It would take me days just to get the window glass, not to mention the paint. And that headrest will cost a fortune to replace,ifI can even find one.”
“Maybe Javi knows somebody,” Vero suggested, following him around the car.
Ramón turned abruptly and leveled a finger at her. “I’m not breathing a word of this to Javi, and neither are you. You’re better off getting rid of it.”
“We can’t do that,” I said. “We borrowed it from a dealership. We have to return it.” Alan may have been bending rules for Irina by letting me take the keys, but this car was too valuable to go unnoticed by the dealer for long, and Irina’s interest in protecting me wasn’t without limits. “How long would it take you to fix it?”
He planted his hands on his hips, turning to face me. “That headrest is a problem. I’ve got a guy who might be willing to get his hands on one, but he’s not cheap.”
“We have cash,” I assured him.
“No,” Vero said quietly, “we don’t.” A cloud passed over her eyes. The same one that had flattened their shine when I’d told my mother Vero was handling my money and she would never let megrow old and broke. Vero gave a small shake of her head, silently begging me not to ask her about it here in front of Ramón.
My throat worked around a swallow. After all we’d managed to survive over the last few weeks, there was no way I was going to let us go to prison for a car.
Numb, I heard myself say, “We’ll find a way to pay for it.”
Ramón’s eyes dipped to the bloodstains on my coat. “I can disable the tracking on the car tonight. Start the bodywork in the morning. I’ll need seventy-two hours at least. But if anyone finds out about this, Vero—”
She threw her arms around him, holding back tears. “No one will find out.”
“I spend way too much time cleaning up after you,” he muttered into her hair. As she pulled away, he dragged a clean rag from his back pocket and tossed it to me, inclining his head toward my hands. “Vero and I found your van. I’ll need a couple of days to look at it, but it probably won’t be a quick fix. After parts and labor, you might do better to replace it. You want me to stick aFOR SALEsign in the window and put it out front?” he offered. “See if I can get you a few bucks for it?”
That van had been through a lot. Ramón was probably right. It was probably long past time to put it out of its misery and find a new one. But I’d test-driven the hot, flashy sports car that handled like a dream yet felt too much like a midlife crisis. And I’d driven Vero’s Charger, with its growling engine and confident lines, which sometimes felt too much like a police car. In spite of the crumbled Cheerios in the carpet and the car seats in the back, there was something simple and comforting about my van, and I wasn’t entirely sure I was ready to give that up yet.
“Can you give me an estimate to fix it?” I asked, rubbing the last of the dried blood from my fingers.
He nodded. “Sure thing.”
“We’ll need a loaner,” Vero said. “Can we borrow some keys?”
“Wait here.” Ramón disappeared down the hall to his office.
An uncomfortably long silence stretched out between us before Vero finally spoke. “I didn’t invest the money,” she confessed quietly. “I lost it. All of it.”
“Thanksgiving weekend. After you left my parents’ house, where did you go?” I already knew. I just needed to hear her say it.
“A casino. In Atlantic City. I… owe some people money. We had all that cash from Irina, but it wasn’t enough to pay them back. I thought for sure I could double it and everything would be fine. And it would have been.” She clasped her hands, pleading with me to believe her. “I was hot that first night, Finn. I was already up by a few grand, and some guy at my table noticed. As I was heading back to my room, he told me about a private party—big buy-in, high stakes. He said he knew someone who could hook me up with a marker if I wanted to go.”
“A marker?”
“Like an advance on your book—a loan.”
A loan she would have to win back. The marker Delia had overheard Vero talking about.
If she can’t get two hundred,Delia had said,she’ll be in big trouble.
“How much was the marker worth?”
Tears brimmed in her eyes. “Two hundred thousand.”
She started as Ramón came back into the garage. He tossed her a set of keys. Her hands shook as she caught them against her chest. He held out a folded envelope. “This was in my mailbox at my apartment this morning. It’s addressed to you.”
Vero took it, glancing at the name printed in bold letters—Veronica Ramirez. Her face paled, and she and Ramón exchanged a long look. “Thanks,” she said, tucking it in her coat pocket. “I’ll bring the car around.”
Ramón grabbed my sleeve as I turned to follow her out. His brow furrowed as he watched her go. “Keep an eye on my cousin. I love her, but she’s reckless. She can’t afford any more trouble.”
I thought of the photo album I’d found in the closet of her bedroom. About the scholarship letter addressed to a last name I didn’t know. About the man who’d gone to her mother’s house looking for her, and how the best place to hide a dirty secret was across a state line.
