Hank has a big welt on his forehead from the dildo but is otherwise okay.
“We’ll make him pay,” Gran promises.
“Wait a minute. You don’t look like cops.” A female officer peers at us.
“Oh no,” Gran says, “we are definitely the police—”
“We’re strippers,” Carolina says at the same time.
“I don’t care who you are, but you’re getting arrested.”
“Run!” Gran hollers. “I’ll hold ’em off!”
I turn to run and immediately trip over a garden gnome.
The female officer pounces on me. “You are under arrest!”
40
FITZ
“Ijust don’t understand why she didn’t want to come home with me.” I pace around the private room in one of my bars where you have to be A-list to even get in and nothing costs less than five hundred dollars.
I’m losing it in front of my brothers, who are gathered on the velvet lounge seats.
“It’s Knox. She’s into him for some reason. I should burn that whole NHL team.”
“Fitz…”
“It’s my stuff, and if I want to light it on fire, I will.”
“Gee, I can’t imagine why a woman wouldn’t feel safe going alone at night to the house of a man who’s threatening to lock an entire NHL team in a stadium and set it on fire,” Whitman states.
“I’m going to have to marry her.” I sit down.
“You just met her.”
“No, he’s been watching her for months,” Faulkner reminds everyone.
“She’s in love with me. We’ve been communicating through notes and gifts.”
“I still have the underground bunker I built to lock up Dad if we ever caught him,” Crawford tells Salinger. “I could stick him in there.”
“Hey, I’m not after the type of women, girls really, that Dad was,” I argue passionately. “Winnie is an ex–private equity analyst, she has a cupcake monopoly, and she thinks stalkers are a cute way to relax after a hard day’s work. She knows what she’s getting into with me.”
“Keep lying to yourself.” Hawthorne hums.
“Maybe she doesn’t care about you at all,” McCarthy says as he sips his expensive malt scotch through a straw.
“Can you have some class?”
“I don’t know, can you have some chairs that don’t suck and aren’t uncomfortable?”
“Those are from Europe, specially made from hand-oiled Alpine walnut.”
“You should have bought a Walmart futon.”
“And she does care about me. She’s not impressed with my money at all. I think she’d think it was a chore if I asked her to go to the Super Bowl even if it was in a private suite.”
