Page 71 of The Woman with the Handcuffs

“Because if he had a lot of cash laying around, that could be a motivation to… take him?”

Kill him.

But if she wasn’t going to say it, neither was I.

“Yeah.”

“Was it that much money?”

“I’d have to go back and see when he started working for me, but it would be sizable, yeah. About half his yearly salary for each haul he did for us. Was he living like he had that kind of money?”

“Not at all. As far as I could tell, he was still being frugal. He sent me pictures from old motels we’d stayed in over the years.”

“Is there any chance your father had a gambling issue?”

“I mean, I don’t think he really ever went to Vegas or Atlantic City.”

“Gambling on the phone is easy now.”

“He can barely text!”

“Hey,” I said, angling my head down as I glanced over at her. “I’m not trying to talk shit about your dad here, okay? I’m trying to come up with plausible scenarios for why he isn’t here right now.”

She nodded at that. “I know. I didn’t mean to snap.”

“That wasn’t snapping. I just wanted to clear that up. I’m not bashing your old man. I’m trying to understand.”

“Yeah. Me too. Even if he did have a gambling addiction, why would he be missing?”

“Because gambling addicts almost never stay within their means. That’s kind of the whole problem with it. No one would give a fuck if people were addicted to something and all they did was win. The problem is that they chase that high until they lose the house, their life savings, and the money for their medical treatments. They ruin their lives over the high. And then, when there is nothing left to ruin, they do the only thing they can think of. They borrow money from shady fuckers who jack up the interest rate so high that no amount of winning could pay it off.”

“You’re wondering if he was taken by a loan shark.”

“Or so indebted to one that he disappeared just to get the heat off.”

She sat with that for a moment, and I appreciated how well she was trying to compartmentalize this. It couldn’t be easy when you hero-worshipped someone to learn that they were capable of some unheroic shit. And she already had that evidence when she learned her father worked for me.

Finding out that he might have done so to fuel a gambling addiction might have even been a sort of relief to her. It was easy to excuse something so crazy if she knew he couldn’t help himself, that he had to do it, that his life was in danger if he didn’t.

“We’ll know more when Zeno gets his phone and we get into his bank accounts.”

“Yeah,” she agreed.

I reached over, giving her thigh a squeeze, then focused back on the road.

We had to stop, again, to grab her car at Ira’s lot before finishing the last leg into the city.

Neither of us discussed stopping. And as much as some selfish part of me wanted to grab a hotel room and spend a few hours rolling around together before we went back to our lives, I didn’t object when she offered to drive so I could nap.

“You’ve got this,” I said, reaching over to grab her leg and squeeze as we approached the GWB.

“But what if I don’t?”

“You do. But if you don’t, we can hop out and change positions.”

“Really?” she asked, looking over.

“Yep.”