The Long Game (16 page)

Jackpot. The room was dark, but the shape of
a desk and chair was visible in the light from the hallway. I
debated whether to flip on the wall switch but decided against it
as I moved into the room and gave my eyes a second to adjust to the
dim light. I went to the desk first.

A laptop sat in the middle of the blotter on
its surface, and a neat stack of folders was on the left. Tommy’s
apparent preference for order made scanning the contents of the
desk easy, and there was nothing resembling the ledger Pop had
described. I pulled open the middle drawer and found neat rows of
pens and pencils and a pile of paperclips stored in one of the
drawer’s compartments. I slid open the drawers that ran down each
side and found a postal scale, a jumble of cords, printer paper,
notebooks, and one drawer of hanging folders, but no ledger.

There was a bookshelf built into the wall
behind his desk, but most of the shelves were taken up by a
collection of leather-bound law books with spines that looked like
they’d never been cracked and a handful of framed pictures of
Spencer at various ages. I wouldn’t have minded getting a closer
look at those, but my pulse quickened with each second that ticked
by. I moved closer to the bookcase to get a better look at the law
books in case the ledger had been hidden among them, but no
dice.

I was about to give up and go back to the
kitchen when something caught my eye. A stream of light from the
doorway fell on a watercolor seascape that seemed out of place in
an otherwise tastefully decorated office. It reminded me of the
painting in Pop’s office—the one that hid his wall safe. It would
be an intriguing sentiment for Tommy to choose a similar painting
to cover his own safe, but it was worth a try.

The painting swung away from the wall on
hidden hinges, and a black safe with a silver keypad stared back at
me from behind it. If the ledger was in this office, this is where
I’d find it. I glanced back over my shoulder to make sure no
shadows moved down the hall and then punched in the first
combination I could think of: 0418. Spencer’s birthday. The green
digital display flashed, but the safe door refused to budge.

“Shane?” Spencer’s voice echoed down the
hall.

I swung the painting back over the safe and
moved quickly back across the room. I pulled the door closed and
made it to the hallway just as Spencer rounded the staircase.

“Find it okay?” she asked, a slight frown
pinching her brow.

“Yep,” I lied. “But thanks for coming to get
me. It gives me a chance to do this.” I pulled her into my arms and
kissed her. It was definitely not the sort of kiss a girl expected
to get with her father a few rooms away, but she soon relaxed
against me. I pushed her back against the wall, and when she
brought her arms up around my neck, I knew any suspicion she’d had
about what I’d been doing was gone.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

“SO, WHAT YOU’RE telling me is you fucked
up?” Judd angrily paced the floor between the kitchen and sofa.
“You were in his house, and you didn’t get the book.”

“I didn’t have much time, but there will be
way more people at the party on Friday, so it’ll be easier to get
into his office without someone noticing. There’s a safe. I just
need to figure out what he’d use as the combination.”

“Ask your girlfriend.”

“Right.” I flopped down onto the sofa and
kicked my dress shoes off over the arm. “And she won’t wonder at
all why I’m asking.”

“Who the hell cares what she wonders? You’ve
already wasted way too much time trying to do things your way. I
say we go over there right now, put this in his face—” He produced
the gun from his waistband and waved it in the air. “—and get the
damn book back.”

“Pop wanted to keep this quiet. He doesn’t
want the police involved.” Even though there was truth in these
words, my main motivation for talking him down was for Spencer’s
sake. She’d be staying at Tommy’s for the next few days to help
organize the caterers and decorators, and there was no way I was
going to let her get caught in Judd’s crossfire.

“My old man’s always been a little too subtle
for my taste,” Judd said, still brandishing the black pistol.
“What’s the point in playing the long game when this’ll get the job
done a hundred times faster?”

“Yeah, and get you killed if you’re not
careful. Put that thing away before you shoot your own dick
off.”

Judd huffed in disgust but put the gun on a
side table and collapsed into the armchair next to it. “You’d be
awfully sad about that, wouldn’t you, nancy boy?”

I laughed. “Trust me, Prince, if I swung that
way, I’d have better taste.”

“You should be so lucky,” Judd sneered.

“Look,” I said, steering the conversation
back to Tommy and the ledger. “I can get the book back without
anyone getting hurt or going to jail. If I play it right on Friday,
he won’t even notice it’s missing until we’re long gone.”

“That’s a big if, as far as I can tell, and
I’m tired of waiting.”

“You know,” I said carefully, “there’s a
chance the book isn’t even there. Tommy isn’t an idiot. He probably
has it in a safe deposit box on the other side of the country.”

“Not a chance,” Judd said, effectively
killing any hope I had of talking myself out of this mess. “He was
stupid enough to steal from us, and he’s stupid enough to keep the
book nearby. There’s no way he’d keep it somewhere he couldn’t
check on it once in a while.”

“I guess.” I rested my head on the arm of the
sofa and stared up at the ceiling. It didn’t matter what I said or
did; there was no getting around hurting Spencer. “Then it has to
be in the wall safe. He might even have the combination written
down somewhere in his office, and if it’s there, I’ll find it.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it, Buffer.”

“And when I do,” I said, pushing myself up to
glare at him, “you better think of a new fucking nickname because
I’m tired of this ‘buffer’ shit.”

“Oh-ho, big talk from the guy who’s made such
a damn mess of things so far.”

“I may not be working on your schedule,
Prince, but I’ll get what I came for.” I gave him a hateful smile.
“And soon after that, you’ll have to start calling me brother.”

The muscle in his jaw flinched, but
apparently he wasn’t in the mood to reassemble any more tables
today. “Since I know you won’t be able to get your head outta your
ass long enough to do anything useful, I ain’t too worried about
it.”

I’d been ready for another fight, but my sore
ribs were grateful I hadn’t been successful in provoking him this
time. I was too tired to keep arguing, and we were both quiet for a
long time.

“I would’ve thought you of all people would
be okay with Tommy Costello getting hurt,” Judd said.

I looked up to see him sliding the gun back
and forth across the tabletop. “Why’s that? He didn’t steal from
me.”

“He did though.”

“What are you talking about? I thought he
took the money and ledger from Pop’s safe.”

“I’m not talking about money, dipshit. I’m
talking about Wiley Jim—your dad.”

I sat up again, this time pushing myself all
the way so I could look him square in the face. “They worked
together, I know that, and Pop said something about Tommy betraying
my da, but he betrayed the whole clan when he stole the money,
didn’t he?”

“He stole from the clan and took off, yeah,”
Judd said. “But what he took from your father was far more
valuable.”

“And what was that?”

“His life.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

MY FACE WAS starting to hurt from the smile
I’d plastered on when I’d reached the mahogany door of Tommy’s
house. The party was already in full swing when I’d arrived, and it
had taken me several minutes of fighting through the sea of
designer labels and overflowing martini glasses to find Spencer.
She was in the kitchen, directing a staff of uniformed waiters
loaded with trays of hors d’oeuvres. Her efficiency would have
impressed Bridget Sheedy, although she spoke in a voice much too
kind for that old bat’s taste.

“There you are,” she said, skirting around
the edge of the island to avoid knocking into one of the waiters.
“I was wondering if you’d come to your senses and decided to skip
this horrible event all together.” She crossed to the kitchen door
and lifted herself on her toes to kiss me hello.

I kissed her back, though it was hard to
revel in it the way I would have done before Judd’s revelation.
She’d been so busy the last few days helping her dad that we hadn’t
had much time to talk, giving me plenty of time to stew over what
Judd had told me. Tommy murdered my da, and although his sins
certainly weren’t Spencer’s, it was getting harder to separate the
two. There was no denying I’d missed her the past few days, but
finding out the truth had lit a fire under my ass. There was no way
I’d be leaving this house tonight without the ledger. I might’ve
thought I loved this girl—and maybe I really did—but I was certain
I loved my mother and my brother, and what Tommy had done had
nearly destroyed my entire family.

“Are you finished giving orders?” I asked, my
arms still wrapped around her waist.

“I think so.” She glanced around the kitchen.
“These guys cater every one of my dad’s parties, so they know what
they’re doing.”

“Good,” I said, holding her at arm’s length
to get a better look at the cranberry dress that hugged the curves
of her body and ended around mid-thigh. “This dress is too good to
waste on standing around in the kitchen.”

“
You keep talking like that,
and no one will be seeing this dress for the rest of the night.”
She kissed me again, and this time whatever her father had done to
mine twenty years ago didn’t stop me from returning it with all the
heat and electricity I felt running through every nerve in my body.
If there would’ve been any real chance that she and I could sneak
up to one of the neglected guestrooms upstairs, I might’ve even put
my mission to find the book on hold for a while.

But it didn’t look like that was going to
happen, at least for now. She turned the open-mouthed kiss into a
quick peck and leaned back. “I guess we should go see if my dad
needs me to do anything else.”

We found Tommy in the living room,
entertaining a group of suits. “So an American on vacation in
Ireland decides to play a round with a few local gentleman,” Tommy
said, waving the Scotch glass in his hand as he spoke. “He takes a
few practice swings, sets up his tee, and proceeds to hook the hell
out of the ball, which goes way out of bounds.”

“Is this a story about you, Richards?” a
middle-aged guy with an orange spray-tan asked, eliciting a round
of chuckles from the assembled crowd. Richards lifted his glass,
offering a good-natured smile and a mea culpa nod.

“So the guy re-tees,” Tommy continued once
the chuckles had died away. “He says to the gentlemen, ‘I’m taking
a mulligan,’ then pounds one down the fairway about 280 yards.
Proud of himself, he beams at his playing partners and says, ‘In
the U.S., we call that a mulligan. What do you call it here?’ The
locals stare at him for a long time and finally one guys says,
‘hitting three.’”

The room erupted into laughter. I glanced
down at Spencer who shrugged at me, apparently less familiar with
golf than she was with Phillies baseball.

“There she is,” Tommy said, noticing Spencer
for the first time since we’d joined the group. He waved her over.
She left my side, flashing an apologetic grin, and joined her
father at the center of the room. “Dave, you remember my daughter,
Spencer, don’t you?” This he said to the orange guy who’d taken the
piss out of Richards a minute before.

“Sure!” Dave said, giving Spencer a lecherous
smile that Tommy didn’t seem to catch. Or, at least, I assumed he
didn’t since he didn’t deck the guy on the spot. “You still in the
business program at Balanova?”

Spencer nodded, leaning away from him a
little.

“She’s in her second year,” Tommy said with a
proud smile. “And at the top of her class. Well on her way to the
MBA program at the Wharton School.”

Spencer looked at me for help, and I gave her
an encouraging smile. When she turned back to the conversation, I
decided that this was my chance to get back into Tommy’s office. I
skirted the crowd that had gathered to regale Spencer with tales of
their days at the University of Pennsylvania and found my way back
into the entry hall of the house.

I was relieved to find the hall on the other
side of the stairs deserted, although the light from under the
bathroom door told me it might not stay that way for long. I found
the second door to the right and slipped inside, pulling it closed
beside me. I didn’t have time to fumble around in the dark, so I
took the risk of flipping the light switch. The fixture overhead
filled the room with soft light, and I crossed to the desk and
opened the drawer I knew contained a stack of notepads. I flipped
open the cover of the pad on top and found some hastily scrawled
notes and a list of names and phone numbers. Nothing that looked
like a combination. I turned a few pages to find much of the same
and moved on to the next book. This one had a list of what I
guessed were company names, some marked with a star, others with a
question mark, some crossed out with a stroke of Tommy’s pen.
Potential investments, maybe, but nothing that could help me get
into the safe behind the ugly seascape. The rest of the notebooks
were empty, and I slammed the drawer in frustration.

The sound of feet moving down the hall drew
my attention, and I crouched behind Tommy’s desk. I waited for the
doorknob to turn, debating whether I should hide myself better or
just make up a reason for being in the office, but the feet passed
by without stopping. I blew out the breath I’d been holding and
straightened up to my full height again. I tried the drawer with
hanging files next. The tabs at the top told me these were mostly
client files, but several folders were unmarked. I opened one,
pulled out a handful of receipts, and paged through them. Tommy had
shelled out several thousand dollars for this cocktail party, it
seemed. The catering company alone had cost him almost five grand
for food and the wait staff. Another five for the alcohol and bar
service. Though, in this crowd, I was surprised it hadn’t been
more. You could take the Traveler out of the Village, but give him
a no-limit platinum card and he’d still throw a damn good
party.