“This is a pack of wolves. If you act like a sheep, they’ll eat you alive.”
Carter’s hands curled into fists. “Like I said:why do you care?”
Tenny ignored the question. “What if it had gone the other way? What if it was your favorite woman who’d been taken out from under you? Used by someone else?”
“I don’townanybody,” Carter said, bristling. “Jazz isn’t mine.” Though he’d challenged Candyman of all people about her, once. That seemed decades ago now. “I guess I’m like you,” Carter said, offering a sneer of his own. “Sex is just sex. Nobody has to be my property for me to enjoy myself.”
“No,” Tenny said, expression hardening, his voice on just that one syllable sending a shiver down Carter’s back. “I assure you that we are nothing alike, you and I. Sex can be just sex. Butif anyone ever touches my property, I’ll rip him apart piece by piece, and stop his heart last of all.”
He was, Carter could see, wholly serious.
Carter wet his lips. “You don’t have an old lady either.”
“No,” Tenny agreed, and Carter thought of a lighted doorway, and a hand on an arm, and Stephanie sayingsomething.
Tenny grinned nastily. “Have I shocked you?”
“Nothing shocks me anymore,” Carter said, and went inside.
~*~
Ghost had an honest to goodness slide projector set up in the center of the chapel table, projecting an image of the currently-under-construction Bell Bar up onto the wall. All the lights were off, and curls of cigarette smoke lifted up into the beam of projected light, distorting the image.
“General updates, first,” Ghost said.
At his side, Walsh opened up the thick file folder in front of him. “The contractor says it’ll be another six weeks or so on the bar.”
“Six weeks?” Dublin asked, brows raised. “Why so long? It’s already been, what, two months?”
“The plumbing, the mold, the permits,” Walsh said, ticking off on his fingers. “And the window glass we wanted was on backorder, so that’s another delay.”
Aidan took a long drag on his cigarette. “It’s so much easier selling hash.”
“Agreed,” Ghost said, mildly. “But I can’t put hash on my tax return, so.”
“The café and the empty place are totally demo’d,” Walsh continued. “Stripped down to the studs, and all the wiring and plumbing checks out on both. We can’t move forward until we know what’s going in.”
“Maggie will get to make the big café decisions,” Ghost said, and there were nods all around.
“Albie, you were gonna draw up a list of things you’d need for Maude’s?”
He nodded and produced a paper list from his cut pocket that he passed down the length of the table toward his brother. When Carter handed it down, he caught a glimpse of tidy, precise writing in pencil, a thorough, front-and-back list organized by categories and brands. Albie had put a lot of thought into it, obviously; spent time debating and researching different options.
Carter couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that, he thought with a little pang.
Walsh scanned the list, nodded, and tucked it into his folder. “I’ll make up a list for the contractors. You’ll need to do another walk-through and come up with a layout,” he told Albie.
“Yeah, I can do that.”
Ghost clicked a button on the projector, and the image changed: a close-up of the boarded windows of Bell Bar, and the unimaginative graffiti painted across the plywood.
“We’ve replaced the wood twice this week,” Ghost said. “And twice last week, and the week before. And this keeps happening.”
“You need cameras,” Hound said.
“We’re putting them in,” Ghost assured. “But then the question is: if we find out who’s doing this, what do we do with the footage?”
“Shake some cages,” Mercy said with a grin. He cracked his knuckles. “Time for some little dipshits to get scared.”
