I dropped the towel, nearly falling off the chair as I gaped at the thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. I scrambled down to shut the windows and snap the curtains closed. “What is that?” I asked, jabbing a finger at the money.
“That,” Vero said, “is thirty-seven thousand and five hundred dollars minus forty percent. You can buy me dinner to thank me.”
“For what?”
“For meeting with Irina Borovkov and collecting half of our money up front.” Every ounce of breath left my lungs. My knees buckled, and I slid down onto the chair I’d been standing on. “Finn? Finlay, what’s wrong?” Vero kicked the leg of my seat, and I swung my gaze up to meet hers.
“Do you have any idea who that woman’s husband is?” My voice was eerily quiet, disproportionately small compared to the depth of my panic.
Vero turned her back on me with a dismissive wave. She opened the refrigerator. “Sure. Irina told me all about him. The guy sounds like bad news. I’m pretty sure we can do this with a clean conscience.” Irina, Vero had called her, as if they were already old friends.
“Vero,” I said in a tightly controlled voice. “Andrei Borovkov is an enforcer for the Russian mob. He murders people for a living. He cuts people’s throats. Like those three men they found in that warehouse in Herndon over the summer.”
“Like I said. Bad news. I’m sure there will be plenty of people who…” Vero closed the refrigerator. She turned to face me, knuckles white around her Coke. “Wait. Run that by me again. I might have misheard that last part.”
I buried my head in my hands. “We were supposed to be severing ties, getting rid of every scrap of evidence! Do you have any idea what this means?”
I jumped out of my skin as Vero popped the top on her Coke can. She set the can down hard on the table, snatched up the money, and waved it at me. “It means you can afford a decent divorce lawyer and hold on to your kids. That’s what this means!”
I stared at her, dumbstruck. Last night, I’d told Vero every word Theresa had said, about how they were buying Delia’s affection and I had no money left for an attorney. About how Theresa was going to take my children from me, even though she didn’t want them. All that time, I’d been fussing about Steven and his damn Dreamhouse when I should have been telling Vero what I’d learned about Andrei Borovkov.
“We are not taking this money!” I said, shoving it back at her. We’d paid all my debts. I was finally right-side up. As long as I didn’t do anything stupid, I stood a better chance at holding on to Delia and Zach. “You’re going to call that woman right now and you’re going to tell her it was all a misunderstanding. Then you’re going to give her the money back.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I spent some of it.”
“How much?”
“Forty percent.”
My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth as I did the math in my head. “You spent fifteen thousand dollars in one afternoon?” She nodded, looking contrite as she hunched over her Coke. “On what?”
Vero sat up, her voice rising as she pointed a finger at me. “You were the one who said we should get rid of every speck of evidence! So I did.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means there was a corpse in the trunk of my Honda! I’ve watched every episode of CSI, and you know there’s no way to cover that up.” Vero cast me a guilty look through the thick coat of mascara on her lashes. “So I sold my car to my cousin Ramón for parts.”
“And…？”
“And I bought a new one.”
I got up and threw open the garage door, blinded by gleaming graphite curves and sleek silver pipes the second I turned on the light. The Charger looked wildly obscene parked beside my minivan. A dealership sales sticker was still taped to the back window, obscuring my view of the two child safety seats buckled behind it. “What is that?”
Vero wrung her hands. “A 6.2-liter V8 … with a really big trunk?”
I slammed the door.
Vero headed for the liquor cabinet. “I think we’re going to need something stronger.”
I opened my mouth to swear at her in at least five languages I hadn’t learned yet when the house phone rang. Vero and I both went still. We stared at it as it rang again. No one ever called the house phone except telemarketers or groups soliciting donations. Groups like our local order of police.