I felt the weight of several pairs of eyes on me as I carried the phone into the ladies’ room.
“What’s wrong?” I asked Vero, my heart already racing as I considered all the reasons she might have called. “Are the kids okay?”
“The kids are fine. They’ve been in bed for an hour, but we have a problem.”
“What problem?”
“Which part do you want first?”
“It’s a multipart problem?”
“I’ve been busy,” she said, her voice clipped.
“What’s the first part?”
“We got an email from EasyClean.”
“An email?”
“Through the address you used to set up the account.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she has dibs on the job, and you’d better step off if you know what’s good for you. So I said—”
“You replied to her?!”
“—that if she wanted the money, she was gonna have to work for it because Anonymous2 backs down for nobody—”
“Tell me you didn’t.”
“I’m paraphrasing for the sake of brevity … Then she said, game on, bitch. And I said, bring it—”
“Jesus.”
“She threatened you, Finn! What else was I supposed to do?”
“Maybe not make it worse?” I needed more vodka. “What’s the second part?”
“I still haven’t located your phone.”
The line went quiet as she waited for me to put the pieces of our problem together. Every message Vero and EasyClean had exchanged would have popped up as a notification on my smartphone. “We have to find that phone, Vero.”
“I tried calling it, but Theresa didn’t answer. And your locator service is turned off.”
I slumped back against the wall. We’d turned off the GPS the night we’d snuck onto the farm to dig up a body and I’d never bothered turning it back on.
“Look at the bright side. At least Theresa didn’t break the circuit when she took off her monitor.”
“How’d she manage that?”
“I wondered the same thing, so I Googled it. Guess what I found?”
“A YouTube tutorial?”
“That video was eye-opening, Finn. You never know when a butter knife will come in handy. We should consider keeping one in the garage.”
“Noted,” I said, pinching the vodka headache blooming behind my eyes.
“I plugged the ankle monitor into the charger in Theresa’s kitchen. That should buy us some time to figure out what to do with Carl. I want that dude out of my trunk before he starts to smell.”
“He was in deep freeze for months, Vero. He’s practically a mummy. He won’t smell,” I assured her. “Not yet.”
“Great. My car’s probably cursed.”
“We’ll deal with him when I get home. Meanwhile, no more emails to EasyClean. I have to get back to the table before Nick comes looking for me.”
“Bring cash,” she said before she disconnected. “Delia’s waiting on the tooth fairy.”
I braced myself against the vanity and frowned at myself in the mirror, certain this day could not possibly get any worse. I didn’t have any money left. All I had in my purse was a broken credit card and a tube of lip gloss. I swiped on a fresh coat of it and fluffed my hair, feeling flat and colorless in Kat’s wake. If she worked with Nick, then she also worked with Georgia, which would explain how she’d apparently heard so much about me. She and Nick obviously had some unpleasant history, which bugged me for reasons I didn’t want to think about.
I tossed my lip gloss in my purse and headed back to the dining room. The air in the restaurant seemed to hum with tension. Nothing I could put my finger on. Just something about the stiffness of the waitstaff. The way their gazes all seemed stuck on the far side of the room.
I slowed as I noticed the ma?tre d’ standing beside our table, wearing a stern expression. Two waiters, both unusually large in stature, hovered behind him. Nick smirked up at them as I approached, his arm slung carelessly over the back of the booth. “What?” he asked. “No dessert?”
The ma?tre d’ set a leather folio in front of Nick. “Your meal is on the house tonight, courtesy of the owner, with the understanding that you will not return.”
Nick stood, yanking his wallet from his pocket. He dropped a handful of crisp bills on the table. More than enough to cover the meal and a generous tip. “Oh, I’ll definitely be back,” he growled. “Tell the owner dinner was unforgettable.”