Page 3

“Ducky—”

I held up a hand, cutting her off. “It’s done. Now, where are the boxes?”

In total, I hauled six boxes from my niece’s house to mine. I regretted setting her up on the tenth floor. Duane had a shit ton of paper to go through so I called Cian and Mac over to help me go through it.

“What the fuck is all this?”

“This is everything he collected over the years.”

“All about Darcy?” Mac asked.

Taking in a deep breath, I let it out slowly as I looked at the papers I had already pulled from one of the boxes. My shoulders slumped when I answered, “No. This is everything he had records of since he got made.”

“That’s thirty fuckin’ years!” Cian shouted.

“I know. Which is why I need your help.”

“What about Sal?” Mac asked as he shuffled through the stack of papers in his hands.

“Sal gets nothing unless we find something to give him.”

Cian and Mac both stopped what they were doing and looked at me.

“Uh, Dunc...”

Setting down the stack in my hands, I looked at my friends. Cian was tall, about six foot four. But thinner than the rest of us. That’s not to say he wasn’t strong. You didn’t make it to where we were in the organization without learning how to fight your way out of certain situations.

Mac was roughly the same height as me, about six foot two. But he was bulkier. His dad was a shady motherfucker, so Mac learned to fight early, and he learned to fight dirty. Aside from Tyran, who was big everywhere, Mac was the biggest of us all, and the only one who hadn’t quite reached fifty yet.

“Sal doesn’t need to be distracted. He’s looking for Tyran. After sneaking away in Nebraska and then killing the Krueger brothers that were under Sal’s protection, he needs to focus on that. For all we know, this could be a wild-goose chase.”

They both nodded, and we got back to work sorting through thirty years of records.

It took us two days to go through all the boxes, separating everything into years. My brother wasn’t the most methodical. I knew he thought Tyran was the reason he never made captain, but it was me. He didn’t have what it took to be a leader, so he always worked under me.

Trying to organize this mess showed me I’d made the right decision.

Once we had the records separated by date, it was time to go through them and organize them by subject, or job.

That took almost a week.

“Jesus Christ, Duane was a fuckin’ idiot.”

“Duane was disorganized, which is why he worked for me. But make no mistake, he wasn’t stupid. If there is information to find about my sister, it’s here in this mess somewhere.”

I knew I would find it as long as I kept looking. I didn’t know why Duane hadn’t come to me with this.

Yes you do.

He wanted to make captain.

I guess he thought if he could find the one who got away, Sal would be so grateful he would make him a captain.

Except it wasn’t Sal’s decision. He’d left it exclusively to me, and I never would have moved him up. I loved my brother, but Duane was too impulsive. Too reckless.

The only thing Duane had ever done with any forethought was getting his wife, Maureen, out and sending her to Lannie in Nebraska. I was happy for her being out of the life. Though, I guess with her connection to Lannie, and his connection to Sal, she wasn’t really getting away. But she was safe.

Now that we knew what Tyran had done, there was no reason for him to go after Maureen. He proved that when he snuck away and ran back to Boston with his tail between his legs.