Page 59 of A Week Away

Cass stared at me. Shocked. Then we passed the parking lot. “What’s happening? Something’s happening.”

“Go around the corner and pull over.”

“Why? We should go back. I’m going to turn around.”

But he didn’t, he pulled over like I told him.

“I’m going to drive.”

“It’s my car. We need to go back. Something’s hap—” And then it seemed to flood him. “That was my mom, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. It was your mom.”

“We have to go back.”

“It’s not going to help. She was lying on the ground. No one was helping her. There was no ambulance.”

“Then it’s on its way!”

“You said your mom was punctual. Whatever happened, happened almost an hour ago.”

He started to gasp. I undid his safety belt and pulled him across the bench seat. I pulled him over me as I slid toward the driver’s seat. It would have been absurdly funny if the kid wasn’t starting to sob and my shoulder didn’t scream bloody murder. Well, that might be a poor choice of words.

My mind was racing, skipping around, jumping at different ideas. There were a few things I was sure of.

“Okay. You need to calm down,” I told Cass. “There are a few things we need to do, and then you can go ahead and lose your shit.”

He looked at me in horror. “What?”

“Technically, I’m Dom Reilly. I just showed up out of nowhere and now my wife is dead. That makes me the prime suspect. Meanwhile, you’ve been embezzling from your mother’s place of employ?—”

“It wasn’t me. It was?—”

“Your name is on everything. The police will tell themselves a story that she found out and you killed her over it. That makes you prime suspect number two.”

I pulled out into the street and began driving back to his house. I kept talking. “We don’t have much time. The police are going to show up within an hour to do the notification. That’s when you want to turn on the waterworks.”

“Fuck you.”

“We have to get the file with all those credit cards and anything else that refers to Top Dawg – D-A-W-G. We also need to get the shoe box full of cash out of your mother’s closet.”

“How do you—you weren’t supposed to go in there.”

“You need to be glad I did. Is there anything I missed?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’d better know, unless you want to go to prison.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“I’m not a DA, but you’re definitely guilty of credit card fraud. A lot of credit card fraud. But that’s not the point. Is there anything else suspicious in the house?”

“There’s a gun.”

“Where is it?”

“Under my bed.”