The Girls I've Been(11)

“I have no idea. It’s been years since I’ve been in the house during a game.”

“Sorry,” I mutter, because this is a wound I don’t like prodding, but here I am, jabbing it. “You’ve seen the guys who show up at the games, though, right?”

He nods.

“Anyone like Red or Gray Cap ever show up?”

“No way.”

“What about a bank manager?”

“Yeah, probably, if they knew someone and had the buy-in,” Wes says. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “The robbers know Casey’s dad from somewhere. If he’s a gambler, maybe he was blabbing somewhere.”

“There are casinos,” Wes reminds me.

“He wouldn’t want to be seen,” I say. “It broke up his marriage.” I glance apologetically at Casey, but she just keeps watching me. “He’s still respected in the community. He’s trying to keep his problem quiet. A private game with the mayor . . . That has prestige and a kind of social cover that public slot machines don’t have.”

“So you think he’s in debt to someone at my dad’s poker game and they’ve sent thugs to rob him?” Wes asks.

“No,” I say. “It’s just . . . they asked Lee for the manager, and now they want a toolbox.”

“Which means they didn’t plan on needing tools,” Iris says. “They thought the manager would be here to give them access.”

“They need something in his office,” I say. “Keys to downstairs, I’m thinking? His office is still locked because he had to go pick up the other teller. Olivia, the teller who’s here, must not have a key. So they’ll have to break in . . .”

“I don’t get how that helps us,” Casey says.

“If we know what they want, we can give it to them,” Wes says. “It builds trust. It might buy us time.”

He’s echoing words I’ve told him, but his voice is as dead as his eyes, and he really is never going to let me live this down, is he? I pray that I live long enough to change that, but as I look up at the ceiling, trying to figure out how to pull this off, I’m starting to wonder if that’s even close to possible.

My gaze snags on the air vent. In this old brick building, it’s one of the big ones.

Big enough to fit into.

The manager’s office is three doors down and across from this one. I saw the placard earlier. I’d have to be quiet. And quick.

There’s a crashing sound through the door, and suddenly the constant telephone ringing stops. And then I hear Red Cap call my sister a name I will not repeat here.

My fingers curl into fists and I try not to wince when my nails press into my skin too hard. I keep my nails a little long, because sometimes you don’t have any weapons but you.

I look back up at the air vent.

It’s a bad idea.

It’s a terrible beginning of a truly horrible plan.

But it’s the only one I’ve got.

Iris sits down next to Casey on the floor and starts talking to her about school, trying to distract her from the thumping coming from outside. It’s not working, but it’s an effort.

I move across the room, right underneath the air vent, looking up at it.

“What are you doing?” Wes asks quietly, following me.

I point up at the vent. “Think you can boost me into there?”

“We can’t get out that way.”

“I don’t want to get out. I want to get in.”

His eyes widen. “Into the manager’s office?”

“They want in, right? Red Cap was looking for tools, because if they start shooting the door, the police will come in. So if I open the door from the inside . . .”

“It’s dangerous.” He steps back, his arms folding, the universal sign of stubbornness, and then he does that twist of his lips that I’m so familiar with, the Wes sign of stubbornness. “You can’t.”

“Wes, think for a second,” I say in a low voice. “Who does he remind you of?”

I don’t need to clarify that it’s Gray Cap I mean, not Red Cap, who’s bumbling and reactive and we’ve both noticed.

Gray Cap’s not bumbling.

Gray Cap’s cruel. Wes and I both know cruel. I hate how well we know it. Wish that it was just one of us. Wish it was just me, but it’s not.

There’s a scar curved on the back of my hip, a crooked horseshoe of sorts, and it doesn’t match the knot of damaged tissue on Wes’s shoulder. But the first time he saw it, before we were even teenagers, he placed a hand over it and asked me, Who kicked you? I knew what it meant, the urgency in his voice, that he knew the shape a boot heel makes on skin so easily. And the only answer I could give in the prickle of understanding between us was to place my palm over the scar on his shoulder, the one that streaked across it in an odd, square pucker like a belt buckle, and ask, Who hit you?

This we share. Scars and knowledge and broken safety that was never really there in the first place, because we were born to bad apples.

The difference is, he grew far from the fruit that tree bore, while I’m rotten at the core, even if I’m good at hiding it.

“They just want what they came for,” Wes says, like he wants it to be true. “If they get it . . .”