“What’s going on?” he asked. He couldn’t recall a time that Joe looked freaked.
“Erm, we were robbed last night.”
“Robbed?”
“Yeah. These fuckers turned up in my office, and distracted me. They owe money, and we were about to collect on the goods. For nearly half an hour, they distracted me. We lost five men last night, Oliver.”
“Tell me everything.”
Behind him, he felt Ruby move around, looking at the empty safes, which were completely open. She didn’t touch anything, and she was frowning.
“What is it?” he asked, interrupting Joe’s fuck up to talk to his woman.
“They knew the codes.”
“What?”
“The safe shows no signs of forced ent
ry. I take it all of your money was locked away in multiple safes, right?”
“Yes.”
“Look at it. This was simply opened. This is really old school handling. Haven’t you thought of, I don’t know, increasing your security?”
Oliver walked over to the safe, and gripped the door. “My dad’s a believer in keeping things old school. It’s a way of staying under the radar. It’s one of those things that he’s gotten from my grandfather.”
“Wait, fingerprints!”
“There won’t be any cops coming down here to take fingerprints. This is where we keep our own problems private.”
“You don’t have your own setup?”
“What?”
“Don’t you have some science nerds who’ll be more than happy to work for you if you paid them a really good salary?” she asked. “They’re not that hard to find.”
He’d not thought of that, and neither had his dad. They usually bribed some cops for information that they needed, and this operation had been consistent all of their lives, through several generations. What was the point in changing something that wasn’t broken?
“It seems a bit careless of you. You could know who stole from you without any worries. There’s no reason for you to bring in the cops. You can handle things in house. You just need to find the right people who are more willing to work for you than they are anyone else. What about security?”
“Security is in the main club. It’s not here. We can’t use any of the footage, and if we get hacked, it could be used against us, which is one of the reasons we don’t have anything hooked up here,” Oliver said. “It’s old school for my parents, and great-grandparents. You can’t trust anyone.”
“Oh. I think you need to come into the twenty-first century.” Ruby walked toward the men in the cells. “What do you know?”
“They’ve not been talking,” Joe said. “I know they know something.”
“They’ll talk,” Ruby said.
Oliver watched as she tensed up. She gripped the bars.
“Fuck you, slut.” One of the men said.
“You’ll regret that.” She turned toward them. “Give me the key.”
“I don’t know who you are, lady. This is a Denton problem, and you’re not a Denton.”
“She is a Denton,” Oliver said. “Give her the key.” He wanted to see what she was made of. No woman had ever impressed him, and he wondered if she was about to be the first one.