Eventually Bridget would have no choice but to work nights at the Playpen, another kind of servitude to Seamus, one she was unwilling to trade for the work she was already doing.
She didn’t know what Nolan had been referring to when he’d told her something was coming, but it didn’t matter. Her only choice now was to keep her head down, do the work Seamus assigned her, hope she came out the other side of whatever was on the horizon.
Traffic was light that time of night, most of the suburban commuters long since home. She arrived at the Cat twenty minutes after leaving BRIC and parked on the street.
It was significantly colder than it had been even the week before, and she made a mental note to pull her scarf out of the closet at home. Normally she would have looked forward to the holidays. Even with Owen’s illness, the comfort food, lights, and decorations always lifted her spirits, helped to keep her in the present instead of the longed-for past or the future she feared.
But this year she could hardly think about it around the knot in her stomach, the dread that had shadowed her even before Nolan showed up outside the house.
She opened the door at the Cat and walked into the bar. She’d appeared with Dougie in court two days earlier to issue his plea and had watched him be led off by the bailiff to serve his thirty days. He might have been leaving for a vacation for all the emotion he’d shown.
Bridget had left feeling sad and defeated. Dougie had been around the neighborhood since she was a kid. She could still see his lanky, awkward frame in middle school, the way his dark hair had curled when he’d grown it long in high school. Now he was acting like some kind of brainwashed cult member, proud to serve time for Seamus.
“Hey, Connor,” she said as she passed the bar.
“Hey!” His face lit up when he saw her and she realized he wasn’t bad looking, tall and muscular in a lean sort of way, with thick hair and warm brown eyes.
It was a dispassionate observation, lacking the heat she felt when she looked at Nolan, but she couldn’t compare other guys to him forever.
Mick stepped aside and opened the curtain when he saw Bridget coming. “How’s it going?”
“Fine.” She kept her voice even, forced herself to look him in the eye even though the way he looked at her always gave her the creeps. “You?”
He nodded and she stepped through the doorway. She scanned the room, then almost felt her knees buckle.
Nolan was sitting with Will and Casey at one of the tables, cigarettes burning in the ashtrays, smoke curling into the room.
Nolan hated the smell of cigarette smoke. Always had.
What the fuck?
His eyes were cold as he looked at her, but she thought she caught a warning in their chilly depths. She looked at Will, who avoided her gaze, then turned her attention to Seamus, sitting alone at his table with the ever-present stack of envelopes. It was hard to focus on him, hard not to wonder why Nolan was there.
Something’s going down, Bridge. Something big.
“Thought you weren’t going to make it, lass.”
“Sorry,” she said, approaching the table. “I lost track of time at work.”
He lifted a cigarette to his mouth, pulled, and released the smoke. “Not a problem. I know how lucky we are to have you.”
She didn’t like the implication that Seamus owned her even if it was true.
“What’s up?” she asked. His text had been cryptic, an order phrased like a request that she stop by the Cat that night.
“I need you to do some research.”
It wasn’t what she’d expected him to say. “What kind of research?”
“Legal research.” He took a drink from the glass in front of him. “Specifically, banks.”
“Banks?”
“I want to know the statutes associated with bank robberies, the thresholds, the kind of time served for thefts of varying amounts. From a strictly historical perspective.”
“A historical perspective?” She was repeating his words subconsciously, her mind trying to parse them.
Seamus was good at what he did, good at intimidating and motivating, but he had never been proactive. Bridget was brought in to fix things, to minimize the damage after it had occurred — never to mitigate it on the front end.