touch the drop bags?”

“No.”

“Do you have the code to the office safe?”

“No.”

“Did Ricky know any of that?”

Clara looked toward the door as though Ricky might hear her through the wood.

“Everyone knows it.”

Damian placed the slip down.

“Yet he was beating you for tonight’s shortage before my bookkeeper finished adding the drawer.”

The words settled over her one by one.

Clara pressed the towel harder against her mouth.

“He said I was skimming,” she whispered.

“He needed me to believe that.”

Damian nodded to Vincent.

The older man opened the ledger to a marked page and turned it so Clara could see the columns.

Her vision blurred at the edges, but the numbers were clear enough: two hundred, six hundred, four hundred, each circled in neat pencil.

Different nights.

Different registers.

The same initials beside the correction line.

R.P.

Ricky Phelps.

“I don’t understand,” Clara said.

“You understand more than you think.” Damian tapped the black money clip with one finger.

“Ricky keeps his personal cash folded this way.

Too tight, paper face in.

He has done it for years.

Tonight my man took this off him after he hit the wall.”

Vincent opened the clip.

Inside were three hundred-dollar bills and two fifties, still held by a torn paper band with a blue stripe.

Clara stared at the band.

She had seen those bands in the office trash after closing.

Coda used blue for register drops and red for bar tips.

She knew because she emptied the bins and sometimes cut her fingers on the metal edges hidden beneath them.

“That’s from the drawer,” she said softly.

“Maybe.” Damian watched her.

“Maybe not.

Money by itself tells a boring story.”

Vincent slid another item across the table.

It was a damp paper band, flattened under a glass paperweight.

The same blue stripe.

One ragged edge matched the tear on the strip inside Ricky’s clip.

“This came from the alley drain,” Vincent said.

“Five feet from where he put his boot into your ribs.”

Clara’s stomach turned.

Ricky had been standing over her, calling her a rat, while the piece of his own theft lay in dirty water near her knee.

“Then why ask me?” she said.

“You already know.”

“No,” Damian said.

“I know enough to be suspicious.

I know Ricky is sloppy.

I know a man who panics at the sound of my name usually has a reason.

What I do not know is whether you will tell the truth when lying might feel safer.”

Clara gave a small, broken laugh.

It hurt her lip.

“The truth got me in that alley.”

“The forty dollars got you in trouble.

Ricky put you in that alley.”

It was not comfort.

Damian spoke the sentence like a correction in a ledger.

Clara could not decide whether that made it crueler or easier to trust.

The office door opened, and Ricky came in between two guards.

Without his boot above her face, he looked smaller than he had in the alley.

His wet hair clung to his forehead.

His jaw had lost its drunken confidence.

One sleeve of his jacket was smeared with brick dust from where the guard had shoved him.

He saw Clara sitting at the table and started talking at once.

“Boss,