Page 4 of Rake

Patrick shakes his head. “You’re something else, Finn. Only you could manage to get the ALC head out to party.”

“I’m a people person,” I say, smirking. “Anyway, it turns out he has quite the appetite for working girls and blow, and I got him to sign our licenses. I also have this for insurance.” I show him my phone: Picture after picture of the Commission official snorting cocaine off of the naked breasts of strippers.

Patrick laughs. “Oh Christ. I’ll never be able to unsee that.”

“No, and neither will his wife or the governor if he tries to renege on our deal.”

“Impressive,” Patrick says. “Horrible but impressive.”

He sighs. “Anyway, I’m glad you took care of that. Dad wants to see you.”

My stomach drops. Aside from our, let’s say “precocious” younger sister Catriona, I’m easily my father’s least favorite child. I was hoping this victory would ease that tension.

“Oh?” I say. “Did he mention why?”

“No. He just said ‘tell your lazy fucking brother to come to my office when he manages to drag his sorry ass here’.” He shakes his head to give the effect of jowls he doesn’t have.

Patrick does probably the best imitation of our father, though he’s known him the longest and has a distinct advantage.

Also, I’m not lazy. I just have different goals than my father and more efficient, fun ways of achieving them.

We’re quiet for a minute. I watch the security footage. It’s quiet this time of day, and even if I saw something, I wouldn’t do anything about it.

If someone is clever enough to steal from a casino, they probably deserve to keep what they’ve acquired.

Not good for business, though, and we’ve got a bottom line to maintain—at least that’s always what James Carney says.

My father leveraged nearly all of our family’s personal and business assets to get the casino license and build this place from the ground up. The cost of realizing his dream makes his mood even more foul. The payoff will be worth it, pushing our family from wealthy and powerful to obscenely wealthy and powerful.

But if things don’t go right? Well, it’ll be impossible to recover from. There are far too many people who’d love to see my father fail and lose everything. He’s certainly left a trail of enemies in his wake over the years.

And personally, I don’t really care about him losing everything, except for one devious reason. My brother Callan and I have done some business of our own that relies on the success of the casino, at least over the next five years. It’s in our best interests to keep our father happy and distracted until that goal is met.

“Well, I have to give him this anyway.” I hold up the red folder with the full bar liquor licenses.

“Good luck,” Patrick says. “I’ll wait here for you.”

For the gruesome details of what I’ve done wrong. I’d do the same, though.

I push out of the chair and head up to my father’s office.

The casino itself is two sprawling floors that include slots, table games, dining, and an events venue. The attached hotel is much grander—twenty stories, and, according to the local newspaper, a blight on the historic Charlestown skyline.

I don’t disagree.

My father’s opulent office is on the second floor of the casino, and I take the stairs, two at a time, not from excitement but from habit. Some people might look at the grandiose space my father carved out for himself and say he was compensating for some kind of lack, or maybe some kind of smallness. But I’d never say that, of course.

I knock on the door and wait for him to call me in.

He always makes us wait. The longer you wait, the angrier he is.

It’s a full sixty seconds before he shouts at me through the door.

That bad? I don’t even bother wondering what it could be this time as I stride over to his desk.

“Patrick said you wanted to see me?”

He looks up from the pile of papers on his expensive mahogany desk, his electric blue eyes boring into me. “Tell me again why I have you on the payroll, Finn? When you can’t even do the simplest of tasks?”

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