Page 3 of Rake

“I’ll knock you out first,” the man says.

“Please,” I manage, finally. “Don’t do this.”

The man sighs, and I see he’s holding a metal baton. “I’m sorry, Miss Saunders. I wish there was another way. Like I said, it’s just business.”

Before I can say anything else, he smashes the baton into my temple. My head snaps against the fence with a sickening crack.

The strike doesn’t knock me out. Instead, I’m unable to react as pain explodes into a thousand embers of misery with each blow that rains down on me. Again and again, the pipe crashes into my flesh, bruising, smashing, and wrecking what’s beneath.

The intensity of the pain rips the breath from my lungs, and my mouth is frozen in a silent scream. I dangle from that awful fence, paralyzed as my body is beaten from top to bottom. When the bone snaps in my shin, a scream finally tears its way out of my lungs.

“Shit. We gotta go, boss.” P.J. says, panic lacing his voice. “They probably heard that all the way back at the casino.”

“I thought she was out. Goddamnit.” My assailant smashes the baton into my head again.

I welcome the darkness.

2

Finn

Six Months Later – January

“Patrick, I’ve had quite the night. You got a minute?”

The look on my brother’s face tells me that he does not.

“Is there a place we can talk in private? I’ve got news.”

I’ve run into my brother while en route to my father’s office at our family’s casino. I’d closed out some important business for him.

Patrick’s my Irish twin—twelve months older than I am, nearly to the day. Not enough distance to engender any kind of big brother protectiveness.

He sighs and motions to the security office. We tell the man monitoring the cameras to take a walk.

“Did you just wake up?” Patrick asks. “It’s fucking two in the afternoon, Finn.”

“I got the liquor licenses sorted.”

Patrick drops like a sack of bricks into the chair and lets out a sigh.

“How the fuck did you manage that? I thought we’d have to bankrupt ourselves with bribes or some shit.”

Massachusetts does not give out liquor licenses easily. The puritanical roots of the state go deep, and it was only very recently that you could buy alcohol on Sundays. You still can’t buy it in most grocery stores. Restaurants regularly go out of business even in Boston due to fights over licensing, and every city or town only has a limited number available.

Our father thought he bribed the right people to get his in order for the bars and restaurants in the casino, but it turns out he’d been granted limited licenses for beer and wine, but nothing harder.

And we’ve been selling the hard stuff since we opened.

We could be shut down for something like this.

I grin at Patrick and sit in the chair next to him.

“I made the acquaintance of the head of the Alcoholic Licensing Commission.”

“Did you now?”

“I did. He’s a middle-aged gentleman in what I’d say is a sexless marriage, and I thought the neighborly thing to do would be to invite him out.”

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