Page 23 of Working for the Mob

I had no idea whether I could do it or not. But I wasn’t going to tell him that.

“Great. I’ll show you where I left off.”

Art explained the books to me over the next hour. It made sense. Debits on the left, credits on the right. The work kept me busy enough that I almost stopped thinking about Virginia Brighton altogether.

Art had me work through a few of the transactions on my own and we reviewed the work together.

“You’re not doing this right,” Art said, and hit his paper. “You need todecreasethe liability. Not increase it.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and gave him my best doe eyes. “I think it’s my teacher.”

Art’s lips tightened.

“Let me see the next one,” he said, and reached across me to grab my next entry. I was about to pay for that comment.

I knew that I had made the same mistake on that one and I shielded the paper with my hand. His fingers landed on mine and just like before, a rush of electricity jumped from his hand into my own.

I let out a small gasp and looked up at his brown eyes staring back at me. The same eyes that reflected the weather outside. Did he feel it too?

He snatched his hand back and muttered an apology. “Can you hand me the next one?”

“Let me fix it and then you can see it.” I quickly scratched out my work and put in the corrections. I handed the paper back to him and he surveyed it.

His jaw worked silently; I was about to be rebuked. Finally, he put the paper back on the table, pointed at the next pile, and said, “You can start on these next.”

I indulged in a satisfied smile. He couldn’t find anything wrong with the journal. Glowing, I continued to work on the books until lunch. They were a mess. I found invoices attached to work orders that had no relation to each other, receipts with no explanation, and even grocery lists. Before tackling the books, I needed to organize the giant stack of papers first.

While I worked, Art made several phone calls to distributors or vendors. By the end of the morning, I recognized most of the companies he reached out to.

“Wait, you own a factory?” I asked him, and for the first time in two hours, Art looked over at me.

“What?” He only half-heard.

“A factory. This is an invoice for a factory that you own?” I held up an invoice for parts.

“Of course. We have one of the largest radio factories on the East Coast. We make almost the whole thing internally,” he said.

The Necci empire was bigger than I imagined

I looked at the clock––it was already half past noon. I thought of Lucy at the café and my stomach grumbled. I hoped that Lucy was getting along okay. She had never worked an entire day in her life, and I wasn’t sure how long she’d last. She wasn’t made to spend eight hours a day in a work environment; her whole life she planned on being someone’s wife.

That had been my plan as well. At least, my parents’ plan for me. But where did that leave me?

I was pulled out of my daydreaming by the irritation in Art’s voice, while he argued with a distributor. It was nice to hear him use that tone on somebody else for a change.

“No, I don’t care that you have to drive all the way across town. I’m not paying a nickel more for the delivery …”

The whites of his knuckles burned through the hand clutching the receiver. “I need that truck tomorrow. You’re going to be there, and it's going to be for the same price.”

He worked his jaw again; that look was reserved for me!

“Fine. Then I’ll send someone over to pick them up. We’ll take out the middle man … I don’t care … I’ll have a guy there tomorrow morning at five and you better be ready.”

He slammed the earpiece onto the receiver and put his hand over his eyes.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

“What?” he demanded, and slapped the table so hard that one of my organized piles fell off it. He said it in the same tone he had used with the unfortunate person on the call and his glare could’ve curdled milk. I cowed under it.

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