Then Max pulled out his burner phone and sent a text to Niki: Max here. New phone—don’t ask. Our boy just showed up.

CHAPTER 41

Spud felt as though he had grown an inch taller as he drove to his mother’s house that morning. Having spent the past two hours signing documents at the lawyer’s office, he was now a millionaire. He owned several units of apartments as well as the house in St. Paul, a total of over two million dollars in equity. The big surprise, however, came when he paid a visit to the bank to take control of her cash accounts. She had almost five hundred thousand dollars just sitting there, earning pennies in interest. His father would have been furious at such a foolish use of his hard-earned wealth.

Spud’s father had worked himself ragged to provide for them and yet still found time to spend with Spud. Those hours had been more precious than anything. He and his father—Spike and Spud—playing and dreaming and planning for a future that would never come.

When he was ten years old, just a few months before his father died, they had been playing catch in the park when Spike pointed at the house and asked Spud if he liked it. When Spud answered yes, his father said, “It’s going to be yours someday. Everything I have will be yours.” Spud never forgot that promise—that pact—but it hadn’t occurred to him that his mother’s stubborn existence would get in the way of his father’s wishes.

She never called him Spud. To her, he was Peter, the boy who could never measure up—her biggest disappointment. In the years since his father’s death, what had once been a chill between Spud and his mother had become a frozen wasteland, and when the time came for her to be forgiving, she had denied him, driving all the way to Grand Rapids to condemn him in front of a judge. All he’d needed was one lucky streak to get out of trouble, just one night of good cards. But it didn’t happen, so he had forged her name on a check and cashed it, knowing that he could win back enough to make good in a matter of days. It was supposed to be his money anyway—Spike had said so.

But his luck didn’t hold, and by the end of the weekend, he had hocked some of his mother’s jewelry. As bad as it got, it never dawned on Spud that his own mother would have him arrested. She could have refused to press charges, or she could have bailed him out, but she did neither.

And in the midst of that gloom, Spud had reached out to the only person who would listen, his cell mate, a guy named Reed Harris, a guy who said he had an ex-wife just like Spud’s mother, a woman who treated their son like dirt. That’s when Reed came up with the plan.

As Spud pulled into the garage at his mother’s house—his house—he thought about the calls from Reed that he had ignored. Reed would be mad. He hadn’t bothered listening to the messages because he already knew what Reed would say. Spud had been waiting for seven months for the estate to be cleared. Reed was just being selfish, making Spud stay in the woods.