“Let’s take a look,” Yousef says, unlocking the front door and opening it as if it’s the door to a palace. I walk in, trying to look like someone who knows how to value a restaurant property.

Inside, the restaurant is dim and dusty, an empty space abandoned to spiders and probably mice. Yousef talks about how the seating area can take all kinds of configurations and how the open kitchen could use some updating but it’s perfectly fine, excellent even, with a new walk-in cooler. As he leads me into the kitchen to show me the cooler, I think about my uncle’s bar and how the Sureños destroyed the kitchen, leaving Frankie to try and pick up the pieces. The thought runs through me and makes me sad, and I don’t want to play this game anymore. Plus we are far away enough from the front windows, even if someone bothered to try to look in.

“Yousef,” I say as he reaches for the door to the walk-in cooler, “I need to talk to you about my father.”

Yousef frowns slightly but still maintains his smile. “Your father?”

“Jimmy Faulkner,” I say. “In Iraq.”

The words wipe the smile from his face. “Who are you?”

“Susannah Faulkner. I need to know about the money you all took.”

He stands in the dim, dusty restaurant, face pale, mouth open. “Please,” he says, “don’t kill me. Don’t hurt my family.”

“I’m not going to. I just want to talk.”

“I’ll give you the money.” He raises a hand to brush his hair, a reflexive gesture. “It will take some time, but I—”

“You have the money?”

“In a bank account. We were going to give it back—”

“Give it back?” I ask. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“Your father and I,” he says.

WE SIT ON a pair of bar stools to talk, our voices low but echoing in that empty restaurant. Yousef seems wary, but as he talks, he gradually gets more comfortable, or at least less panicky.

“Your father found a way to get the money out of Iraq,” he says. “There are Gulf state banks who don’t ask questions and are happy to accept large deposits of cash with little paperwork, for a healthy fee, of course. When Sergeant Finnegan was arrested, I helped your father negotiate with a Kuwaiti banker in Baghdad. The Kuwaiti was a parasite, someone who materialized after the American invasion, when the money planes started coming in—the kind of man who profits from war and misery. But he was a legitimate banker, and he wasn’t interested in stealing a few million when he was planning to do business in Iraq worth billions. For a ridiculous amount of money, he took the duffel bags of cash and flew them out of Iraq to Kuwait. A week later, as planned, he returned with a receipt showing the money had been deposited.”