Nobody said anything.
Zane stopped.
The toolbox hit the floor.
Detective Ilene Trevino came through the front doors a moment later, in a navy blazer, with a folded paper in her hand.
“Mr. Cardenas, I have a w*rrant for your toolbox,” she said pleasantly.
“I’d like you to open it.”
He didn’t.
A uniformed officer did it for him.
Inside, on a bed of screwdrivers, lay two small black devices wrapped in foam, a laptop-sized reader, and an envelope with twenty-three hundred dollars in it.
Detective Trevino held up the device from the hostess counter, which another officer had lifted with a gloved hand.
“Forty-one cardholders,” she said.
“Fourteen months.”
“One hundred eighty-six thousand, four hundred dollars.”
She looked at Hunter.
“All of them over seventy.”
“All of them regulars.”
In the booth, Mrs. Lathrop gave a small, broken sound.
“Thirty-nine hundred dollars,” she said.
“In one weekend.”
