It’s a dispute over money, and every bill has blood on it. I put down the pen and looked up from my journal. The clock read 6:15. It was Tuesday morning. My meeting with Knuckles and Tyler would happen in forty-five minutes. The Bird Cage Club was silent. Doug and Harry were asleep on the couch in the other room, the little dog wrapped around Doug’s feet. My eyes had popped open at 4:00 a.m., my subconscious churning with questions about how to offer Elzy four billion dollars for my family without getting captured, and how that would fit in with the street war. At least one of those concerns was on Knuckles’s mind, too. Tyler had sent a text to him (and copied me) late the previous evening. It was a precautionary message, asking what ingredients were being used in the lasagna—the meeting. “Spinach” was code for a financial issue, and “meat”
