Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 59146 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 296(@200wpm)___ 237(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59146 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 296(@200wpm)___ 237(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
I stared at the numbers on the screen. “So we’ve got nothing.”
“I didn’t say that.” Knight pulled up another window. A different list. Different transactions. “Same card. Three months and four days ago. Paid a data broker called UrbanMetrics for property records, tax assessments, and ownership history on…” He squinted as he counted. “Eight buildings on Charlotte Avenue. Your girl’s bakery is number three on the list.”
Three months put him squarely in her apartment. Sleeping in her bed. Eating at her table. Watching her get up at three-thirty in the morning and come home covered in flour. The man had been casing her building while he was still fucking her.
I’d seen a lot of ugly in my life. Fire doesn’t discriminate. It burns the innocent and the guilty with the same indifference. But this, planning the demolition of someone’s life while pretending to love them, this was a special kind of cruelty I hadn’t been prepared for.
“Three months,” I said. My voice sounded flat even to my own ears. “He was still there three months ago.”
Knight didn’t answer, but the dates on the screen said everything.
The doorframe darkened. Tiny stood in the opening, his massive shoulders nearly spanning the width. The mohawk was freshly buzzed, the braided beard hanging to the middle of his chest. “You got something,” he said. Not a question.
“Maybe.” I straightened and crossed my arms. “The storage fire two years ago. The ex-girlfriend’s unit.” Tiny nodded slowly. “Who sells accelerant off the books in this town?” I asked. “Where does someone go when they don’t want anything on paper or a camera?”
Knight gave me a grin. “I think I know just the place.”
Tiny nodded, then looked at me. “You ready?” I nodded. “Then let’s go have a conversation with the bastard,” he said.
Before I left with Tiny, I stopped and turned back to Knight. “Will you see if Darby will stay with Juniper? She was asleep when I left, but I don’t want her to wake up alone.”
Knight gave me a nod. “Yeah, man. I’ll get Lavender to go with her.” He grinned. “Besides, you know how the old ladies are. They form en masse at the first sign one of their own needs backup.”
“Yeah.” I grinned when I didn’t feel like it. Not because of the women circling the wagons, but at the thought of them considering Juniper my old lady. “They definitely do that.”
Tiny and I took an older model Bronco to the storage yard south of the river where the city stopped and the industrial parks took over. It sat at the other end of the city away from our warehouses, thank God, with a fenced lot between a defunct machine shop and a rail spur that hadn’t seen a train in a decade. Gravel crunched under the tires as we rolled through the gate. The chain-link was topped with razor wire that had rusted to the color of old blood. Someone had hung a NO TRESPASSING sign with a bullet hole through the O.
Tiny killed the engine, and we sat for a moment in the silence. The yard was laid out in rows of shipping containers and conex boxes, some stacked two high, forming narrow alleys between them. A single light pole at the far end threw a weak yellow glow over everything, turning the shadows between the containers into pools of absolute dark.
“There,” Tiny said, nodding toward the back row. A conex box with its door rolled halfway up. Light spilled from inside, and the faint sound of a radio playing classic rock filtered through the evening air.
We got out of the truck together and took a slow pace, careful to keep our footsteps on the gravel as quiet as we could.
The man inside the conex heard us coming. The radio cut off mid-chorus. He was waiting in the doorway when we reached him, a thin guy in his fifties with a salt-and-pepper beard and the wary eyes of someone who’d survived certain death. He knew who we were. More importantly, he knew what we were, and what that meant for men in his position.
“Gentlemen,” he said. His voice was steady. His Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed.
Tiny stepped forward and put one hand on the man’s shoulder. The gesture looked almost friendly unless you were standing where I was standing, where you could see the way Tiny’s fingers dug into the trapezius muscle just enough to communicate that the friendly part was optional. “We need to know about your cash sales,” Tiny said. His voice was low and measured, the way he always talked. No threat in it, but with his size, there wasn’t really a need for threats. “Over the past three weeks. One customer in particular. Well-spoken. Paid extra not to be asked questions.”
The man looked at Tiny’s hand on his shoulder, then at Tiny’s face, then at me. “It was you guys. Wasn’t it. At Éclipse. You know. That night.” He didn’t elaborate, but the way his face had gone pale and he broke out into a sweat said he was more afraid of the bloodbath before the bonfire than the destruction of the building itself.