by Toby Neal
Turnouts. Knock the fire down. Meaningless gibberish in the scope of what was happening.
Stevens crawled forward a few more feet and collapsed on his face on the cool grass. He gasped at the fresh air and convulsed with more coughing.
“Kiet?” he managed to get out.
“Wayne has him. He’s okay.”
Stevens lifted his head enough to see Wayne, cradling and patting the baby against his shoulder, way back against the fence. The baby was crying, great, big, healthy-sounding yells. That was a very good thing.
Stevens lowered his face into the grass and felt tears filling his scorched eyes. Their home. Burned. Everything they’d been trying to build destroyed again.
This was no accident, and they’d barely made it out alive. He was pretty sure there was a shroud lying around somewhere.
Lei. He had to call her, but his phone was gone, just one of the many things he’d think of needing and find had been burned. He remembered that constant disoriented feeling all too well. He crawled toward Wayne. “Phone?” he croaked, reaching out his hand.
Lei woke to the chattering of mynah birds in the huge banyan outside the motel. Somewhere not far away, she heard the shrill chirp of the invasive coqui frogs that had emigrated from Puerto Rico to the Big Island and made it their home. Warm, leaf-dappled sunlight fell through the louvered window whose drapes she’d forgotten to pull last night.
She’d gone to bed late after putting in hours at the South Hilo Station computer lab, searching through scores of cases on the secure computers. The good news was she’d been able to find some patterns and put together a list of victims and complainants to interview today. Not only that, she’d identified the two knee-breakers as small-time criminals from the Hilo area. She had names and addresses to call on.
She was actually working the case, and getting somewhere, too.
Lei rubbed her eyes, then shut them again. There was nothing too urgent going on today. She planned to set up a distance-feed surveillance cam on Chang’s house so she didn’t have to waste hours in the car in the hot sun. Then she’d see if she could get one of the other detectives to go out on some interviews with her.
She felt that funny feeling in her stomach, the twitching like gas bubbles.
The baby was awake, too.
She slid her hand under her sleep tee onto the smooth skin of her waist, pressed down on the hard, round bulge of her uterus.
There it was. A fluttering like a moth against the palm of her hand. She held that movement in her hand for a long moment, gently feeling around. She pulled up her shirt. If she lifted her head and sighted down her body, she could see where the baby was growing, a slight rise between her hipbones making a round shape as firm as a grapefruit and about as big.
Curious whether she could see the baby kicking, she pulled off her sleep tee and propped herself up on her elbows, watching the expanse of pale ivory skin that ended at her panties.
There it was again, that silvery movement. This time Lei could even see it happening, a staccato beating that jiggled the skin of her belly. “You must be hungry or something, Baby,” she said aloud, and swung her legs to the side of the bed. “Can’t believe I’m talking to you, but it’s obvious you’re really in there, doing your thing.”
She smiled as she stood, feeling happy as she imagined Kiet and his brother or sister together. She couldn’t wait to show her belly moving to Stevens. The message light was pulsing on her phone, but she needed a shower before she dealt with anything more to do with work.
She took a long shower and washed her hair. She’d noticed it was growing in fuller and even curlier, something the pregnancy books said to expect. Like she needed more hair. Her stomach fluttered again. “Okay, finding food, Baby,” Lei said aloud.
She dressed and scooped up the phone, unplugging it from the charger, and loaded it into her purse along with her weapon and creds.
She didn’t listen to the message until she had eaten a full breakfast of bacon and eggs and was sipping her second cup of decaf coffee.
Stevens’s voice was so hoarse it was almost unrecognizable.
“He burned down the house.” Cough, cough. “We got out, but he burned down the house. Call me!”
Lei’s belly tightened so hard she almost hurled the breakfast back up all over the table. She took deep, slow breaths so as not to do that and looked at the time of the message: 1:35 a.m. She had the ringer off and had slept right through the crisis.
Twin demons of terror and guilt stabbed her.
Lei called his phone number back, but it went to voice mail. Then she checked the number the message had come from and realized it was her father’s phone. She called it back, trying not to hyperventilate, wrapping her hand tightly around the poky tines of a fork to keep herself in her body.
“Dad, it’s Lei. Oh my God, I just got Michael’s message! Is he okay?”
“Aw, Sweets, your house is gone.”
“Is Michael okay? The baby? Keiki?” Her voice had gone high and tinny, and her sweating hands could hardly hold the phone as her vision telescoped down to a dot.
“Everyone’s okay.” He used a gentle tone. “They made it out okay.”
“Oh, thank God!” She focused on trying to breathe.
“Jared was spending the night, and good thing he was. He got them all out okay. It was a bad fire, honey, and the whole place went up unbelievably fast.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Keiki and Stevens went to the hospital for burns and smoke inhalation, but they’re both recovering. They’re going to be a little bald for a while, but okay. In fact, Mike’s right here and wants to speak to you.”
Lei squeezed the fork, feeling her terror recede, leaving her shaky and queasy in its wake. The big breakfast had been a mistake.
“Lei.” The croak of his voice brought tears springing to her eyes. She stood up in agitation, ripping a twenty out of her wallet and throwing it on the table.
“Oh my God, Michael. I’m so sorry I had the phone off! I just got your message.” She walked rapidly out of the restaurant to stand on the sidewalk in the shade of the banyans. She paced back and forth to work off the adrenaline. The baby kicked, and she realized it was feeling everything she was.
“I’m okay. We’re all alive and we’re gonna be fine. But the house, Lei.” His voice cracked and broke. “Everything we had. Gone.”
Lei shut her eyes, breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth. She reached up to clasp the rough, white gold medallion around her neck as she walked back toward her car, feeling her heart rate come down as she deliberately controlled her responses. “It’s just stuff. It came easy; it went easy. We have each other.”
“I know. I can hardly talk.” He coughed, and it hurt her to hear the sound like ripping cloth. “I’m on oxygen, if I need it, for a couple days. Kiet is totally fine. Jared got him out first. We’re here in Wayne’s cottage and we’re okay, but Keiki and I got pretty singed.”
“This has to stop,” Lei said. She got into the car and stared out the window, feeling blind and deaf to anything but this one thought. “This has to stop.”
“I love you. Come home,” Stevens croaked.
“I love you, too. I’ll come. Just as soon as I can,” she said. “I will be there as soon as I can.” She closed the phone and whipped the car around, out into traffic.
Chapter Ten
The Fireman opened the bin from yesterday’s fire. He sorted the few tools remaining back into the tool chest: the staple gun, the tranquilizer pistol, the empty bottle of nail polish remover, the plastic bag the cotton balls had been in.
He could have left everything, including the bin, and it would have been obliterated by that masterpiece of a fire he’d set. Sure, they would find out it was arson, but that didn’t matter. In fact, the blackmailer had wanted him to leave a message at the scene. That fire had done exactly what he wanted it to, right down to leaving the family a way out.
He sat back on his heel
s, replaying in his mind the scene he’d watched last night.
From his perch in the tree, he’d known they were out when the old man had run around to the backside of the house where the kitchen door was out of his view. He’d reappeared holding the baby—someone had carried it out to him. A few minutes later two men and the dog had appeared, one on his feet, the other crawling.
Where was the woman? He remembered the twitch of panic he’d felt as he swung the glasses around the scene of the blaze—and realized her truck wasn’t there. Hadn’t been the whole time.
She wasn’t at the house. So much the better. He’d released a breath of relief. He didn’t want that on his conscience. Nor anyone’s death, in fact. He’d already had nightmares about the homeless man, gobbled by the Bitch. So he’d left a way out, and burned the house so dramatically that he was pretty sure the blackmailer would be satisfied. It was the best he could do for them.
He would know soon if it was enough.
Stevens lay back on the couch in Wayne’s little cottage, sucking oxygen through a cannula into his sore lungs, and trying to recover from talking to Lei. His throat was still so painful, the tissues inflamed.
“She said she’s coming home as soon as she can,” Stevens said to Wayne, who was sitting with the baby on his lap and trying to feed him rice cereal. The spackle-like mixture was ending up on Wayne’s shirt and all over the baby’s hands and face as Kiet kept trying to grab the spoon.
“Of course she is,” Wayne said. “Little man, we’re making a mess here,” he said to Kiet. “I really miss that bouncy seat. Soon as I’m done and cleaned up from this, I gotta go to the store and buy him a new one and more formula and diapers. Good thing I had some extra stuff out here.”
“Thanks, Wayne. Don’t know what we’d do without you.” Stevens inhaled through his nose, which hurt less. He was needing less of the oxygen, but every time he exerted himself, he realized his body just wasn’t getting all it needed right now.
He shuddered, remembering the experience of last night. That first big waft of smoke, when he’d opened the bedroom door, had seared his throat and lungs, causing them to constrict. By the time the EMTs got to him, he was almost unconscious, but not so far gone that he didn’t remember the struggle to breathe as they strapped a mask over his face and turned on oxygen. Pain medication had helped him relax enough to get more of the oxygen into his system.
He needed to take it easy for just a day or two and let his burns recover. He looked down at his bandaged chest, hands, and knees.
He checked on Keiki. She was sleeping, still under some anesthetic from her burn treatment. She’d been intubated, and the mobile vet had treated her here. The side he’d dragged her on had lost most of its hair.
Thank God for Jared. He was pretty sure none of them would have made it out without his brother’s cool head and quick action.
“All done.” Wayne carried the baby to the little sink, wetted a paper towel, and wiped him down. “Hold him, will you? I gotta change my shirt.”
“Hey, buddy.” Stevens took Kiet, who grinned and reached for Stevens’s blistered face as he sat up carefully. One side of Stevens’s hair was mostly burned off, but Kiet’s expression of delighted curiosity was as happy as usual. He folded the child close in spite of wriggling protests. “Thank God you’re safe,” Stevens muttered into the baby’s tender neck.
Wayne cleared his throat, having reappeared in a clean T-shirt. “Okay, I’m going out to get the baby stuff. Got anything you need?”
Stevens gave a bark of a laugh. “Well, if you hadn’t loaned me some clothes, I’d be naked right now. So yeah, maybe pick up a few things to wear. Mainly I need a new phone. Grab me a minutes-only burner and keep all the receipts. I’ll get on the phone with the insurance company, see what’s going to be covered.”
“Sounds good.” Stevens’s father-in-law left, and as he did, Stevens glimpsed movement outside. He stood up with the baby, gasping involuntarily as his scorched feet hit the floor. Wayne had loaned him socks to go over the bandages, but the skin was tender. He walked to the little front porch and sat on the top step with the baby on his lap, looking over at the black hole where their house had been.
It was easier to think of the foul-smelling mounds of charred rubble as a black hole than to remember what it used to be. The fire crews were long gone, but the unpleasant smell of wet, burned wreckage lingered.
“We didn’t have long to get too attached to it, did we?” Stevens asked the baby. “It’s just stuff, like your mama said.” Kiet flexed his legs, sticking out his tongue. His simple vitality was soothing to Stevens’s ravaged emotions.
Stevens’s eyes still stung and his vision was blurry at times, but he could see Tim Owen and Jared in their yellow turnouts, sifting through the remains.
Jared spotted him and raised a hand. In the chaos of last night, they hadn’t spoken since their dramatic escape from the house. Jared crunched through the rubble and approached them.
“Hey, bro!” He took off his heavy hat, setting it on the step below Stevens. “How ya doing?”
Stevens felt his smile painfully in the tightness of his facial skin. “Glad to be alive.”
“Little guy’s looking no worse for wear,” Jared said, as Kiet, gurgling, reached for his uncle.
“Thanks to you,” Stevens said. “Not sure I could have got us out without you.”
Jared’s blue eyes crinkled and he shrugged, self-deprecating. “I should have been onto the fire sooner. I was sleeping so hard from all that beer. I didn’t wake up until things were well on their way in the living room. I saw your door was closed and knew you’d have a few minutes, and Kiet was closer to the fire, so I went there first. Glad I did.”
“Me too.”
“So Tim thinks the fire was arson.”
Stevens snorted. “’Course it was.”
“And you’re not gonna like this. He found one of those shrouds in the washing machine.”
“Not surprised.” Hot rage boiled down Stevens’s veins, and he tightened his arms protectively around the baby. “This has to stop.” He thought of Lei’s voice as she said that and wondered if that was what she’d been feeling, too.
“Tim’s figuring out what the point of origin was. He thinks, from what I told him, it was by the front door in the living room. He’s done a depth test on the wood left to confirm, and the char is deepest there.”
“Tell him to coordinate with Pono. Pono’s been in charge of the shroud investigation.”
“I already did. Meetings, talks, and such are underway.” Jared sat on the bottom step. “I shouldn’t be too close to the baby,” he said, leaning away when Kiet reached a hand for his hair. “We pick up all kinds of chemicals walking around in fires. That’s why I never bring my turnouts into the house.”
Stevens wasn’t done talking about the night before. “You knew just what to do. I panicked when I realized the house was on fire, yanked the door open, and once I got that big draft of smoke, I was pretty much out of it. If I’d been thinking straight...Dad always told us to stay low, be careful opening doors if there was a fire.”
“You get a pass. You’d already been through that other fire. That’ll mess with a man’s head. Besides, you’ve been looking for a way to give me a chance to save your life for years. Since we were kids, in fact.” Jared grinned.
“Ha-ha, right.” Stevens made a gesture as if to punch his brother, brought up short by the reminder of chemicals and his bandaged hands.
The lifted purple truck Pono drove pulled up the driveway, and they watched as Lei’s burly ex-partner approached.
“The morning after a good poker game is always a little rough,” Pono said as he reached the porch.
Stevens laughed a hoarse rasp. “Yeah, that was some game last night.”
“So I’m up to speed with Tim Owen on what he’s found so far,” Pono said. They all looked at the young man dragging a metal sledge through the rubble to load with items as he continued sifting for evid
ence. “What’s interesting is that he’s sampled the accelerant. Preliminary reading shows it’s the exact same mixture that was used on the cane fires.”
Kiet chose that moment to get restless, fussing and writhing. “Why don’t we go inside and you can get my statement,” Stevens said. “I’ll give this guy a diaper change.”
“Never thought I’d hear that in a sentence.” Pono chuckled.
“I’m back to work.” Jared loped off as Pono came up the steps. Pono pulled open the screen door for Stevens, loaded with the baby and awkward with his bandaged hands.
“Can you do the diaper? Want me to help?”
“Nah, got it covered.” Back in the cottage, Stevens put the baby on a towel on the couch and changed him while telling Pono the series of events. “Come to think of it, Keiki was acting funny all evening—running around, wouldn’t settle down. She must have smelled something. Wish I’d paid more attention.”
Pono flipped his notebook shut. “I know. I was there. How’d the arsonist get past her?”
“Don’t know. But Keiki wasn’t herself—that’s for sure.” The big Rottie raised her head at the sound of her name. “Yeah, girl, wish you could talk.”
Keiki lowered her head with a deep, sad-sounding sigh. Pono frowned. “She looks pretty beat-up.”
“She’s got a few more battle scars, that’s for sure, and the vet said she’s getting up there for a Rottweiler. I dread how Lei’s going to take it when she passes.”
“Speaking of your wife—where the hell is she? I thought she’d be back by now.”
“She didn’t get my message until this morning. She said she’d come as soon as she could.” As Stevens said that, he felt the same prickle of alarm, remembering her voice when she said, “This has to stop.”
“Well, I hope she hasn’t gone all lolo and taken on the Changs by herself,” Pono said with a forced chuckle.
Stevens glared up at him. “Leaving me here to take care of the baby?” Neither of them, looking at each other, could make a joke of it. “I better call her. I’ll tell her about the arson, the mixture of accelerant.”
