“Copy that,” Gamble said. After Kennedy put her mask back in place and got a deep breath or two past her unrelenting frown, he launched into a methodical retelling of the night’s events, starting when Kennedy closed the bar. He left out their near-kiss—not that it was forgettable by any goddamn stretch, but it also wasn’t pertinent to the fire—and by the time he got to the part where Forty-Two had arrived on-scene, Lynch had scribbled off a full page of notes.
“So, this guy Kennedy tossed,” Boldin said, her tone clearly substituting the word “dickhead” for “guy”. “Have either of you ever seen him before?”
When they both shook their heads, she followed up with, “Did you happen to catch his name?”
Gamble went for a repeat with his head shake, but Kennedy slipped her mask aside to say, “He ordered a couple of craft beers so obscure, we only serve a handful of them a week, and he paid with a credit card. I can pull the receipt, no problem, but...”
“But?” Lynch asked, and she replied with a tight shrug.
“I don’t know. Do you really think this fire wasn’t just an accident? Some dumbass throwing a lit cigarette into the dumpster, or something? That guy was a jerk, but he hardly seemed the type to try and hurt me, let alone vandalize the bar.”
She had a point on both counts, Gamble had to admit. Plus, the dude would’ve needed wings on his feet and gallons of accelerant in his back pocket to have started a fire like that in the time between when Kennedy had booted him and when they’d smelled the smoke.
Still, Boldin split a glance between Gamble and Kennedy, finally keeping her eyes on Kennedy as she answered. “That’s possible, sure. But you kind of kicked this guy’s pride in the balls when you threw him out. Not that he didn’t deserve it”—she nodded—“but you’d be shocked at what some people are capable of when they’re knocked down a peg like that. He might’ve just wanted to scare you, or he might’ve been pissed enough to want to torch your bar. Maybe he wasn’t involved at all, like you said, but either way, we have to find out.”
“Right. Of course,” Kennedy said. “I can pull the receipt as soon as I can get back inside.”
“That would be really helpful.” Lynch looked at his notes again. “And, just to confirm, neither one of you got a look at this car that went speeding around the corner, other than it was light in color and possibly had a malfunctioning right brake light.”
“No.” Frustration heated Gamble’s veins, doubling up when Kennedy shook her head to echo the sentiment.
“I didn’t see anything. I’m sorry.”
The officers finished up with a few more questions, then handed over their cards in case he and Kennedy remembered anything pertinent. Chelsea gave Kennedy the all-clear a few minutes later—that oxygen had done the trick, just as she’d said it would—and Kennedy signed the medical release form with a quick scrawl.
“If that’s all you need, I’d like to go see about my bar,” she said, her titanium-reinforced demeanor perfectly back in place.
“Of course,” Lynch said, gesturing to the card he’d given her. “Just do me a favor and give us a call if you remember anything. Even if it’s something small.”
“I will, Officer.”
But as Gamble watched Kennedy jump down from the back of the ambulance and disappear around the corner and into the night, he knew she’d just lied through her teeth about not seeing that car.
And he was going to find out why.
4
Most people would probably call Randall McGee crazy. Generally speaking, he supposed they were right; at least, by their own narrow definition of the word. He was admittedly conscience-free—although, fuck, you couldn’t miss what you’d never had—and if someone so much as lit a cigarette within a fifty-foot radius of him, his dick would get harder than advanced algebra. Fire was his best friend, his boss, his lover. The more he started, the more he wanted to start, until the flames and heat and smoke consumed everything.
So, yeah. Most people would probably call him crazy.
But most people lacked vision.
“What the actual fuck, Rusty?” A distressed huff sounded off from the passenger seat of the freshly boosted POS Camry Rusty was currently driving through downtown Remington, and oh, Christ, here they went. “You said this was just practice to see if the remote ignition device worked. You never said the fire would be that big, and you definitely didn’t tell me there would be anyone inside that place!”
“Don’t be such a pussy, Xander,” Rusty said, his tone dangerously close to boredom. Seriously, this was the problem with breaking people in to the higher levels of the game. They got so goddamned squeamish when the rubber met the road. Or, in this case, when the flames met the two days’ worth of trash that had been sitting in that dumpster. “This was practice to see if the device worked, which it obviously does. And did you honestly think there wouldn’t be any fire when we were testing a remote ignition device? God, that’s so cute.”
The shot at Xander’s lack of toughness made him scowl and straighten, just as Rusty had known it would. “No. You just…you didn’t say exactly where we were going to test the stupid thing, or that there would be people there. That’s all.”
Irritation sliced through Rusty’s chest, tightening his knuckles over the steering wheel. “First of all, that device is going to make you a lot of money, so watch your fucking mouth. Second of all, what do you care about a trendy bar in the middle of downtown?”
Xander shrugged and looked out the passenger window. “I don’t. Those people who live downtown are so damned entitled. They don’t even know how good they have it. Most of them wouldn’t make it ten minutes in North Point without pissing their pants.”
“Exactly,” Rusty said, although, with all this wah-wah there-were-people-there sniveling, he wasn’t quite convinced that Xander’s societal disdain had stamped out enough of the guy’s conscience to get him to the next phase of the plan without balking. “So, there were a couple of people in that stupid bar after-hours. So, what? They were too busy choking on their own lungs to see us.”
The thought sent a smile over Rusty’s face, his scar pulling taut from his lip all the way to his right ear. He knew all too well what the burn felt like in his lungs, filling his chest and covering the delicate tissue of his respiratory system in dirty, bitter ash. Fire was such a nasty mistress when she really got going.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Xander said quietly, then shrugged. “I mean, what if they did see us when we drove by? I don’t want to get busted for this.”
“Please.” A snort rose from the back of Rusty’s throat. Xander was such a goddamned amateur. It was a good thing he had other skills—and also that Rusty had him by the balls, although, right about now, those balls seemed to be the size of marbles. “I’m too smart to get busted, especially on something like a trial run. This car isn’t ours, and the plates are stolen, anyway. There’s no street cam in existence advanced enough to pull facial recognition at this time of night—not with how fast we were going. Even if those two morons on the street corner did catch a glimpse of us, which I highly doubt, it wasn’t enough for an ID. And do you know how many silver Camrys there are in Remington?”
“Lots,” Xander said. The guy had probably stolen enough of them to know. Shit, he’d stolen this one just a couple hours ago. Rusty had the photographic evidence to back it up.
“Thousands,” he corrected. “And this one isn’t going to be recognizable as a car, much less a silver Camry that may or may not have been spotted at the scene of a dumpster fire, in a day or so.” Torching the thing was going to be his reward for the remote ignition device working so flawlessly. He could barely wait the twenty-four hours he needed as a precaution, just to be extra-sure the cops didn’t string the dots together. He’d promised The Money he’d be extra careful, and even though that guy was a self-righteous pain in the dick, Rusty didn’t want to jeopardize the whole project. Not when he’d get to torch half the city while the other half watched,
and make a shitload of cash on top of it.
He turned toward Xander. “Seriously. Nobody died, and nobody saw us. Just fucking relax, would you?”
The raw truth was, Rusty had been glad there had been people in that bar. Not because his goal was to hurt anyone, although, hey, sometimes shit happened. But if setting fires was what made his cock hard, then having an audience for those fires was what made him blow his load. He loved the thrill of watching things burn, yes. But he was addicted to the voyeurism of other people watching him do it, and knowing exactly what he was capable of.
That was the pain in the ass of testing these devices before they’d been perfected. He had to be stealthy about it. As much as he hated it, city cams and surveillance videos were fucking real. Not that Rusty didn’t know ways to get around them—tonight’s little getaway was case in point—but the job in front of him was all about stepping up his game and getting a real spotlight. He’d had to climb under the sheets with some sleazy-ass people in order to set it into motion, but in the end, he was going to get the great, big moment of glory he’d always craved. Which meant he’d needed to test the device where The Money had wanted him to. He’d needed that dumpster, behind that bar on Marshall Avenue, no matter who had been inside.
The Money had been clear about the location, and Rusty would’ve been game if the guy had told him to smoke the place up during the halftime show on Super Bowl Sunday.
They were a match made in heaven. Or, no.
Probably, it was more like hell. Either way, Rusty was going to get what he’d always wanted.
Xander’s silence drop-kicked him back down to the right-here, right-now of the Camry. “What’s up your ass?” Rusty asked, making sure to stick the words with enough venom to sting.
“Nothing,” Xander said, looking out the passenger window again. Jesus, the guy was like a bad ex-girlfriend, with all the freaking mood swings. “It’s just that you said no one would get hurt on this job.”
Rusty pushed an impatient exhale through his teeth—not an easy task with all the scar tissue on his jaw, but he was pissed enough to do it anyway. “No, I said that wasn’t the goal. Bodies will make this job harder to do, and the last thing any of us wants are the cops nosing around if someone gets cooked before we get to the good stuff.”
At Xander’s obvious grimace, Rusty said, “You’re not having second thoughts, are you?”
“No.”
The reply was far from convincing, and Rusty pulled over to the side of the deserted street they were on, right on the fringes of North Point. “Listen to me, Xander, and make sure you do it good. You said you were in, so you’re in. There is no backing out of this job.”
“I get it,” Xander said, his light green eyes flashing through the shadows in a display of the street punk toughness Rusty had recruited him for, and he’d give him this. The guy wasn’t a total limp-dick. “I don’t want to back out. Not with this much money on the line.”
“Good.” Rusty measured him with a long glance, and screw it. A good insurance policy never hurt. Plus, he loved a good bedtime story. “Do you ever wonder what happened to Billy Creed?”
Shock moved over Xander’s features. “Billy? I heard he took off. Got tired of the shit life in North Point and went back to Tampa, or wherever he was from.”
Rusty laughed. That was the lamest of the rumors that had floated around about the guy who had been in the same position as Xander eight months ago. “That’s not what happened to Billy.”
“Okay,” Xander said with obvious confusion. “So, what did?”
“A gas can and a match,” Rusty said, the words making his blood heat with excitement as it moved faster through his veins. “See, Billy was a lot like you, Xander. He came at me for the small stuff, the amateur shit where no one got hurt and it was no big deal—Molotov cocktail in a lowlife wife-beater’s parked car, fake explosive devices to scare rival gang members off a job. You know the beat.”
Xander nodded. The poor guy had tried to blank the fear from his face, but oh, it was there in his eyes, giving him away as the weakling that he was.
Rusty continued, “But then, I got a line on a big job. One of my clients needed a real device placed under a fire engine. High profile, lots of people around. Enough C-4 to put a crater in Washington Boulevard and turn everyone within a thousand feet into finger paint. Serious shit. Serious enough that Billy tried to back out, and dealing with him cost me the time I needed to make sure the device was foolproof.”
“I’m not—”
“I’m not done,” Rusty snapped. He needed to keep Xander in line, and that meant keeping him scared. He wasn’t about to let the job of a lifetime go pear-shaped over a fucking disciplinary issue. Bad enough that Billy’s freak out had cost Rusty precious time in making that bomb, and that he’d left a loophole the goddamn bomb squad had taken advantage of to keep the thing from detonating like it was supposed to. That explosion would have made the national news. Hell, it would have made him a god.
Rusty’s pulse flared along with his anger. “What Billy didn’t realize, even though that bomb never went off, is that he didn’t get to back out. He’d done so many things—illegal things, bad things—that I could have had him busted for. See, I kept proof of all the vandalism he’d done, all the times he’d gone to the hardware store for things that could be used as accelerant. Did you know even pool supply stores keep track of frequent flyers who buy a lot of chlorine?”
“No.” Xander paled, likely thinking of the last four times Rusty had sent him out for chlorine, and how they’d all been this month, and Rusty laughed.
“Of course you didn’t. But even though all the evidence for those crimes pointed to Billy, I didn’t want to turn him in to the cops for all the terrible things he’d done.”
Xander asked, “Why not? It would’ve gotten you off the hook if he went down for stuff you did, right?”
Off the hook. Rusty’s smile disappeared in less than a breath. Circumstances would have to be pretty goddamn grave for him to let a fuckwad like Billy Creed take credit for the fires he’d started. Those fires had been his. The credit, his. No way would he let the media tell the world Billy had set those. Not unless he’d had no choice.
And, oh, he’d made sure he’d had the best choice. “Because I wanted to watch Billy burn instead. Just because bodies make things complicated doesn’t mean I don’t know how to hide one from time to time, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to do when I’m just spreading ashes.”
He turned toward Xander, nailing him with a stare through the shadows of the car. “Billy screwed with me, Xander, but what he didn’t know was that I owned him from the first time he flicked a Bic. And, like Billy, I own you, too. So don’t get any ideas about doing anything other than exactly what I tell you, or talking to anyone about this deal. Because I mean it.”
His heartbeat accelerated, his smile returning with a vengeance. “A gas can and a match. I won’t hesitate to find out if you scream louder than he did when he died.”
Kennedy was one hundred percent certain her chest was going to explode. Never mind that her lungs felt like someone had beaten them with a rust-encrusted tire iron. It was the nasty combination of guilt and dread that had parked itself on her sternum like a utility truck when she’d seen that car go screeching around the corner that was making her feel like her rib cage was T-minus three seconds from detonating.
She hadn’t lied to Officers Lynch and Boldin last night when she’d said she hadn’t seen the driver of that car. There had been too much adrenaline and not enough time for that, given her vantage point. But the lights from the bar and the positioning of the vehicle had afforded her just enough of a glimpse inside to see the passenger. Kennedy didn’t know if she’d have been able to pick him out of a lineup if she wasn’t already wildly familiar with his dark hair, his green eyes, and his clean-shaven face.
But since he was the baby brother she’d practically raised while their mother had held down three jobs in the worst part o
f the city, yeah, she’d recognized him, alright. Just like she recognized the fact that she was going to give him a gigantic raft of shit as soon as she got her hands on him.
God, Xander. What have you gotten yourself mixed up in?
Taking a deep breath even though it burned like a sonofabitch, Kennedy slung her black leather messenger bag over one shoulder and squinted through the Saturday morning sunlight. She’d planned to sleep in—Lord knew her body was tired enough to hit snooze for a bloody month. Her brain had had other ideas, though; namely, ones that involved the recurring nightmare that had been popping into her sleep schedule since she’d been twelve. In the dream, she’d lost her brother in a department store. It was, of course, the way Kennedy had known it was a dream that first time, since the only time she’d ever seen the inside of a department store at that point in her life had been in the movies. But she’d been in one in her nightmare, and she’d lost Xander somewhere among the racks of clothes. Every time she’d shove the hangers aside to try and find him, more clothes would pop up in their place, until she’d search so frantically that she’d wake in a cold sweat and a complete panic.
Which was exactly how she’d flown into consciousness this morning, three and a half hours after she’d fallen asleep.
“Just as well,” she grumbled to herself, slipping her oversized sunglasses over her face and heading toward The Crooked Angel, which stood a block away. Although her assistant manager, Sadie, was scheduled to open the bar and grill, she had a ton of cleanup to coordinate. The fire marshal might have green-lighted them to open today, but Kennedy still had to schedule someone to come in to assess whether or not there was any permanent smoke damage to the back of the kitchen, not to mention figure out how they’d handle deliveries and trash removal with the alley roped off until the fire department had concluded their investigation and the owner of the building had completed repairs and cleanup on his end.
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