Luna brought her hands into the air. I watched as her eyes flicked back and forth, absorbing the sight of the three guns. Wes jerked his head to the right, telling Hank to come around to our backs, ensuring we couldn’t somehow escape through the kitchen—not that we’d be dumb enough to run from guns.
These men surely had no problem shooting people in the back. I’d met enough of them as I’d run away from Detroit the past few months, robbing every Midwestern gangster I could find.
“Boy, I’m trying to wrap my head around the timeline,” Wes drawled, his eyes focused on Luna. “Because I know it’s this handsome fella over here who took the money. But when did he hook up with you, little Luna? Was it before or after? Did you put him up to it to save your daddy’s ass? Because if so, you had to have known I’d catch on. I always catch on.” Wes chuckled. He tipped forward, knocking his finger against her delicate chin. My insides boiled in anger.
“You’re making a huge mistake,” I spouted then, unable to control myself. I felt inclined to spit at his feet.
“Am I?” Wes said, giving me a wry smile. “You know, I don’t think I ever caught your name. I ran the plates on that Mustang of yours, and they belong to some guy back in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But you’re not Garrett, father of three and teacher at the nearby high school, now are you?”
I’d bought the Mustang from a guy who’d stolen the car. I’d known that much. But he’d said he’d driven it in from the suburbs—Ann Arbor, I supposed—back to our hood, a place those types of people didn’t exactly frequent. Nobody had caught on. I’d been driving it for the past four months without an issue, until now.
“Suppose not,” I returned.
“Don’t worry, son. I’m not going to involve law enforcement in this issue. I think it’s always a bit of a waste of time, if I’m telling the truth. Haven’t necessarily been a darling of the law in recent years, if you catch my drift.”
“Caught it,” I said.
His gun pointed back at me. With his eyebrows high, he took a step forward, toying with me like a ragdoll.
“Now, son, I don’t think you want to take that kind of tone with me, do ya? You’re a newcomer here in our pretty little town. Probably too early for Luna to have knocked any sense into you. Although, according to one of the local chefs at a certain 24-hour diner, I’ve heard that you two have been knocking around a bit otherwise.”
Luna’s shoulders slumped at his words. My hands formed into fists, yearning to punch him. Instead, I tried to reason with him.
“We can get you your money back,” I said. “If you know anything about me, you know I can get it—from someone else, anyone else.”
“That’s quite an offer, son,” Wes said. When he scrunched his face up, I thought I could see a resemblance to my old pal Vinnie, back in Detroit. “But you see, at a certain point, money doesn’t matter. It’s just something to burn in the end. And it ain’t like I don’t have more piled away somewhere. I’m an organized man. You caught me at a weak spot, and for this, I’m embarrassed.”
“You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” I stuttered, taking a step back. “Just let us go, and we’ll find a way to repay you.”
“Oh, gosh, Hank, Chester, it seems he’s a simpleton.”
With a snap of Wes’s fingers, Hank burst forward, pulling a loop of rope from his knapsack and then tossing Luna into the armchair. She cried out in terror. His hands were grabbing her, firm against her forearms, and my stomach flipped in horror. But she fought. God, she did. She kicked her legs wildly in the air as Hank tried to guide her, ultimately causing her to fall on her back on the rug. Chester rushed forward, grabbing me, and then shoved me toward the wall, where he wrapped my wrists in rope.
“Come on, Kraemer,” I pleaded, nodding my head toward Luna, who was still scrambling on the floor. “She had nothing to do with this, and you know it. I took the money. Me. And the fact that she got involved was purely accidental. I mean, you’re a reasonable man…” I trailed off, watching as Wes’s eyes flashed with a demonic glare.
Hank lifted Luna from the ground and tried to shove her into the chair. She smashed into his face with her elbow, causing blood to squirt from his nose. She was all gangly limbs flailing, making her look like a wild animal out of her cage. As Kraemer approached her, his boots tapped against the ground ominously, like drumbeats in the introduction to a song.
My heart grew cold.
“Please, Wes. She had nothing to do with it,” I said again. “You need to let her go. I’ll live with the consequences, but she hasn’t done anything.”
Wes snarled at Luna. “Stop moving around, girl, or I’ll pop your head off.”
With a lurch, Luna brought her head back and then cast it forward, spitting directly into Wes’s face.
The moment the spit hit his cheek, Kraemer let out a raucous laugh. The spittle slid down his face, toward his neck. Without bothering to wipe it off, he brought his hands around Luna’s arms, locking her down as Hank tied her up. Wes chuckled as she continued to strain, her eyes flashing left and right as she realized she was cornered.
“Fuck you,” she whispered, her voice low and gravelly. “You’re a monster.”
“I say,” Wes sang, his voice bright, “this has been one of the most pleasurable days of my life. Finding the two of you wasn’t the nightmare I’d assumed it would be, and now look at us, all together under one crooked roof. You should really get that looked at, little Luna. This whole house might come down over your father’s sleeping head. And think of what that might do to his heart.”
Luna half-snarled with rage, her chest rising and falling.
“You know what?” Wes said then, snapping his hands together. “I have a wonderful suggestion. I think all of you are really going to like this, especially you, hot-shot.”
My wrists strained at the ropes. Chester was now tying up my legs, leaving me standing up against the wall. If I made a single wrong move, I would fall on my face and bust my nose. Hank’s nose still bled freely, making a ketchup-like stain on his shirt.
“I say we start fresh, with a good old-fashioned burning,” Wes said, a smile stretching between his wide cheeks. “Hank, Chester, light up this piece of trash house. And don’t bother to take these hooligans away. They look like they could use a good cleansing. Don’t you think?”
Luna quaked within the confines of her ropes, trying to tear herself from the chair. I stared at her, shocked by the cruelty of this man. After months of running, was I really going to allow this slow-talking loan shark to tear me down?
“Gasoline’s in the car,” Hank said, speaking for the first time since arriving.
Crossing through the house, he left, creaking across the front porch and then back. He dragged two cans of gasoline in with him, each one stinking and thick with dust. Chester accepted one. In a fast motion, they clinked them together like a strange ceremony, a cheers. And then, without further ado, they poured the gasoline around our feet, making fast, squiggly lines around us.
“They’re artists,” Wes said, rubbing his palms together. “I always say, they make my career into a passion project, especially Hank there. He’s the most loyal of them all.”
With a flourish, Hank doused Luna’s left leg. Luna blinked down at her now-sopping dress as gasoline pooled at the edge of the chair.
“Wonderful,” Wes purred. With several clops of his boots, he left the house and stood on the porch, giving the broken porch swing a lazy kick. Drawing a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket, he placed one between his lips, lighting it and then allowing the smoke to filter through his browning teeth and into the air. “I think that’ll do, boys,” he said.
Chester and Hank dropped the gasoline tanks on the carpet and Hank drew out a pack of matches. Swiping one match along the matchbox, he brought a flickering, yellow flame into the air and then flung it between Luna and me, causing the carpet to catch immediately. Orange spikes of fire burned through the beige as Hank and Chester left the house.
“F
uck,” Luna murmured across from me.
Within seconds, Wes, Chester, and Hank had piled into their car and sped down the driveway, leaving us to become corpses.
As I glared at the flames, an image of Aaron flitted through my mind. Aaron, of all people, had grown so stupid, so greedy, he’d allowed us both to get murdered. I remembered him sitting in that armchair at my old place, burning the tips of the ropes his grandfather had given him. His grandfather had been a sailor, and had taught Aaron to tie various complex knots and tidy up the ends. But Aaron had just loved the smell of fire burning through the edges of the rope, crisping it.
Jumping forward, I allowed the fire to lick at the edges of the rope that held my ankles tight. That familiar smell met my nose as the orange and yellow bursts eased over the rope, eating into the core and then—finally—breaking the rope.
Luna gasped in delight. The fire had begun to surround her armchair, causing her to lift her tied legs as high as she could to get them away from the nibbling flames. “Colt! You’re incredible!” she cried out. “Try the arms! Be careful!”
My wrists, tied behind my back, proved more difficult. Dropping to my knees, I turned around quickly, leaning back and trying to keep control of my core. I allowed the fire to rip at my hands for a moment before finding the right groove. The rope tore into two pieces, falling to the carpet and immediately becoming engulfed in flames.
I was free.
“Come on, Colt!” Luna yelled.
Turning quickly, I found that the bottom of Luna’s chair was alight, crisping at the edges and then drawing upward, toward the armrests on which her arms were pinned. Leaping over the fire between us, I reached her, stepping gingerly from one flame-free spot to the next, inhaling the stench of burning gas.
My eyebrows pushing together low over my eyes, I began to untie her arms, releasing first the left, and then the right, in a flurry of confusion and panic. She knelt down and untied her ankles, singeing her hair slightly and crying out in alarm as the stench of it met her nose.
Grabbing her hand, I led us toward the front door, and we bolted down the porch steps and held each other close on the sidewalk, watching as the entire living room filled with thick smoke and the carpet flooded with fire. The armchair split into pieces as the fire engulfed it completely, tearing into the very space in which Luna’s beautiful frame had been pinned moments before.
Luna began to quiver in my embrace. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders, hoping I could be strong enough for both of us.
The house’s exterior began to falter then, as well. Fire spit out from the front foyer and onto the porch swing, dancing atop the armrests and causing the back support of the swing to crisp and then burn. Upstairs, the glass in the windows broke from the intense heat inside the house, and smoke began to billow high into the air. We could feel the heat on our faces, but we didn’t move back.
We shouldn’t have made it out alive, but there we were, poised on the brink of death. In those moments of panic, we just had to keep breathing. And we were grateful for each breath.
Chapter Fourteen
Luna
That bastard. Wes Kraemer didn’t have a good bone in his body. I could still smell him, that horrible, thick cologne simmering in the air around us, even as I watched my childhood home burn to the ground.
It had been the home into which my parents had moved after they’d first gotten married. It had been the home in which I’d first kissed a boy, first cried myself to sleep, first learned what it meant to grow up. And now it was mere splinters, falling down before me.
The sheer unfairness of it consumed me. I slipped from beneath Colt’s arms, falling to my knees on the ground. Bringing my hands before me, I let out a guttural scream that made my bones quake. Somewhere far in the distance, I heard the sirens as they barreled toward us.
They didn’t know yet that there would be nothing left to save, that the bones of the house were breaking before us, that the organs had already been destroyed.
As I watched my home burn, Colt bent down next to me, placing his firm hand on my shoulder.
“Baby, you’re not breathing,” he told me.
I forced myself to take a breath, coughing in the smoke-filled air.
“Talk to me,” Colt demanded. “Let me know you’re all right.”
I turned toward his handsome face, blinking. His eyes were just an inch away, glistening and reflecting the fire that grew before us. Soon, I thought, the fire could overtake the entire neighborhood. It could take over the entire world.
“Please, Luna. I don’t want you to go catatonic on me,” he said, giving me a wry smile. “We made it out of there alive, and that’s all that matters. And your father—he’s all right.”
I gave him a soft nod, my nostrils flaring in disbelief. What had been a fortuitous meeting with an attractive outlaw had grown into—what? The most dangerous day of my life? My heart hammered in my chest as I felt the urgency to wish this all away, every moment of it.
But going back to the past didn’t prove to be so easy.
“Listen, Luna,” Colt said, his voice growing lower. “If the cops find me here, I’m finished.”
Without thinking, I reached into my pocket and drew out the keys, my lifeless hand dropping them into Colt’s outstretched one. He clenched them, giving me a knowing look. The sirens grew louder and more insistent around us, the fire trucks and the ambulance halting in strange patterns outside the burning building.
“You’re going to be okay, right?” Colt asked me, as if I had any other choice than to stay there, to observe the world as it shook before me.
“Go on,” I said, hardly able to hear my own voice. “Get out of here.”
Colt pulled his lips into a half-smile. “I’ll come back for you,” he called back.
My hands fell to my sides, my fingers tracing along the sidewalk. The firefighters around me began to holler at one another, yanking a hose from the fire hydrant down the road and toward the burning yellow house. Colt gave me a final nod and then raced toward my little red Chevy, hopping into the front seat and revving down the driveway.
As he drove away, I felt certain I would never see him again. With a quick leap, I rose to my feet and thrust a waving hand toward him, hopeful that he would remember me: the diner waitress with long, fire-tinged hair and bright green eyes. We’d had a connection. We’d almost died together.
And now, watching him go, I knew our paths couldn’t cross again. We were too volatile, too alive for one another. Colt’s path was the open road, and mine was right here, standing on the sidewalk, watching my life burn to the ground. It was a metaphor. It was the reason I woke up and went to work and cared for my father. Somebody had to do it.
The water burst over the boards of yellow and through the shattered windows, making a brown, swampy soup of the house. The firefighters’ helmets reflected strangely in the late October sun.
As I stood, my arms pressed to my chest, a police officer approached me, placing a hand on my upper back and guiding me toward his squad car. He began to ask me questions, to demand things of me, but my ears had given up on hearing. I just shook my head at him, in shock, my eyes like saucers.
How did he expect me to know anything when, if it wasn’t for Colt, I would have been a pile of ashes the living room floor?
“Kraemer,” I whispered to the ground, unsure if the officer could hear me or not. My nose filled with the scent of smoke, making me unable to breathe correctly. I staggered into it. “He did this. Him and his men—to teach my father a lesson. They have guns.”
“Guns?” the officer repeated.
He motioned his partner over and whispered to him. They glanced at one another, and then me, incredulously. To them, this was merely an accident, as if houses just sprung up in flames overnight all the time. They couldn’t imagine the depth of what had happened over the past day.
My eyes flashed with anger. “Wes Kraemer. Make sure he pays.”
Putting me in the back of a sq
uad car, they tried to drive me to the station, but I insisted they take me to my friend Donna’s apartment instead. They drove me with my lips pressed tightly together and my fingers against the windowpane. My eyes filled with tears.
As we drove past the diner, I caught a view of Marcia in the window, swiping a sponge over table six, her eyes glancing toward the black smoke in the distance. I hadn’t appeared at work that day. Now, at least, I had a pretty good reason why.
Chapter Fifteen
Colt
The little red Chevy served me well, revving down the highway at first 80 mph, and then 92. My fingers gripped the steering wheel, my knuckles white, and I turned up the radio as loud as I could stand it, screaming into the noise of a ’90s metal band and feeling my pulse rise.
I’d almost died back there. Both of us had. We were playing with extra time now, like we’d gotten a sequel to a movie that hadn’t been that great anyway. Where would the plot take us? Could we act it out?
A memory flashed through my mind, of Luna standing on the sidewalk, black tears coursing down her cheeks and that little yellow shack ablaze behind her. Jesus, she’d looked so broken and lost, terrified. God knows I didn’t want to leave her there, but what choice did I have? What kind of life could I offer a girl like her?
I’d been driving for about five minutes when I caught sight of cop cars in the distance, barreling toward me. Sensing a chase was on the cards, I forced the car into overdrive, blasting across the final stretch of the shitty Midwestern town, past abandoned houses and a deserted movie theatre, past the crooked cross on the Baptist church and the little ice cream shack that sold soft serve into November. Past Wes Kramer’s dilapidated offices.
The bastard loan shark was right there. Parked outside was the very same vehicle that had screeched away from the scene with Wes, Chester, and Hank inside, meaning they’d hightailed it back to the office to talk shop and gab about their victory. They were probably toasting to it at this very moment, clinking beer together and hailing Wes Kraemer, the man who delivered violence whenever necessary.
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