Burn It Up

by Cara McKenna

  “You remember when you asked me what it is I want most?” Casey murmured. “And how I said I didn’t really know yet? Well, I still don’t, but I’m starting to. And it’s because of everything that’s come into my life these past few months. All the responsibilities, even the ones that scare me. It’s feeling like I’m finally becoming a man, and you guys are no small part of that. I want whatever this feeling is that it’s been giving me. Worthiness, maybe.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “I want to be worthy of people’s respect, and faith, and love, maybe. That’s what I want most now.”

  “Those are wonderful things to want.”

  “Way fucking better than money—that’s for sure . . . I don’t have everything all figured out,” he said softly, his breath finally coming smooth and even. “And I’m still scared. Fucking petrified. But I knew the second I shut your door behind me last night, I’d made a mistake. I’m so scared of becoming my dad, but that’s exactly what I did. I left the second you asked something of me that I was afraid I couldn’t give. But I want to take that back, if you’ll let me.”

  And would she? She nearly could, but not yet. “There’s a lot I don’t know about you, and plenty you don’t know about me, either.” The former no longer frightened her, but what he might make of her own past still did.

  “Of course. And I don’t know if I can be what you need. If I can be something for you that I’ve never been able to be for anyone before, and even though I don’t know if it’s enough . . . I know I’m thirty-three so maybe this sounds really pathetic, but I feel like a man, for the first time,” he said, speaking to her hands or her knees. “Like a grown-ass man who can protect somebody, and take care of them, and cheer them up and crap like that. No woman’s ever made me feel like that. Like you look at me sometimes and suddenly I’m eight feet tall, and that you think I can do anything.” He paused just long enough to take her hand in his. “It makes me want to be better. And to do good. Makes me feel about a thousand things, all stuffed inside my chest, and in my head, and hell, in my dick probably, too. Like, everything, everywhere. I can’t promise forever, or even that I won’t fuck everything up, but I’d like a chance to try. If you wanted to give me one, that is. If you’re ready to swap some skeletons.”

  She was already crying, and she stole her hand back to wipe at her cheeks.

  Her entire life, she was coming to realize, she’d only ever wanted to be wanted. She’d wanted a father’s love and a mother’s protection, and in the end she’d run off in search of those things in all the wrong places. And now she wanted Casey, so bad it nearly hurt. So, so much rode on how he took her confession.

  Casey had never been into her because he’d thought she was some innocent—the whole knocked-up-by-a-felon thing ruled that out. At the end of the day, this man had surely made his share of reckless, dumb decisions. Drug addiction and a sex scandal . . . He could handle that, couldn’t he? He’d heard and maybe seen worse in his life.

  Abilene steeled herself, took his hand again, and committed anew to face up to the thing she’d been running from for years now. The truth. The truth about who she was, and how she’d come to be here, now, with this particular man holding her hand.

  “I’ll go first,” he offered.

  She nodded. “I’m ready. I want to hear.” And I’m ready to talk.

  “Guess I’ll start at the beginning.” He kept his gaze on their linked fingers. “I was pretty much a normal kid, growing up around here. I shoplifted, and probably drank too much in high school, but nothing that your average small-town punk kid doesn’t get up to. It wasn’t until I moved away that I went a bit more rotten.”

  “Rotten?” Something about that word filled her with sharp misgiving. But he said already, he wasn’t violent. He never hurt anybody. She prayed for the best, forcing deep and steady breaths as he went on.

  “You know I was a card counter,” he said. “That’s no secret. And I did some grifting shit, too, during that time. Con jobs with some of the people I counted with—tricking people into parting with a few thousand bucks here and there.”

  “What sorts of people? Not, like, the elderly or . . . ?”

  He shook his head, and her heart unwound by a measure. “No, nothing like that. We made decent money, and the cons were strictly for sport. We targeted the most obnoxious blowhards we met at the blackjack tables, typically.”

  “Okay.” While not admirable, it certainly beat preying on the desperate.

  “I never loved those cons the way I did the counting. Like I said the other night, I’ve always been good at math. I like numbers; I like science. The conning was a rush, but it never clicked for me the way the counting had. Not until I found a way to make it about what excites me.”

  “And what excites you, then?”

  His smile was shy, or maybe guilty, and his gaze moved to the far horizon. “Fire.”

  She frowned, confused. “Fire?”

  “Yeah. I was a borderline pyro when I was a kid. I know lots of boys are, but that shit just fascinated me. Always has. Most kids, they grow out of it by puberty, but for me, the romance never stopped.”

  The romance. She knew what he meant, as he said it. His eyes changed when he stared at the hearth at night, transfixed, sometimes, the way somebody on drugs could fixate on a pattern or texture or a dripping tap for minutes and minutes and minutes. She shivered.

  She’d thought she could handle this, but all at once, she wasn’t so sure. She’d thought that as long as he hadn’t hurt anybody, physically, she could forgive him. Hell, she’d forgiven James. Then again, the woman she was now, with a daughter in her life, a future to consider, would never take up with James Ware. She’d changed so much from that girl he’d met in that trailer last Christmas, she was unrecognizable. Literally, and in every other way. And she felt colder with every word that came out of Casey’s mouth, her blood growing icy with dread and worry.

  Conning people. Not hurting them physically, but still hurting them. And on purpose. Sitting down and thinking up ways to hurt strangers. Abilene had hurt her fair share of people over the years, good ones and bad ones, but never on purpose. Never without regret. And she didn’t hear regret in Casey’s voice.

  Those deeper thoughts scared her, so she turned to logistical ones. “What’s fire have to do with conning people?”

  “Everything, in my old business. I’ve probably read every book there is about the physics and chemistry of it, anything and everything about friction and accelerants, explosives, how it all behaves—just for fun. Basically turned myself into an armchair fire forensics expert. When I was in Vegas, if any fire made the news that was suspected to be arson, if I could I’d try to sneak onto the scene, afterward. Study the burn patterns, all that stuff.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Anyhow, that’s always been a part of me. Always the thing that got me juiced like nothing else could—” He paused, looking up, catching her expression. Worry and unease had to be written all over her face. “You all right?”

  “You’re not going to confess that you went to work for the FBI, using your powers for good, are you?”

  His smile was pure apology. “Sorry, honey. I liked money back then, as much as fire. And good doesn’t pay all that well.”

  She nodded, and, feeling cold, she took her hand back and locked her arms around her middle.

  “This is my confession, remember?” he said gently. “It was never going to be a happy surprise.”

  “I know. Go on.”

  “So, over time, hanging with all those card-counters and dabbling in those con jobs, I got involved with some folks who were into insurance fraud.”

  Fraud. Okay, that didn’t sound too terrible, she thought, trying to quell the nausea.

  “There’s this whole criminal sector,” he said, “to do with insurance. Guy takes out a big policy on his house or his boat or his business; then the place burns to the ground, he gets his fat payout.”

&nbs
p; “On purpose. Like, he sets the fire himself.”

  “Exactly. The thing is, arson’s real hard to do right. It leaves a million fingerprints—in the chemical residue, the burn patterns, loads of little tells. You can’t just splash some gasoline, light a match, then tell the investigators it must’ve been some faulty wiring. Dumb-asses try that shit all the time, and all of them get busted.”

  Her heart had gone from racing to plodding at some point, and as the truth began to gel, her body went cold, cold, cold. “So you did that yourself? Bought places only to destroy them and get insurance money?”

  He shook his head. “No, I contracted. People hired me to start fires for them. Then in exchange, I got a hefty cut of the settlement.”

  “But . . . I mean, what people? And where are you setting fires? In houses?”

  “Some, but mostly commercial spaces. Most of my clients—”

  “Clients?” That word sounded so, so . . . businesslike. So prim, or something. Something vulgar in its propriety.

  He nodded. “Most of my clients were business owners on the brink of bankruptcy, or else they’d cooked their books or otherwise fucked themselves into a corner, and needed quick cash and a way out. I go in, I set up a scene—finesse some wiring, or maybe it’s a faulty space heater, left on too close to a trash can full of paper. Maybe it’s industrial—the right rags soaked in the exact sorts of chemicals you’d expect to find in whatever place of business it was, too close to a heating duct that’s got too much dust built up in it. Whatever accident fits the scene.”

  “Accident,” she repeated.

  “Seeming accident, yeah. The key is to design the fire to burn through quick.” He sounded excited now, talking faster, gesturing like he was recounting a boxing match. “You leave the right windows open in the right sort of weather, keep others closed, control the spread. Make sure the building goes down quick, ideally before the authorities can even arrive.”

  “The firefighters.”

  Casey nodded.

  Her stomach turned all the way over, three hundred sixty degrees. “My grampa was a firefighter, and my uncle.”

  Casey sat up straighter, snapping out of his animated state in a blink. “Oh, honey—don’t worry. Nobody ever got hurt by any fire I set. I was careful.”

  “Because you didn’t want to get caught,” she inferred. Anger was simmering now, melting some of the ice in her veins. Anger was her least favorite emotion, the one she avoided at all costs. But just now, trying to square the look in Casey’s eyes with the facts he was telling her . . . She was pissed, yeah. “Only because if you did get caught, and somebody had gotten hurt, you’d probably be in way more trouble.”

  “Yes, because of that. But because I didn’t want to hurt anybody, period. We were careful. We made sure no other buildings were in danger of going up. We made sure there were no people around, no pets in the buildings. Hell, I did industrial jobs where we had to make sure we weren’t going to release a load of toxic smoke too close to a residential neighborhood. We were careful,” he repeated. “If anybody suffered, it was the multibillion-dollar insurance industry, and they’re a load of cons themselves.”

  “But somebody could have,” she said. “A firefighter could’ve been hurt or killed, responding to what you did. They could’ve gotten trapped and died, had a ceiling collapse on them, or . . .” She was about panting now, feeling suffocated. “I can’t help but imagine it was my grampa or my uncle Hal who was in there. What could’ve happened to them.”

  “Don’t picture a fire like you see on TV. We accepted these jobs because they were ripe for it. Remote, or out in industrial areas, dead after dark.”

  “But you couldn’t know that something wouldn’t go wrong. That somebody wouldn’t get hurt. This was in Texas. You could’ve started a wildfire.”

  His smile was weak, and definitely guilty now. “No, I suppose you can’t ever know for sure. All I know is that it all worked out. Every single job.”

  She felt hot all over, agitated and verging on out of control. She hated this feeling. This feeling had made an addict out of her, made her want to feel nothing, rather than sit in the discomfort of her own emotions. She focused on other questions, to keep in control of herself.

  “Who’s we? Who did you work with?”

  “Small teams. Very small. I did the research and all the planning and set the fires. I worked with one of two drivers, who got me and the materials in and out, and monitored the police scanner. And then another one of us was in charge of brokering the deals—finding the jobs, setting the terms, working with me to pick the right time for it to all go down. Three people per job, just four of us, total, that I ever worked with. Though the woman who did the brokering, she worked with more teams than just the one I was on.”

  “Woman?” Why was that so especially disconcerting?

  Because we’re raised to be kind. To care about people and want to keep them safe. Raised to defer and be good and please others. Especially men. Though where exactly had those values landed Abilene, anyhow?

  Casey nodded. “Yeah, she’s a woman. My partner.”

  “How long did you work together?”

  “A little over three years.”

  “When was the last . . . job you did?” Job. That word tasted sarcastic on her tongue. Sour.

  “End of June, last year.”

  “And what was it? Where, and what kind of a building or whatever?”

  Another apologetic smile. “I can’t tell you that. That’s beyond just my own business. But I can tell you that nobody got hurt, and the client got paid. So did we. I used a lot of that money to buy into Benji’s with Duncan, and some I gave to Vince, to help with our mother.”

  She froze. So her wages were paid in dirty money. Jesus, she’d thought she’d moved past all this when she’d put her foot down with James, told him he had to go straight. But all this time, every bag of groceries Casey had brought her, every check she’d let him pay in the diner . . . Every single one of those dollars could’ve left somebody dead. Somebody who’d dedicated their own life to helping others, at their own risk.

  Christ, she had fuck-all clue what to do with any of this.

  “Say something,” Casey prompted after a minute’s silence. “You’re making me nervous.”

  “You . . . But all of this is over, right?”

  “Yeah, I’d say so.”

  Her eyes widened. “You’d say so?” She’d heard him on the phone with someone, that night when they’d first kissed. His so-called partner, maybe. He’d told that person to fuck off, in no uncertain terms.

  “I’d been on the fence about one final job, but I never agreed to it. So yes, it’s over.”

  “You said you’d gone straight.” Hadn’t he? Or had she merely assumed? “You said you wanted to be a better man, from now on.” Because of me. Because of us.

  “The bar’s nearly cleaned me out. I can pay my rent, keep food in the fridge and gas in my car, but there’s other things I need a little padding for. One night’s work, thirty thousand bucks. There’s a lot of good I can do with that kind of money.”

  “But the money itself is bad,” she spat, catching how hysterical she now sounded, and not caring. “And the bar is full of that same bad money.” How on earth could it possibly succeed, when it was built on a pile of dirty cash? “Does Duncan know about all this? About how you made the money you used to go into business with him?”

  Casey shook his head. “He knows it was shady, but he never asked for the details.”

  She wished she didn’t know those details herself . . . But she had to, didn’t she? Without them, she’d been falling in love with a stranger. With a man as bad as James had been. Maybe the bad that James did left marks on people’s bodies, and bullet holes, and maybe he didn’t apologize for those things. But he’d never taken pleasure from his job, she didn’t think. Whereas Casey . . .

  “Did you enjoy it?” she asked. “Those jobs?”

  “I’d be lying if I said I d
idn’t.”

  She stared down at his hands for a long time, more than a minute. Hands that had held her baby—the hands that had held her before any other person in the world. Hands that had made Abilene feel wonderful in ways she’d all but forgotten about. And hands that had struck matches and started fires, counted money, but in all likelihood never come together to pray for forgiveness.

  “Say something, honey.” There was worry in his voice, the excitement she’d sensed all drained away.

  “I don’t really know what to say. I’m not even sure what I think just now.” All she knew for sure was that this changed everything.

  “Tell me what you’re feeling, then.”

  “I feel . . . disappointed. And a little disgusted, to be honest.” She looked up and met his eyes, finding more than worry there now. Pain. That might’ve been enough to have the old Abilene wanting to take it back, to soothe his hurt feelings, but fuck the old Abilene.

  “Disgusted?”

  “Yes,” she said, sitting up straight. “That you don’t sound, with hindsight, like . . . like, ‘Holy crap, I’m so lucky I never hurt anybody. Thank goodness I stopped when I did.’ Plus you didn’t stop, not completely. You were still thinking about doing it again.”

  “I was, but I won’t now.”

  She huffed, exasperated. “Because of how I’m taking it, you mean?”

  He nodded. “I only wanted the money for you. To help you find a place, maybe take some classes. I can make a person’s entire salary in one night. Tax-free. And I’m not bragging, I’m just saying, that’s a lot of money, a lot of money that could do a lot of good. But it’s pretty clear you wouldn’t take it, knowing where it came from.”

  She shook her head. “No, I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. Even if I sent it to an orphanage, how could it ever feel right? Nothing feels right now, knowing that. Knowing that’s where my wages are coming from. Knowing that’s how you paid for the groceries you’ve brought us, for everything you’ve ever given Mercy . . .” She sighed, shoulders trembling faintly, tears stinging.