Burn It Up

by Cara McKenna

  “I won’t, but thanks.”

  Vince frowned and pocketed his cell. “Lemme know if you find anything.”

  “I will. And you better stop at the gas station and buy yourself some mints or something. You smell like an ashtray.”

  “Call me,” Vince reiterated as he got up and headed for the kitchen. Casey listened as the voices there rose and mellowed, then to the footsteps, then the click and hush of the front doors as Vince saw himself out.

  He glanced at the ceiling, wondering what Abilene was up to. Who had called her. But just then the guest room door popped open, and she emerged. She peered down into the den, eyebrows rising as their gazes met. He watched her make her way down the steps silently in her socks, the baby apparently left in her crib.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey. I have a favor to ask.”

  “Okay.” Yes, please—any goddamn thing to keep him busy until late tonight.

  “Raina called. She tried you first, but you didn’t answer.”

  “I think my phone’s in my car. What’s going on?”

  “She wanted to see if one of us could bartend with Duncan, so she could come see Miah.”

  Of course. They might be exes, but they’d been friends far longer. “I can go in,” he offered. “I couldn’t stay until close, but until midnight or so.”

  “She was just hoping for a couple hours. I could go, too. I’d like to, actually, if you could watch Mercy. Until ten, maybe?”

  He nodded. “Sure.” The bar might be good for her, just now.

  “She ate a half hour ago, and I just changed her, so she should be fine, apart from maybe wanting some attention.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Thanks. And I’m sure Raina would say the same.”

  He tailed her upstairs, hefting the baby from the crib while Abilene got her shoes on, then followed her back down to the den.

  “Thanks again,” she said, finding her keys in her purse.

  “Anytime. Have fun,” he added, though the sentiment sounded awful stupid the moment it left his lips.

  She offered a weak smile and left him alone with Mercy. He struggled to imagine how on earth so many things could have happened in the past thirty hours. Two confessions—one of feelings, one of past crimes—then a breakup, an awkward breakfast, the eclipse, the fire. Soon, a night spent prowling around a dark murder scene.

  He took a seat on the couch and got the baby comfortable, then switched on the TV and turned the volume down.

  “You’re awful lucky you won’t remember any of this,” he told Mercy, passing over the news stations until he found a channel playing an old western.

  She also won’t remember Don, he thought. He’d held her only once or twice, and somewhat reluctantly, but he’d also given her a home for a time, and the protection of his family.

  “You missed out on knowing a real good man,” Casey told her. “As good as they come.” He felt tears welling then, and blinked them away.

  Chapter 26

  Casey passed a quiet evening. Raina arrived about an hour after Abilene had departed, accompanied by the smell of pizza. That drew him off the couch, and he carried Mercy to the kitchen to join the world’s most miserable dinner party.

  “I didn’t think any of you would feel like cooking,” Raina was saying, setting three large white boxes on the counter as Casey entered. She cast him a lame smile. There were a lot of those going around today.

  The meal was somber, and after perhaps forty minutes, Miah asked to be left alone with his mom. Casey and Raina excused themselves, finished their beers in the den, then bid each other a heavy good night. Abilene returned not long after and retired upstairs with the baby.

  Casey waited until midnight, until he couldn’t sit still any longer. He had a Maglite in his trunk, and he fetched it, stowed it in his pocket. With an idle thought about criminals returning to the scene, he got his pistol as well. He couldn’t think where to find a tarp without looking suspicious himself, creeping around in the dark, but he did nab some extra-thick trash bags from under the sink and took two of those and a roll of duct tape with him, plus a pair of rubber dish gloves.

  It was a dark night, the moon out of sight. Darker than it had been during the eclipse. A million times quieter, with a million stars now glittering above. He gave the bunks and stables a wide berth, hugging the fence that bordered the road. If anybody asked what he was doing . . . Shit, he had no fucking plan. Pretend he was drunk, maybe. He’d spent years caring about nothing more than covering his own ass, but just now, it was way too hard to give a shit.

  The barn was in near darkness, with just the weakest trickle of light making it over from the bunkhouse windows. There was yellow tape up, but nothing more. To most people this looked like the scene of a tragic accident.

  Lucky them, Casey thought, weary to the marrow with all the death that had begun skulking around his hometown.

  He sat on the dirt, taped two layers of heavy plastic around each foot, and donned the gloves. Switched the flashlight on but kept it trained low, mere centimeters from the ground.

  It had been a huge barn, but a secondary circle of caution tape narrowed ground zero—the spot where Don’s body had been uncovered beside a small industrial tractor, black now, but surely the telltale green and yellow not twelve hours earlier. The floor was covered in junk. Charred wood, fat old nails, slate tile scraps everywhere. Casey turned his attention to the tractor first, to its engine, exposed where one panel had been propped up. He couldn’t make much sense of anything with just one beam. Couldn’t say where the fire had started, which way it had spread, how hot it had gotten. Only daylight could tell him those things. But tonight, he wasn’t after the how. He was after the who.

  He swept the light around the mess underfoot, shifting debris, looking for anything unusual and wishing he owned one of those doohickeys his father had had when he’d been little—a strong magnet on a long rod, for fishing dropped bolts and screws from underneath cars or behind workbenches. There might be a single tiny staple somewhere in this mess—the only clue left behind from a pack of matches. Even if there was, though, talk about a needle in a hay—

  His hand froze, locking the beam on something square, just where his rustling, plastic-booted foot had pushed aside some litter. Square and black and familiar. He moved the Maglite to his left hand and picked it up.

  A cigarette lighter.

  It wasn’t unlike his own—a chrome deal, though a gas station knock-off, not a real Zippo. He didn’t dare wipe at the soot, on the off chance any fingerprints had survived, but instead peered at it by the beam of the flashlight. Like his, it, too, had an emblem on one side. Faux enamel, it looked like, and the plastic once coloring it had melted away, leaving only the metal relief of a cheesy skull-and-daggers motif.

  Don didn’t smoke, far as Casey knew, and even if he’d had a secret habit, he sure as shit wasn’t dumb enough to have lit up while working on a greasy old tractor engine.

  It could have already been here. Just another forgotten bit of junk cluttering up this disused barn. But Casey doubted it. Doubted it as surely as he could picture the amateur arsonist who’d started this fire—picture him flicking it open, striking the wheel, perhaps dropping it in surprise or pain when those flames lashed back at his hand, more aggressive than expected, startling him.

  He set the lighter on the hood of the tractor and resumed the search.

  Casey couldn’t say how long he was there, scrabbling around on his hands and knees, peering at blackened scraps and bits of junk by the beam of the Maglite. He only knew that when his back began to ache and his head to throb that it must’ve been hours.

  He checked his phone. Hours indeed. It was pushing six, and though he wasn’t sure when dawn was due, precisely, he knew he’d be stupid to still be here once the sky grew light.

  One cheap lighter wasn’t much, but it was something. He slipped it into a sandwich bag from his pocket and picked his way through the rubble, the sco
rched earth, and eventually found grass and gravel beneath his feet once more. He ditched the taped-up plastic and the gloves, wadding them up and stashing them in his trunk for the time being. Sloppy, but time was of the essence.

  He found his front door key and let himself into the farmhouse, relieved to find it dark and silent. Normally Christine would be up by this hour, but he had no doubt she needed to sleep in . . . if she’d dropped off at all. He fucked around until he found the right light switch, then crept up the front stairway to the Churches’ wing of the house, hoping Miah’s room was where he remembered, the last door on the left.

  Casey knocked firmly. No answer. He turned the knob and eased the door in on a dark room. “Miah?”

  “Yeah.”

  He pushed inside, letting the light from the hall reveal Miah, who was sitting on his bed, fully clothed, with his back against the wall and his hands linked atop his belly, staring at the far window.

  “I got no doubt you don’t feel like talking just now,” Casey said quietly, “but I found something that I could really use your opinion on.”

  “What?”

  “Turn on that light.” He nodded to the lamp on Miah’s deep windowsill, and he turned it on. He looked about fifty by its mellow glow.

  “I found a lighter in the barn, beside the John Deere. Any chance you recognize it?”

  He handed Miah the baggie, and the man’s eyes were wide in an instant.

  “You know it?”

  “Yes, I fucking know it.”

  “Whose?”

  Miah spoke so quietly—a simmering growl of a sound—Casey could only just make out the name.

  “Bean?” he echoed.

  “Chris Bean.” Miah sat up, still staring at the bag. “He used to work for us.”

  “When?”

  “Must’ve hired him five, six years ago. Fired him two winters back.”

  “Why?”

  “Drugs. He was one of our best hands, until he got mixed up with amphetamines. I was the one who caught him at it. I’d know that lighter anyplace—I found him camped out in one of the outbuildings, and I saw it on the floor beside a couple of folded-up sheets of aluminum foil, with tweaker streaks burned all over them.”

  “You think this is revenge, for your dad firing him? That’s pretty fucking extreme.”

  Miah shook his head. “Dad didn’t fire him. I did. Dad gave him more second chances than he deserved, even paid for him to go to rehab. I’m the one who got sick of it and kicked him out.” His head jerked to the side, facing the open door like he might jump to his feet and stride out into the predawn darkness at any moment.

  “There any chance he could’ve dropped that in the barn back when he was still working for you?”

  “None. I hustled him out that night. Stood there watching while he packed.”

  “He drive a dark truck back then?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean shit.”

  Well said. “You know where he is these days?” Casey asked.

  “I know where he used to stay, after he left.”

  “Has he been in touch since? Started anything, with any of you?”

  “Nothing. But I’m only happy to start something with him right fucking now.”

  “It’s six a.m.,” Casey said, but Miah was already swinging his legs over the edge of the mattress and reaching for his boots.

  “I’m coming with you.” Casey didn’t trust the hate blazing in Miah’s eyes and wouldn’t put it past the man to do something rash.

  He followed his friend out of the room, down the stairs, and they grabbed their coats in the front hall. Miah didn’t hold the door for Casey, just flung it wide and went striding into the dark. “We need answers, Miah, okay? Answers first, justice later.”

  “If you come, you stay the fuck out of my way.”

  “I can’t promise that.”

  Miah stopped short. “That cocksucker murdered my father. You have any fucking clue what he has coming to him?”

  “Miah—”

  He began walking again. “Come with me and you’ll find out.”

  “Just don’t get yourself shot or thrown in prison for the rest of your life, man. Your mom needs you.” Hell, fucking Fortuity needed him. Needed the ranch. Vince needed him. “You got too much riding on your shoulders to fuck this up, Miah.”

  “You come, you better keep out of my way,” he said again.

  And what choice did Casey have, really?

  Chapter 27

  It wasn’t a long drive—just to the other end of Fortuity, barely twenty minutes at the clip Miah was going. He turned them off the main road just before the railroad tracks and down a cracked and faded residential road, all the way to its end. It was one of the town’s more depressing corners, dotted with small houses and trailers, a good quarter of them looking abandoned or at the very least terminally neglected.

  The sun was just rising and Miah squinted at the various shitboxes they passed.

  “What number?” Casey asked.

  “Can’t remember, but it was a single-wide, with an old-school laundry line beside it. Dad insisted on cutting him a final paycheck. I insisted on delivering it, so Bean wouldn’t get a chance to play the pity card and try to win himself any more chances. I remember there were about six cars parked out front. Just what you’d expect from a load of—”

  He went silent and eased them to a halt along the roadside, approaching a trailer. There were two cars and three trucks sprawled half on the patchy front lawn like beached whales.

  “Motherfucker,” Casey breathed. The far pickup was navy blue, and a good fifteen, twenty years old to judge by the headlights’ glaucoma. “Could that be the truck?”

  “One way to know for sure.” Miah got out and pulled the rifle from behind his seat. Fuck, that wasn’t a good sign. Still, Casey secured the pistol at his own back and followed, jogging to keep up.

  Miah wasn’t discreet. He circled the truck, boots crunching on the gravel shoulder. The bed was loaded with crap—a shitty old chair and cardboard boxes, trash bags that looked to be maybe stuffed with clothes, like somebody was planning on moving out, and in a hurry. Crouching, Miah inspected the plate, and Casey did the same. Though he couldn’t say it was a shock, he still got chills when he saw the dirt clinging to it, in the perfect outline to mark where a sticky length of duct tape had once been pressed.

  Miah stared at it for a long breath, then murmured, “I’m gonna fucking kill him.”

  “Dude—”

  He was up, striding toward the house. Casey dashed behind to catch up, just as the door to the trailer popped open.

  A slender pale man of thirty or so stood on the threshold, keys dangling from one hand, an army green frame pack in the other. He had a narrow face and stood about Casey’s height. Bundled up and wearing a balaclava, he could easily have been taken for James Ware, if that was who you’d been expecting. He got one foot on the cinder block standing in for a front step and froze, eyes growing wide.

  Miah kept on marching, the rifle swinging right along like an extension of his arm. “And just where the fuck do you think you’re off to?” he shouted.

  “Fuck,” was all Chris Bean said before dropping his pack and hitting the dirt, running at full-tilt for Christ knew where, aimed at the badlands.

  Miah was a dozen paces behind him and gaining. “You stop or I will fucking shoot you in the back!”

  Casey got his own weapon drawn but kept the safety on. He hoped to hell Miah had the sense to have done the same.

  He found out only seconds later that the answer was no.

  The shot rang out in the still morning air, and an instant later Bean went loping off on long, splayed steps, one leg seeming to give out on him as he tumbled headlong into the scrub grass. Miah tackled him as he tried to stand, the impact of his body snapping through Bean’s and knocking his face against the earth.

  Casey skidded to a halt beside them on pebbles and rocks.

  Miah fisted Bean’s jacket at the sh
oulders, flipped him over, and slammed him against the ground so hard his head bounced back like whiplash. “Why?”

  “I had to,” the guy gasped. His nose was bleeding from his first collision with the dirt, making his words gurgle. He looked about a breath from passing out, and not only on account of the flesh wound and the impact—his eyes were glazed and unfocused, chest rising and falling like mad, words slurred from more than a head injury, Casey bet. The guy was as fucking high as a kite.

  “I had to,” Bean sputtered again. “They would’ve hurt my wife if I didn’t.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, man. I don’t even know. They never gave me names. They gave—” His chest jerked and he coughed, eyes growing hazy, drool slicking his lips.

  “They gave you what?” Casey demanded. They needed answers before this cocksucker went into shock.

  “Gave me money,” he wheezed. “First just to tell them—tell them where to start a fire. Which building. What time. Then they—then they made me do it.”

  “Who?” Miah gave him another violent shake.

  “Calm the fuck down,” Casey said. “You’re gonna knock him out.”

  “I don’t know,” Bean said, sobbing now. “I don’t know. Just some guy, who worked for somebody else. No names.”

  “And you said yes?” Miah hissed. “After every goddamn thing my father did for you? Every fucking chance he gave you to clean your ass up?”

  “I didn’t—I didn’t know it was him.”

  Miah’s expression sharpened, tense body stilling by a degree. “What?”

  “I didn’t know, until it was already burning. I thought—I thought it was you. When he came in, he had his back to me. It was dark. He was wearing a black hat—he always wore a white one, before.”

  Miah sank back on his heels slowly, eyes wide, tanned skin going pale.

  “It was you they wanted,” the man wailed, then turned over, curling up on his side, racked by sobs. “I thought it was you I talked to when I called about the tractor. It was your name on the ad.” But not Miah’s number, apparently—probably just the office line. “By the time I realized, it was too late.”