Chapter 21 #2
"I think you know what I mean." He picks up the bolt again and turns it between his fingers. "She's had a difficult few weeks. A fire. Unwanted press. The kind of attention that can follow a person. I imagine she's looking forward to things settling down."
For one sharp second I picture her asleep in my bed, one hand shoved under the pillow, Pancake spread across her feet like she owns the place.
Something cold shifts low in my gut. Stein says it too casually, and Maureen's expression changes just enough to tell me she knows exactly how I was supposed to hear it.
I push back from the table.
"We're done here," I say. "You don't get to threaten people and call it business."
I stand up to leave, but then I smell it.
It arrives before the heat does, which is how accelerant fires work when they're set correctly.
The chemical smell rides under everything else, thin and specific, the particular sharp sweetness of something petroleum-based applied to a surface and given time to soak in.
I've read enough fire investigation files to know it.
And suddenly I know where I've smelled it before.
The bookstore corridor after the fire, with Avery unconscious on the floor while the same smell hung in the air around her.
I didn't clock it then. The remediation work had just finished and I must have folded the smell into paint, chemicals, construction dust.
But it's the same smell.
I know what I'm smelling now.
My eyes go to the south wall.
The heat follows eight seconds later. Not smoke first, not the gradual orange crawl of an accidental fire finding its way along old wood.
A line of it, precise and low along the base of the south wall, running the full width of the building and moving inward at a speed that tells me the pour was laid in advance and the ignition was remote.
Stein's phone is in his hand.
He didn't make a call. He pressed a button.
Everything clarifies at once, the way it does in the moment after a decision has already been made and there's nothing left but the consequence of it. The two cars in the lot. I never checked if anyone else was still inside them.
I'm already moving when the man near the door steps forward.
He's faster than he looked, which means I misjudged the level of preparation, and that's a mistake I don't have time to account for. His arm goes across my chest and his partner comes in low.
The next few seconds aren't a fair fight. I get one step before his forearm drives into my chest and the air leaves me. Then it's not a negotiation.
It ends with me on my back on concrete with my wrists zip-tied to a table leg and my left side burning from a hit I didn't fully see.
They tie Maureen to a chair, her wrists cinched tight behind the backrest, the plastic biting deep enough that her fingers twitch once before going still.
She looks irritated more than frightened, like she's waiting for someone to explain the inconvenience.
Then Stein takes a step back.
She doesn't understand it for a moment. I watch her face while she processes it, the genuine disbelief of a person who has spent years believing loyalty is a currency that gets honored eventually.
"Marvin." Her voice is different now, the oil gone out of it. "What are you doing?"
"Closing loose ends," he says. "You're the one who said the Star reporter was reliable.
You're the one who said the forum post was a good idea.
You've said a lot of things, Maureen, and every one of them left a thread I've had to manage.
" He looks at her the way he looked at the room when he walked in. "I'm done managing."
"I've been loyal to you for eleven years," she says, and the word loyal comes out cracked at the edges.
"I know," he says. And he sounds, in some terrible way, like he means it. Like he's genuinely aware of what she did and genuinely unconcerned. "It doesn't change what you know."
He turns to me. "Same principle," he says. "I believe you when you say you haven't talked to anyone yet. I'd rather the yet didn't become a problem."
He nods at the two men, who are already moving toward the door.
"Marvin!" Maureen's voice breaks open now, the control finally giving. "Marvin, I'm on your side! I've always been on your side! You can't leave me here!"
The door shuts behind them.
The fire on the south wall has reached the support beams. I twist hard against the chair, testing the give, but the zip ties bite deeper into my wrists and the legs scrape uselessly against the concrete.
The industrial lights flicker, which means the electrical line is still intact, but that there could only be minutes before that changes. The northeast fire door is thirty feet away and the storage units between me and it are already catching at their bases.
Maureen is screaming Stein's name at a door that won't open, about years, loyalty and promises made in other buildings in other rooms where the understanding was that she was protected. The screaming is real and genuine and completely useless.
I know that, and I think somewhere in the part of her that has been doing this long enough to know how it works, she knows it too.
I stop listening to her and think about the table leg my wrists are tied to.
The building shudders in the direction of the south end.
I hear a roof truss buckle and then an explosion and loud crashing as it all comes down in a long slow roll of collapse, concrete and steel and structure coming apart in the specific way of a building that has had its load-bearing integrity removed from the inside out.
The lights go and the fire keeps moving, and I plant my feet and drive the table sideways as the next collapse hits. Heat tightens across my face and the air turns thin enough that every breath starts to scrape.