Chapter 16
Nick jumpedto his feet and spun around to see smoke pouring from an object on the floor. He couldn’t tell what it was, but he guessed it wasn’t an explosive, because it would have already detonated. Before he could question that logic, he dashed toward it. Operating on pure instinct, he ripped off his jacket and dropped it over the smoke bomb.
“Get back,” he shouted. “Everyone, get back!”
The dinner guests fled from their seats, toppling chairs and upending tables as they rushed to escape.
Nick stomped on his jacket as smoke swirled from every opening it could find—a cuff, the lapel, a bit of the hem. It was like playing Whac-A-Mole with a package of cigarettes. At least the smoke wasn’t increasing.
At least the mystery object wasn’t blowing up.
Suddenly a torrent of water came pouring down over the mess. He looked up to see Charlie holding a plastic pitcher of ice water, calmly emptying it onto his jacket and whatever was underneath.
“I said to get back!”
“I’m the hostess,” she pointed out. “It’s my responsibility.”
He looked down at his sodden leather jacket. The water had worked. The only smoke rising from the pile were tendrils of light gray, more steam than smoke.
He let out a breath of relief. “In that case, Fire Peak Lodge owes me a jacket.”
“The closest dry cleaners is in Blackbear, but I’ll see what we can do.”
In her voice, he heard a kind of forced calm, the kind that hid a racing pulse, the same kind he was drawing on. Keep cool. Work the problem.
She put a hand on his arm. “Are you okay?”
His heart was still racing from the adrenaline rush of running toward an unknown smoking object. He nodded, then looked around to see that the entire restaurant was empty. “Where’s Hailey?”
“I sent her out with the others. The bartender is keeping everyone corralled in the foyer.”
“Good thinking.” He ran a hand over the back of his neck and frowned down at his charred jacket.
“I’m not sure I can say the same for you. You ran toward that thing. What are you, some kind of kamikaze firefighter?”
He met her gaze and saw that she was genuinely worried for him. That hostile wariness he’d seen in her eyes ever since he’d cornered her in the storage shed was gone. The warmth of that shift lit a little spark inside his heart. “My father was a firefighter. Maybe it runs in the genes.”
“It could have been a bomb.”
“Bombs don’t generally smoke.” He crouched down and peered at the steamy mess. “Got a stick or something? It’s still too hot to touch.”
Charlie disappeared for a moment, then returned with a long-handled metal spatula. “From the grill. Big Eddie will kill me if I don’t bring it back.”
He took it and gingerly lifted the sleeve of his jacket, which lay crumpled across the mystery object. The stench of ash and burnt leather nearly made him gag. With a flick of the spatula, he tossed aside the jacket to expose a metal cylinder. The smoke had been pouring from slits in its side.
“What the hell?” he murmured.
Charlie crouched next to him. “Are you sure that thing isn’t going to blow up?”
“I don’t think so, no. Look.” He pointed to words etched onto a disc of metal that functioned as a lid. “It says, ‘strike’ and then the number one.”
“Strike one? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, but you should probably bump up your security. ‘Strike one’ implies that there will be a strike two.”
“Security?” She scoffed. “Our security is that we’re halfway up a mountain at the end of a forty-five minute drive.”
“No security cameras? No guards?”
She shook her head. “This is the wilderness. People are more worried about bears than smoke bombs.”
“I’m pretty sure a bear didn’t throw this. You should call the police.”
“Like I said, this is the wilderness. There’s no police out here. We can notify the state troopers, but they hardly ever come out here. The closest thing we have to police is…well, probably you, showing up looking sort of like a cop.”
He snorted. “If I’m the closest thing, we’re in trouble.”
“Exactly. People police themselves out here. If someone steps out of line, the community figures out a way to handle it.”
That sounded like vigilante justice to him. “Does it work?”
She shrugged and rolled the cylinder over to expose its charred underside. “Mostly everyone just tries to survive the winter. I’ve heard about a few feuds that turned violent. Flying fists at The Fang, that kind of thing. There have been a few murders. Daniel O’Connor is the most recent one. I haven’t heard about anything like this before.”
“What about the Chilkoot mess from this spring?”
She glanced at him curiously. “You think it might be related?”
“I have no idea. I’m not an actual police officer, you know.” Nonetheless, he used his phone to take a picture of the object.
“You could have mentioned that after you chased me into town.”
She had a point. “How long are you going to hold that against me?”
“As long as it suits me. So what are you going to do about this thing?”
“I’m on vacation,” he said firmly, sitting back on his haunches. “I did my part, sacrificed my jacket, now it’s someone else’s problem. Who’s the owner here?”
“April Whitfield. I already called her, she should be here soon.” Charlie rose to her feet and brushed ash off her hands. “Sorry about your jacket. You should go find Hailey, she’s probably worried about you.”
He climbed to his feet. “Sorry I can’t be more help.”
“What on earth?” A woman’s voice made them both turn around. From her deep, frontier-rough voice, he would have expected someone about six feet tall, maybe wearing cowboy chaps and aiming a six-shooter. Instead, she was tiny but dynamic, a sixty-ish woman with short gray hair and perfect posture. He’d seen her before, he realized, that first night at The Fang. “What is that thing?”
“Someone threw a smoke bomb through a window,” said Charlie, putting a sympathetic hand on April’s arm.
The woman shook it off. “Foolishness.” She turned to Nick. “Who are you?”
“Random dinner guest.”
“He threw his jacket on the smoke bomb,” Charlie explained. “If it was meant to set a fire, he stopped that.”
“You’ll be compensated for it,” April said briskly. “Your next dinner here is on the house. Charlie, see to it. Clear out now, I’ll get someone to clean up this mess.”
“Don’t throw it away,” Charlie said. “It’s evidence.”
April shot her a look, then kicked the whole mess, jacket and smoke bomb, toward a pile of shattered glass.
“Go on. Check on our guests, Charlie.”
As they made their way toward the foyer, he exchanged a glance with Charlie, and saw that she too found April’s reaction to be odd.
“Was that weird?” she whispered under her breath. “That seemed weird.”
“Weirder than a smoke bomb? Or the hostess crawling across smushed olives?”
“It’s all weird.” She paused as they reached the door to the foyer. “Then again, this is Firelight Ridge. Weird is relative.”
He started to push through the door, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Wait.”
He paused. They both glanced back at April, who was on her knees picking up glass from the floor.
“Awfully quick to clean up the scene of the crime, don’t you think?” she whispered. “Wouldn’t she at least want to document it for insurance?”
He didn’t disagree.
“Come on.” She beckoned him to follow her out the door and into a small coatroom off the foyer. Before he stepped into it, he scanned the room for Hailey, and found her happily chatting with a family who’d been seated near them.
“What’s up?” he asked Charlie as he joined her in the coatroom.
“You didn’t plant a listening device here at the lodge, did you?”
In the confined space of the coatroom, her scent—something light and citrusy—went right to his head. It made him grumpy. “When the hell would I do that? We just got here and I’ve been a little busy since then.”
“I didn’t think so, I just needed to confirm. What about a CCTV camera mounted across the street from Lila’s hardware store? Did you install that when you were looking for me?”
“Absolutely not. I tried to call you back at The Fang that day when I left, but I couldn’t get a message through. I put cameras at the airstrip and the road out of town, that’s it. Someone else put that one up.”
“That’s creepy. It was one thing when I thought it was you. That’s a little close to home, someone spying on Lila.” She gave a shiver. “I don’t like that one bit.”
He didn’t like it either. “Want me to take it down?”
“I already did that. I’m just wondering…” She lowered her voice even further. “I wonder if it’s connected to the listening device.”
“Hard to say. Two different locations. Does Lila ever come up here?”
“Just for a drink now and then.”
“Maybe it’s not about Lila. It could be the hardware store itself, or something in the vicinity.”
She nodded, a worried line appearing between her eyebrows. “Lila said a raccoon broke into her place. But she also says she’s not worried because of Bear.”
“That’s fair.” He’d seen enough of Bear to know that no one messed with him.
“Here’s the other thing, Nick.”
He liked it when she called him Nick—just like the not-so-old days back in Indiana when they’d been hanging out and flirting.
“This is the second strange thing to happen up here. First the listening device, then the smoke bomb. And both times, April destroyed the evidence.”
“Well, it’s her lodge. She doesn’t have to investigate if she doesn’t want to.”
“But she had you right there. She could have asked you to look into it.”
“I told you, I’m on vacation?—”
“Not the point,” she interrupted with a wave of her hand. “You’re clearly a competent quick-thinking individual. Why not at least ask you?”
He’d take that compliment. “You think she’s hiding something?”
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m curious. Curiosity is my fatal flaw,” she added. “It gets me into all kinds of trouble. Aren’t you a little curious too?”
“Are you saying you want me to investigate?”
“No, I’m saying you already want to investigate.”
Damnit. She was right. Whoever had thrown that smoke bomb had put his daughter at risk. That was unforgivable.
“But you can’t really do it without me,” Charlie added. “I’m the one on the inside. I have access. In fact, I probably don’t even need you, but the way you sacrificed your jacket was kind of hot. So here we are.” She gave him the kind of smile that could entice anyone to do anything.
“I thought you said we couldn’t trust each other? Now you want to work together?”
“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, isn’t that what they say?”
He sighed. Would she ever believe that he wasn’t her enemy? Maybe conducting a joint investigation would help with that.
“Okay. I’m in.”
She clapped her hands together in delight. “Where do we start?”
“I’ll take the smoke bomb angle. Why don’t you start with April. It seems clear that she might know something more than she’s saying.”
“Agreed.”
“See what you can find out about her.”
Charlie put her hands on her hips. “You want me to spy on my boss?”
“Only if you don’t get caught.”
“I never get caught.”
He lifted his eyebrows. Suddenly they seemed very close together. It was so intimate, being surrounded by coats and jackets, with barely room to turn around. He leaned even closer, bracing a hand against the wall behind her, watching her pupils dilate in response. “Is that so?”
Surprising him, she ducked under his arm and slipped out of the coatroom. “Catch you later, Perini.” And she disappeared into the crowd of guests milling in the foyer.
He drew in a long breath. It was going to take him a few moments to wrestle his sudden erection down to a manageable size. Bested by Charlie Santa Lucia once again…where it counted, this time.