Chapter 4
They sat the lot in the dark and waited for the fire to come.
Jackpot had Slick on the north side of the shop behind the dumpster, Bustout at the back fence near the tire stack, and Viper on the south corner where the gravel met the road.
Switchback was a block east in his truck with the lights off and the engine cold, watching the highway approach.
Four brothers on a two-bay shop in the industrial dark, and the only light was the sodium security lamp over the front bay throwing a sick orange circle on the concrete.
Dana was in the circle.
He'd told her to stay inside the shop. She'd looked at him like he'd suggested she set her own hair on fire, and walked out into the lot with a thirty-pound commercial fire extinguisher braced on her hip like she'd been born holding it.
"This is my shop," she'd said. "I'm not watching it burn from behind a window."
He should have argued harder. Should have put his hands on her shoulders and walked her inside and told her this wasn't her fight to stand in.
But the set of her jaw and the way she planted her boots in her own gravel — wide, solid, not moving for anyone — killed the argument before it reached his mouth.
She wasn't behind them. She was among them. And every time he looked at her standing there in the dark with the extinguisher ready and her hair tied back for a fight, the thing in his chest pulled tighter.
Mine, something in him said. Not yet. Not spoken. But the word was there, heavy as a fist, and he couldn't unhear it.
"Anything?" he said into the phone.
Switchback's voice came back low and calm. "Headlights on the highway. Three vehicles. Coming slow."
Jackpot pocketed the phone and moved to Dana. He put his hand on her arm — not gentle, not rough, just firm, his fingers wrapping around her bicep — and pulled her a step closer.
"When it starts," he said, "you stay on my left. You don't go toward the fire. You don't go toward the men. You use that extinguisher on the inventory and you let us handle the rest."
She looked at his hand on her arm. Looked up at his face.
"And if the rest comes to me?"
"It won't."
"If it does."
He held her eyes. The sodium light caught the dark of her hair and the stubborn line of her mouth and the absolute refusal to be managed that he was learning lived in every bone of her body.
"Then you swing that thing like you mean it," he said. "And you stay on my left."
She didn't pull her arm away. He felt her pulse under his fingers, steady and fast, and the heat of her skin through her shirt, and he let go only because headlights were washing across the front of the building.
* * *
They came in quiet. No engine roar, no headlights after the first sweep — the crew-cab and a panel van rolled in from the east with their lights killed, coasting on momentum. They parked on the road fifty yards from the lot and three figures got out.
Jackpot watched from the shadow of the bay wall.
Cutter was in front. He recognized the build — rangy, loose, the kind of body that moved fast when it had to.
The lighter was already in his hand, the little flame appearing and vanishing in the dark.
Behind him, two heavyset men carried plastic fuel cans.
Five-gallon jugs, two each. They moved toward the back of the lot where the storage bay sat — a single concrete-block room bolted onto the rear of the main building, full of Dana's overflow inventory: tires, filters, brake parts, a season's worth of stock she couldn't fit inside.
A warning fire. Not a leveling. Burn the back bay, destroy her inventory, make her eat the loss and the insurance nightmare, and wait for the math to break her the way the frame hadn't.
Cutter's men went to work fast. They splashed gasoline across the storage bay door and along the base of the walls, the chemical stink cutting through the sage-and-gravel smell of the lot.
Cutter hung back, watching, flicking the lighter.
The flame caught his face each time — young, sharp, scarred along the forearms where old burns had healed shiny and tight.
Jackpot let them finish pouring.
He wanted them committed. He wanted the cans empty and the fuel on the ground and no question about what they'd come to do. Evidence didn't matter — this wasn't going to court — but certainty did. When you made a move, you made it clean.
The last can hit the gravel empty, and Cutter stepped forward with the lighter held high.
"Now," Jackpot said.
Bustout came off the fence like a rockslide.
The bigger of the two fuel men didn't even see him.
One moment he was backing away from the gasoline-soaked wall, and the next Bustout's arm was around his throat and his feet were off the ground.
The second man turned toward the sound and walked straight into Viper, who materialized out of the dark on the south side and hit him across the jaw with a length of chain that sent him spinning into the tire stack.
Slick closed the north side, cutting off the path back to the vehicles. Switchback's truck fired up on the road, headlights blazing, blocking the crew-cab and the van.
Cutter froze.
For one second he stood there with the lighter flame dancing between his fingers and gasoline pooling at his feet, and Jackpot saw the exact moment the arsonist's brain caught up with his situation.
Then Cutter ran.