Chapter 60 The Outside — Ii
So I got Pike’s people moving on the paper even while the paper’s author was trying to burn it.
The shell accounts had closed but money always leaves a wake.
The shredded room downtown had a cleaning contract, and cleaning contracts have logs, and logs have signatures.
The insurance filings on every fire this summer existed in three separate places, and Holloway controlled exactly one of them.
I made the calls from the perimeter with my eyes never once leaving her lit window.
Preserve, subpoena, freeze, put a hold on the third-party copies before his lawyer got in front of another judge in the morning.
Daylight, Birdie kept calling it, all summer.
Not vengeance. Not a reckoning with a capital letter.
Just daylight, poured over the records until they couldn’t be un-seen.
“This is Grant Holloway,” he said, and I nearly didn’t believe it, and then I heard sirens under his voice, my sirens, the county’s, coming through his end of the line, which meant he was close, which meant he was somewhere on the edge of this thing watching it happen to the town he’d spent a year telling himself he was rescuing.
“I need to — is it true. Is there a — is Cody in the Alvarez building. With people in it.”
“There’s a family inside,” I said. “A woman and a twelve-year-old. And your man. And a device.”
The silence on the line ran long enough that I heard him breathe, once, and then again, wrong.
I have spent a career learning to read the exact moment a person’s story finally fails them, the precise second the thing they’ve been telling themselves every morning stops holding any weight at all.
It’s a quiet moment. It doesn’t sound like much of anything.
Over the phone it sounded like a man in an expensive car parked on the edge of a working-class block, listening to the sirens he’d paid for come home to roost.
“It was supposed to be property,” he said.
“Nobody was ever supposed to — it was just to move people along. Just the empty buildings. He wasn’t supposed to —” and he stopped himself, because even Grant Holloway could hear it now, out loud, the lie he’d been living inside for a year.
No one gets hurt. It’s just property. He could hear at last how thin it had always been, how a fire set on an occupied block was never once in the history of the world just property, and how he had known that and un-known it every single morning in order to be able to shave and go to work.
“Grant,” I said. “There’s a kid in that window. You want to tell me it was just property, you say it looking up at him. I’m forty feet from him. I’ll hold the phone up so he can hear you.”
He didn’t answer that.
“You have got exactly one decent thing left to do in the whole of this,” I said, and I kept my voice flat, floor-flat, because a man about to fall needs a floor under him the same as a scared woman does, and I’d learned that from her.
“The case you’re paying a lawyer to bury for you.
Cody’s the one holding the match tonight, but you lit the long fuse a year ago, and you know where every dollar of it went, down to the cent.
And right now the only version of the rest of your life that you can stand to live inside is the one where, when this is over tonight, you were the man who told the truth before he was forced to.
Or.” I let it sit a beat. “Or you can keep shredding, and you can spend the rest of your life being the man who was on the phone with the fire marshal while a torch he’d stopped paying tried to take a twelve-year-old boy, and who chose, in that exact minute, the paper.
Those are the two men you get to be after tonight, Grant. There’s no third one. Pick.”
Sirens on both ends of the line. His and mine. The same sirens. The town he thought he was saving.
“I’ll call my attorney,” Grant Holloway said, and my heart went straight down through the pavement, and then he finished it, and it came back up.
“And tell him to stop. Stop everything. And then I’ll come to Pike.
All of it. The payments to Rourke, the accounts, the filings, everything, in a box.
Tell her — tell her I’m coming in on my own.
” A long breath. “Is the boy going to be all right? Please. Is the boy going to be all right.”
I looked up at the window, where a shape I loved had come to stand beside the boy’s, moving slow and easy and unhurried, doing something with her hands that I couldn’t see and, for once in my life, didn’t need to.
“She’s up there,” I said. “So yeah, Grant. He’s going to be all right.”