CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX #2
Another shrug, smaller this time. “He’s my employer.”
“That’s all?”
“What else would it be? I deeply respect him, if you want to know the truth.”
Connor looked down as if consulting notes, though he already knew where he was going. Better to let a man think the paper mattered more than his face.
“Oh, you respect him? Does that mean he saved your soul?”
Nolan let out a short laugh. “From what?”
“What about Ohio?” he asked. “That ring a bell?”
Pruitt went still.
Not frozen. His eyes moved around nervously.
Connor stared at him. “The fire in your juvenile record.”
“That’s… That’s supposed to be sealed to let me establish myself as an adult… There was a fire,” he said. “Long time ago.”
Pruitt’s eyes dropped to the carpet.
“That was when you were young,” Connor continued. “Maybe stupid. Maybe angry. Maybe neither. But it’s there. Let’s say you lit a fire somewhere you shouldn’t have. I wonder what else you’re capable of?”
“It has nothing to do with this!” Finally, a reaction.
First defensive answer. Quick enough to be honest maybe. Or rehearsed from years of private shame.
“I never said it does.”
“Well, it doesn’t.”
Connor straightened a little and looked around. He knew he was tall. Sometimes that was enough to add a little pressure on a suspect. He took one step closer, not enough to crowd Nolan, enough to make him feel helpless.
“What happened with the fire?”
“Nothing.”
“Doesn’t Elias tell you to never lie?”
Pruitt’s jaw worked once. “It was a house.”
“Whose house?”
Silence.
Connor waited.
At length Pruitt said, “Nobody died.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“So was the Civil War. People still talk about it.”
That earned him the faintest flare of irritation from the other man, which was useful. Irritated people got sloppier than frightened ones.
“I was a kid,” Pruitt said. “Trouble happened. It got handled. What the hell does this have to do with anything?”
“What kind of trouble?”
Pruitt looked up at last. Fear lived in his face now, yes, but so did something else Connor couldn’t yet name. Not guilt exactly. Something bruised and hidden and old.
“It has nothing to do with this!” he repeated.
“Maybe not.” Connor closed the notebook without writing anything more.
“But if you think of it, we’re homing in on someone attached to the revival as the killer.
Previous for burning down a building might be seen as early distrustful behavior that could later escalate into violence.
You understand why I’m interested in that, don’t you? ”
Pruitt stood from the bed because sitting seemed unbearable now. He took two steps toward the keyboard, stopped, and put both hands on the stand as if steadying it.
“I play music,” he said. “That’s what I do. I keep to myself. I had nothing to do with those women. I’m not good at talking to people. Never have been.”
“Preacher Croft does enough of that for both of you, I guess?”
A bitter little smile touched Pruitt’s mouth and disappeared. “I suppose so.”
Connor followed the thread. “You comfortable behind an instrument?”
“Yes.”
“More than with people?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Pruitt’s fingers pressed harder against the keyboard stand.
“Because instruments don’t ask what happened to you.”
That was the first fully honest sentence he had spoken.
The phone in Connor’s pocket buzzed again.
Damn, forgot to call Selena back. But he ignored it. He felt he was onto something. In many ways, he was enjoying the chase.
The room had changed now. Not by much. A degree here, a degree there. Enough for Connor to trust the old instincts that had kept him alive through traffic stops, domestic disputes, and one meth cook in a barn who had tried to hug him while reaching for a knife.
“I still come back to that fire…”
Pruitt’s throat moved as he swallowed. “Leave… leave me alone.”
“Sounds like something burned. Are you sure no one was there?”
Pruitt’s hands had begun moving again, not with music now but with tremor. His whole body seemed built for retreat, for shrinking from conflict, for folding inward until louder men filled the space around him and no one thought to ask what the quiet one might be carrying.
When he finally spoke, the words came low.
“It was an accident.”
Connor believed, at least, that Pruitt believed that.
“Tell me about it.”
Pruitt shook his head. “No.”
“Because you can’t or because you know I’ll see that it points to something worse?”
“It points nowhere.”
Connor held his gaze. “Then prove it. Tell me about it.”
For a second Connor thought the man might bolt.
“This has nothing,” he said again, quieter now, “to do with those women.”
Connor did not answer right away.
Through the thin motel wall came the thud of a door closing in another room. A truck started outside. The world kept moving. Inside Room 12, something had begun to come loose, but not enough yet. Not nearly enough.
Connor let one more moment pass, then reached for the phone in his pocket.
Selena’s missed calls glowed on the screen like a warning.
He looked back at Nolan Pruitt, at the trembling hands and the hunted eyes and the name that had finally surfaced in the room like something dragged up from the bottom of dark water.
Then the radio on his shoulder crackled.
“Connor, come in. It’s Pruitt… Do not go in alone…”
Selena.
The sound was enough.
Nolan moved.
One second, he was slumped by the keyboard looking half-broken.
The next he launched at Connor so suddenly that Connor barely had time to shift.
A shoulder drove into his middle and slammed him backward into the wall beside the door.
Pain flashed white along his spine. The back of his head clipped plaster hard enough to scatter his thoughts.
Connor got one hand to Nolan’s collar and the other toward his gun.
Too late.
Nolan slammed his forearm across Connor’s throat and drove him down.
They hit the carpet in a tangle of limbs and grunting breath.
Connor’s shoulder struck first. Fire shot through it.
Nolan came down on top of him all sharp elbows and desperate force, not strong in the usual way but frantic enough to make up for it.
Connor grabbed his gun, and Nolan smacked it from his grip, the gun sliding along the floor.
Connor shoved at him and nearly rolled him off.
Nearly.
Nolan’s fist connected once with the side of Connor’s face. Not clean, but enough. The room jerked sideways for a beat. Connor tasted blood. Nolan stood snarling now, no softness left in him at all. The mask had slipped.
The radio crackled again.
“Connor? Are you there?”
Selena’s voice, sharper this time.
Connor reached for it.
Nolan saw the movement and lashed out with one kicking foot. The radio tore free from Connor’s shoulder mic and skidded across the room, bouncing off the dresser leg before sliding under the far bed.
“Connor!”
The voice came thin and tinny from the floor.
Nolan scrambled up first.
Connor pushed onto one elbow, vision blurring at the edges, and saw the other man’s face fully for the first time without the meekness, without the musician’s nerves, without any of the shrinking little habits he used to disappear behind.
What looked back at him was pure panic and something uglier and more deadly beneath it.