Chapter Thirteen
The call came at noon on a Thursday.
Hollow's voice on Foxfire's phone, flat as a headstone: "Harmon's is burning."
Patty heard the words from across the compound kitchen. Heard them the way you hear a gunshot—the sound arriving before the understanding, the brain taking an extra second to catch up to what the body already knows.
Foxfire was moving before Hollow finished the sentence. Patty was moving before Foxfire.
She was on his bike without being asked. Without arguing, without grabbing anything, without thinking about anything except the twelve-seat diner on the Vicksburg highway that held twenty-two years of her mother's life in its cinder-block walls.
The ride took eleven minutes. She counted every one.
She smelled it before she saw it. The smoke rolling across the highway in a black column that bent the Delta sky, carrying the smell of burning grease and melting vinyl and something sweeter underneath that she recognized as pecan pie because the sugar caramelized at a different temperature than everything else and her nose knew the difference.
Foxfire pulled into the lot and she was off the bike before it stopped rolling.
Harmon's was an inferno.
The kitchen wall had caved. Flames poured through the hole where the window used to be—the window that had been bricked, then replaced, then smashed by a stool, then replaced again—and the heat pushed her back three steps before she planted her feet and refused to move further.
The counter.
She could see it through the flames. The counter where her mother had stood for twenty-two years.
The counter where Earl sat every morning.
The counter where Foxfire had been drinking coffee for over a year.
It was burning from the inside, the wood blackening and curling, and the pie case beside it was already gone—melted glass and scorched metal and the ghost of every pecan pie she'd ever baked rising into the sky with the smoke.
"Eileen."
The name came out of her before she could stop it. Not a scream. Not a curse. Just her mother's name, spoken to a building that was dying, because the woman who'd built it couldn't remember it existed and the woman who'd kept it alive was standing in a parking lot watching it burn.
"Eileen. Mama."
Foxfire's arms came around her from behind. She didn't feel them. Didn't feel anything except the heat on her face and the smell of her mother's kitchen turning to ash.
"LAST brEAKFAST" was spray-painted across the parking lot in letters three feet tall. Red paint, still wet, dripping in the heat like the asphalt itself was bleeding.
Owen Pratt.
She knew it was Pratt because the message was loud and public and ugly, because that's what the outline of Garza's operation said about him—the message-runner who made problems visible, who took pride in noise because noise was the only thing that had ever earned him a seat at the table.
He'd done this in broad daylight.
The fire trucks arrived twenty minutes later—volunteer crew from the nearest station, men who moved with the slow resignation of a department that knew the building was already gone. They sprayed water on the shell and kept the flames from jumping to the scrub brush along the highway.
Patty stood in the parking lot the entire time.
Foxfire stood behind her. His hands on her shoulders, his body a wall at her back, the restless energy locked down into something harder and colder than she'd ever felt from him. He wasn't vibrating. He was still. The particular stillness of a man calculating exactly how someone was going to die.
"I'm going to kill him." His voice was barely audible over the fire. "I'm going to find Owen Pratt and I'm going to kill him with my hands."
"Not yet."
"Patty—"
"Not. Yet." She didn't turn around. Couldn't take her eyes off the building. "I need to see it. I need to see all of it."
He stayed behind her. Stayed still. Let her watch.
The roof collapsed at one-thirty. The sound was like something breaking that could never be fixed—a groan of wood and metal and twenty-two years of history giving way to gravity and heat.
The cast-iron skillet was on the wall at the compound.
She'd taken it with her when they'd fled.
But everything else—the photographs, the recipes taped inside the cabinet doors, the coffee mug with the chip in the handle that her mother had used every morning—was inside that sound.
Gone.
When the fire burned itself down to embers and black skeleton walls, Patty finally moved.
She walked into the parking lot. Past the spray paint. Past the melted remains of the sign her mother had hand-lettered thirty years ago. She walked until she was standing at the edge of what used to be the front door, close enough to feel the heat still radiating from the rubble.
The counter was ash. The pie case was a twisted frame. The grill where she'd cooked ten thousand breakfasts was a warped slab of black metal.
But the floor was still there. The concrete slab her mother had poured when the building went up. Cracked, scorched, but solid.
The foundation held.
She turned back to Foxfire. He was watching her from the lot, his jaw clenched so tight she could see the muscles from thirty feet away, his hands curled into fists at his sides.
"The foundation held," she said.
"Patty—"
"The foundation held." Louder this time. Harder. "The walls are gone. The kitchen's gone. But the slab is solid. You can build on a solid slab."
His expression shifted. The cold fury cracked, and underneath it she saw something that looked almost like awe.
"You're already thinking about rebuilding."
"I'm thinking about what my mother would say if I stood in this parking lot and cried instead of making a plan." She walked back to him, her boots crunching on broken glass and wet ash. "She'd say the eggs don't cook themselves, Patricia Ann. Get behind a counter and get to work."
"There's no counter."
"Then I'll build one." She stopped in front of him. Met his eyes. "After we kill the man who burned this one."
The ride back to the compound was silent.
Patty held on to Foxfire's waist and pressed her face against his back and didn't cry.
Not because she wasn't broken—she was broken the way a bone breaks, clean and sharp and deep—but because crying didn't rebuild kitchens.
Crying didn't catch arsonists. Crying didn't pay her mother's nursing home bill next month without a diner to generate revenue.
She'd cry later. Alone, probably, in the kitchen she'd claimed at the compound, where nobody would see a Harmon woman come apart.
Right now she needed to work.
They hit the compound at three. By three-fifteen, word had spread. Pratt hadn't stopped at the diner.
"Two more hits." Crossroad laid it out in the common room, brothers gathered, the air thick with the kind of anger that preceded violence.
"Highway gas station on the southern stretch—windows smashed, pumps tagged with Garza's mark.
And the bait shop past the Greenville turnoff—door kicked in, inventory trashed, same spray paint. "
"He's making a statement." Cottonmouth's voice was low. Heavy. "Three businesses in one day, all in daylight, all on our highway."
"He's telling the corridor we can't protect it.
" Foxfire was pacing again, but this wasn't the aimless restless energy.
This was a predator walking the fence line.
"Garza lost his escort chief and his warehouse man.
Pratt's the only operator he has left, so he's using him for maximum noise.
Daylight hits, public destruction, spray paint so everybody on the highway knows. "
"It's working." Outlaw said it quiet, the way he said everything. "Three business owners called this afternoon. They want to know if the Destroyers are done or if they should start paying Garza directly."
The silence that followed was the kind that preceded war.
"Nobody pays Garza." Cottonmouth stood. "This highway has been ours since before any of us wore a patch. One punk with a spray can doesn't change that."
"Pratt's not just a punk." Patty heard her own voice before she'd decided to use it. Every head in the room turned. "He's a pattern."
Foxfire stopped pacing.
"He hit my diner at noon," she said. "The gas station—what time?"
"Two-thirty," Crossroad said.
"And the bait shop?"
"Four."
"That's a two-hour gap between each hit.
Noon, two-thirty, four." She stepped forward, feeling every eye on her and not caring because she'd been managing men across a counter for thirty years and a common room full of bikers wasn't any different.
"He's working south to north along the highway.
My diner's the furthest south. Gas station's in the middle.
Bait shop's north of the Greenville turnoff. "
"He's running a route," Foxfire said. His voice had changed—sharper now, the predator catching a scent.
"He's running my route." Patty looked at him.
"I've been watching that highway since I was tall enough to see over the counter.
The road from Harmon's to the Greenville turnoff is ninety minutes if you stop for gas.
He's adding extra time for the hits—setup, execution, spray paint. That's your two-hour gap."
"So he's predictable."
"He's proud." She felt the anger in her chest—not the wild grief from the parking lot but something harder, something with edges.
"He wants people to see. He hit my diner at noon because noon is when the highway has the most traffic.
He wants witnesses. He wants the whole corridor to watch him work. "
"A man who wants witnesses operates in daylight," Foxfire said.
The grin was back—not the warm one, not the reckless one.
The cold one. The one that came before the worst part.
"Which means he's visible. And a man who runs a route on a schedule is a man I can find faster than he can finish his next hit. "
"He'll hit again tonight," Patty said. "Or tomorrow. He's not done—three hits isn't enough for a man who wants to prove he owns the highway. He'll keep going until someone stops him or until there's nothing left to burn."
Cottonmouth looked at Foxfire. Something passed between president and brother—permission, authority, the particular trust of a man who'd given a weapon its target.
"Find him," Cottonmouth said. "Before he lights another match."
"I'll find him tonight." Foxfire's eyes were on Patty. "But I need her maps first. She knows every business on that highway, every stretch where Pratt could hit next. She's been watching that road longer than any of us."
"Then get her maps." The president's voice carried the weight of law. "And when you find Pratt, make it loud. He wants the highway to see his work—I want the highway to see ours."
The brothers dispersed. War footing. The compound shifting into the particular rhythm of men preparing for violence—weapons checked, routes confirmed, the conversations going quiet and practical.
Patty found the kitchen.
She grabbed a notepad from the counter she'd scrubbed clean a week ago and started drawing.
Not a map, exactly—a diner woman's version of one.
Every business on the Vicksburg highway from her stretch north to the Greenville turnoff.
The gas stations, the bait shops, the farm stands, the two bars and the auto repair place where the owner still owed her for six months of catfish plates.
She marked the three targets Pratt had already hit. Drew his route—south to north, two-hour gaps, daylight hours.
Then she marked the businesses he hadn't hit yet.
Foxfire appeared in the doorway. Watched her work.
"You're mapping his next target."
"I'm mapping his next three targets." She tapped the notepad.
"If he keeps running south to north, the next hit is the auto shop past the mile-forty marker.
After that, the bar at the crossroads. After that—" She drew a circle.
"The fuel depot where the highway meets the county road.
That's the biggest target on the stretch.
If he wants maximum noise, that's where he ends. "
"When?"
"Tomorrow. If he's running the same schedule—daylight, two-hour gaps, south to north." She looked up from the notepad. "He's not random. He's not smart. He's a man running a route because running routes is the only skill that got him into Garza's crew."
Foxfire crossed the kitchen. Took the notepad from her hands. Studied it with the quick, sharp focus of a man who read situations the way she read breakfast orders.
"The auto shop. Mile-forty marker." He tapped the spot she'd circled. "That's where I'll be waiting."
"That's where we'll be waiting. I know that stretch of highway better than—"
"No." His hand closed around her wrist. Not hard. Not gentle either. The grip of a man who was done negotiating. "You're staying at the compound."
"My highway."
"My fight."
"He burned my mother's diner."
"And I'm going to kill him for it." His eyes held hers. Dark. Certain. The cold grin replaced by something fiercer. "You gave me the map. You gave me the pattern. Now let me do what I do."
She wanted to argue. Every part of her wanted to argue—the stubborn Harmon backbone, the fury over the diner, the need to be there when the man who'd destroyed her mother's legacy paid for it.
But she looked at his face. At the knife scars and the bruised jaw and the eyes that said he would walk through fire for her and had already walked through worse.
"Bring me proof," she said. "When it's done. I want to know he's gone."
His grip on her wrist tightened. Then loosened. Then his thumb traced a circle on her pulse point—one slow, deliberate circle that made her breath hitch.
"I'll bring you more than proof." The grin came back. Cold and sharp and promising. "I'll bring you his whole operation. Piece by piece. Until there's nobody left to light a match."
She handed him the notepad with the map she'd drawn from thirty years of watching a highway through a diner window.
The last thing her mother's kitchen had given her before it burned.