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ABOVE THE CRACKLING hiss of the fire, an engine cranked over. The stifling heated air hurt Taka’s lungs and cooked the heat into his skin and bones. He coughed, fighting the heaviness of his own body as his chest expanded against the dirt under him. Grass roasted under weeks of unrelenting sun pressed against his cheek. He knew this. He lifted his head.
Through watering eyes he watched the flaming suicide flail in the gas station parking lot until the woman caught Taka’s attention, tugging on the sliding door of the mini-van. “Hey,” the stranger lying in the ditch beside him said. Taka glanced over only to see his brother’s familiar features. He lay on his back, his face turned towards Taka, his eyes closed. Wide, wet bandages exposed weeping burns from the fire that swept across the aircraft carrier’s deck. Angry raw flesh covered his chest and belly, his groin, his thighs, circled his arms. Someone leaned over Taka, pressing hard into his shoulder. It hurt.
He tore his gaze from his burnt brother. Blood dripped off Dewey’s blond bangs onto Taka’s face and ran down his neck, leaving a cool trail on his skin. He watched Dewey’s lips move. The fire roared inside his head. He shook it. Nightmare. Had to wake up.
“Get up,” Dewey shouted right into his ear. He yanked on Taka’s arm and Taka got a boot braced on the door frame and rolled onto his knees and forehead, then fought his way up to his feet.
He stumbled out over the door of his makeshift cell through the black, cinder-filled smoke. Snaking up under his feet, an electric cord sizzled and popped. Coughing, Dewey lumbered into him and fell.
“Dewey,” Taka said, his voice muffled and strange, and then choked. Nose streaming, he coughed and tried to blink the smoke out of his eyes. Found the hard floor under his knees. He leaned over Dewey to yell in his face. “Fire! Get the fuck up!” Dewey lurched upward, smacking Taka in the face with his shoulder as he listed sideways. “Get up,” Taka screamed, his jaw stretching tight.
Dewey rolled onto his hands and knees. An explosion in the flames across the room. Sparks hit Taka’s back like a thousand needles sinking home. He jerked upright. The cuffs tore into his damaged wrists, the cotton padding his senses ripped away.
Dewey. Cabin. Fire.
Red embers sunk into the back of Dewey’s jacket, the exposed skin of his neck.
Kitchen. Gas.
“Dewey,” Taka screamed.
Head hanging, Dewey lifted a hand and found Taka’s shoulder. Levering himself up, he struggled to his feet. A racking cough closed his fists. His nails dug through Taka’s shirt into his skin as Dewey whined deep in his throat with the effort to quit. Sweat and blood ran down his face and dripped onto the floor. Reaching down, he wrapped both his hands around one of Taka’s biceps, bracing himself against Taka’s weight to help Taka stand again.
The cabin walls were fully engulfed in flames, but most of the flammables and sparse furniture hadn’t caught yet. Taka heard the echo of an Army instructor’s voice barking, flashover, flashover, flashover. He plowed through the room, dragging Dewey along as he clung to Taka’s arm. Four steps from the snapping, ash blown night just visible through the flames, they stumbled over someone’s legs.
Taka caught them both before they fell again. Cody lay face down, a big hole torn through his back. A mighty cough climbed Taka’s throat. He made himself move. One step, and then another, until they ducked out through the fiery front doorway.
Every bit of fresh air trickling down into his lungs made Taka cough harder. Dewey beat at his shoulders and back as Taka tried to sink onto the flattened grass and rutted dirt where Trevor lay on his side, his eyes open.
Growling, Dewey kept him on his feet for several more yards towards the tree line before he finally let Taka go to his knees. Dewey leaned over, coughing and wheezing, until he gave up and wilted onto the ground. The fire talked, scolding and roaring, reaching into the cold, dark sky as it greedily devoured the dry hardwood of the cabin. The slight breeze drew the swirling smoke above their heads and over the tops of the trees.
Taka wondered if the flames would be visible from whatever road lay out front. To the back, there was only the cloaked landscape of a creek lying hard against mountainside. Snuffling, he shrugged his shoulders up and wiped his streaming eyes and wet face on each in turn.
Dewey patted at his pockets. “No cell,” he coughed. “My fucking head is killing me.”
“Trevor?”
Dewey careened up and forward to check. He came back empty handed and stood swaying.
“Sit down,” Taka ground out between coughs.
Dewey did. They watched the fire burn. It ran off into the dew-soaked grass in one direction, then petered out. As long as the wind didn’t shift too much or pick up, maybe the thing would just gut out on its own after the small cabin burned.
******
ANDREA WATCHED THE shadows on her ceiling for a while. Finally she rolled over to check the time. Four minutes after three. Too early for Billie Mae. She got up. Concentrating on the cold press of the hardwood on her soles, she walked to the window and looked out towards Susan Pepper’s yard. Lights were on in the house. They reflected off a rippling surface peeking out from between the crepe myrtles and butterfly bushes and daylilies Billie Mae had stood in just beyond the four-board fence. The possible koi pond shown on the Goggle Earth map pinned to her corkboard at work. “What’s that reflection?” Taka said again in her head.
Andrea’s nose filled with the must of that first time they opened the ruined box of Billie Mae’s case files. They’d been trading explosive sneezes and then she’d picked up Susan Pepper’s statement and Taka said, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore. She thought about the pepper shaker standing alone on the table after Taka disappeared. She thought about the fact that Taka’s flash drive contained more notes on attempts to collect Susan Pepper’s background than anyone except Dr. Huntley.
Two. In the small amount of time she’d put in so far, Andrea had already found two unsolved child murders near addresses where Susan Pepper once lived. Both were strangulations. Both occurred during the time periods when Susan lived nearby. There was no evidence Susan was the pharmaceutical drug rep she claimed to be. How those two facts fit together, Andrea couldn’t fathom, but she knew both to be true. How delusional was she to accuse a man of kidnap while suspecting him of murder and then to turn around and accuse his sister of the same?
The koi pond stole her attention again. She thought about the sound of running water. Shallow ponds like that lost water to evaporation. Small pre-formed ponds like that were filled using hoses. She loved to play in the hose as a kid. Stomping through the puddles it formed in the grass. Holding a hand over the end to spray water high into the air to make rainbows. Cold droplets on hot skin. Captive fish. She could see her little girl hands in the cool rippling water, the flash of white and gold darting away from her touch. A joyful hound dog leaping in past her, sending glittering water into the warm sky.
Lost in thought, Andrea pulled her robe on and shuffled down the stairs to check her internet fishing lines.
******
TAKA AND DEWEY MOVED further back from the intense heat after something inside burst spectacularly and sent the flames shooting higher into the black sky. Taka worried about the scattered trees nearest the cabin catching fire, but they had only charred, the flames dying within minutes every time one caught. The overhead electrical line burned through and fell, throwing off fitful sparks every few moments.
A car rolling down the gravel drive broke Taka from his resigned zone-out. Dewey had tried unsuccessfully to break the cuffs. Taka’s wrists were too abraded and Dewey’s head hurt too bad to let him get the torque he needed to snap the weld. Blood kept running down into Dewey’s eyes, annoying him.
“Hey, hard head,” Taka said, kicking at Dewey’s ankle. “Someone’s coming. “
Verny had taken Dewey and Trevor’s guns with him, along with their cell phones. He’d shot the tires and windows out of the BMW Dewey said he’d borrowed. The fire was no longer raging, but it hadn’t laid down yet, either. There was nowhere to hide.
Dewey swiveled his head towards the noise and then squinted back at Taka before breaking the tense silence between them. “My family is my business, Taka. You owe me that.”
“I don’t owe you anything, Dewey,” Taka bit back.
“I know I hurt you, asshole, but if you ever felt anything for me, let it go. You at least owe me that for Zach.”
A forest service truck nosed into the clearing, blinding them in its high beams as it turned in their direction. The headlights dimmed and then died, leaving only the running lights, flashing red lights, and top spotlights on.
The driver eased out into the flickering light, the shadows crazy between the truck and the flames, a hand on the bulge of a gun. “Y’all okay?” a woman asked. “Can you stand for me?”
“No,” Taka called back to her. “I’m Detective William Taka of Charleston PD. This is Dewey Sanderson, of Charleston. Guy near the house is dead.”
“Can you raise your hands?”
A male voice from inside the truck threaded inaudibly between her words.
Taka nodded at Dewey and Dewey duly lifted his hands. “I can’t, ma’am,” Taka said.
“Are you injured?”
“Handcuffed. He’s been shot in the head.”
The woman conferred with her partner as he continued talking to what Taka could only hope was dispatch. She reached in and popped the headlights back on. Dewey growled, turning his head away and covered his face with his hands.
“Okay,” she said. “Ambulance is on its way.”
Her partner, white, rangy, and bearded, got out and came around the front of the hood, carrying a small tackle box. She walked forward and covered him as he approached them in the bright light. He glanced at Taka and then crouched near Dewey. “I’m Bryan,” he said, opening the box. “My partner there is Mary.”
After snapping on gloves, he asked Dewey to lower his hands and evaluated his pupils with a penlight. Liberating a stack of gauze from its paper wrapping, he swiped at the blood on Dewey’s face, dropping the used gauze on the ground as he went until he found an entry wound. He applied pressure with one hand, his fingers spread over the top of Dewey’s head while he used the other to search for the protrusion of flesh that marked the bullet’s exit. “You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Sanderson. Can you hold this?” Dewey pressed his fingers against the gauze while Bryan prepared a compression bandage and then carefully wrapped it around Dewey’s head to cover both wounds.
In the far distance, air raid sirens wailed. It had been years since Taka had heard one. All across West Virginia, fire houses were staffed by volunteers and the air raid sirens called them in as needed. In many counties they were still more reliable than cell service.
“Detective?” Bryan said, turning to him. “Are you injured?”
“No. Just pissed.”
Bryan laughed. “How’d the fire start?”
“My kidnapper splashed some gasoline on the place and threw lit matchbooks until it started burning.”
“Good one. Kidnapper?”
“Yes.”
“But you aren’t injured?”
“My wrists are kinda torn up.”
“What about your lungs? Breathe a lot of that smoke?”
Taka resisted the tickle in his throat just thinking about taking a deeper breath caused and said, “Better now.”
“Your head?”
“It’s better now.”
“What was wrong with it before?”
“They drugged me with something, but I don’t know what.”
“Injectable?”
“Yeah.”
All the while, Bryan had been checking Dewey’s lungs, his pulse, his blood pressure. Now he scooted over and shifted his ministrations to Taka. After listening to Taka’s chest, he pulled him forward a bit and shone his penlight down his back to look at his wrists. “Ow,” he said. “You know what they hit you with?”
Taka shrugged.
“Hey, Bryan,” Mary said, walking over to join them, her gun holstered. “We’ve got confirmation that Detective Taka was officially reported missing yesterday morning. His department’s being notified he’s here.”
“Get the bolt cutters,” Bryan said.
Mary returned to the truck and opened one of the side compartments, plucking the cutters off their hanger, while Bryan went to confirm Trevor’s death. Murder. Whatever.
“Hey,” Bryan called. “I’m guessing the perpetrator left here in an SUV of some sort.”
“Cody Smith’s Escalade,” Dewey muttered. “Black. 2008.”
“Smith the suspect?” Mary asked.
Taka shook his head. “That would be Verny Fitch. Oliver Fitch. He’s supposed to meet his sister at his place at four a.m. but I don’t know where he lives. She’s Susan Pepper, Double Branch Lane in Charleston.”
“I’ll call it in, Bryan.” She set the cutters down by Taka’s thigh.
Oh, well. His arms and butt were numb, anyway.
Bryan came back. Something in the house cracked with a groan and hiss. They all jumped, watching the flames for a minute before Bryan asked, “What’s dead guy’s name? He with you or the bad guy?”
“Trevor Parsons,” Dewey said, his voice a little stronger. “He’s my bodyguard. Was. Shit. And Cody Smith is still inside the house.”
“Who is he?”
“My dumb fucking cousin.”
“Was he also shot?”
“Yes.”
“Are you Senator Sanderson’s son?”
“I am.”
Bryan looked at Taka. “And you’re the cop that shot that diabetic kid in Charleston?”
Taka sighed and nodded.
“I thought I recognized your name. Do you know each other or were you both kidnapped?”
Taka glanced sideways at Dewey. He knew what he’d heard, but did Verny really lure Dewey here in order to give Taka to him as a gift? Or had Verny intended to kill them both all along? Why kill Dewey?
“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” Dewey growled. “The asshole got me here on false pretenses.”
“The asshole?” Bryan asked.
“Verny Fitch.”
“And how do you know him.”
“He was on my security team. I fired him last week.”
“He took me hoping to get his job back,” Taka croaked, his throat closing, which set him off coughing again, pain shooting through his arms.
Both Dewey and Bryan ignored him, Bryan talking to Dewey instead. “Did you know Detective Taka before today?”
Dewey nodded.
“Do you know the reason why Detective Taka was kidnapped?”
Dewey shook his head.
Taka didn’t like this guy overstepping his legal bounds, but he didn’t want to get into dicey territory with him right now. Or open his mouth about Zach Taylor without a lot of thought about it first.
“Okay, then,” Bryan said. “Detective Taka, can I help you stand?”
Mentally congratulating the guy on knowing when to shut the fuck up, Taka said, “If you’ll cut these fucking cuffs off now.”
Bryan just reached down and hauled him up.
The painful motion made him dizzy and he started to cough. Bryan steadied him.
When he calmed, Bryan said, “Why are you wet?”
“Verny tried to drown me.” Which wasn’t strictly true, since if Verny had wanted to drown him, Taka couldn’t have stopped him.
“Hey, Mary? Could you call in a second ambulance, please? And bring me the O2 tank.”
Holding onto his left arm, Bryan led him to the far end of the service truck and sat him down again in the dimmer light. “Sorry, Detective. I could tell that line of questioning wasn’t going anywhere and I don’t want to run afoul of CPD, so I’m not going to ask him anything else.”
“You’re a fire investigator?”
“I am, with the Fire Marshall’s Office. And a supervisor with the Division of Forestry. Just putting in some volunteer overtime, brushing up on what our people in the field are facing these days. I’ve heard things. Did Mr. Sanderson have a role in your kidnapping?”
“Can you cut these off?”
“How long you been restrained this way?”
Taka shrugged. “Since yesterday?”
“Yeah. You’re not going to be talking after I do that.” Scowling, he shifted his attention to Taka’s arm. “Did Sanderson play a role in your kidnapping?”
There were fire sirens winding along the road towards them, throbbing over the cabin’s death throes and Dewey’s soft words with Mary and the dullness of Taka’s fatigue. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“You know him? Besides from tonight?”
A hot brand of pain flared across Taka’s upper left arm under Bryan’s fingers and stole his breath.
“Sorry,” Bryan said, digging in a little deeper.
Taka breathed in through his nose, intending to blow it out through his mouth, but the deeper breath got him coughing. He coughed until he choked, his eyes tearing. Breathing shallow on small sips of air, he blinked blearily at Bryan, who promptly fitted a mask attached to an O2 tank over his mouth and nose. He tried not to suck the sweet, moist air in too deep while he concentrated on killing the urge to cough again.
“To add insult to injury, Detective,” Bryan said lightly, “I do believe that’s a bullet hole in your arm.” He held up the long-handled cutters. “Ready?”