In her bedroom at the far end of the added wing, without turning on any lights, Janeal threw the five-thousand-dollar bundle she’d taken earlier into the suitcase. It landed next to a change of clothes and a picture of her parents and dead siblings, three sisters, taken before she was born. She stood in the center of the small space on a pink rag rug, imagining the room in daylight, and tried to think of anything else she could possibly want to take with her. She had seconds to decide.
Her eyes lit on a small packet of seeds that sat in the beam of moonlight reaching in through the window. Katie had given these to her for her fifteenth birthday. Sweet peas, too fragile for this desert’s summer climate. Janeal had meant to plant them at their California base during the winter, but early frosts two years in a row had discouraged her. That and the idea that she might someday have a heartier, more permanent place for them to bloom. This, after all, was why Katie had given them to her.
“To plant in that place you daydream about,” the card had said.
She picked up the packet and threw it into the case next to the bundle of bills. She closed the case again and set it in the hall. Then she turned over the gas can and emptied about a quarter of it onto her bed, the rug, the desk by the door. She tossed a splash into her closet for good measure.
Moving into her father’s room, she checked the places where he usually kept his valuables. He didn’t have many, because he wore most of his treasured possessions: his wedding ring, his engraved tenth-anniversary watch, a tattoo across his back bearing the names of “his girls.” But in the loose floorboard under his bed she found a bowie knife with an ivory handle given to him by his brother, who was now rom baro of a kumpanía in Canada. In the opaque light fixture she found the keys to the Lexus. In the safe behind the painting of a California vineyard she found his journal, her mother’s wedding ring, and a small bag of uncut stones she had not seen before.
Janeal took all these items, planning to find a way to put them back in her father’s safekeeping after the house burned and she was on her way with Sanso.
The hidden compartment built into the bookcase-style headboard was empty.
No money.
Janeal ran to the suitcase and heaved her armful of items into it, all but her mother’s diamond-studded band, which she slipped onto her own finger. It was safer on her hand than in a container that might or might not survive this night.
She hastily repeated the process with the gasoline in her father’s room. She’d been in the house maybe three minutes now, and she’d broken out in a sweat. There was only one other place for her to look.
Her confidence waned as she ran into the bathroom. By the dim glow of the night-light, she opened the medicine cabinet and swept the contents into the sink. A box of matches rattled as it fell onto the top of the pile. She retrieved it and shoved it into the pocket of her jeans. She pried the glass shelves out of their brackets and in her flustered state dropped one. It crashed against the sink and shattered across the floor.
She removed the last shelf then pried out the back panel, breaking two fingernails in the process.
A cascade of bundled bills spilled into the sink.
“Janeal Mikkado!”
The voice that had called to her from outside minutes earlier now traveled down the hall. It could be coming from any part of the house.
“Janeal Mikkado, I’m looking for my money!”
Janeal crammed the bills into the suitcase, tossing out the change of clothes when she saw that it wasn’t all going to fit.
Doors in the house started crashing open, bouncing off the doorstops or walls as someone kicked them in.
By the time she scrambled for the last bundle, she was hyperventilating and hardly thinking. He could not come back here so soon. She could not let him see the bathroom and know that she already had the cash.
She closed the case and grabbed the gas can, trailing it behind her as she ran for her bedroom at the end of the hall.
. . . rushed into the room, threw open the window over her desk, climbed onto it, kicked out the screen
. . . heaved the weighty suitcase onto her desk, scraped it over the surface, shoved it to the ground
. . . tumbled out and landed on her backside next to the case, breathing hard.
Apart from the licking tongues of flame in the distance and the occasional far-off shouts, the night was still.
While she lay on the ground, she reached into her pants and fetched the matches, withdrew one, and struck it against the sandy paper on the side of the box.
The wood stick snapped in half.
She lit another one on the fifth strike and made sure it was burning before she tossed it into her room.
Nothing.
The third match would not light.
Tears of anger and frustration escaped against her will.
Standing, she withdrew three matches from the box and struck them together, then leaned in through the ripped screen and hurled them onto the gasoline-soaked throw rug.
It blazed like the red New Mexican sun.
“Janeal Mikkado! You hold your father’s life in your hands!”
Janeal stared at the red sun and stopped breathing. He had her father. Her father was in the house. Her father would take Sanso to—
Someone was crying, sobbing uncontrollably. Not her father.
What had she done?
The free flames ran out her bedroom door and down the hall.
Janeal dashed away from the window, the bouncing suitcase biting at her heels, toward the mesa she had so often climbed with her friends. At the base, a pile of rocks that had slid down the face created a short wall. She threw the case behind the pile, then ran back toward the meetinghouse. Already flames had eaten their way through the roof of the living quarters. She raced around the wing and aimed for the kitchen door.
The room had filled with smoke. She ran through, bent over double, holding the collar of her shirt over her mouth. Her eyes burned from tears and heat. She emerged in the dining room. To the left, through the French doors, she could see flames and smoke consuming the hallway and bedrooms. Smoky fingers curled up from under the door. The glass panels were starting to sag in front of the heat.
She moved right, into the hall that led past her father’s office and out to the large meeting room.
No sign of anyone. The lights were out here too. Only the fires outside cast a flickering illumination into the large room.
“Dad!” she yelled. “Dad, where are you? Dad ! ”
To the left of the main entrance, the flight of stairs followed the wall and then turned at the corner, leading up into the open-floor game room. To the right, Mrs. Marković sat in her chair, looking out the window.
“Mrs. Marković! You need to go now!” Janeal rushed to her side. “You need to get out.”
The old woman turned her head to look at Janeal and smiled this time.
“Please go!” Janeal pleaded.
“You go,” Mrs. Marković said, flipping her wrist in a backhanded way toward the stairs. “Both of you. You decide now.”
“Who are you talking to?”
Janeal gasped and spun toward the new voice. Salazar Sanso stood on the stairs in the corner landing, leaning against the wall, arms crossed. His face was in shadow. She recovered quickly and turned back to help Mrs. Marković out of her chair. It was empty. Where had—
“You look empty-handed, Janeal.” Sanso looked down on her like a hawk about to swoop for a mouse. She caught her breath, tried to change mental gears. Where was Mrs. Marković?
“Why are you doing this?” she demanded. “I did everything you asked! I left the money exactly where I said—”
“You’re a fool to betray me.”
“I wouldn’t . . . I didn’t . . . I meant to go with you. Please.”
Sanso descended the steps slowly. Behind her, in the dining room maybe, Janeal heard glass explode. She wondered if the fire had hit the wiring of the light fixture over the wide walnut table.
“You were more reluctant last time we spoke,” he said. “It’s better that you be direct with me. It prevents”—he gestured to the burning tents outside the front window—“misunderstandings.”
“Let’s be clear then,” Janeal said, wondering if she sounded as frightened as she felt. “When I know my father won’t be harmed, I’ll leave with you.”
Sanso stood in front of her now and reached out to tip her chin up toward him. He spoke to her like a lover, whispering low and tender, but the words were all wrong. “Yes, let’s be clear. A good number of your little tribe here are already dead. I blame your sloppy communication skills. And if you don’t produce the money before this shack burns down, the rest of you will die too.”
He let go of her chin and ran a finger down the buttons of her blouse, then let his hands drop. “Except maybe you,” he whispered. “I haven’t completely decided about you yet.” He lowered his face toward hers. “I expect we have two or three minutes to decide.”
Janeal’s entire body shook when Sanso kissed her, touching her only with his lips as if to test her sincerity. A simple step backward would separate them. A simple step backward might also end her father’s life. And hers. Not entirely unwilling, she kissed him back. After a few seconds, he broke contact.
“Now then, that’s promising,” he whispered. “You can communicate when you like, I see.” He turned back to the stairs and began to ascend, stopping on the fourth step to look over his shoulder and say, “I’m pretty good at convincing others myself. Let’s go see who plays best at this game.”
Upstairs? He was crazy to stay in the building. No doubt that was part of his plan. Janeal looked back toward the wing that was burning. If the fire had moved into the office hallway, she could see no sign of it yet. Still, the man was insane to go up in this burning tinderbox when the front door was two yards out of her reach. She looked at the door. How easy it would be to run out . . .
“Your father is waiting,” Sanso said as he turned the corner of the stairs.
“I don’t know where the money is,” she blurted. Sanso kept walking. His feet hit the steps in a steady rhythm. “Someone found it, moved it—maybe they were watching me.”
“Don’t say too much more,” he said as his head disappeared into the upper room. “You’re not so convincing when you lie.”
Janeal raced up the steps to the game room. She could smell smoke in the air. The table games separated her from a door on the opposite side of the room that led to an exterior flight of stairs. Next to the door, vinyl-covered bar stools surrounded a green-felt poker table.
The beam of a low-hanging café lamp illuminated her father, perched on one of the stools.
“Dad.”
She took several steps toward him before she noticed another figure sitting on a bar stool against the back wall. Katie! Her head was haloed by the dartboard that hung behind her, and her wrists and ankles were bound to the stool’s metal rungs. Her eyes were closed, and her face looked puffy, accentuated by the poor lighting in the room. Was she conscious?
“Katie?”
Her friend’s eyes opened to slits.
An invisible cold hand reached out of the darkness and touched Janeal directly over her heart, all five fingers grazing her like feathers yet with the power of a force field.
“That’s as far as you get to go.” Sanso stepped into the boundaries of the red pool table light, loading a gun. “Let’s work quickly now, shall we? Here’s how the rules of this game will go: I ask a question, you answer. If you give me the wrong answer, I get a point. When I get two points, I win. But you need only one right answer in order to win. And by that I mean you get to come away with me, and I will promise to take care of your loved ones here.”
Janeal gripped the edge of the pool table for balance. She nodded her understanding.
“First question. Where is the money, Janeal?”
Janeal’s knees weakened.
“I set fire to this house in hopes of smoking out the thief,” she said. Her father’s eyes rose to meet hers, and they were filled with a fear she had never seen in them before. She tried to communicate with her eyes that he shouldn’t be afraid, but how exactly could one do that and keep up a believable pretense? “If they hid it here, they would come running for it, give away the location—”
A gunshot rang out, hammering out the sound of Janeal’s words.
Jason crumpled on the poker table.
“Wrong answer.”
Janeal started screaming.