How am I supposed to accept this sweet as pie girl who keeps wanting to support me like she can carry all my weight on her shoulders?
I glare down at the steel struts I’m working, just a mess of dark bars and hazy sparks through my welding mask. Day job. That kind of shit.
There’s always something needing to be rebuilt around Heart’s Edge, especially with the fire damage from that blowout back around Halloween. I’m usually not short on work.
But thinking about that just leaves me more pissed off, a reminder of how Holt’s moving in on the town construction biz, too.
I’ve had to see him a few too many times over the last few days.
From a distance, sure, while he’s organizing the crew of locals he hired to start rebuilding the public structures that took shrapnel damage from the big kaboom.
At least he’s not signing my checks.
I hired on with a crew from here in town for that.
I don’t think I could stand taking money I earned from my brother.
Tell you what, though, right now is the wrong damn time for my phone to be ringing.
I shut off the blowtorch, grimacing as the bastard phone quivers against my back pocket, then set the torch down, lift my mask, and pull off my gloves.
When I see the name on the caller ID, I go cold inside—which is a feat when I’m standing in a hot-ass room over superheated metal.
It’s Rich. And he’d only be calling me for one reason.
I stand, swiping the call and shoving my phone to my ear. “Update me.”
“Nothing major,” Rich says. “It’s already over. Just a grease fire at the diner. Didn’t need a full response, but I wanted to keep you in the loop, Chief.”
There’s something he’s not saying.
It’s in the unsteadiness in his voice, in the strangeness of the way he pronounces his words.
I frown, glancing over my shoulder at the construction crew. I hadn’t even noticed them going on their lunch break, sitting around the tarp-covered stacks of supplies and eating out of paper bags from the one or two lonely fast food joints in town.
Then I step away, ducking into the hall of the temporary warehouse that’s been erected to protect the supplies from winter.
“Talk,” I say. “What are you not telling me?”
Rich hesitates. “I…shit. I wasn’t alone on the response.”
“Justin?” I ask. There’s not many other people it could be. With a volunteer crew, you tend to have tiers of people—your regulars, and then folks you only call in when things are too much for the main crew to handle.
Justin’s one of the regulars.
I’ve got a sinking feeling in my gut before Rich says, “Well, Chief, he kind of bugged out.”
“Describe ‘bugged out.’”
“It wasn’t a big fire. Like, it hadn’t even jumped from one burner, but you know how grease fires are. Justin, he just stopped. Froze up, went blank, nothing there behind his eyes. And he was just staring at it instead of helping me with the extinguisher. I had to say his name like five or six times to get him to snap out of it.”
I drag a hand over my face, rubbing my temples. “Aw, shit. I was afraid of something like this.”
Rich sounds worried. “I don’t follow.”
I sigh. Damn, I feel bad talking about Justin’s private crap like this, but there’s no way around it now.
“You know he’s carrying a lot of trauma from the Paradise fire,” I say. “Seems like he’s been going through a lot lately. I’ve been meaning to ask him about teaching a safety course at the carnival for the kids to take his mind off of it.”
I just haven’t gotten around to it.
Never got around to telling Rich and Justin about what Leo found, either, and that we might have an arsonist in town—one who’s been laying low since the incident at the clothing shop, but I don’t think they’ve given up yet.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been so tense.
Or maybe it’s that my daughter keeps crushing on a pyromaniac punk who’s been the cause of a few too many fires of his own.
Everything’s got me on edge lately.
I shouldn’t have taken it out on Peace like that.
Goddammit.
I can’t be thinking about her right now with Rich still silent on the line.
“Keep an eye on him. Report in if he has another incident, okay? Listen…was there anything else weird about the fire?”
“Nope. Looked like one of the younger kids in the kitchen wasn’t doing the work with cleaning up the grease drippings, so they just caught.” Rich sounds like he knows what I’m going to say already, though, when he asks, “Why? Something up?”
“Because.” I hesitate. “That fire at Farley’s Fashion. It looks like it might’ve been set.”
I don’t want to say anything about the note.
If this is Leo’s past coming back to haunt us, even with everyone in town knowing about the Galentron company and their shenanigans now, I don’t want it leaking and scaring people.