Page 56 of Fire Fight

“I disagree. Rooting out arsonists is part of the job description,big bro, and you won’t find anyone in the county more qualified than me.”

He grumbled but wisely didn’t argue because he knew I was right. Chief Madden had some experience, but not as much as I’d gained working with the CFD.

“So where are we heading?”

Lane’s teeth still ground together as he spat, “Chris Taal’s place.”

I blinked in surprise.

“He’s still dealing?”

“Is the sky blue?”

I made a show of looking out the window.

“Yep.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time over the last week going over the reports, and it seems my predecessors thought he was good for it but could never make anything stick. So I’m going to see if I can be the one to shake something loose.”

“Like what? A confession? He’s gotta be in his sixties now, Lane. Don’t you think he would’ve come clean already if he was the guy?”

“I think that little weasel will do anything to save his own ass.” He glanced pointedly at me. “Including throwing a seventeen-year-old under the bus.”

I couldn’t help wincing at the memory, but the blame for that incident couldn’t rest strictly on Chris’s shoulders.

I’d been there. Been an active participant.

But he’d made me the fall guy for the whole thing instead of taking responsibility for his role in it all.

That was the night everything changed for me, and if Chief Madden hadn’t pulled me out of that twisted hunk of metal that had once been a car, talked some sense into me in the aftermath while I’d been laid up in the hospital with a shattered tibia, I wouldn’t be having this conversation with Lane.

I likely wouldn’t have made it to my eighteenth birthdaywithout that accident. Wrapping that car around a tree had been the best thing that ever happened to me.

Memories continued to plague me, anxiety rooting in my chest at the prospect of confronting this demon I thought I’d banished.

“Maybe it’s a bad idea for me to come with…”

“Nah,” Lane said, his blinker filling the space between us while he navigated through town, toward the trailer park. “I think it’ll be good having you there. Might make him a little more forthcoming.”

I snorted in disagreement but kept my mouth shut.

Once upon a time, Chris and I had been…close, in the way that all drug addicts were close with their dealers. Now, I doubted he’d recognize me. I was so far removed from that spiraling teenage boy, those events may as well have happened in a different lifetime.

Dusk Valley’s trailer park, aptly named Mountain View Estates because it did afford residents a gorgeous backyard look at the lower peaks of the Owyhee Range, was a well-kept neighborhood. The people who lived there were mainly single parents who worked hard for their money as laborers, waitresses, and nurses.

On two streets perpendicular to the trailer park sat Dusk Valley’s version of the slums. The rows of houses were rundown and falling apart, with broken furniture, vehicles that no longer ran, and other detritus littering the lawns.

Pulling up to Chris’s shack—there really was no other word for the dilapidated two-story that leaned precariously to one side—was like stepping into a time warp that transported me back sixteen years to the very first time I’d been here. I knew without going inside that nothing had changed. The main floor was an open concept kitchen and living room, constructed before such things were fashionable mainly to cut costs on putting in more walls, and a small bathroom with an ancientclawfoot tub, overhead shower, and cracked toilet that somehow still ran. The upper level held the bedroom. Both the front and back yards were postage stamps that Chris kept clean, mostly to not give law enforcement any reason to come knocking at his door—even if they all knew what went on behind it.

The tick of the cooling engine after Lane turned the car off was damn near deafening as he waited for me to move.

I wasn’t sure I could. Walking back in that house…there were inevitably things about a past version of me, the man Chris had known but who existed no longer, that would be thrown in my face. That would stir up all kinds of bad feelings and memories, both for me and my brother.

“I’m sorry,” Lane said quietly. “You don’t have to do this. I didn’t really think it through, what it’d be like for you coming back here.”

That was quite possibly the most sensitive and empathetic thing any of my brothers had ever said to me, and somehow, it gave me the courage to get the fuck out of the car.

Wordlessly, I opened the door and climbed out, and Lane followed my lead.