Page 160 of Not Quite Dead Yet

She hung up.

‘On it,’ Billy said, pulling out onto the main road, headlights carving through the darkness.

Jet leaned forward as the night sped past the window, pulled open the glove compartment.

Henry’s gun was there, waiting, hiding in the shadows.

Jet reached in, fingers closing around it, its metal shell cold enough to sting. She pulled the gun out, catching Billy’s eye as he took another turn, ripples in the lake.

‘Just in case,’ she said. ‘Luke can be scary.’

Jet opened her window, breathed in, filled herself with the darkness, a new shape now. Breathed it out.

They didn’t talk.

Jet turned the radio up instead.

‘Hey, this is the song you like, Billy.’

She turned it up some more.

That song, about Vermont and sticks.

Billy kept driving, started to hum. Jet did too. Then more.

Singing.

Loud.

Louder than that.

Turned the radio up again.

Almost shouting.

Jet making up the words because she didn’t know them, Billy laughing at her, singing even louder to make up for it.

Out of tune but not out of time.

Jet cradled the gun in her lap, the night in her hair, closed her eyes and she just fucking sang.

‘You never heard that expression, Luke? About not returning to the scene of the crime?’

Jet walked over to her brother, feet crunching in the fallen leaves.

He didn’t move. He was standing just before the gate into Mason Construction, his back to them. The gate locked and padlocked, yellow-and-black tape strung across it in a crisscross. Another crime scene.DO NOT ENTER.

The burned-down husk of the building behind it, none of it left standing. Piles of blackened bricks. Bent, curling metal that might once have been the stairs. A collapsed section of the roof, bite mark through the middle. Ash. Soot. All color leaked away except black and gray. The parking lot full of white vans and blue logos looked otherworldly, out of place, still alive, here in this graveyard.

‘Luke,’ Jet called, tearing her eyes from the burned building where she’d almost died, back to her brother. ‘What are you doing?’

The truck behind Jet and Billy was still running, still breathing, beams on, lighting up their stage. Luke in one spotlight, Jet three steps behind in the other.

‘I’m just looking,’ Luke said, a crack through the middle of his voice. ‘It’s all gone.’

Jet sniffed. ‘Yeah. That tends to happen, Luke, when you cover something in gas and set it on fire.’

She took another step forward.