Page 34 of Kid Gloves

The week of the fire, the Halloran Group sent me a buyout offer. It's generous and it's still open and the timing has always smelled wrong to me. I should have shown you in April.

Three sentences. I've delivered harder news to dog owners. I say it once more to Gran's photo (she looks mid-laugh, she always looks mid-laugh, no help at all) and I take the envelope out of the junk drawer.

It's lighter than it's been in weeks, the envelope. Funny how that works. Paper doesn't gain and lose weight. Carriers do.

Navy blue, embossed, market conditions, we encourage a prompt response. I set it on the kitchen table, square to the edge, where it can't be missed, where it can't be walked back, and then I set the table around it like a lunatic — two glasses, the good salsa, napkins, because apparently my plan is to serve my worst secret as an appetizer, and I stand back and look at the arrangement and say, "No," and take the napkins away again. Full disclosure shouldn't have napkins. Tank watches the whole choreography from the rug with the weary patience of a dog who has seen me rehearse conversations with a rooster.

I check the clock. Fifteen minutes. I feel the drawer-shaped bruise in my chest start, finally, to go down. He'll be here in fifteen minutes. He'll read it in ninety seconds. He'll go quiet, and his pen-slowing face will happen, and then he'll make it a checklist (probably literally, tab ten, buyout contingencies) and it will get small, the way everything gets small once Wade Mercer files it. And then I'll have handed the last heavy thing over the fence, and whatever's left after that is just — us. Just the good clean weight of us.

"Okay," I tell Tank, and my hands are only a little stupid. "Okay. New plan. Full disclosure, windows, dinner. In that order."

Tank's ears come up. Not at me — past me, at the window, the north window, Gran's window, where the evening's gone that gray-gold color, and gravel sound is coming up the drive.

Too early. Wade said six, and Wade's never early, Wade arrives at appointments like a tide chart, and it's not his truck, the engine's wrong, and I'm at the sill with the county's whole held breath in my lungs when the car resolves out of the caliche dust.

White sedan. Government plates. A light bar tucked discreet against the rear window, and on the door, gold and unhurried, the seal of the State Fire Marshal.

Behind the house, Gary crows. Six p.m. Dead wrong, as always. Or early, depending what's coming.

The envelope sits square on the table where full disclosure was scheduled to happen. My hand's already moving — I'm not proud of it, I'll never be proud of it, the hand had the vote and the hand was faster, and the junk drawer swallows the Halloran Group whole, and the last thing I do before I open the door to whatever the state of Texas has decided about my barn is lean on it.

The drawer doesn't close clean anymore.

Neither do I.

Chapter 14

Wade

I'm two hundred yards out when I see the state car in her drive, and I cover the distance in a time I decline to enter into evidence.

By the time I'm through her door the introductions are done and the kitchen has rearranged itself into a room where news gets delivered: Delaney standing behind a chair instead of in it, both hands on its back like it's a rail on a pitching deck. Deputy State Fire Marshal Okafor, a squared-away woman with a folder she holds like it's loaded. Dooley, hat in hand, positioned where a friend stands when he's here in an official capacity and hates it.

"Mr. Mercer," Okafor says. "Good. This concerns your contract facility as well."

"Whatever it concerns, you can say it to both of us." I take up the ground next to Delaney, and under the table's edge her cold hand finds mine and grips like the gate she is.

Okafor opens the folder.

"The laboratory analysis is complete on the samples from the structure fire of April eleventh." She reads it clean, no wind-up, and I'll give her that much forever. "Chromatography identified a medium petroleum distillate along the north interior wall, in a pour pattern, at three sample points. The burn indicators are consistent with that finding. The cause has been reclassified from undetermined to incendiary."

The kitchen makes no sound. Outside, a truck downshifts on the county road, ordinary as weather, in a world where somebody poured accelerant along the wall of a barn with nine puppies asleep inside it. Under my hand, the back of Delaney's chair has gone slick where her grip was a minute ago, and Tank has moved himself, unbidden, to sit square on her boots — full weight, full verdict, like ninety pounds of dog can hold a person to the floor of her own life. It can. I watch it work.

"Incendiary," Delaney says. Her voice is level and comes from somewhere else entirely, the voice she used at 0200 in April to give me a timeline with her eyebrows singed. "You're saying arson. Someone burned it. On purpose."

"Yes, ma'am."

"There were — my dogs were in there. I was a hundred feet away, asleep. If the wind—" She stops. Rebuilds on flatter ground. It's the worst thing I've ever watched her do, and I've watched her do it before: Boone triage, feelings crated and stacked so the hands stay useful. "What happens now?"

"Now it's a criminal investigation, run jointly with the sheriff's office and the county fire investigator. There will be interviews. I'd ask you not to discuss the details outside this room." Okafor's eyes are steady and professionally kind, and then they do the thing I've been braced for since the phrase pour pattern: they go flat, procedural, careful. "Ms. Boone, some of the interviews will need to be with you. Standard scope. Timeline, access, financials⁠—"

"Financials," I say.

"Standard scope, Mr. Mercer." Which is true, and which I knew before I said it, because I've read enough arson files to know the first door investigators knock on, statistically, belongs to the owner. Insured structure. Distressed property. It's not personal. It's arithmetic.

It's about to be personal.

Okafor walks the burn site before she leaves, and I walk it with her, because Delaney asks me to—"go, I can't look at it today with new eyes, I only just got my old ones used to it," and because I've been waiting eight weeks for permission to look at that north wall with somebody who reads fire for a living.