Blue Smoke

trouble?”
    “Not anymore.” And raise the gun, shoot him twice in the face.
    Body jerks like a puppet. A mother wouldn’t recognize that face now. Time for the gloves now so you can unbuckle the cocksucker, give him a shove. Now all you have to do is drive this handy four-wheeler into the woods a ways. Not too far. Want him found easy, after all.
    Flatten one of the tires. Looks like he ran into trouble, and somebody came along and gave him more.
    Hike on back, get the gas can.
    Let’s see now, we want the wallet, want the watch.
    Oh no! Poor bastard was robbed and murdered on his way to play at the beach! What an awful tragedy!
    Gotta laugh. Make it look sloppy, slosh that gas, gouge that upholstery! Pop the hood, light the engine. Get those tires soaked good and proper. Now step back—safety first!
    And set that bastard on fire.
    Look at him burn. Just look at him go. The human torch, blazing like a son of a bitch. The first minute’s the best, the whoosh and the flash. Amateurs are the ones who have to hang around and watch. It’s only the first minute that flashes in, flashes out.
    Now we just walk away, and drive this rattletrap back toward Maryland. Maybe get us some bacon and eggs for breakfast.
    It was Steve who brought Reena the news. He came into the precinct, stopped by the desk where she was typing up an incident report. His eyes burned out of a bone-white face.
    “Hey, what’s up?” She glanced over, stopped typing. “Oh, don’t tell me you’ve got to pull a double and can’t go down. I was about to go off shift, head home and pack.”
    “I . . . Can I have a minute? Private?”
    “Sure.” She pushed away from the desk as she took a good look at him. Nerves fluttered in her belly. “Something’s wrong. Gina—”
    “No. No, not Gina.”
    “Well, what . . . Hugh? Did he have an accident? How bad?”
    “No, no accident. It’s bad. It’s really bad.”
    She gripped his arm now, pulled him out in the corridor. “What? Say it quick.”
    “He’s dead. Jesus, Reena. He’s dead. I just got a call from his mother.”
    “His mother? But—”
    “He was killed. He was murdered—shot.”
    “Murdered?” Her hand went limp on his arm.
    “She was pretty incoherent at first.” Steve’s mouth thinned, razored as he stared hard over her head. “But I got what I could out of her.Somebody shot him. He was on his way down, just a couple hours from the island, and somebody must have gotten him to stop his car, or ran him off the road, or he had a flat. I’m not sure. She wasn’t sure.”
    He sucked in a breath. “But they shot him, Reena. Jesus, they shot him, then set the car on fire to try to cover it. They took his wallet, his watch. I don’t know what else.”
    There was sickness backing up in her throat, but she swallowed it down. “Have they identified him, positively identified him?”
    “He had, ah, stuff in the car, stuff that didn’t burn, with his name on it. The registration in the glove box. His parents called me from down there. It’s him, Reena. Hugh’s dead.”
    “I’m going to see what I can find out. I’m going to call the locals and see what I can find out.”
    “They shot him in the face.” Steve’s voice broke. “His mother told me. They shot him in the fucking face. For a goddamn watch and what was in his wallet.”
    “Sit down.” She nudged him down on a bench, sat beside him, held his hand.
    Whatever she found out, she thought, a man—a good man—one she’d kissed good-bye less than twenty-four hours before, was dead.
    And once again fire haunted her life.

CHAIN REACTION
    A series of events so closely related to one another that each one initiates the next.
     
    Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?
    Proverbs 6:27

10
BALTIMORE, 1999
    Fire sprang out of an untenanted building in South Baltimore on a bitter night in January. Inside, firefighters worked in a holocaust of raging heat and boiling smoke. Outside, they battled temperatures in the single digits, and a frosty wind that blew water into ice and licked flames into torrents.
    It was Reena’s first day as a member of the city arson unit’s task force.
    She knew part of the reason she’d bagged the assignment and was working under Captain Brant was because John had pushed a few buttons on her behalf. But it wasn’t all the reason. She’d worked like a dog to earn it, studying, training, putting in countless unpaid hours—and had never taken her eye