Page 32 of Into the Fire

“I know.”

“So you don’t need to alphabetize it tonight.”

“It’s not alphabetized.”

I set the forms down. I made myself leave them a quarter inch out of square.

“You believing me now doesn’t erase then,” Dante said.

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

He tossed a paper towel at the wastebasket and missed. He stood and looked at me across my office, shirt untucked, smoke still in his hair, and for a second he looked younger and more tired than he’d let anybody on this base see him look in a month.

“I don’t know what this is,” he said.

“Neither do I.”

“Will that drive you crazy?”

“Yes.”

He waited a beat. “I saw New Order in Chicago. My sister took me.”

I looked at him. “You fuckhead, and you didn’t call—”

For the first time all night, he smiled. It was small, crooked, and gone in a second.

“You said tomorrow we’d go through Carson Ridge,” Dante said.

“Yeah.”

“What time?”

“Eight. My office.”

He groaned. “You’re a base manager, not a rooster.”

“Eight,” I said. “Eat first.”

He stayed for another minute. Then he pushed off the table, knocked his shoulder into mine on the way past, and walked out into the dark toward the bunkhouse. I listened to his boots on the gravel until they were gone.

Chapter nine

Dante

Boone’s office at eight in the morning looked like nothing had ever happened. The lampshade sat straight, and he’d squared the Whitmore forms on the corner of the desk, a quarter inch out of true.

He had coffee brewing on the file cabinet, a legal pad at his elbow, and the folder Marty had left for us open on the desk. He hooked a chair with his boot and slid it toward me without looking up.

“You ate,” he said.

“Eggs. Toast. A witness can confirm.”

“Sit.”

I sat and put my forearms on the desk. Boone didn’t start with Carson Ridge. He turned the laptop so I could see it and pulled up Whitmore Creek instead.

I understood before he said anything. Whitmore was the fire that had happened this week to four of us, in broad daylight. We needed to know what Whitmore could actually tell us before it made sense to use it as grounds for reopening Carson.