DANNY CAME BY IN midafternoon, and Josiah was feeling fine, having spent the day sanding and painting the porch rails, with a beer or three for company. Funny, too, because those porch rails had needed paint for years, and he’d never gotten around to it. He’d bought the paint damn near a year ago, figured on tackling the job the next day, but the next day got away from him and soon the paint cans were covered with dust and cobwebs and the porch rails looked worse than ever.

Today, though, he got to the job simply because he needed something to busy himself with. It was a fine day, warm and filled with promise, one that called for doing something beyond sitting on your ass. Most weekends, Josiah was more than content to sit on his ass; he spent Monday through Friday working for other people, figured he’d earned himself a couple days of doing jack shit. Something was different today, though, in his mind and in his body, as if that evening wind that blew up while he slept on the porch had carried some sort of energy right through his skin. Mark it on your calendars, folks-as of May 3, Josiah Bradford was no longer content to bide his time.

It was a shame to involve somebody like Danny Hastings in such a plan as this, but fact was, there were some things you couldn’t do alone. Some things called for a bit of help, and though Danny wasn’t ideal in a lot of ways, he was loyal to a fault. They’d been brought up near as family, though they weren’t blood-related, and Josiah had spent much of his childhood kicking the shit out of Danny and then watching the little freckled bastard come ambling along for more, like a dog that doesn’t know how to stop loving its master regardless of the whip. Danny was fire tested by now.

When Danny arrived in his Oldsmobile Cutlass with the mismatched door, Josiah was pacing the porch with paintbrush in hand, looking for places that needed a touch-up and not finding any. He’d done a thorough job. The house-if it could be called that-was a one-bedroom, cracked-slab-on-sloping-grade shit pile that Josiah never could figure why he’d purchased. It had been a bank repo, bought for a song but still overpriced, and there wasn’t a thing desirable about it except for the fact that it was located within a sprint-car race of what had once been Bradford property. There had been a good-size parcel in Bradford hands once, and generation by generation, it got sold off in bits and pieces to keep the bill collectors at bay, pissed away until there wasn’t anything left at all. Why he wanted to be close to those memories he didn’t know, but somehow he’d found himself drawn back here.

“Hell,” Danny said, walking up beside Josiah, cigarette dangling from his lips, “I was close to certain you wasn’t never going to get that painted. What got into you?”

“Boredom,” Josiah said. There was something about the porch rails that offered him a surprising amount of satisfaction, his work shining clean and white and stark under the sun. It had the shine of achievement.

“Looks nice, though.”

“Don’t it?”

“Better’n you anyhow. That black boy poked you good, didn’t he? Your eye looks like hell.”

“It was a bullshit sucker punch,” Josiah said and walked away. He went to the spigot that hung loose from the foundation-he’d been meaning to mortar it back in for years-and, turning on the water, put the brush under the stream and massaged it with his fingers, watching the white paint wash away from the bristles and waiting on his anger to do the same. Last thing he wanted to hear about was his damn eye.

“I got a funny story,” Danny began, but Josiah lifted a hand to shut him up, not enough patience in him to listen to Danny carry on about some bullshit or another.

“You hear what I asked you earlier?” Josiah said.

“About making some money?”

“That’s the one.”

“I heard it, yeah.”

“And you’d like to be in on that.”

“You was to twist my arm enough, I’m sure I’d agree to it.”

“Even if it was the sort of thing could get you in a piece of trouble if you were dumb enough to get caught.”

Danny’s florid face went grave and he took the cigarette from between his lips and tossed it down in the weed-riddled gravel drive, smashed it out with his boots. Wasn’t like he could be shocked by the suggestion-he and Josiah had done some law breaking in their time-but he didn’t look thrilled by it either.

“I hope you ain’t talking about cooking crank,” he said.

“Hell, no.”

That seemed to put Danny’s mind at ease. He’d had a buddy, a guy they all called Tommy Thunder for no reason Josiah could ever recall, who blew up his trailer and killed himself while attempting to fine-tune a batch of meth. Danny, who’d sampled the drug as a user and mover prior to that occasion, had steered clear of it since. Only took one explosion to get his attention.

“All right. Good. But what is it you’re thinkin’ of?”

Josiah went up the porch and into the kitchen, came back out with two Keystones and handed one to Danny and cracked the other open for himself.

“You ever lift your head up when you’re pulling weeds down at that damn hotel?” he asked. Danny also worked on the grounds crew; he had, in fact, gotten Josiah the job.

“Every day,” Danny said cautiously. He hadn’t opened his beer yet.

“You noticed any signs up lately?”

“Always signs up.”

“Uh-huh. I’m talking ’bout one in particular. List of things going on down there, conventions and tours and shit.”

“I know it.”

“You noticed what convention’s heading in next month?”

Danny shook his head.

“Gemstones,” Josiah said. “Gonna have an exhibit down in the lobby, cases of diamonds and rubies and shit. A pile of stones worth millions, Danny. Millions.”

Danny’s face went sour and he took a few steps to the side, started to lean on the railing, then remembered it was wet and stopped himself.

“A thing like that comes rolling into your town,” Josiah said, “you’d be fool not to capitalize on it.”

“You got to be kidding,” Danny said.

“Kidding hell. We’re going to get those stones. Won’t be all that hard either. See, the way I got it figured, a fire clears that building out, and fast. With all the liabilities and shit they got to consider? Man, first flame goes up, that place empties out.”

“Josiah… you don’t think them guys who own the stones have thought of that?”

“They can think of it all they want, point is they can’t stop it. You have any idea the sort of scene you’d have down there with a fire going? They call that chaos, son, and you know what happens during chaos? Shit gets lost.”

“You think they’re not going to notice-”

“’Course they’re going to notice, numb nuts, what I’m saying is by the time they do, it’ll be too late. We get a fire going, get the building empty and the sprinklers on and then hit those cases fast and get out. You don’t got to worry about alarms because there’ll already be a thousand going off, a few more ain’t gonna mean a damn thing.”

“All them stones is, like, registered or whatever,” Danny said. “You can’t sell them. Where we gonna sell them? Go on up to the pawnshop and sell stones like that?”

“We won’t sell them here.”

“Well, I know that, but where do you think we’re going to do it? We could go all the way across the country-”

“Won’t sell them in this country,” Josiah said, voice soft, and that brought Danny up, his version of a thoughtful expression coming on.

“I’m getting out,” Josiah said. “You can come or not, it ain’t my concern. But I am getting out of this place.”

“It’s a dumb idea,” Danny said, and the audacity of that blew Josiah away. Danny Hastings calling him dumb? He should’ve swung on him, knocked the red hair right off the top of his head. He didn’t, though. Instead he just stood there and stared. Something was odd about what Danny had just said, and it took a minute but then Josiah figured out what the odd quality was-Danny had been right. It was a dumb idea.