Looking into his dead, blank eyes, I didn’t have anything much against Luke Jordan at that moment. I couldn’t hold a grudge against a stiff. Forget he’d been a total dick in high school. Forget he’d been a rowdy and bully. Forget too many girls thought he was a cool, dangerous stud. Forget all of it. Right then he was just another of the untimely dead.

Something caught my eye on the tool bench. The chief’s hat. I picked it up. A red smear of blood along one side. Hell. What had happened to him? I felt something cold crawl up my spine, standing there looking at the chief’s blood on his hat like that.

I backed out of the garage, left Jordan and the bloody hat.

I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to find the chief. I went upstairs just to cover my bases. In the master bedroom, the drawers were half-open, clothes pulled out. I checked the two other bedrooms. One had been converted into an office, and the chief’s desk drawers were open. I took a look. Empty.

I scratched my chin, figuring what it all meant, forming a picture in my head.

And then the lights went out.

I twirled in a panicked circle for two seconds, bumped into a chair.

Okay. Chill.

I felt and fumbled my way into the hall in case it was just the office light that had burnt out. I found the switch, flipped it on and off a half-dozen times. It stayed dark.

I felt my way back to the master bedroom. A bouncing orange light flickered on the windows. I rushed to the window, looked down.

Flames licked up the side of the house.

I ran back to the office, my shin smacking something in the darkness. I grunted, hopped the rest of the way. In the office I saw the orange glow even before I looked out the window. Flames there too.

I ran downstairs as fast as I dared in the pitch black. The living room filled with the hellish, flickering glow from the front windows. I flung open the front door, and the blast of flames knocked me back, singed my eyebrows. The chief’s wooden benches and chairs from the front porch had been stacked against the door, the whole pile a raging inferno. I shielded my face with my hands, felt like I was being cooked, eyeballs instantly dry, throat parched.

So much smoke.

I backed up the stairs, closing my eyes against the hot sting. The angry orange glow filled every window.

I rushed into the upstairs bathroom. The window faced the front of the house. I opened it wide, punched out the screen. I looked down, saw the fire hadn’t brought down the porch roof yet. If the flames had eaten underneath, I’d fall through and fry. I hoped it was still solid.

I climbed through, caught my foot on the window ledge and tumbled out and down. I hit the porch roof and bounced. I clawed for a grip, tore a nail loose and rolled. The world blurred fiery orange and I was in mid-air, a tsunami of heat washing over me. I hit the ground hard, and the wind whuffed out of me. I rolled away from the heat, dust in my face and eyes. I got to my hands and knees, tried to gulp air between fits of coughing. My eyes streamed, nose snotty. The inside of my mouth tasted like hell on Earth.

The house went up fast. I stood on wobbly legs and watched. If I’d hesitated, waited just a little longer to escape …

I stumbled to the barn, found a water spigot. I gulped tepid water a handful at a time, washed my face and the back of my neck. Even this far away from the house, the heat from the fire was almost too uncomfortable to bear. Luke Jordan’s Truck was parked too close to the house. Already the hood was turning black from the fire. I wouldn’t be able to get near it.

I was stranded again, the walk back to town too long to contemplate.

But maybe I didn’t have to go back to town. I wasn’t out of it yet. I hobbled back up the chief’s driveway toward the Six, trying to massage the bruises out of my ribs. At some point, when this hellish night had ended, I’d need to check with a doctor, make sure nothing important had been knocked beyond repair. Only willpower and stubborn-headed stupidity kept me together.

When I hit the Six, I turned north and started jogging toward the Jordan place.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Ten minutes jogging and I had to stop, the stitch in my side like a hot fork in my flesh. I walked, holding my ribs, panting, sweat sticking my shirt to me.

I paused, looked back at the chief’s house, the flames visible for miles and miles. I remembered the phones were out. Nobody would be able to call it in. Lucky there were no other houses close. The fire wouldn’t spread.

By the time I reached the gate to the Jordans’ ranch, I was down to a slow hobble. My body was screaming for me to lie down anywhere, even in the middle of the road, and go to sleep. I pushed the gate, and it creaked open on rusted hinges. I walked the dirt road to the Jordan home. It was a sprawling brick ranch house with a pebble circular driveway in front, untended, scruffy shrubs under the front window, a barn and a few out buildings a hundred yards beyond.

Somewhere a herd of lazy, skinny cows munched dry grass, keeping up the appearance that the Jordans were in the cattle business, and not a bunch of redneck hoods with a finger or two into every disreputable scheme within reach.

It’s true that in high school I had disliked Luke Jordan from a distance, but it was the stories of his older brothers, surfacing here and there in excited whispers, that I remembered most as a teenager. The town toughs, bullies and bad eggs. See them coming down the sidewalk, and you crossed the street. And everyone knew they were generally up to no good, yet somehow they always managed to slide, get off on a technicality or maybe a witness would reconsider what he’d actually seen, sitting up there on the witness stand. Only the oldest, Brett, had gone away to the big house. Can’t win them all. So Brett was known as the heavy criminal, but it was Jason more than any other brother that made me stay clear of the Jordans.

One thing I’ll always remember about Jason:

I was sixteen years old, sitting in my Mom’s Aries K car outside the Tastee-Freeze. Tiffany Davies sat in the passenger seat licking a chocolate ice cream cone like she was in love with it, and the only thing I could thing of was how to get her pants down around her ankles. I’d been working her hard, Saturday night dates three weeks in a row, heavy petting and dry humping, and I’d figured that night was going to be go-time. I had a condom in my pocket, pressing a permanent ring in the leather of my wallet.

Jason roared up on a black Harley Davidson, denim jacket, biker’s boots, wraparound sunglasses, no helmet, his dishwater hair tied back with a blue bandana. He leapt off the bike and jumped onto the car next to mine, a white El Camino. He stomped across the hood, jumped down on the driver’s side, opened the door and pulled Mark Foster out from behind the wheel. Mark was a year ahead of me, skinny in t-shirt, jeans and scuffed Doc Martin’s.

Mark didn’t get a chance to say anything. Jason had popped him in the nose, a smear of bright blood down Mark’s face. It all went downhill from there.

The El Camino’s passenger door flew open and Missy Shaw emerged, some Tracy Chapman song spilling out of the car with her. She was in my biology class. I thought she was hot but strange, so I really never talked to her that much.

“Stop it, Jason,” she screamed, almost hysterical.

“You shut up,” Jason told her.

And she did, shrinking back into the El Camino, eyes so wide with terror.

Jason had Mark back over the hood of the car and just kept beating him in the face.

“Oh, my god, oh, my god!” Tiffany kept bleating next to me.

Jason’s girl. Now Mark’s girl. Maybe nobody’s girl in a second.

Mark had gone all floppy and loose on the hood, Jason still beating down on him. I thought a minute Mark might’ve been dead. It seemed to take forever for people to erupt from the Tastee-Freeze, five of them grabbing Jason, a couple truckers and farmers and Mr. Iverson in his stained apron.