Page 34 of Fire Peak

He looked down at his sodden leather jacket. The water had worked. The only smoke rising from the pile were tendrils of light gray, more steam than smoke.

He let out a breath of relief. “In that case, Fire Peak Lodge owes me a jacket.”

“The closest dry cleaners is in Blackbear, but I’ll see what we can do.”

In her voice, he heard a kind of forced calm, the kind that hid a racing pulse, the same kind he was drawing on. Keep cool. Work the problem.

She put a hand on his arm. “Are you okay?”

His heart was still racing from the adrenaline rush of running toward an unknown smoking object. He nodded, then looked around to see that the entire restaurant was empty. “Where’s Hailey?”

“I sent her out with the others. The bartender is keeping everyone corralled in the foyer.”

“Good thinking.” He ran a hand over the back of his neck and frowned down at his charred jacket.

“I’m not sure I can say the same for you. You ran toward that thing. What are you, some kind of kamikaze firefighter?”

He met her gaze and saw that she was genuinely worried for him. That hostile wariness he’d seen in her eyes ever since he’d cornered her in the storage shed was gone. The warmth of that shift lit a little spark inside his heart. “My father was a firefighter. Maybe it runs in the genes.”

“It could have been a bomb.”

“Bombs don’t generally smoke.” He crouched down and peered at the steamy mess. “Got a stick or something? It’s still too hot to touch.”

Charlie disappeared for a moment, then returned with a long-handled metal spatula. “From the grill. Big Eddie will kill me if I don’t bring it back.”

He took it and gingerly lifted the sleeve of his jacket, which lay crumpled across the mystery object. The stench of ash and burnt leather nearly made him gag. With a flick of the spatula, he tossed aside the jacket to expose a metal cylinder. The smoke had been pouring from slits in its side.

“What the hell?” he murmured.

Charlie crouched next to him. “Are you sure that thing isn’t going to blow up?”

“I don’t think so, no. Look.” He pointed to words etched onto a disc of metal that functioned as a lid. “It says, ‘strike’ and then the number one.”

“Strike one? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know, but you should probably bump up your security. ‘Strike one’ implies that there will be a strike two.”

“Security?” She scoffed. “Our security is that we’re halfway up a mountain at the end of a forty-five minute drive.”

“No security cameras? No guards?”

She shook her head. “This is the wilderness. People are more worried about bears than smoke bombs.”

“I’m pretty sure a bear didn’t throw this. You should call the police.”

“Like I said, this is the wilderness. There’s no police out here. We can notify the state troopers, but they hardly ever come out here. The closest thing we have to police is…well, probably you, showing up looking sort of like a cop.”

He snorted. “If I’m the closest thing, we’re in trouble.”

“Exactly. People police themselves out here. If someone steps out of line, the community figures out a way to handle it.”

That sounded like vigilante justice to him. “Does it work?”

She shrugged and rolled the cylinder over to expose its charred underside. “Mostly everyone just tries to survive the winter. I’ve heard about a few feuds that turned violent. Flying fists at The Fang, that kind of thing. There have been a few murders. Daniel O’Connor is the most recent one. I haven’t heard about anything like this before.”

“What about the Chilkoot mess from this spring?”

She glanced at him curiously. “You think it might be related?”

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