Page 54 of Smoke Season

Fuck, itdidremind her of that duffel. And along with that reminder came another: Fallows could pin all of this on them just as he had on Zack, if they weren’t careful.

“Mel?” Lewis’s voice cut through her racing thoughts, sending them scattering and bringing both her and True scrambling back to their feet.

“Coming!” Mel yelled.

“Find anything?”

She looked down at the duffel, then at True, then back at the duffel, her gaze narrowing through the smoke until it seemed all she saw was the zipper pull, inviting her to tug it.

She did.

No glint of metal this time. No guns. Just stacks and stacks of green.

And not of the herbal variety.

Cold, hard cash. And far more of it than she and True ever ran on the river.

Mel actually stumbled back from it, like the currency might leap out of the duffel and bite her.

“Oh my God,” True said beside her. “Grab it!” she whispered, then, just as quickly: “No! Don’t touch it! Shit, I don’t know! What should we do?”

Mel had no fucking idea. But she thought of the ammo box still waiting for retrieval at Temple Bar, a lost cause. She thought of Annie, coughing in the smoke. She thought of her best friend, still half hyperventilating beside her, and what it could cost them if they came back to Carbon empty-handed for the second time in two days.

“We’ll bring it to Fallows,” she said.

“As what?” True shook her head emphatically. “Penance or something? We can’t replace what we’ve lost with his own damned stash!”

Shit. That was true. Fuck.

“Hey, guys?” Lewis called again. “Let’s roll out!” He still sounded distant. Hopefully he’d been unwilling to break protocol and leave the fire vehicle.

“We can’t come back empty-handed, either,” Mel whispered to True. Annie couldn’t afford it.

True nodded.

They both looked back down at that money, just sitting there in the open duffel bag.

Fallows’s money, which could very easily replace what they’d lost on the river, becoming presurgical-prescription money in a serendipitous act of alchemy.

“What should we do?”

Once, during fire-science training, Mel’s supervisor had said there would come a time in every firefighter’s career when training protocols took a back seat to good old-fashioned survival instinct.

“We do what we have to do,” she decided, reaching into the duffel and stuffing two thick stacks of bills into her go bag, and tossing the duffel back into the hole. True looked like she might have more to say, but after just a moment’s beat of hesitation, she nodded, kicking the floorboard back into place.

They slid back out between the shed doors and hurried past the greenhouses, trying to see through the sudden onslaught of tears at the backs of their eyes. Mel’s stomach was in knots, her brain blaring a warning ofBad idea, bad idea, bad idea. Had she learned nothing in the past twenty-four hours? She already faced disciplinary review for lives she had put at stake. How many more laws was she going to break, trying to cover her own mistakes?

But another, more visceral voice drowned out the litany of these thoughts.

Woman up,she told herself harshly.

This was for Annie.

CHAPTER 25

True’s pulse pounded in her ears as she and Mel reached the barbed-wire fence bordering the grow site. Something didn’t feel right about this, and it had nothing to do with her conscience.

“Wait. What do we tell Lewis?” she asked. Mel was a public servant. Would she really risk tampering with evidence?

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