Page 61 of Smoke Season

He jerked Mel’s shoulders with every sentence, practically throwing her to the ground, and True shook her own captor and launched herself at him, managing to slam a shoulder into his side before three guys pulled her away. A sharp stab of pain shot down her arm as her hand was yanked behind her back, and then her head hit something hard. A side window or maybe a door. She tasted metal as her mouth filled with blood.

She fought to keep consciousness as Fallows shoved Mel toward one of his goons and then pivoted to spit at True’s feet before frisking her with rough, callused hands. “Give it up. The cash you snatched. Where is it?” When she shook her head, still seeing spots, he fisted his hand and sent it into her gut. Then again. “You wanna be treated like one of the guys? You will be.” A third blow sent her knees into the dirt, and a fourth brought her face to the ground, where she had a hazy, horizontal view of their go bags and gear being tossed from the inside of the truck cab, ripped open, and searched.

“Please,” she heard Mel beg, and True tried to lift her head to see her. “We don’t have it! We just need to get to my kids. I’ll do anything. Please.” The desperation in her voice landed harder than Fallows’s fists. True knew she meant it.

She managed to find her feet again in time to see Fallows yank Mel up against him, laughing when her head jerked awkwardly at the sudden impact. True bit back a sob, her own impotence the hardestgut punch of all. A scathing look contorted Fallows’s face above his bandanna as he pressed his face right up to Mel’s. “You can see your precious children when I have what’s mine.”

Nausea roiled in True’s gut, and she spit out more blood as an ugly realization dawned in her clouded head. Fallows had blocked their path, right here, right now, for this exact purpose. He’d stooped even lower than True had imagined he could go, exploiting a mother’s primal need for her kids in hopes of wringing something out of her that she couldn’t even give.

Mel continued to claw at Fallows in an effort to escape, and True knew if she found a way to slip free of the vise grip that held her, she would run the rest of the way up Highline on foot if she had to. And she’d only get more desperate the closer the fire crept.

True tried to call out to her, her voice snatched by the howl of the wind. She took a staggered step in her direction, the need to get to her, to help her, burning through some of the pain. Vision still blurring, she homed in on the sight of Fallows’s sidearm. Could she grab it while his attention was on Mel? Or would his men be on True within one step? It was a risk, but True had just decided it was riskier not to when—sirens! Cutting through even the roar of the fire. At the sight of a sheriff’s department Suburban, Fallows’s men scattered as if on instinct, making a leap for their truck, and Fallows released Mel. But not fast enough.

“They rammed us off the road!” True shouted as the deputy who had been stationed at the base of Highline leaped out of his vehicle, his hand already on the service revolver on his belt. His partner took Fallows by force and cuffed him deftly as Mel sank to her knees in the dirt.

Relief washed through True to see her freed, only to feel another clutch of panic as Fallows’s getaway vehicle peeled out, nearly hitting her. It left their boss in the dust, however, just as another car, this one a civilian sedan of some sort, skidded to a stop. Lewis alighted from the driver’s seat, swearing loudly.

“Got about halfway across the parking lot to White before realizing there was no way in hell I wasn’t coming up here to back you up,” he told Mel, who had scrambled to her feet in relief at the sight of him. “When the sheriff detail said they’d just seen Fallows screaming up here in your wake, I knew that meant trouble.”

He turned toward the deputies. “He’s threatening them for what we discovered at the Fallows property,” he shouted as they shoved Fallows into the patrol rig.

“You can’t prove that!” Fallows bellowed back.

“Two full evidence bags of guns, ammo, and cash say otherwise,” Lewis told him, “all to be processed by the DEA ASAP.”

“Fine, fine,” the deputy shouted, coughing on each word. “In the meantime, you’re under arrest for assault and reckless driving,” he told Fallows. “Not to mention obstructing an emergency-evacuation route.”

True heard this from what felt like very far away, hands braced on her knees, still trying to fully come to. Her head rang from her impact with the car. She managed to lift her head and confirm that Fallows was really in cuffs, that Mel was still here, trying to shake off Lewis’s concern for her. It was so hard to see anything in these conditions.

The deputy also eyed the billowing smoke, all that obscured the red wall of Flatiron somewhere behind it, and turned to his partner. “We’d better get downhill.”

At this, Mel grabbed Lewis’s arm. “The kids!” she shouted. “The house! We’ve wasted too much time already!”

Lewis nodded. “I know, I know, but this is all I could get my hands on.” He gestured frantically toward the Honda Civic he’d commandeered. The tire rubber was already melting off the axles.

“We can get the rest of the way up in the department rig,” Mel insisted, gesturing toward the truck she and True had hijacked, which still sat at a haphazard angle on the road where Fallows had hit it. “It’s made it this far.”

One deputy shouted to them, waving them back, and True caught the wordsrestrictedandhazardousandno timebefore his partner urgedhim, “Forget it, just go!” and then they were gone, peeling out in the dirt back in the direction of Carbon, Fallows in the rear seat.

Lewis looked like he might want to follow suit, but he, too, could see there was no stopping Mel.

“We can try,” he shouted, “but we stay only long enough to hold off the fire until an EMS vehicle can get up here for Annie.” He waved Mel toward the department rig. “Load up. True, you head down in the Honda.”

True just shot him a look while hefting herself back up into the battered truck behind Mel. She swiped roughly at the sweat pouring off her face. “When hell freezes over, Lewis.”

“Wouldn’tthatbe a welcome development right about now,” he shot back, sliding into the driver’s seat and hitting the gas.

CHAPTER 28

The heat in the cab of Claude’s truck was now nothing less than an oppressive physical force, pinning Sam in place with the unrelenting strength of a gravitational centrifuge.

“Dad!” Astor screamed in an octave Sam had never heard from her, straining against her seat belt in fear, but he barely registered the sound over his own terror. They hadn’t even left the driveway, and yet directly in front of them, visibility had horribly, terrifyingly improved: the Flatiron Fire burned hot in a dramatic billow of red and pink and black, the wind sending a huge flume of smoke toward the east, illuminating the entire upper road.

“It looks like the ... poster from ... school,” Astor gasped, her words oddly muffled by her mask. They’d had a contest at the elementary; the winner of the best fire-safety poster had been a sixth grader with a penchant for dramatic watercolor strokes. He’d won a trip to the fire station, where he’d allegedly sprayed Dave Lewis with a fire hose. Sam let his eyes rest on Astor’s face for just a fraction of a moment, even her scared expression preferable to the sight of the blaze out the windshield.

He wrapped an arm around her, and she shrank into him, her face pressed close to his armpit.

“Claude!” he prompted, because the old man seemed to have frozen in place in the driver’s seat. “Go!”

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