Page 11 of Up In Smoke

He leaned over and kissed her on her forehead. That at least made her smile. It was the least he could do for all she had given them—even if it hadn't been enough.

“You have to get back to that fancy job of yours?” she asked, finally flicking the long ash into the old brown glass tray next to her. Both it and she looked like relics.

Again, he wanted to laugh—as if being a firefighter was abig fancy job. But seeing his mother and seeing where his brothers had ended up, he could also see where she would believe that. “I do.”

As he turned to leave, he had another almost more horrifying thought. “What about Mario?”

“What about him?” She shrugged as though she also had no idea about her third child.

“Is he in rehab?”

“Why would he be in rehab? He's doing great.” She took another drag and Luke’s heart broke for her lungs and all the damage her smoking had already done. Again, though, he knew she was a victim of her circumstances. She’d given the boys enough to get out and make things better even if she hadn’t been able to do it for herself. Luke and Carlos had actually taken advantage of the possibilities.

Luke didn't even know what she meant that Mario was “doing great.” For a brother who'd already been through rehab twice and had insisted all the way up until the moment he entered the facility each time that he was clean and had stayed sober, there was no trusting what he reported. Luke couldn’t trust his mother either. He’d have to see it for himself.

Another thought hit. “What about J-ho? You see him anymore?”

His mother looked at him like he'd gone off his rocker. “Why are you asking about J-ho? And why would I even see him?”

J-ho and Tiago had been inseparable as kids and that was the problem. Lupe Hernandez had never hidden the fact that she wasn’t home. It wasn’t unusual in their neighborhoods. So the neighbors had relied on each other to watch the kids because they'd all worked their fingers to the bone and none of the parents could afford real childcare.

Luke realized now that meant the possible suspect pool of arsonists who could have followed Luke from home to home was larger than he might imagine. Tiago had done time. If Luke told the chief to look into his oldest brother, Tiago would likely go back in whether he'd done it or not.

His mother would plausibly disown him for turning his brother in, no matter what the evidence showed. What if Luke turned the suspicion on Tiago and he was wrong? What if it was Mario?

Mario concerned him. He hadn't seen his youngest brother in some time, and the last time he had seen him, Mario had been in one of those jovial good moods, where everything was right. With the third Hernandez brother that was suspicious. But with nothing to act on, Luke had asked his few pointed questions and was now forced to let it lie if he didn’t want to turn in his family members on a horrid suspicion that he couldn’t back up.

Though at one point he'd wanted to be a police officer, Luke was now grateful that his own criminal record had made certain that it didn't work out. At the time, he had been furious with Mario for getting him caught and then trying to blame it on Carlos. But now the thought of being in a job where he consistently had to put his own brothers up on the suspect list was something he was grateful he didn't have to do.

This was hard enough.

But if he didn't find out who the arsonist was soon enough, someone was going to die. Previously, the homes their firebug had set ablaze had been abandoned. It didn't pass Luke's notice that two of the places he had lived in had been in such bad repair that they'd been left to rot. The store where he'd worked might not have quite been rotting, but it had been sitting empty.

Ivy's house, however, was an entirely different story. Not only was the home lived in, she’d been in it at the time and, according to the neighbors, it had been obvious she was home. That was going to go down as an attempted murder.

The game had just become deadly.

If he couldn't figure out who knew his own personal history and was lighting it on fire, those deaths would fall on Luke. It didn’t matter if he set the fires himself or simply hadn’t stopped it.

Tiago would be arrested as soon as they could find him if Luke even hinted at the possibility. People in this town knew the Hernandez boys, knew what kinds of trouble they could cause. Luke had worked so hard to distance himself from a family that he couldn't untangle himself from. But, as he thought about how to go about his investigation, an idea began to form.

He wondered just how much he trusted her.

Chapter Ten

“What do you mean?” Ivy stopped, the paint roller still in her hands as she turned to look at Luke.

“Nothing.” He covered too quickly.

She was going to have to fire him. Could she fire someone she wasn't paying? “That was super cryptic. And Idon'tkeep secrets.”

She turned back to the wall, applying the paint, but stopped when his voice came again.

“What do you mean you don't keep secrets? You’re one big secret.”

She was about to break into a sweat and not because she was getting a workout despite all the windows being open to the winter air. This was a cold sweat. She’d meant she didn’t keep secretsnow. But everything before she’d arrived in Redemption was not up for discussion. She would show people her degree for a job interview and that was the only thing she would say about it.

She couldn't have people picking at her past. She'd worked too hard to get away from it. So she shifted the topic, hard. “You keep asking things that sound like you know more about my fire than you're letting on.”

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