Ann Aguirre - Hell Fire

“Sounds like a threat,” Chance said quietly.

“Somebody knew something,” Jesse agreed. “But were they blackmailing Farrell or trying to get him to stop?”

An excellent question. Farrell hadn’t displayed the confidence of a career criminal. He’d seemed hesitant, like he didn’t know what to do when confronted with resistance. His job had been spelled out for him—and I still wasn’t sure what he’d intended to do to Miss Minnie—and once things went wrong, he didn’t know how to respond.

“Is this a religious thing?” I asked. “Or someone just using the Bible for a convenient code?”

“Impossible to say.” Jesse took the Bible from Shannon and flipped through it. As he gave the book a last shake, a scrap of paper tumbled toward the floor.

With his preternatural reflexes, Chance snatched it before it touched. He scanned it and then looked at me with a half frown. “Robert Frost? It’s that ‘Two roads diverged in a wood’ poem.”

“ ‘The Road Not Taken’?” I took the torn yellow sheet from Chance; it looked as if it had been pulled from a legal pad. “Wish we had a sample of Farrell’s handwriting. Then we’d know whether he wrote this down himself or someone else gave it to him.”

“Can I?” At Shannon’s question, I passed it along. Her eyes widened. “This is John McGee’s writing. I’d recognize the crabby little letters anywhere.”

“So Farrell had been talking to McGee,” Jesse mused. “And they both ended up dead.”

I wondered aloud, “Could that have been the point? Someone may have sent Farrell to Miss Minnie’s house right then, knowing we were there.”

A thundercloud frown knit Chance’s brow. “Knowing we wouldn’t react well to a robber threatening an old lady.”

“If that’s the case,” Shannon said, “then the guy on the roof wasn’t working with Farrell. He was there to keep us pinned down until we noticed something was wrong inside.”

Jesse gave her an approving nod. “Good thinking, Shannon.”

She flushed with pleasure. “Just makes sense, right? He didn’t try too hard to hit us. He might’ve been trying to drive us back inside the house, and then Butch heard the intruder.”

It would’ve taken a dog’s hearing to notice someone jimmying the back door with the varmint rifle pinging away. But then, everyone in town knew I took Butch everywhere. As theories went, this one seemed to make sense.

That put a scowl on Saldana’s face. “If that’s true, it makes it even more embarrassing that he got me.”

I didn’t look at him. He’d been shot trying to protect me. I couldn’t make light of that, even if it hadn’t been strictly necessary, but there was no evidence to support any of our hypotheses, anyway.

“We sound like crazed conspiracy theorists,” I said in disgust. “It was this; it was that; it was—”

“Bigfoot,” Chance said, deadpan.

He startled a laugh out of me. “Definitely.”

“Nothing else was underlined,” Jesse murmured, getting us back on track. “I think it’s safe to say our guy isn’t a scholar or a church-goer.”

Shannon nodded. “No shit. I expect to find a closet weed farm somewhere in here. But if you want to scope out the church scene, there’s a potluck dinner every Saturday night.”

“That’s your grandfather’s territory,” Chance pointed out. “Is that going to be a problem for you?”

She shrugged. “Up until we leave, everything here is going to cause problems for me. I’m just waiting for it to hit the fan.”

At that point, Butch jumped out of my bag into her arms. She caught him with a startled laugh. He was simply the best dog ever; he seemed to sense that she would derive comfort from snuggling him instead of thinking about her troubles.

I rubbed my hands against my denim-clad thighs, trying to scrub away the residual filth of poking around that bathroom. To me, Farrell’s home hygiene suggested he didn’t believe he had long to live, and thus, saw no point in keeping up the place. But I wasn’t sure I could profile someone, based on slovenly ways.

“Then I’d say a church social is what we need to scope out the local color.”

“This won’t end well,” Jesse predicted.

We didn’t find anything else of interest, not even that closet weed farm Shannon expected. I was starting to get frustrated with all the separate pieces not coalescing into a recognizable shape. There’s a reason I hate jigsaw puzzles. I don’t have the patience to find all the border pieces, especially when they’re all the same shade of gray.

When we left Farrell’s house, we took the Bible. I’d handle it later, but it didn’t seem wise to hang around Farrell’s place longer than necessary. If Sheriff Robinson found us here, the consequences would be unpleasant.

“Let’s take one last look around,” Jesse said.

Shannon cocked a brow. “What’re we looking for?”

“Anything that offers a hint at who’s been hanging around,” he answered. “Corine learned a lot from a button, as I recall.”

That much was true. Any small object that might’ve dropped when people were coming and going might tell us something. Right now we had no clue why Curtis Farrell had decided to trade a life of petty drugs and making change for one big felony.

Chance nodded. “Better to be sure we don’t miss anything. Somebody will be along to shovel this place out, so we probably won’t have another shot at this. Corine, you want to take a look around back?”

I nodded as they divided up the rest of the small yard. Shannon kept Butch, and he showed no signs of minding the attention. I circled the house. Near the back door, I found some weird impressions in the dirt behind Farrell’s garage. It would take a tracker to make anything of the morass of churned mud, unless—

I’d never have attempted, or even considered anything like this in the past, but since dying, my gift seemed to have stretched into unknown dimensions. Before, I wouldn’t have tried to read a whole house. I knelt, studying the ground: torn earth and grass pulled up by the roots. I wouldn’t be able to do anything with the plants, but what about dirt?

The others were searching the front and sides. If Chance or Jesse had been there, they probably would have tried to talk me out of it. I gazed at the new brand on my palm, the smooth, unscarred skin around it, and felt a cold, eerie certainty. I could do this. I didn’t know what the mark portended, but it signified change. Though I had no way to prove it, I suspected I’d received more of my mother’s power. Instead of passing to me cleanly during her spell, something must have gone wrong and it had wound up in the necklace instead. Now that I’d touched it, I’d absorbed the rest, but there was no way to know how it would affect me down the road.

But it had made me a more powerful handler, no question.

Without hesitation, I sank my fingers into the dirt. It felt like bathing my hand in chemical fire, but I gritted my teeth and held on. Nobody died here; it wasn’t that bad, but it was awful enough.

I became two men at once, locked in a life-or-death struggle. That had never happened to me before because objects belonged to one person. Not dirt—it belonged to everyone, no one, or whoever trod upon it.

Their conflicting emotions swamped me: greed, anger, terror, exhilaration, desperation. I seesawed between the apogee and the abyss while they grappled and tore the earth. I’d have given a lot to hear what they were saying, but it never worked like that for me. I imagined the grunts and gasps of breath while pain washed over me in waves of red fire. Though I tried, I couldn’t jerk my hand out of the soil until the vision ended. Immersion, immolation; I hovered but a half step away from one or the other.