Chapter Twenty-Four – Lucy

 

“L-l-lucy?” Bernadine, from Shamrock Water, asked again as Carter and I emerged from the hallway containing the fire examiner archives, that damned birthday card held up in front of her like a shield. “I have that card to sign—”

I just looked at her, file folder tucked under one arm as I bit back the urge to snap at her, to tell her what she could really do with the Mayor’s birthday card. In graphic, triple X detail. She wasn’t a bad person; she was just kind of a busybody. But, I held it back, the sweet words of the one person I wanted to protect in all this ricocheting inside my mind.

Amber telling me she thought Cassidy and I were angels. Angels for saving her life. For pulling her out of the flames, for helping her mother keep her out of the hospital because of the crushing costs of an emergency room visit and ambulance ride.

So I kept my mouth shut. Because Amber was more important than telling Bernadine where that card might fit.

Maybe it was the anger on my face, the fire in my eyes, or the way I held my chin, but she closed her mouth with a click of her teeth and took two steps back, her backside bumping into the cubicle wall right behind her.

I know I should have felt bad, but I was too busy being upset. Too busy being enraged by the idea that maybe Bunk had done something to set back our investigation, ruin our chances of figuring out what was going on. Had he been the one to move the file that way? Was he going back, covering his tracks?

“Never mind,” she nearly squeaked as we swept past her.

“Sorry,” Carter said, “we’re just in a hurry.”

“O-o-okay,” Bernadine stumbled at our backs as we turned the corner and headed straight for Bunk’s office like two bloodhounds following an escaped convict’s trail. “Maybe later?” she called after us. “When you’re done?”

Carter right on my heels, I just kept going. Charging forward like a firefighter into the flames. Like Cassidy would’ve wanted.

Up ahead, Bunk’s door was open. I stomped my way in, and he looked up at me in surprise.

“Skinner?” he asked, glancing over at me from his computer monitor. Behind me, Carter gently closed Bunk’s office door. My boss looked past me, at Carter, but his eyes quickly came back to mine. “What’re you doing here? Thought you were closing up those investigations? Why the hell aren’t you in the field?”

“This is what I’m doing here,” I said, tossing the file on Bunk’s messy, crowded desk. “Recognize it?”

He glanced down at the file, shrugged at me. “No. Should I?”

“It’s the file on the fire at the Christmas tree lighting, three years ago. Remember that?”

“Yeah, of course I do.”

“Of course you do,” I said. “You were the damned investigator on it, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, letting the words trickle from his mouth as he slowly nodded, “I was. What’s your point?”

“Didn’t you recognize any of the names of the people on my case?”

“Should I have?”

I leaned forward over his desk, stabbed the list of the non-terminally injured with my finger. “Well, they were right fucking here, Bunk.”

His eyes went wide before he quickly furrowed his brow, looking down at the page I’d tossed in front of him. “What?” he asked. “Are you serious?”

“Every single goddamn person that was injured,” I nearly shouted as I prodded the page with my finger to emphasize each word, “without fucking fail. Right here.”

He looked up at me as he picked up the file. “But that’s just insane. What’re the odds of that happening?”

“Odds?” I asked. “Odds! Come on, Bunk, you know that’s more than a coincidence. You know as well as I do there’s no goddamn odds about this! This isn’t horse racing!”

He frowned and shook his head as he leaned back from the desk. “So, what? What’re you saying? Something that happened to those people three years ago is causing them to spontaneously combust now? That how you’ve decided you’re going to solve this case, huh? You think anyone’s going to believe that shit? You think anyone’s going to believe the stories from three years ago? You’re fucking dreaming, Skinner.”

I bared my teeth as I straightened up a little, folded my arms across my chest. “Doesn’t matter what anyone’s going to fucking believe, Bunk. What matters is the truth, and trying to save anyone else who might be in harm’s way.”

His eyes flickered down to the page. “What does it matter, anyways? All the people on there already went up, didn’t they? We couldn’t do anything to save them. History should stay history.”

“Not all of them,” I said, stepping forward and leaning over his desk. “There was one girl. Cassidy and I helped her, bound up her burned arm, kept her off the ambulance because her mom couldn’t afford it. Amber Vargas. A sweet, wonderful girl who doesn’t deserve to go up in a pillar of fire just because of the past coming back to bite her in the ass.”

My boss’s mouth dropped open. He looked down at the file.

“So there’s one more victim out there,” I growled, planting both fists on the edge of his desk. “A young woman. So fucking talk. What did you keep out of the file, Bunk? How’d you come up with your cause of the fire, huh? Just pull it out of thin air?”

He sighed through his nose, chewing on the inside of his mouth as he looked away. His head hung forward a little bit as he frowned deeply at the page in front of him. For a second, he almost was about to say something, looked like he was going to try and explain himself. But all he did was open his mouth for a second, then shut it.

“Look,” Carter said as he took a step forward, flanking me like a good partner, “we don’t care about what kind of bullshit you came up with. What we care about is what you actually saw. And, if we’re right, and there’s a connection between what happened three years ago, and what’s going on today in Shamrock, I can stop it from hurting Amber. Lucy and I can stop it together. But we need to know. Now.”

“And who are you, exactly?”

“Carter Grant,” I said. “The fire investigator from out of town.”

“I sort of specialize in this kind of thing.”

Bunk nodded as we spoke, seemed to resign himself. “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. I’ll tell you what I remember. What didn’t go in the files, okay?”

“Talk fast,” I said. “Because I don’t think we have much time.”

“All right. This is what people told me, okay? I thought it was batshit back then, but, now, I dunno. I never thought it would all come back like this. But, yeah, at the time I thought something had just gotten into the water. Or it was shock, or something.”

I pulled out my notepad, flicked it open as I took a pen from his desk. “Go on.”

“Wings,” he said, almost so quietly I couldn’t hear it.

“Keep going,” I said, trying to move him along, even as my eyes flickered to the analog clock hanging on my boss’s wall.

“Wings is what people saw. A giant thing, a creature or something, coming down out of the sky, landing right on the tree. Wings made of flames, a couple of them said, and the thing just went up, and the fire started to spread as it seemed to dissolve into ash before their eyes. Fucking crazy talk, right?”

“Yeah,” Carter said from beside me, nodding. “But it wasn’t.”

“Well, you try telling the mayor’s office that, huh? You try telling the big guys upstairs what people were saying. Know what they told me?”

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “Same thing you told me last night.”

He nodded solemnly. “What was I supposed to do? It was the biggest tragedy here in decades, Lucy. Biggest goddamn tragedy, and people were saying there was a fucking UFO that landed on this thing, that a UFO killed all these people.”

Silence in the room. Silence so deep, it seemed to suck in even the sound of the building’s air conditioner. So silent all I could hear was the hum of the office lights overhead, and the fan in Bunk’s computer.

“A phoenix,” Carter said, awe in his voice as he wiped a hand down his face. “A goddamn phoenix.” He grabbed my shoulder and turned me towards him. “A phoenix, Lucy. I had it all wrong.”

“Fucking Phoenix?” Bunk asked, his voice confused. “What the fuck’s Arizona gotta do with this?”

Carter turned to Bunk, shook his head. “Not the place…” He sighed and shook his head again as he turned back to me. “Lucy, we’ve gotta go. This Amber girl, do you know where she is? And I need to call the office, see if they know what we can do to help her.”

“Wait,” I said. “The exorcism won’t work?”

He shook his head. “Nope. I don’t know what will work. Everyone thought they were dead a long, long time ago.”

“Fucking exorcism?” Bunk groaned, his chair creaking as he settled back into it, his hand slapping against his forehead in disgust. “Will you listen to this fucking malarkey? Where’d you dig this guy up? Same place the cops always get Madame Blavatsky for their cold cases?”

I turned and glared at Bunk. “Carter knows what the hell he’s doing, Bunk. More importantly, he’s never lied to me, or tried to make me compromise my values. So, if the blood on your hands isn’t proof enough for you, just do everyone a goddamn favor and keep your opinions to yourself while we’re trying to save lives.”

“Save fucking lives?” Bunk asked, his voice flat. He huffed and turned away. “Save fucking lives? Skinner, I gave you twenty-four fucking hours on this shit, because I thought you needed the time to pull your head out of your ass. But what did you do instead? You somehow managed to discover a fucking way to ram it even farther up there.”

My mouth dropped open. Was he really going to—?

“You’re off the case,” he said, his voice full of derision and something else, pity maybe. “You’re relieved, Lucy.”

My fists balled up at my sides as I gritted my teeth together, clenched my jaw so tightly I could crack walnuts. I took a small step towards him. “I can’t believe—”

Carter put a hand on my shoulder, stopping me. “Lucy, we don’t have time. We need to go.”

“Yeah, your boyfriend’s right about one goddamn thing,” Bunk said as he went to stand. “Go. Take some time off and get your shit together before you’re ready to come back and put forward some sane goddamn explanations.”

I turned back to Carter, gave him a nod as I tried to cram all my anger into one tight little ball, and stuff it down as far as it would go. So what if I was suspended? So what if I was off the investigation? What mattered right now was Amber, and getting her to safety. To make sure she lived through this thing. “Shamrock General, Oncology Center. I know the room number.”

“Really?” Carter asked, already pulling open the door and flipping open his phone. “Already?”

“She’s an old friend,” I explained, following after him.

“Thought I told you to stay the fuck out of this,” Bunk said, planting his hands on his hips.

I crossed my arms over my chest as I turned back to my boss. “Well, clearly she’s not part of this. Far as you and this office are concerned, I’m just visiting an old friend in the hospital.”

“Skinner,” Bunk said, looking from me to Carter, and back again, “this is just fucking ridiculous. You hear yourself? How fucking crazy you sound? You know this is crazy, right?”

I just gave him a tight smile. “If you’d seen the things I’ve seen, Bunk, you wouldn’t think any of this was crazy.”

“Lucy,” Carter said. “We gotta go.”

“Yeah,” I replied as I turned to follow after him. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Skinner,” my boss said, “please, kid. Don’t go with this guy. This is fucking crazy, and you know it.”

“I told you,” I replied. “This isn’t crazy. Right now, this is the only sane thing in the world.”

“Lucy,” he said, his voice heaving with a great sigh. “You go after him, I don’t know what I can do for you. This doesn’t reflect well on your record, you know? We need stable people in this department. You understand what I’m saying here?”

He was saying I didn’t have a job after this. That, even if I did manage to save Amber, my job with the city of Shamrock and any chance at a career here, was over. There was no coming back from this. No turning over a new leaf. Even if Carter and I were right, I still had to face the consequences.

“You do, right?” he asked. “Is that what Cassidy would have wanted? Or your dad? For you to be washed up because of you suddenly believing in UFOs and ghosts and shit?”

But, if I stayed, Amber would be next. Either Phillip Winters would get her, or the flames would. Just like they’d consumed Cassidy and the others.

I turned back to him. “No,” I said, my eyes narrowing as I focused in on him, “what they would have wanted is for me to try and save that girl. For me to do what was right, even with my career on the line.”

Before Bunk could reply, I spun on my heel and joined Carter outside my boss’s office.

As we strode down the hallway, heading for the stairs we’d come up only a few minutes prior, I heard Bunk yell in frustration, a raw, angry shout that echoed down the halls after us. “Skinner! Dammit!”

I didn’t waver, though. I just kept after Carter.

Where I couldn’t save Cassidy, I was going to save Amber. I’d save her with the handsome, funny, weird private investigator in front of me.

Even if it was the last thing I did.