He stopped dressing and leaned over to kiss me. “That was Tyler. They think they’re on to something. I need to go find out what’s going on. Do you want to come with me?”
I thought about it for a few seconds but then shook my head. “No. You go on and handle that. I’ll stay behind and focus on the issue with the company.”
“Divide and conquer,” he said, then finished getting dressed.
I nodded, and he kissed me again. “I’ll see you later.”
I watched him leave, wondering how he felt about what had just happened between us. It wasn’t like it hadn’t been bubbling up ever since we got into town. Since well before that, if I was really going to be honest with myself. But thinking about something and actually letting it happen were two very different things.
Now that we had given in to our desire for each other, how would it change things between us?
I finally forced myself out of bed and took a shower before getting dressed and settling into work. After scanning over my to-do lists briefly, I called Landon. The next few hours involved several more phone calls with Landon, each one just as uncomfortable as the one before.
It was hard to talk to him now. There was no reason to think he would, but I felt like he might find out what happened just by the sound of my voice. When he asked to video chat, it was even worse. He had to be able to see it written on my face.
“Are you okay?” he finally asked.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “Tom is just really stressed, but I’m handling it. Everything is good.”
We got off the phone, and I only gave myself a few seconds of cringe time before burying myself in the rest of the tasks for the day.
17
Tom
The papers spread across the dining room table looked more like schematics than notes from a private investigator and amateur research at the local library. For that matter, the men surrounding the table looking down at those papers and a map of the street where our bar sat, looked more like a recreation of an old Sinatra-style heist film from the sixties. I watched as Mason and Tyler grumbled over the possibility that a frankly old man could start the fire himself, while Jordan and Matt insisted it was arson for hire.
“I’m telling you,” Jordan said, one finger pressing down into the table and trying to keep his voice low despite the anger rumbling in it, “he hired someone to do it. I would put money on it. There is no way that old fart could start a fire at our place, get over the fence and out to the street, and not be seen and heard grunting by everyone within a half-mile radius. He hired a pro.”
“Considering what we know about his past, it would make sense,” Matt said, chiming in. “We know he’s at least in contact with underworld types and has a gambling problem. What are the chances that he doesn’t know someone who could light a place up for him? Especially if it meant he got more business and could pay off his debts faster.”
“I just don’t see it,” Mason said. “The most logical conclusion is the simplest one, most of the time. And the most logical conclusion is he set the fire himself. He probably got drunk one night and figured it was high time we went away and snuck in.”
“But the investigators are still saying the fire could have started inside. Do you think he would be able to break in without someone noticing?” Matt asked.
“Yes,” Mason said. “It would be hard, but it’s doable. We didn’t exactly have a state-of-the-art security system set up over there. And we don’t know that the fire started inside, just that it might have. Let’s not put all our eggs in that basket.”
“To that point,” I said, standing, “we don’t know for sure that it was Danny at all.”
A chorus of objections began, and I put my hands out in a conciliatory way to stop them.
“I know, I know,” I said. “It certainly looks like it is him. And all the evidence seems to point to it. And like Mason said, the simplest answer is usually the right one, but that said, we don’t know for sure. Stranger things have happened. Dallas said that the first fire Danny happened to be around was ruled an arson, but that the police said Danny had a rock-solid alibi. This all could be a coincidence.”
There was silence for a moment, and then Jordan spoke. When he did, his voice was low and even, but there was a barely contained rage behind it. He stared at me directly when he did so, and I felt the anger bubbling up in his words.
“Do you really think that, Tom? Is that really, what you think?”
I took a moment to respond, and then I bowed my head. “No. No, I don’t. But I also am not going to jump to a conclusion without solid, undeniable evidence. Danny is a son of a bitch, and I’d like to slap the taste out of his mouth but being a son of a bitch doesn’t necessarily mean you’re an arsonist.”
Jordan huffed in disbelief, but there was a general agreement among the rest of them. When Jordan realized he was outnumbered and that there was no uprising to challenge my thoughts, he sat down hard in his chair and took a swig of the beer that sat in front of him.
“Bullshit,” he muttered. I ignored him for the moment.
I sat back and let my brothers continue to discuss the most recent developments, which as it turned out were minimal. The police had essentially told us there was not much to learn, and that they would look to forensic investigators to figure things out. The problem of course being that there was no timeline. And without a timeline, there was no resolution.
The insurance representative was with us on the idea that it was likely arson, but his hands were tied. Unless it was ruled arson by the police, there wasn’t much he could do, and that left me either footing the entire bill for starting a new bar in hopes of maybe getting an insurance payment in the future, or playing the waiting game. My brothers had all agreed that waiting for insurance was the fairest thing to do, and since we were all very convinced of the crime being committed, that hopefully it wouldn’t take long.
The eventual conclusion was that the police weren’t doing enough, one way or the other, and that it was time for us to start taking matters into our own hands. I worried what exactly some of them had in mind, but it was nonetheless true. The police were dragging their feet. It was time for someone else to get involved.
As I listened to my brothers drift into a conversation about what else they could do to speed the investigation along, my mind wandered elsewhere. Specifically, to last night and early this morning. A vision of Amanda—her naked body curled up under the sheets of the bed in our hotel room, her taut nipples poking up while one hand slid between her thighs—filled my mind and I had to shake it off. Now was not exactly the time to be getting an erection, and I needed a clear mind to decide what we were going to do next.
But thoughts of Amanda weren’t going to go away that easily, and I remarked to myself how sex with her blew every other experience I’d ever had completely out of the water. She was gorgeous, obviously, but besides that there was a hunger and a passion in our experience. She was more forward and aggressive than I had ever seen her, and she knew how to get exactly what she wanted. She harbored a natural talent for satisfying my needs, doing things I didn’t even know I liked, and being so damned alluring that our second round that morning was almost as memorable as the sudden and intense first one.