Page 70 of Into the Fire

Marty glanced at the pad on his way past with the phone log. “That’s everybody who ate chili and one man who didn’t eat enough of it,” he said. “I’ll type up the lunch hour in the morning. Go home, Boone. The tower will still be broken tomorrow.”

I looked at the ninth name for a while after he said it.

We stripped the letdown stations that night, all of them, and laid the hardware out on the packing table in rows under the loft lights. Hollis took the first pass, piece by piece, with a lens and a rag. I took the second. Everything came up clean. Whoever had cut that link had cut one link.

Hollis went to bed a little after midnight. I told Dante to go too, but he stayed.

I should have stopped there.

Instead, I went down the rack line to the third rack, second bay, and took Dante’s harness down and started through it: leg straps, chest strap, every buckle. I looked for anywhere a blade could have left a mark.

I finished and hung it up.

“Do you think it was for me?” Dante asked.

“It could have been.”

“It could have been for Nash, too. He’s the one who inspects everything on this base. If somebody wants the investigation slowed down, breaking the loft foreman does it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Or it wasn’t for anybody in particular. If you break something and hurt whoever draws the ride, the base will spend a month looking at itself instead of at Carson Ridge. That works too.”

“Nash is wearing a boot because he was where you were supposed to be.”

“Yes, but I’m here,” Dante said.

“Right now.”

I reached out for him. I wrapped a hand around the back of his neck and pulled him in, staring into his eyes. We stayed like that for a minute, maybe.

“You know this doesn’t mean you get to inspect everything I’m wearing,” he said.

“Depends on who packed it.”

“Absolutely not.”

I almost smiled. I let him go, and we turned off the loft lights together.

***

I found Shep at the wash rack the next morning with the ice machine.

The machine was supposed to be unplugged and waiting for Dwyer. It was on its side on a tarp with its back off, and Shep was lying half under it with a socket wrench and an open granola bar balanced on the housing.

“Dwyer’s coming Monday,” I said.

“Dwyer’s been coming Monday for three weeks.” His voice came out from under the machine. “We want ice.”

“Hollis already broke it worse.”

“Hollis fixed the wrong thing. The compressor’s fine, it’s the—” He slid out, sat up, and took a bite of the bar while he pointed the wrench at something inside the machine that meant nothing to me. “That. Two-dollar part. I looked it up.”

“Did you order it?”

“Marty needs me to build the case first.”

I did my job.