Chapter 16 - Fire at Carter Development
The glow was visible from half a mile away.
Orange against the night sky.
My construction yard was burning.
Fire crews blocked the entrance.
A storage building near the administrative office had caught first. Flames climbed through the roof while firefighters dragged hoses across the lot.
I felt numb.
Twenty years of work sat behind that gate.
Rollins grabbed my arm.
“Server?”
“Office building. Second floor.”
“Backups?”
“Cloud and off-site weekly.”
He nodded. “Good.”
Then an explosion shook the yard.
Everyone ducked.
A fuel drum had ignited near the equipment shed.
For one terrible second, I thought workers might be inside.
But the yard was closed.
No night shift.
No injuries reported.
A patrol officer found Darius’s truck abandoned two blocks away.
Inside were gloves, bolt cutters, and a half-empty gasoline container.
Darius himself was gone.
Simone, meanwhile, was at the hospital with a cut above her eyebrow and bruising on her arm.
She told police Darius attacked her because he thought she had kept money from him.
For once, I believed her.
At 2:00 a.m., I sat beside Maya in Tiana’s living room watching news footage of my company burning.
Maya leaned against me.
“Is this because of me?”
“No.”
“You said that before.”
“And I’ll keep saying it until you believe it.”
She stared at the television.
“Everything got worse after the shoes.”
“No. The shoes showed us how bad it already was.”
She thought about that.
Then she asked, “Are you going to lose the company?”
“Maybe part of it.”
“Are we going to be poor?”
I looked at her.
“Would that scare you?”
“A little.”
“Me too.”
She gave me a tiny smile.
“But we’d still be us.”
That nearly broke me.
At 3:18 a.m., Melissa called.
The cloud backups were intact.
The forged filings could likely be reversed.
The house transfer had not closed.
The line of credit had been frozen.
For the first time in days, something had gone right.
Then Rollins called.
They had found Darius.
He was picked up at a bus station forty miles away.
In his backpack was cash, fake IDs, and Renee’s locket.
I closed my eyes.
“Can I get it back?”
“Eventually. It’s evidence.”
“I understand.”
“There’s something else.”
Of course there was.
Rollins continued.
“We recovered a flash drive.”
“What’s on it?”
“Spreadsheets. Names. Accounts.”
“Mine?”
“Yours is one.”
I stood.
“What do you mean, one?”
“Darius and Simone may have done versions of this before.”
I looked at Maya sleeping beside me.
“How many families?”
May you like
“We don’t know yet.”
Then Rollins said quietly, “Andre, one of the names on the file belongs to Simone’s ex-husband.”
