She ran around the side of the house through the dark, her feet finding the grass by memory because she'd run this yard a hundred times as a child, past the corner of the house and into the back field. And she could see the tail lights, small red, a car or something light, 50 yards out and moving. And she was not going to catch it on foot. And she knew it.

And she ran anyway. She stopped at the fence line. The tail lights kept going. The field swallowed them.

She stood at the back of her grandfather's property with the smoke in her hair and the cold on her face and the sound of Crane's extinguisher still going at the front of the house. And she breathed ragged deep the full breath of someone who had been running on compressed air for 3 weeks and was finally taking in as much as her lungs could hold. Then she turned around and walked back. Crane had the fire down to smoke.

The tree was damaged, the lower third of it, the bark scorched, and the lowest two branches gone, but the core of it was standing. It would survive. She looked at it in the dark at the smoke rising from what was left of those branches, and she thought about Eleanor's hand on the bark, the brief particular touch of something being left. And she felt something moved through her that had no clean emotional name.

Not grief, not rage, not relief, some compound of all three, and something else underneath it that was much older than any of them. Crane came to stand beside her. He still had the extinguisher. He looked at the tree.

It'll live, he said. I know, she said. The house is clean, he said. He didn't touch the house.

He didn't want to touch the house, she said. He wanted to touch something that mattered, something that couldn't be repaired in a lawyer's office. She looked at the scorched bark. He still doesn't understand what he's dealing with.

No, Crane said. He doesn't. Her phone buzzed. Silas.

I see the call from Decker, Silas said when she picked up, Are you all right? Yes, she said. Trees damaged, house is clean.

He was here and he's gone. License plate on the vehicle. I didn't get it, she said. Went out through the back field.

A pause. Massen was on a call when he left the county road. Silas said, "We think he called someone who was already at the property. Webb, possibly."

The fire was set before Massen left the shop, which meant it had been running while they were all watching the headlights on the county road. while she was on the Road King with the engine running and the baylights blazing and the four motorcycles saying we are here. The fire had been burning while they held the position. He planned for both outcomes, she said. Yes, Silas said if we held and he backed down, the message still got sent.

"If we didn't hold, he had more planned."

Silas said, "I think so." She looked at the scorched tree. She looked at the house. dark, quiet, undamaged. The same house her grandfather had come home to for 40 years.

The same house where Eleanor made soup on the stove and called her by her first name when she worried and said, "You have enough." when she was trying to carry something alone. The fire department was somewhere on the county road. She could hear the distant change in the air that came before sirens, the way sound bent around a coming vehicle. "Silas," she said.

Yeah. Massen has nothing left. She said everything he built independently is in Puit's documentation. The fire is criminal evidence.

Webb left tracks in that field. She watched the smoke. He has nothing left except the thing desperate people do when they have nothing left. A long pause.

I know, Silas said. He's going to come directly. Not at me, she said. He's done coming at me.

I'm not the soft target anymore, and he knows it. She looked at the house. He's going to come at you. The silence on the line had a different quality now.

Not the organizational 3-second silence, not the weightbearing silence. Something older. The silence of a man receiving information he had already considered and had been hoping was wrong. When Silas said tonight, she said before his lawyers know what Puit gave us. before the AG desk opens in the morning and the referral becomes formal.

He has one window and it closes at sunrise and he knows it. She turned away from the tree. Get everyone inside, lock the bay, call Burch, and tell her to stay on the night line. And you, he said.

She was already walking back around the house toward her truck. Crane was beside her, reading the direction of her movement, putting the extinguisher back in his saddle bag. I'm coming back, she said. Ria, I'm coming back.