Ray nodded slowly. Outside, the sun was going down on the scorched shop, and somewhere across town, Victor Larkin was about to learn what it felt like to have the truth finally catch up.
Jack thought about his father — the man who burned pancakes, who saved screws, who walked into fire because people were still inside. He thought about the journal line, nine years old, finally finished.
check the wiring — didn't look right.
You were right, Dad, Jack whispered.
They arrested Victor Larkin on a Tuesday morning, in the thin gray light before the town had decided what kind of day it wanted to be.
Jack heard about it the way everyone at the shop heard about everything now — Cole's phone buzzing against the workbench, Cole reading the screen, Cole setting the phone down very carefully, the way a man sets down something that might explode.
They got him, Cole said. "At his house. Ten minutes ago. No fight in him."
The shop went quiet in the particular way it went quiet now, all of them having learned the sound of news landing. Mason set his wrench down. Cal stopped sweeping. Ray stood by the parts shelf with a gasket in his hands and did not move for a long moment.
Jack felt something loosen behind his ribs, and then, stranger, felt almost disappointed — as if he had been braced for a final battle and been handed a phone call instead. He had imagined Larkin running, imagined sirens, imagined himself somehow in the middle of it. Instead the man had been taken in his bathrobe, probably, blinking at detectives on his own porch.
His phone buzzed in his pocket — MOM, with three exclamation marks, which meant she'd heard it on the scanner app she pretended not to have. He texted back: I'm okay. At the shop. Then, because it was true: It's over. Almost.
Mason came over and clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to stagger him, and Cal — Cal, who never said anything — said, "Your dad would've liked this part," and Jack didn't know what to do with that except nod. The night of the shop fire kept surfacing in him at odd moments: the smoke rolling under the office door, his own hands remembering the training before his mind caught up. He'd dreamed about it twice. In the dreams, his father was always just around the corner, saying, "Low, Jackie. Look low."
Where are they taking him? Ray asked.
County holding first, Cole said. "Then they'll move him. Fire marshal wants him on ice until the arraignment."
Ray nodded slowly. He set the gasket on the shelf with exaggerated care, the way old men handle things when their hands want to shake.
I want five minutes with him, Ray said. "Before they put him away. At the lot."
Cole looked at him. "Ray—"
Not to touch him. I don't need to touch him. Ray's voice was level, but there was something underneath it, some deep tectonic pressure. "I need him to stand on that ground and hear it said out loud. Then I'm done carrying it."
Cole studied him for a long moment, then picked his phone back up and stepped into the office. Jack could hear the murmur of his voice through the thin wall. When Cole came back out, his face gave nothing away, which with Cole meant yes.
Detective says five minutes, Cole said. "Supervised. You don't go alone — I go, and the kid goes."
Jack's head came up. "Me?"
You earned it, Cole said simply.
They rode in Cole's truck, Ray in the passenger seat with his hands folded in his lap like a man going to church, Jack in the back with his backpack between his feet out of pure habit. Nobody spoke. The town slid past, ordinary and sunlit, and Jack thought about how strange it was that the worst night of Ray's life had happened in a place you could drive past without noticing.
The lot was chained.
That was the first thing Jack noticed — a rusted chain across the entrance, a padlock, a faded NO TRESPASSING sign wired to the fence, all of it performing a vigilance nobody had felt the need to perform nine years ago. Behind the fence: cracked concrete, weeds pushing through in green defiance, the blackened footprint of the foundation where the warehouse had stood. You could still see it if you knew what you were looking at — a great dark rectangle, like a shadow the building had left behind when it burned.
Ray stared at that shadow for a long moment, and Jack watched the old man's face do something complicated. Later Ray would tell him what he'd been seeing: not the lot, but the night — the orange mouth of a doorway that wasn't a doorway, the heat on his knees through his jeans, Cole's voice shouting Frankie's name and then just shouting, the moment he'd understood the exit was behind him and his legs wouldn't do what he told them. "I thought that was it," Ray said quietly, as if Jack had asked. "I made my peace with it right there on that floor. And then there was a light. A flashlight. And your dad's voice saying, 'On your feet, gentlemen, the night is young.'"
Two police cruisers were already there. Larkin stood between two officers beside the second car, hands cuffed in front of him, wearing a windbreaker zipped to his throat and the stunned, flattened expression of a man whose morning had come apart. He was thinner than Jack had imagined. Smaller. The great villain of the last two months looked, in the daylight, like somebody's tired uncle.
The detective — a woman named Okafor, with the patient eyes of someone who had seen every version of guilt — met them at the fence.
Five minutes, she said to Ray. "He stays cuffed. My officers stay close. You say what you came to say."
Ray nodded. He walked through the opened gate like a man walking into deep water.
Jack followed with Cole, and the three of them stopped ten feet from Larkin on the broken concrete. The wind moved through the weeds. Somewhere far off, a truck downshifted on the highway.