He always wanted to know where Kelly was. Every minute of every day. He could just imagine how much she’d appreciate this when she was well into her teenage years.
When Kelly saw the signs for an upcoming service center, she announced that she was so hungry she thought she might die.
“We wouldn’t want that,” her father said. “I guess I could use a coffee. I’ll make a quick pit stop.”
Turned out not to be so quick. Given that it was Saturday, and the middle of summer, the lot was packed, and the lineup deep when they went into the restaurant. When they finally reached the counter, Glen placed their order. The girl ringing up the sale said the nuggets would take a few minutes, but she had his coffee to him in seconds. Glen wrapped his hand around the takeout cup and quickly let go.
“Yikes,” he said. “We’ll be up there before this is cool enough to drink.” He put the tip of his index finger on the bottom lip, and his thumb on the edge of the plastic lid.
“Where’s my nuggets?” Kelly asked.
“The girl said they’d just take a—”
That was when the woman screamed, “He’s on fire! There’s a man on fire!”
The first thing Glen thought was, no way! A car on fire, maybe. Wasn’t unheard of for a car to overheat here along the interstate, especially when it was pushing ninety degrees out there. But a man in flames? That didn’t sound right.
The second thing he thought was, he had a fire extinguisher in his pickup, a Ford F-150 with the words GARBER CONTRACTING, MILFORD plastered on the doors. Should he run out, grab the extinguisher from behind the driver’s seat, and try to help this guy, assuming what this woman said was true?
Yeah, maybe. Except he wasn’t about to leave Kelly all by herself in a crowded, roadside fast-food joint, where someone could grab a kid, toss her in a car, and be God knows where in ten minutes.
“Honey,” he said to her, “we’re going to the truck.”
“What about my—?”
But by the way her dad pulled her arm, she knew something bad was going on. She hadn’t only heard the woman screaming about that guy, she could feel the anxiety sweeping the room. People trying to decide what to do. Whether to stay in there, flock to the window and gawk, or run outside and get a front-row seat.
Glen guided Kelly quickly to the door, pushing past people, butting in ahead of them to get outside. Coming out of the air-conditioning, the midday heat hit them like a warm, smothering blanket.
“Over there,” Kelly said, pointing.
A crowd had formed a couple of car lengths away from the pumps. Waves of heat riffled through the air. Glen let go of Kelly’s arm, reached into his pocket for the remote, and hit the button to unlock his truck as they approached it.
He brought Kelly around to the passenger’s side. She was more than big enough to hop in herself, but her father gave her enough of a boost that she was nearly tossed across the seat. He reached over her and placed his coffee into one of the cup holders between the seats.
Then he went around to the driver’s side, opened the door, and reached behind the seat to grab the red cylinder he always kept there. Doing construction, you were just as likely to need one of these at a work site as you were to put out a car fire.
“Stay here,” Glen said firmly. “Lock the doors.”
“I’ll die with the windows up,” Kelly said. “It’s a million degrees in here.”
He hopped in long enough to engage the ignition, without firing up the engine, and power down the windows, leaving the key inserted in the steering column. “Keep the doors locked just the same.”
Glen, extinguisher in his right hand, ran toward the commotion.
People screaming.
He pulled the pin on the extinguisher, then got his left hand under the cylinder for support, and shouldered his way through the onlookers.
Good God.
It was hard to tell with the flames, but it was, indeed, a man. In his thirties, probably, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds, dressed in sandals and a T-shirt and a pair of those cargo shorts with the oversized pockets.
Not exactly a Tibetan monk setting himself ablaze.
If the man had been flailing earlier, he’d given up by the time Glen had arrived, now down on the pavement, his body crumpling in on itself as the flames consumed him. But that didn’t stop Glen from taking a few quick shots with the extinguisher.
The people who’d gathered round backed away, mouths still open in horror. But a couple of them had screamed and shifted their gaze to something else, and were looking no less shocked.
Glen managed to tear his eyes away from the dead man to see what could possibly be distracting these people from a sight as ghastly as this. It wasn’t exactly every day you came upon a man on fire.
A man was staggering out of the men’s room, which was off on one side of the restaurant. He had blood across his face and held one hand against his temple, and was teetering unsteadily on his feet, barely able to walk. But even from this far, Glen could make out a fierce determination in the man’s face.
He didn’t have too much time to dwell on it. The next thing he heard wrenched his heart out and squeezed the life out of it.
It was a sound he was well familiar with.
The starter drive of a Ford F-150.
His Ford F-150.
He snapped his gaze away from the injured man in time to see his truck charge out of its parking spot and roar off in the direction of the interstate.
Sean Reilly couldn’t see clearly.
His eyes weren’t functioning properly. Not yet, not with the blood streaked across them, and the little information they were filtering in was being processed by a concussed brain.
A direct hit from a toilet tank cover usually had that effect.
He glanced around as he advanced, willing his head to clear up, trying to process whatever inputs he could pick up from the scene around him. He could make out a small crowd gathered off to his left. He could hear panicked screams and sobbing coming from them. And then the smell hit him, a horrific smell that he instantly recognized. A putrid, sickly-sweet smell that was unique and traumatizing to anyone who’d ever suffered the misfortune of coming across it. Mercifully, most people hadn’t. Then again, most people weren’t FBI field agents for whom the worst horrors the human mind could dream up were just part and parcel of the job.
Reilly saw the rising smoke and instantly guessed what must have happened there. He also knew who had to be responsible for it — the same man who had left him for dead in the men’s toilet — and as anger spiked through him from that realization and morsels of clarity tumbled into his mind, he heard a man yelling out, “Kelly!”
He saw a man burst out from among the crowd and charge off across the lot, chucking a fire extinguisher he was carrying. Reilly’s instincts shifted all his attention away from the crowd and locked onto that man, and he willed his legs to propel him faster as he chased after him.
The man stopped by a row of parked cars that were lined up outside the restaurant, and again screamed out the name, a reverberating scream that seemed to emanate from the very pit of his soul. He was glancing ahead, down the interstate, then his head darted left and right as Reilly caught up with him.
The man must have heard and sensed Reilly. He spun around to face him, one arm raised high, its fist balled offensively and ready to pummel.
“My daughter,” he growled, his face burning with fear and fury. “She’s gone!”