On the day they went back to Detroit, Mrs. King gave me one of the biggest hugs of my life. I promised I’d call her. I promised I’d come down to see her again soon.
“Maybe you’ll move back to the city someday,” she said. “Detroit needs more good people. Otherwise, I don’t know if she’ll survive.”
I promised I’d think about it, but I knew it would never happen. Paradise was my home now.
On the night before Halloween, we got more snow. I lay in my bed that night, listening to it fall. I thought about Detroit. The Motor City. Motown. A great city that could still be great again.
Then I remembered what night it was. Devil’s Night. The night they burned down the empty houses, all over the city. It would have been a hard night to be there, watching the sky glow red above every corner of the city.
Watching the city I love burning to the ground.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEVE HAMILTON’s first novel, A Cold Day in Paradise, won the Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin’s Press Best First Private Eye Novel Contest before becoming a USA Today bestseller and winning both an Edgar and a Shamus Award for Best First Novel. His stand-alone novel The Lock Artist was named a New York Times Notable Crime Book, received an Alex Award by the American Library Association, and then went on to win the Edgar Award for Best Novel, making him only the second author (after Ross Thomas) to win Edgars for both Best First Novel and Best Novel. He attended the University of Michigan, where he won the prestigious Hopwood Award for writing, and now lives in Cottekill, New York, with his wife and their two children.
