Chapter 3

• Junior bobbed his head. “His name’s Ethan Reed. He used to be a captain.”
• His voice was low, but every word hit like a nail. “Three years ago he got suspended for misconduct. Then he vanished. My uncle used to work with him.”
• My palms started sweating. “You sure?”
• “Positive. He’s got a scar at the base of his left thumb. From a knife.” Junior pointed at the body’s left hand. “Look.”
• I glanced down. There was an old scar across the web of his left hand. About three centimeters long, pale and healed.
• A captain from this district.
• Suspended three years ago.
• My brain spun, trying to stitch the pieces together. But a bigger question crashed to the surface—why would a suspended captain be lying in a funeral home cooler? Why was he strangled? And why would someone use my daughter to force me to burn him?
• “Junior, listen to me.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “You didn’t see any of this today. Got it?”
• Junior’s face tightened.
• “Jake, I—”
• “You don’t want trouble, right?” I pulled out my phone, opened the transfer screen. “I’ll wire you two hundred. You weren’t here. You don’t know shit.”
• Junior stared at the screen and swallowed.
• “Hits in three minutes,” I added. “Your wife just had the baby. Gotta buy formula.”
• His expression kept shifting. He hesitated, then gritted his teeth and nodded.
• I sent the money. He left.
• The hallway was just me again—and a corpse with a smile.
• I turned to the furnace.
• Captain Ethan Reed—the dead man—still had his eyes half open, that weird little curve at his mouth. I stared at him for ten seconds, then hit the ignition.
• The chamber whooshed. Flames roared up.
• Through the heat-proof window, I watched Ethan Reed’s body jerk, curl, and pop in the fire. Skin shriveled like paper. Fat sizzled. Bone went from white to yellow to black.
• Then I saw his hand lift.
• Not a heat twitch. Deliberate. Slow. Like he was waving at someone.
• The hand rose halfway, paused two seconds, then dropped.
• My knees turned to jelly. I grabbed the wall so I wouldn’t go down.
• Forty minutes later, the door opened. The remains were gray-white with black chunks. I used the long-handled scoop to load them into an urn and slapped on a label: “John Doe, No. 2307.”
• Then I pulled out my phone and texted Carl Moore.
• “It’s done.”
• Carl Moore didn’t reply.
• But ten minutes later, six grand hit my account.
• I moved the money to my daughter’s medical account. With what we already had, we were just shy of covering the next six months of chemo and the imported meds.
• I stared at the number climbing on my screen. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff—bottomless pit below me, and on the other side, my little girl’s life.
• There was no going back.