Page 161 of Flint’s Strike

My ass is numb, legs stretched out in front of me, and another thick zip tie cuts into the skin around my ankles.

I can see a faint outline of the door. The only light in the room comes from a battery-powered lantern. It spills across cardboard boxes stacked four feet high.

The air doesn’t move at all. It smells like dust with something faintly chemical underneath. Familiar, but I don’t know why.

Until my eyes adjust enough to read the side of one of the boxes.

Harris Middle School

Christ. I was here this afternoon.

I inspected this building. Marked it as unsafe for occupancy and went home.

Somebody brought me back.

Footsteps sound beyond the door. One set. Then another. Getting closer.

The door opens, and a man moves carefully around the boxes, like he hates the idea of letting anything in the room touch him.

A second man, taller and broader, stands in the doorway. I know the shape of him, even if it’s too dark to see his face. I can still feel the pressure of his arm against my throat.

“Mr. Flint.” The first man picks up the lantern, and once it’s closer to his face, I know exactly how much trouble I’m in.

“Senator Dines.” My voice is weak. Raspy. Every swallow hurts more than the last.

“Your girlfriend is quite remarkable.” He’s almost amused. “A woman in law enforcement, and she actually thinks she can tell people what to do. She’s spent the past two days digging into my finances, and just an hour ago, had one of her colleagues serve my company with a warrant. Righteous law-enforcement nonsense.” His smile doesn’t falter. “A woman like that should know better than to stick her nose where it doesn’t belong.”

If I could, I’d rip his tongue out for the way he’s talking about her. Like her mistake was believing she had the right to question him. He hasn’t even considered that she might have found something. That her instincts and insights were dead-on. She dared, and that’s enough for him to condemn her.

“I’ve had to make some…staffing cuts the past few weeks. I have one more position to eliminate, but I’ll have that taken care of tomorrow.” He considers me with all the passion of a man checking his calendar for the day. “Kurt will be so distraught over what he did to you, it won’t be a surprise when he drinks himself to death.”

“What he…did to me?”

The senator smiles, and the light reflects off his perfectly white teeth. “Well, yes. You threatened to expose him, and he panicked. He brought you here, made sure you couldn’t escape, and set the building on fire.”

He says it so matter-of-factly, that for a second, I wonder if Kurt has been in on the whole thing. Fuck. He was. The report on the fire that killed Zack. That stole my career. He knew why the building came down, and he let me spend the past seven goddamn years believing I could have saved Zack.

“It’s not personal, Mr. Flint. Well, it is, but not in the way you think. I’m aware you discovered that the fire that ended your career was made so much worse by a building owner who preferred to pay me ninety thousand for a rubber-stamped inspection rather than spending two hundred thousand to bring his paper mill up to code.”

Hearing him say it makes it real in a way it couldn’t be until this very second.

“You killed Zack McNaulty! He was twenty-two, you fuckin’ piece of shit!”

I lunge so hard and fast, I almost pull my shoulder out of the socket. The pipe scrapes against my wrists, but whatever’s holding me doesn’t give an inch.

“I didn’t do anything. Blame the builder. Blame the forklift driver who left a pallet of flammable ink right next to a frayed electrical cord.” The senator waves his hand, dismissing Zack’s death like an inconvenience he can brush away.

Something cold settles in my gut. He isn’t denying what happened. He’s denying that it matters.

“Men like you don’t stop, Flint. You know it. I know it. And from what I’ve been able to learn about your girlfriend, she won’t stop either.”

I know where this is going. The anger builds, rage consuming every rational thought until the senator smiles again.

“So I’ll give her what she wants. Someone to blame. Someone she can hate for the rest of her days. Of course, Kurt will be dead, but that’s of little consequence. It will occupy her long enough for me to pin all of Ridgeline’s actions on one of the board members.”

I blink up at him.

“I need her distracted for a bit, you see.” His expression doesn’t change. “Hence, your death.”