Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(54)

Her hair’s completely different now, her face longer and more adult. But she’s the girl in the video. “It’s Burning Girl.”

“That explains everything,” Ed says.

“Not everything,” Cole answers.

And Ed says nothing, maybe because he knows Cole’s right.





20

When Luke was in college, he didn’t know the meaning of a day off.

Days off were for other people. People who didn’t have life plans. People who didn’t use wipe-off pens to turn one window of their dorm rooms into a running list of both daily and weekly tasks and objectives.

If he didn’t have class, he was studying or working one of two jobs, or he was in the gym. Holidays, especially the long ones, were spent doing prep work for whatever classes he was planning to take the following semester. It always gave him a thrill to walk into a language course already fluent in basic conversational phrases.

Yeah, how’d that work out for you, hotshot? You’re really wowing Mona with your Mandarin, aren’t you?

He’s not too crazy about days off now, either. Especially since his job feels like a monotonous grind that only uses a third of his available mental energy. When he shelves his badge after a long week, he doesn’t feel the kind of bone-deep exhaustion and satisfaction he associates with hard work.

Instead he feels restless and bored.

A slug of Heineken should help.

When his cell phone rings, he jumps, spilling beer down the front of his shirt. He grabs for it, expecting to see Mona’s name on the caller ID, but he doesn’t recognize the number.

“Howdy, hometown hero,” Marty says when Luke answers.

“OK. We can go with that, I guess.”

“Still want to see Trina?”

Luke stands, brushing beer foam from the front of his T-shirt.

“I’d like to be in touch with her, yeah. But I didn’t say I could—”

“You’re renting the old Hickman place, right?”

“Yeah, but—”

“We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Wait. Now?”

“No, not now. Twenty minutes.”

“Yeah, I’m not really ready to receive visitors.”

“Ah, just brush off the Cheetos dust and put the porn away. She’s not expecting high tea, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’m not watching porn.”

“And it’s not gonna be visitors plural. Just her. I’m gonna wait outside in case you start wailing on each other.” For some reason, Marty cracks up like this is the funniest joke anyone’s ever made.

“Yeah, or maybe this evening I can meet her in town or something, and we can grab a cup of coffee or a—”

“What’s your problem, Jack? Do you want to make this right or not?” Marty barks. “She’s in town, she doesn’t have much time, and she’s willing to see you. Isn’t this what you wanted?”

“Why doesn’t she have much time?”

“Ask her yourself. In twenty minutes.”

“Marty—”

“Oh, and by the way, she changed her name. Goes by Charley now.”

“OK.”

“You know, probably because of people like you.”

Marty hangs up.

Luke reaches for his beer and downs the remainder of it. Whoever said you can’t go home again was just engaging in a bunch of wishful thinking.



As Marty drives, Charlotte studies the pill in her palm.

Up close and in broad daylight, she can see the wrongness of it, the lumpiness that suggests it didn’t come off a factory assembly line. In Dylan’s office, she’d been distracted by too many things to notice the strangeness of the pills or the cheapness of their packaging.

“Take it,” Marty says. “Soothe an old man’s nerves.”

“You’re not that old,” she says.

“Come on, Charley. You don’t want me busting in on your old high school bully with guns blazing, do you?”

“I don’t want to waste a pill over something that’s probably not true.”

“What? You got big plans for the rest?”

“We’ve been over this.”

“Not really. I mean, I get it. It’s important. What they can do. Maybe they could help people in the right hands. Only problem is, the hand that gave it to you doesn’t seem like one of those hands.”

“I’m having a hard time believing Luke Prescott is in on this, Marty.”

“You had no idea Dylan was in on it, did you? And you still don’t really have any idea what it even is.”

Ouch.

“Fine.”

She swallows the pill as if it were an Advil and turns her attention to the road.

They’d arrived in darkness early that morning, after which she’d slept until noon, occasionally roused by the sounds of Marty moving about the house, having low conversations with guys who’d dropped by throughout the morning, other sober men he’d enlisted to help protect her. “I’ve kept their secrets. It’s not asking much of them to return the favor,” Marty told her. Each time she woke, this thought comforted her enough to send her back to sleep.

By the time she’d woken up for good, the only one in the kitchen was Marty, hiding his sleeplessness behind a cup of coffee and a warm smile.