At half past one Gus barked.
It was not the growl that had got Thorsen to the window before midnight, to an empty road. It was high and hoarse and frantic, and the dog was hurling himself at the bedroom door, and the ceiling over the bed was moving. Orange. Flickering.
And the smell. Smoke, and under the smoke, sweet and flat and chemical, gasoline.
He was out of bed with his feet in his boots before he was awake. He did not lace them. He went through the house in long johns and a T-shirt and out of the kitchen door, and behind him he heard Claire say one short word and then her voice on the phone, very fast and level: Fire. Lacourse Marine, Stone Bay road. The shop. Get them out here.
The cold hit him in the face.
It was minus twenty-nine. There was no wind. The air was so still that the smoke from the shop went straight up into the black in a column, lit orange underneath, and stood there, as if it had been built.
The office end was burning. The road end, by the boat on the pole. The square of plywood that had covered the front window since the rifle shot was lying face down in the snow ten feet from the wall, and through the hole where it had been the fire was roaring inside the office, filling it, pressing at the window frame, licking up and out under the eaves. There was a dark stain on the snow under the window, spreading, and the smell of gasoline was so thick he could taste it.
And at the end of the drive, where it met the road, an engine.
A big diesel, revving high, then dropping. In the firelight he saw it: a black pickup with a plough mount and a light bar, nose-down in the bank of ploughed snow at the side of the drive, where it had swung too wide trying to turn round. Its back wheels spun and threw up snow and spun.
The driver’s door opened and Pruitt got out.
He came round the front of the truck in the glow, in his black canvas jacket and a watch cap, with a shovel in one hand. He saw Thorsen. He stopped.
He dropped the shovel. His hand went inside the jacket.
Thorsen was forty feet away across open snow in his long johns, and there was nothing between them but the van. He went for the van. He heard the shot behind him, flat and huge in the frozen air, and saw the muzzle flash light up the side of the van as he got round the back of it, and heard the glass in the back doors go, all of it at once, with a sound like gravel thrown at a wall.
Ray’s van.
He crouched behind the rear doors with his back against the frosted steel. Pruitt did not fire again. Thorsen heard him swear, and the engine of the pickup roar, and the tyres scream and spin. He was trying to get out, not to win. He had come to burn a woman’s office and drive away, and he had put his truck in a snowbank.
Thorsen went round the far side of the van and out into the dark beyond the yard light, along the line of the birches, low.
The snow squeaked at every step, and there was no going quietly. He went fast instead, and Pruitt, who was back at the open door of the truck with one foot on the running board and the pistol still in his hand, reaching in for the gearstick, heard the squeak at the last moment and turned, and Thorsen hit him.
They went into the plough bank together.
The snow was dry as sand at that temperature and it went down Thorsen’s neck and up his sleeves, and burnt. He had Pruitt’s gun wrist in his left hand and forced it down into the snow, and Pruitt drove a knee into his ribs and twisted, and was strong, much stronger than at the overlook, because this time he was frightened. Thorsen’s hands were going. The fingers were white and stupid and did not close properly, and Pruitt felt it too, and wrenched the wrist free, and brought the pistol round and down in a short hard arc, butt first, onto the side of Thorsen’s head above the ear.
There was a white light. There was a sound like a door slamming in an empty house.
He was on his back in the snow looking up at the column of smoke going up orange into the stars. He could not work out what had happened to the sky. There was something warm running down the side of his face and into his ear, and then not warm.
Pruitt was getting up. On one knee, in the snow, with the gun coming round.
Claire came out of the dark behind him in her welding jacket over a thermal shirt and long johns, with her braid loose and her face perfectly calm, and swung.
It was the chipping hammer that lived in the right pocket of the jacket. She did not swing it at his head. She swung it low, two-handed, the way she would have swung it at a stuck pin, into the back of Pruitt’s right knee.
Pruitt screamed. The leg went out from under him as if it had been cut, and he went forward onto his face in the snow, and the gun went out of his hand.
Thorsen rolled onto it. He got it in his fist, his stupid white fist, and held it pointing at the snow, away from everybody, with his finger outside the guard, because a Glock has no manual safety and he could not feel his finger. He got his other hand on the slide. He dropped the magazine into the snow, and racked the round out of the chamber, and heard it go somewhere, and lay on his side with the empty gun against his chest, breathing.
“Is there anybody else?” Claire said. Her voice was shaking now. “Is he on his own, Thorsen?”
“I think so.”
Pruitt was rolling in the snow holding his knee, making a high thin sound through his teeth, like a kettle.
“Get up,” Claire said. “Get up, get a coat on, or you’ll be dead before the shop is.” She was already turning back towards the fire. “The bottles. Thorsen, the bottles are on the office wall.”
There were cable ties in the van, in a bin Ray had labelled TIES — HEAVY. Thorsen put Pruitt’s wrists together behind his back and pulled two of the ties tight with his teeth, and did his ankles, and dragged him by the collar across the snow and up into the back of the van onto the plywood floor, and shut the doors on him. The van was still plugged in. It was warmer in there than out. He took the Glock and the magazine with him and ran for the house.
He was in the house for thirty seconds, and came out with blood freezing in his eyebrow and running stiff down his neck into the collar.
Claire had the first roll-up door open, at the office end, hauling on the manual chain hand over hand, and smoke was coming out under it in a black roll and pouring upward into the night.
Inside, against the wall that was the back of the office, stood the oxy-acetylene cart, two tall cylinders chained to a trolley. The plywood behind them was blistering and beginning to smoke.
“Acetylene,” Claire said. “If that one gets hot it can go any time it likes, even after you’ve cooled it. It’ll take the roof off and us with it.” She was coughing. “Low. Stay low.”
They went in under the smoke on their knees. He found the cart by putting his hand on it, and the cylinders were warm through his gloves, and that was bad enough. They tipped it back on its wheels and ran it, bent double, out across the yard to the edge of the birches, and ran back.
The hose was in bay three, coiled on its reel, warm. Claire screwed it onto the frost-free hydrant at the corner of the building and threw the lever up.
The hose jumped and went hard and the water came out of the nozzle in a white rope.
“Don’t let it stop,” she said. “If it stops for a minute, the hose freezes solid and we’ve got nothing.”
She took it to the window and put it into the office. The fire spat steam out at her, and the steam froze in the air and fell glittering. Within two minutes her jacket was glazed white down the front and the end of her braid was a stick of ice, and she stood there in it, braced, and kept the water going in.
Thorsen took the extinguishers from their brackets by the doors, four of them, and emptied them one after another into the burning top edge of the door between bay one and the office, short hard bursts at the base of the flame. Nobody could stop the office. He could only stop it coming through.
He did not know how long. He could not feel his feet. His head was ringing in one ear and silent in the other.
Then, across the bay, very far off, a siren. Rising out of Nordby. Going round the shore.
The Nordby Volunteer Fire Department came down the Stone Bay road eighteen minutes after Claire called them, with an engine and a tanker and a pickup full of men who had been asleep a quarter of an hour before, and the yard went red and white.
They were farmers and plumbers and a woman who ran the café, in turnout gear over their pyjamas, and they drove the fire back into the office and put it out, and the water froze on their coats until they moved like men in armour, creaking.
Joe Bellanger was with the ambulance, as he seemed always to be. He sat Thorsen on the back step and looked at his hands and swore mildly, and then at his head, and put in six staples. Thorsen felt every one.
“What day is it?”
“Friday.”
“Close enough,” Bellanger said. “Put your hands in your armpits and keep them there.”
Novak came at ten past two in her old blue Honda with the ski rack, one headlight out, in a parka over tracksuit bottoms with her badge on a chain round her neck. She had heard it on the scanner at home.
“Where is he?”
Thorsen told her, and gave her the Glock in one of Ray’s freezer bags.
She went and opened the back doors of the van, and looked in, and climbed in. When she came out she had Pruitt by the arm, in her own handcuffs, with the cut cable ties in her other hand. He could not put weight on his right leg. He hopped, and swore, and she let him swear.
She stood him against the side of her Honda in the firelight and read him his rights from memory, every word, in a clear flat voice.
“Jarrett Pruitt, I’m arresting you for arson and for assault in the second degree. You have the right to remain silent.” He looked at her the whole time with his eyes wide and his mouth working, and she did not look away once. “Do you understand these rights as I’ve read them to you?”
“Kayla,” he said. “Come on. Kayla.”
“Deputy Novak,” she said, and put him in the back seat.
Hollister came at twenty to three.
The black Tahoe stopped at the end of the drive behind the F-250, and Hollister got out in a sheepskin coat and a fur hat with the flaps down, and came across the yard, nodding to men he knew.
“Well, now,” he said. “Kayla. Good work. Good work. I’ll take him from here.”
Novak was standing by the Honda with her hands in her parka pockets. She did not move.
“No, sir,” she said.
Hollister smiled. It was a kind, puzzled smile.
“I’m sorry?”
“BCA’s on their way, Sheriff. Agents Marchetti and Okonkwo. They’re at the motel in Two Harbors for the morning. I called them. They’ll be here in forty minutes.” Her voice did not shake. Thorsen, on the back of the ambulance, saw her hands in her pockets, and saw that they were fists. “He’s theirs.”
Hollister went on smiling at her. Behind him the firemen had gone quiet, the way a room goes quiet, and were coiling hose very slowly.
“Kayla,” Hollister said gently. “You’re off duty. This is my county.”
“I’m a licensed peace officer in the state of Minnesota, sir, off duty or not. I made the arrest. I’ll hand him to the state.” She took a breath. “You can write me up tomorrow. I’ll sign it.”
Hollister looked past her, through the window of the Honda, at the man in the back seat.
Pruitt was looking back at him.
Hollister looked at him for three seconds, the way you look at a car that is going to be written off, and turned away, and walked back to the Tahoe, and sat there with the dome light on, talking on his phone.
Novak opened the back door of the Honda and leaned on the roof and looked in at him. Thorsen stood beside her with his hands in his armpits and the bandage stiff on his head.
“Agent Heikkinen’s got a body shop in Cloquet,” Novak said, “that put a new wing on your truck on the fourteenth of October. Cash. Goatee.”
Pruitt looked at her. Then he looked past her, at the Tahoe with its dome light on, and back. Thorsen watched him add it up, and get the same answer twice.
Novak took her phone out and started it recording.
“He’s going to put it all on me,” Pruitt said. “You saw him. You saw his face. Him and Hale.” His voice was high and fast and his breath came out of the car in clouds. “I want it on the record I’m cooperating. I want that written down.”
“It’s written down,” Novak said. “Go on.”
It came out of him in pieces. After Claire Lacourse filed, Hale had called him up to the lodge. Make her understand what it costs, Jarrett. Hale never said how. The how was Pruitt’s. He had known which end of the shop the office was, because he had put a rifle round through its window in November, from Shawna’s car, so nobody would hear the diesel.
The apartment in Duluth, in October: that was Hale. Hale had called him the day after Strand died and said the man had copies of something at his place and he wanted them gone. Pruitt had gone in in the small hours of the Sunday with a pry bar and taken every folder with work in it and turned the rest over so it looked like kids. Hale had burnt the folders in the fireplace at the lodge. There had been no laptop. A cable plugged into the wall and nothing on the end of it.
Hollister got an envelope from Hale every Christmas, cash, on top of the campaign money. Pruitt had carried it. Three Christmases running. Merry Christmas, Curt. And in November Curt had put Kline in one of the old tan cruisers on the Stone Bay road at first light, to see where Thorsen slept.
“And the cliff road,” Pruitt said. He looked at Thorsen through the open door, and his face twisted. “Above the Gooseberry. That was me. That was just me. Hale didn’t know. I wanted you off this shore before you wrecked everything.”
He stopped. He looked past them at the Tahoe again, at the sheriff’s face lit by the dome light, and his shoulders came down: a man deciding to turn out all his pockets at once.
“And your heater,” he said. “That was me too. Hale said you’d been to Kansas City. Curt got that off somebody at the courthouse. And Curt said you’d tucked that van down behind the fish house where nobody could see it from the house. Kline drove the lane. I took a bit of twine off a reel in the old man’s fish house. Door’s never locked out there. I wanted it on her.” He jerked his head at the shop. “A bad install. Everybody’d say the Indian welder killed the cop.” He swallowed. “Curt asked me after did I do something to your van. I said no. He knocked that plug out anyway.”
Thorsen stood very still.
“Thirtieth of September,” he said. “Hollister went on the air at eleven forty-one and off it at one-oh-six. Where did he go?”
“Curt?” Pruitt stared at him. “Curt doesn’t go out at night. Curt doesn’t tell me where he goes. Ask him. He won’t tell you either.” He shook his head, hard, and the snow came off his cap. “And that guy. The title guy. Strand. I never touched that guy. I never even saw him. I served that letter on your uncle at seven and I drove to Duluth and I was at Shawna’s by half past nine. Ask Shawna. Ask the gas station. I was in Duluth.”
Thorsen looked at him, and believed him. There had been no laptop in the apartment on Fifth Street because Paul Strand had taken it with him to the Point, and Thorsen had seen what was left of it, fused to an iron grate.
He stood by the car in the glare of the yard light with the blood frozen in his hair.
Arne had not put the twine in the pipe. Thorsen let that much go. A man could run across a yard for his nephew and still have walked another man out to the end of the Point.
Across the yard the dome light was still on in the Tahoe.
He closed the car door, gently, and walked away across the yard.
The BCA came at ten past three, Marchetti and Okonkwo, with a State Patrol trooper behind them to drive Pruitt to the jail in Duluth, which was not Hollister’s. They photographed the F-250 in the bank, and the gas can in the snow beside it, and the van’s broken window, and Thorsen’s head.
Claire was standing in the snow in front of her office.
The roof over that end had held. The shop would stink of smoke for a year, but it was standing, and the tools on the board above the bench were all in their outlines.
The office was gone. Desk, filing cabinet, the old answering machine with the cassette. The box file with her father’s letters, the copies Thorsen had made in Kansas City. Ash, frozen into a black crust on a floor of ice. On what was left of the shelf, Arne’s jar had burst in the heat, and the herring lay black on the ice among the welding rod.
She stood looking at it with her arms folded and her braid frozen to her jacket. Thorsen came and stood beside her.
“Rose has the set I filed,” Claire said. Her voice was hoarse with smoke. “They’re in a safe in the Band office.” She was quiet for a moment. “And Kansas City’s got the real ones. In a box. With a man in a cardigan to look after them.”
She started to laugh.
It shook her, and she put her hands over her face and laughed until she was bent over, with the ice on her clothes cracking as she moved, and Thorsen could not tell whether it was laughing or the other thing, and he did not think she could either. He put his hand on her back.
“They burnt photocopies,” she said, through her hands. “They burnt my shop down for photocopies, Thorsen.”
By four the fire was out and the engine had gone. The yard was a sheet of grey ice under the floodlights, with the frozen hoses lying across it where they had been dropped.
Claire’s phone rang in her parka pocket. She looked at it and handed it to him.
“Wally,” she said.
He put it to his ear.
“Thorsen.” Wally’s voice was very low, and it sounded odd. Not tired. Something else. “Arne’s lights just went off.
“They’ve been on all night. Kitchen. And the bulb in the fish house, the one you can see from the lane. Okonkwo sat it for me this afternoon while I slept in his car, and I’ve watched them since. Ten minutes ago they went off, one, then the other.” A pause, and Thorsen could hear him breathing, and the enormous silence of the lane around him. “And I heard an outboard. Down at the water.”