Blue Smoke Read Online Free Page A

kinds of things. I’ll show you sometime if you want. Mr. Hale? Can I have a second? Could you wait here, Catarina?”
    Again, he didn’t wait, simply stepped off a short distance.
    â€œIf there’s anything you can tell me,” Gib began.
    â€œWe’ll get to that.” He took out a pack of cigarettes, a lighter. He took the first drag as he pushed the lighter back in his pocket. “I need to talk with your daughter. Now your first instinct might be to fill in details for her, prompt her. It’d be better if you didn’t. If you just let the two of us talk it through.”
    â€œOkay. Sure. She’s, ah, observant. Reena.”
    â€œGood.” He stepped back to Reena. Her eyes, he noted, were more amber than brown and, despite the bruises under them, looked sharp. “Did you see the fire from your bedroom window?” Minger asked as they walked.
    â€œNo. From the steps. I was sitting on the steps of my house.”
    â€œA little past your bedtime, huh?”
    She thought about this, about how to answer it without revealing the embarrassing personal details and avoiding a lie. “It was hot, and I woke up because I didn’t feel very good. I got a drink of ginger ale in the kitchen and came out to sit on the steps and drink it.”
    â€œOkay. Maybe you can show me where you were sitting when you saw it.”
    She dashed ahead and obediently sat on the white marble steps as close to her original position as she could remember. She stared down the block as the men approached. “It was cooler than upstairs in my room. Heat rises. We learned that in school.”
    â€œThat’s right. So.” Minger sat beside her, looked down the block as she did. “You sat here, with your ginger ale, and you saw the fire.”
    â€œI saw the lights. I saw lights on the glass, and I didn’t know what they were. I thought maybe Pete forgot to turn the lights off inside, but it didn’t look like that. It moved.”
    â€œHow?”
    She lifted a shoulder, felt a little foolish. “Sort of like dancing. It was pretty. I wondered what it was so I got up and walked a little ways.” She bit her lip, looked over at her father. “I know I’m not supposed to.”
    â€œWe can talk about that later.”
    â€œI just wanted to see. I’m too nosy for my own good, Grandma Hale says, but I just wanted to know.”
    â€œHow far’d you walk down? Can you show me?”
    â€œOkay.”
    He got up with her, strolled along beside her, imagined what it would be like to be a kid walking down a dark street on a hot night. Exciting. Forbidden.
    â€œI took my ginger ale, and I drank some while I walked.” She frowned in concentration, trying to remember every step. “I think maybe I stopped here, close to here, because I saw the door was open.”
    â€œWhat door?”
    â€œThe front door of the shop. It was open. I could see it was open, and I thought, first I thought, Holy cow, Pete forgot to lock the door, and Mama’s going to skin him. She does the skinning in our house. But then I saw there was fire, and I saw smoke. I saw it coming out the door. I was scared. And I yelled as loud as I could and ran back home. I ran upstairs and I think I was still yelling because Dad was already up and pulling on pants, and Mama was grabbing her robe. And everybody was shouting. Fran kept saying, What, what is it? Is it the house? And I said, No, no, it’s the shop. That’s what we call Sirico’s mostly. The shop.”
    She’d thought this through, John decided. Gone back over it in her head, layered the details.
    â€œBella started crying. She cries a lot because teenage girls do, but Fran didn’t cry so much. Anyway, Dad, he looked out the window, then he told Mama to call Pete—he lives above the shop—and tell him to get out, get his family out. Pete married Theresa and they had a baby in June. He said to