The Burning Men: A Nathaniel Cade Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

Cade picking up the wreckage of things that were not supposed to exist. The head cleaner, Smitty, wasn’t available, but he sent a team. Zach had them contain the scene and collect the evidence.
    Then there wasn’t much else he could do. He sat and watched them work. They were vacuuming up the ashes and bagging the bits that got clogged.
    “Seabrook’s people will love this,” one said to the other. “I bet he’ll have a campaign ad about it before the end of the week.”
    “Oh, hey. Too soon.”
    “Not for him. So what are we going to call this one?”
    “Gas main explosion?”
    “We use that all the time.”
    “Well, it happens.”
    Zach felt sick, and not from the barbecue stink in the air. The cleaners kept talking.
    “How about an electrical fire?”
    “That’s about as original as a gas main.”
    “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know we were grading on creativity.”
    “Hey, who says you can’t have fun at work?”
    They both laughed at that. It was the laughter that did it.
    “Will you both just shut the fuck up ,” Zach said through gritted teeth.
    The cleaners turned. They looked puzzled.
    “You got a better idea, Barrows?” one asked. “You want to come up with a cover story on your own?”
    They didn’t get it. Zach crossed the floor to the nearest cleaner, grabbed the front of his coverall, and yanked him around violently to face the center of the explosion.
    “Seventeen people,” Zach said. “Seventeen. And that’s just so far. You want to keep making more jokes?”
    The cleaner seemed ready to make some kind of smart-ass comment. But then he saw the look in Zach’s eyes.
    “Hey,” he said, almost whining. “We’re just doing our job, Zach.”
    Zach let go of the man’s coverall and shoved him back. “Then do it.”
    The man looked sheepish. “Um. What do we say about — ”
    Zach locked it down. He felt embarrassed. This was his job. “Here’s what we do. We release the video.”
    “What?”
    “Freak accident. Gas leak. Pipes running under the concrete. One developed a crack. This guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
    “He wasn’t a bomber. He was a victim,” the cleaner said, getting it now.
    “Right,” Zach said. “A one-in-a-million chance. I can see the headline already. ‘This Guy Stepped in the Wrong Place at the Mall, and You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next.’ No one would ever think this happened on purpose.”
    Then Zach heard Cade’s gravestone voice behind him. “Of course, it’s only a freak accident if it happens once.”
    Zach turned around. The cleaners edged away. Zach looked up through the shattered windows of the atrium. Night already. Cade must have woken up early.
     
    
     
    They walked to the car. Cade drove this time.
    Zach thought about all of the chalk outlines in the ash, each one signifying someone who just wanted a night out, or a couple hours’ distraction. Seventeen people who would never have another moment to waste, ever. Seventeen holes burned out of the world.
    “I want to tell you something,” Zach said. “Usually, I don’t want to know what you do. At the end. I get that some things require a permanent solution. But I do not like to be a part of it. The killing. I don’t like it. I never have. Most of the time, it makes me sick. Even when I know it’s necessary.”
    Cade didn’t reply. He knew all this.
    “Not this time,” he told Cade. “This time, I want to kill these people.”
    Cade nodded. “Then we should get to work.”
    Zac h’s phone beeped to signal a priority message. Cade looked at him, waiting for the news.
    “Son of a bitch,” Zach said. “We got one of them.”
     
    
     
    Josh Gregory used his credit card. A Visa he’d signed up for as a student , billing address at his parents’ house. Like his friends, he hadn’t used it at all since he’d been in Nevada last month.
    Zach put an alert through the financial system anyway, designed to ping him if it was run through