Cain’s apartment building was an inferno. From the ground floor to the roof, fire tore away the structure. Flames shot from every window. Smoke billowed thick into the clouds overhead. Trying to stop the blaze would be useless. The best bet was to contain it, and judging from the lackadaisical efforts of the firefighters, I guessed that was the plan.

Let it burn, let the haunted halls crumble. I’m sure that was what everyone was thinking. Erase the horror once and for all. I could see it in the eyes of the onlookers—they were watching a monster die.

I shook my attention away from the fire. I had to find Blout so I headed toward the nearest squad car where I found some medics working on a nasty swelling beneath his left eye. When he saw me, his eyes went wide. I had a pretty good idea what a bloody mess I was.

“Jesus H. Christ, Cal! Are you okay? My God, they really worked you over!”

“It’s a karma thing, no doubt.” I touched the back of my head. My hand came back soaked with sticky red. “Can I get a goddamn bandage here?!”

I finally allowed a pesky medic to bandage me up. They wrapped my ribs and put in a couple of butterfly stitches, including a few in the bullet graze that I’d stitched earlier. They doused each wound with antibiotics, which hurt worse than the damn beating, then finally backed off.

Meanwhile, Blout gave a very abbreviated report to his captain.

“. . . there was every reason to believe we had a connection between the bodies discovered early yesterday and the events that took place here ten years ago. We decided to check it out, but instead came across a bunch of crackheads. They attacked us, and I guess that’s who set the fire.”

Luckily, the captain was too concerned with the arriving TV crews to notice the huge holes in the story. He wasn’t even looking at Blout during the last half of the spiel.

“Um, okay . . . I want it on my desk by this afternoon,” the Captain said, and was gone.

Blout rolled his eyes in my direction.

I winked, blew him a kiss, and re-split my lip doing it. “Fuck!”

All I wanted to do was get back home. I needed to shower. I needed to sleep. But before that, I needed many drinks and smokes. Unfortunately, Blout wasn’t finished. I tried to walk away from the rapidly burgeoning media circus when he came stomping up behind me.

“What the hell happened in there, Cal? How’d we get out? Did you do it?”

I kept on walking. “Last thing I remember was being in the stairwell getting the shit kicked outta me.”

“Cal, stop. We’ll take my car.”

I fell behind him as we walked. He was asking too many questions too soon. My head was spinning and I guess his was as well. After all, he wasn’t used to this kind of thing.