Page 263 of Sweet Ruin

Smoke doesn’t behave the way it does in movies. It’s not a polite cloud you can wave off. It comes in like it’s filling a bathtub and I’m standing in the bottom of it. My eyes go hot and start streaming and my throat closes down to the width of a straw. I get my apron up over my mouth and breathe through it.

Keys. Phone. That’s all I need. I pat my hip for the keys and they’re there.

I go for the front.

Sixteen feet from the office door to the front of the counter. I know this shop in the dark. I know where the corner of the case catches your hip if you cut it too close. I get my hand on the front door, turn the deadbolt, slide the chain, and push.

It doesn’t move.

I push harder, put my shoulder in it. It gives maybe an inch and then stops with a dull groan. Something’s against it out there, wedged low and tight. It’s hard to see, but through the smoke and the glass, I can just barely make out a dark shape across the bottom third of the door. Long. Heavy. Something laid up against it on the sidewalk side.

I hit the glass with the heel of my hand on some crazy whim of breaking it. Shockingly, that doesn’t work.

“Ma’am, are you out?”

“The front’s blocked,” I say into the apron. “Somebody blocked my front door.”

I don’t remember what she says next. I’m already turning.

There’s only one other way out of this building.

The smoke is thicker by the time I’m back through the kitchen. I can feel the heat of it, a wall of spiky heat pressing at my face like an open oven. But the fire’s still outside. I can see that. The door is hot but it hasn’t burned through. Whatever’s going on is happening in the alley, against the brick, in the trash area by the plywood ramp where my curb used to be.

I crouch down low, plaster the apron over my face, and I run the last of it.

Heat and light and a roar, and then air. Cold air. I stumble out over the threshold into the alley coughing so hard I’m bent double. My eyes are running so bad the whole world is smeared into watercolors.

The fire is to my left, up against the wall, in a pile of what looks like pallets and rags. Something about it looks organized, in a way I can’t explain at first.

That’s when I understand. It comes painlessly, clearly, like how you can cut yourself and there’s a moment of delay before the blood arrives.

Someone planned this whole thing.

The fire isn’t in the building. It’s away from the front. Right beside the only other door.

It was meant to direct me.

Right.

Here.

There’s a van at the mouth of the alley with its lights off and its side door open. Two men stand between me and the street. One’s already moving.

I turn to go back inside, which is when I see that there’s a third one coming around the corner of the fire.

I try for the street anyway. I make it about four steps before a hand closes on the back of my coat collar. I’m yanked backward hard enough that my feet come out from under me and my shoulder hits the brick. My phone goes out of my hand and skates across the wet concrete and slides under the plywood ramp with the woman still talking on it.

I hear her saying, “Ma’am? Ma’am?” from under the wood, tinny and far away, and then somebody’s arm is across my chest.

I drive my heel down on the top of his foot with everything I have. I’ve got clogs on, professional ones, steel shank, nasty enough that he makes a surprised noise. I twist in the coat, which gives me just enough room to drive my elbow back into him and hit something soft. He grunts and lets go with one hand.

I’ve got my keys in my fist. When the second attacker swoops in from the night, I rake them across his face.

There’s a hot, wet snag and he screams, then falls back with both hands up over his gushing eye.

“Get her, get her⁠—”

I run.