Then the phone buzzed again, and the dream retreated. He untangled himself from the bedding, sat up, and got the phone.

  “Mr. Hazard?” Her voice was a spring that hadn’t sprung yet. “It’s Ayelet. Ayelet Ames. My mother’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “She’s gone. She’s not in our hotel room.” Panic spurred her voice as she said again, with a different emphasis this time, “She’s gone!”

  Somers raised his head: tousled blond hair that looked platinum in the weak ambient light, eyes droopy dog with sleep.

  Hazard shook his head at the unasked question and said, “Hold on,” into the phone. He got out of bed as Somers dropped back onto the pillow and immediately started breathing his sleep breaths again. As quietly as he could, Hazard crossed the room, filched a tee from the dresser, and let himself out into the hallway. Colt’s door was ajar; familiar, even breaths came from his room, so Hazard took the stairs down and sat at the kitchen table.

  “All right, go ahead.”

  Ayelet’s breathing grew ragged. “What do you mean? She’s gone. I need you to get her!”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  Ayelet’s hesitation was its own answer, but after a moment, she said, “I had too much wine at the reception. And, for that matter, at dinner; I couldn’t make it through my mom’s talk. And I had a nightcap, yes. Mr. Hazard, I know where she went. I’d get her myself, but she took the rental.”

  “I’m not a taxi service.” That sounded dated so, he added, “Or an Uber.”

  “But she’s in danger! This is why I hired you!”

  He rubbed his face. Even with the lights off, the room was starting to take on a crisp, firm insistence, a sure sign that he was waking up whether he wanted to or not. “What happened?

  “She got that email, and we had a fight, and then I…I had to get out of here, and—”

  “Slower. What email?”

  Ayelet took a breath. “She got an email. I don’t know from whom. Anonymous, I guess. It said that some of the parents were holding a book burning for her books, and it gave an address. She wanted to go.” Defensiveness sharpened Ayelet’s voice. “I told her no; I told her she was in danger, she couldn’t go. But you met her. She thinks she’s invulnerable. She said she had to go—she thought this would be it, her chance to be in the news again. The lesbian author who stood up to a bunch of Nazi book-burners. That’s what we fought about. I said she should at least take you, but she said no, she didn’t need a white man protecting her and validating her, and then I said I’d call you, and she said no, absolutely not, and—and I left. I had to get out of here.”

  The stitch in her telling sounded an awful lot like a certain teenager who often forgot key details, like whose parents would be supervising a party and how many passengers were allowed to ride in the truck and whether he’d finished his chores so he could go out. There were gaps in the story; the biggest one was that Ayelet must have at least suspected her mother would go haring off, and the timeline felt wonky. But Hazard didn’t trust his judgment completely, not having just woken, not without time to process everything she’d told him. So, he settled for: “Where did she go?”

  “The email said a place called Okashka Heights. Have you heard of it?”

  “I know it. It’s an abandoned development outside the city limits. Why would—” But he knew why, partially. It was outside the city limits, which meant no neighbors to report anything that got out of hand, and which meant much looser building codes and development ordinances. It was also outside the jurisdiction of the Wahredua PD. After the plan to have Theo arrested had backfired, maybe whoever was behind all of this was hoping the sheriff’s department would be more sympathetic to their cause. “Are you sure that’s where she went?”

  “Yes, of course. I have a tracking app on her phone. She’s out in the middle of nowhere, but the map shows the Okashka River.”

  “God damn it.” Hazard weighed his options for a moment. “Send me that location. Did you call the police?”

  “They said the sheriff would send a cruiser—” Her voice filled with disgust. “—when they had a chance.” Hazard’s phone buzzed a moment later with the incoming message, and Ayelet said, “Call me when you’re downstairs, and I’ll be waiting in the lobby.”

  “What? No, you’re not coming with me. The situation will be complicated enough already. I’ll drive out there and see what’s going on. I assume you’ve tried to call her and she’s not answering?”

  “Mr. Hazard, I’m paying you, so if I want to go—”

  “That’s what I thought. If you hear from her, or if she comes back to the hotel, let me know.”

  He disconnected the call. He thought about the Blackhawk revolver in the gun safe under his bed. Too much? He’d made the mistake before of not going armed, and a three AM callout to an abandoned development, where his client might have been lured into a trap, seemed like justification for the weapon. He went back up to his bedroom. He dressed, adding jeans and socks and boots to the tee. He unlocked the gun safe and took out the Blackhawk, and then he unlocked the safe with the ammo and took out a box of cartridges and a speed loader. He strapped on the holster; the revolver, chambered for .45 Colt, with a five-and-a-half-inch barrel, weighed almost four pounds, which strapped to his hip felt like a metric fucking ton. But he liked it there. And no matter what Somers and Colt said, it had nothing to do with feeling like a cowboy.

  The husband in question had slept through all of this, which made Hazard think he needed to start staging more home invasion training exercises. Unannounced, of course. Then he thought about his husband’s accuracy when they went to the range for date nights, and he thought maybe a fire drill instead. For now, he simply said, “John.”

  Somers’s head came up a moment later. He was doing a lot of blinking as he said, “I wasn’t asleep.”

  “Debatable. I’m going to Okashka Heights to try to find Loretta Ames.”

  “Jesus Christ.” In the gloom, his movements ghosted as he twisted toward the clock: the blur of mussed, platinum hair; the gleam of skin and the darker gleam of ink over perfect muscle. “What time is it?”

  “A little after three.”

  “Hold on, let me get dressed.”

  “No, someone needs to stay with Colt. Go back to sleep; I just wanted you to know where I was going.”

  Somers propped himself on an elbow. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Although God knows why. They could hold a Monster Truck rally downstairs, and both of you would sleep through it.”

  Somers smirked and pushed a hand through his hair, messing it in a way that was unfairly provocative. “Turn. Just a little to the side, I mean.”

  “Why?” Hazard asked as he turned.

  “Is the Blackhawk seated in the holster all the way? It looks loose.”

  Hazard rested his hand on the checkered rubber grip. “It’s fine.”

  Somers made an appreciative noise. “Now we just need to get you a hat.”

  Hazard took himself in, the cowboy pose, hand on the butt of the gun. “You’re an asshole.”

  “Next time Colt sleeps over at Ashley’s, you’re wearing that big revolver and a hat.”

  “I used to think you were the normal one,” Hazard said with a scowl.

  Somers’s grin got huge. He dropped back on the pillow, arms behind his head, biceps swelling under the whorls of ink.

  “No,” Hazard said. And he held up a finger in warning.

  Somers bit his bottom lip.

  “I’m a professional,” Hazard said, backing toward the door. “I have a job to do.”

  It was slightly unprofessional, he had to admit, how long it took him to find the doorknob. Mostly because he was pretty sure that was an epic boner under their sheets.

  But a few minutes later, he was driving east out of town, the Odyssey flying through the web of yellow blinkers. Then he left Wahredua, the houses and lights dropping away behind him, and he plunged into the darkness of oak and sycamore and rolling limestone bluffs and the silver dissolve of the moon.

  Okashka Heights was perhaps the most visible casualty—in Dore County, anyway—of the Great Recession of 2008. Hazard had read up on it when he’d come back to Wahredua, but, unused, that knowledge had settled to the bottom of his brain, and now he was trying to dig it back up. There had been some sort of problem with the loans; he was fairly sure that at least one of the developers had lied to get the money. And then, of course, the recession had hit, and construction all over the country had collapsed as home prices plummeted.

  What he remembered of Okashka Heights, though, was that it hadn’t just been a neighborhood. It had been—or had been meant to be—a kind of redneck resort, a luxury community. There would have been a hotel with almost four hundred rooms, a conference center, high-end shopping, a golf course, even a water park. And then, of course, all the mini-mansions.

  Whether it would have succeeded without the recession, Hazard couldn’t say. A luxury resort community in mid-Missouri seemed like a real whopper of a fuck-up, but then, stranger things had been successful. The question was moot now. And he had bigger things to worry about.

  The wooden skeleton of a billboard marked the turnoff; the road was dirt, and dust puffed up under the minivan, filtering inside, bringing its smell as Hazard left the state highway. He followed the road across a two-lane bridge that released a loose, metallic rumble as the Odyssey’s tires rolled over it. Then the ground sloped down, and Hazard realized these idiots had built their real estate development on the Okashka’s bottomlands—a natural floodplain, in other words. He could pick out the sedge and rushes and broken reeds furring the Okashka’s banks. How many times, he wanted to know, had these buildings flooded in the last twelve years? And what had it done to their structural integrity?

  Then his headlights cut across the first building: sheetrock speckled with mold, openings where windows should have been, something—a tarp, some sort of plastic sheeting—nailed to the rafters as a temporary roof that had lasted twelve years. The sheeting flapped once when an errant breeze caught it, and it made the whole house come alive: something bleached and rotten, thrashing in its death throes.

  Fuck, Hazard told himself as he wrapped his hands more tightly around the steering wheel. No more of those late-night jump-scare flicks with Colt.

  The whole development was like that—what he saw of it, anyway. He followed the unpaved road between the cadaverous mansions. As he moved deeper into the community, the skeletal frames got bigger, more convoluted. There were areas left fallow, where prairie grasses—this year’s and last’s—grew in waist-high snarls. Parks, maybe. Or custom lots that hadn’t been sold. Every so often, he’d reach the upscale version of a strip mall, the storefronts with empty windows like knocked-out teeth.

  Then his headlights painted the outline of something much, much larger. The hotel, Hazard realized after a moment: so many windows. This structure was further along than many of the others, with a brick façade in place halfway up the front, and with a porte cochere extending over a circular drive. A Chevy Malibu, dark maroon, Florida plates, was parked under the awning. If Hazard had ever seen a rental car, that was it. He followed the driveway and stopped the Odyssey behind the Chevy. He turned off the engine and got out of the car.

  Immediately, he was met by the humid air of a Missouri evening, with gnats and mosquitos buzzing at his eyes and ears. Mayflies batted against the headlights by the hundreds until the lights timed out. He opened his mouth to call out, and then he stopped. He waved away the insects and listened. A soft clicking came from the Odyssey, the sound of the metal beginning to cool and contract after the drive. And off in the distance a whippoorwill was singing its song. A breeze picked up again, and from somewhere nearby came the crinkle of a poly tarp being stirred and stretched. But what he heard most was the isolation of this place, the sound of his blood in his ears. Thirty minutes from anything remotely like civilization. He checked the Blackhawk in the holster and told himself, Clear.

  One rental car. That didn’t seem like enough people for a book burning. But when he took his next deep breath, he smelled fresh smoke and char. One rental car. And no sign of Loretta Ames. And the smell of smoke. And the silence, whining in his ears with the gnats.

  “Jesus goddamn Christ,” he muttered, hating that he was talking to himself, needing something to break the stillness. “I’m going to have to go into that fucking hotel.”

  He took out his gear bag, slung it over his shoulder—not the side with the Blackhawk—and headed toward the entrance. Construction had gotten far enough that the main floor appeared to be complete. A wall of windows looked out on the driveway, set with revolving doors and regular, handicap accessible doors, all of which had been at some point boarded up and sealed. Someone had pried open one of the regular sets of doors, and a quick glance at the weathered boards told Hazard it had happened years ago. He tested the door, and it opened easily.

  Inside, his first impression was darkness thick and heavy as velvet and the smell of mildew. He turned on a high-lumen flashlight. It looked like something out of one of those post-apocalyptic movies that Colt and Somers liked: the bones of the hotel remained, even after the years of wear and abuse. On one side, the front desk was a sinuous curve of wood and chrome. On the other, armchairs and sofas, some of them still wrapped in plastic, created conversation areas. One yawning patch of deeper darkness must have been a fireplace. Another, much larger, led into what Hazard assumed was the hotel restaurant. As he adjusted to the mildew, he could pick out, more faintly, the stink of animal scat.

  But while the hotel had been abandoned for years, it obviously hadn’t been left alone. Several of the pieces of furniture had been unwrapped, and they were soiled from water damage and dirty shoes and body oil. A mattress lay near the hearth, looking spongy with all the moisture it had absorbed. When Hazard steadied his light on the fireplace, he could make out soot stains, the bones of old fires. And, when he played the light back and forth more slowly, he could see the detritus of the people who had used this space: Dinty Moore cans, the brown glass of beer bottles, needles glinting like silver threaded into the night.

  A sound—a rustle and bump from behind the front desk—made him turn. He brought the light around in time to see something small and furry squeeze itself through a hole in the baseboard. A rat. He let out a breath and steadied the light against his thigh. Jesus fucking Christ, he ought to come out here for target practice. He blew out a breath, stood up straight, and saw the fire.

  It was just an orange blur, light reflected on glass down the hall past the front desk. He took another breath, but the reek of waterlogged carpet made it impossible to detect any hint of smoke. Fires in old buildings were a major problem, although admittedly, it seemed like this one would sputter and smolder rather than blaze up right away. His second thought was of the book burning and the possibility that maybe, somehow, that’s what was happening. And his third thought was telling himself to get a grip. He adjusted his hand around the flashlight’s textured nonslip handle and started down the hall toward the pinprick of light.

  He felt the shift underfoot, the slight bow and flex of the joists, a moment before he heard the wood protest. He stopped and brought the beam of the flashlight back toward him. The carpet here was patterned to cover up dirt, and the water had darkened the fibers even further, but something didn’t look right about the floor ahead. He shifted his weight, testing his next step, and the floor warped under his weight, buckling a section the width of the hall.

  Stepping back from the rotted-out floor, Hazard called himself nine types of stupid. Sure, fires were one of the major problems with abandoned structures. But the other one? The one that got stupid kids and even stupider adults who decided urban exploration—or whatever they wanted to call it—was the best possible use of their time? Collapse. Most often, it was the floors, where supports had weakened and could no longer bear additional weight.

  Still, he hadn’t imagined the light from the fire. He could see the reflection even more clearly from where he stood, the light glinting on the glass of double doors that suggested what was often called a ballroom or multipurpose room—doubtless part of the hotel’s convention offerings. There had to be a way to get to the fire without crossing that section of flooring; someone else had gotten there, and while Hazard was bigger than a lot of people—he could see, for a moment, his husband’s smirk—he guessed that the weight of any adult human would have brought that section of flooring down.

  So, where to now?

  He ran the flashlight along the lobby’s back wall, where windows and French doors looked out on a kind of courtyard—an open space, anyway, in the center of the hotel. For the pool, Hazard guessed. And to maximize natural light in hotel rooms. And possibly some kind of natural, chimney-like effect to circulate air.

  You’re stalling, said a voice in his head that sounded rather like his husband.

  Sure, Hazard thought. I’m in a tinderbox and someone already started the fire, and there're rats the size of Dustbusters, and the next step might send me through the floor into water that’s God knows how deep and has God knows what living in it.

  But he took his first step, and then another, testing his weight before easing forward as he made his way toward the French doors that led out to the courtyard. The floor creaked ominously a few times, and he had to stop and count his breaths until he was ready to move forward again. But the floor held. And when his fingers closed around the brushed nickel door handle, he decided he wanted to pick a fight, a big one, with his husband when he got home.

  He pushed open the door, and fresh air washed over him—clean, in contrast to the air inside the hotel, with the fragrance of the wild sweet William that had grown between the pavers, their petals like bruises against the deeper purple of the night. Ahead of him, an oblong polyester tarp drifted and shifted, the ties securing it over the empty concrete basin of the pool slowly shredding in the elements. A few pieces of patio furniture—molded plastic chairs and chaises, tables with sagging umbrellas—lay scattered around the pool. Hazard took a step out onto the pavers. Something crunched underfoot—it sounded like an aluminum can. And ahead of Hazard, a big shape startled, head coming up.