Heaven Should Fall - By Rebecca Coleman Page 0,122

a little edgier. This was the plan: I’d walk over to the usual lunch spot and wait for Fielder to show up, act surprised to see him, tell him I was in town for a job interview, then mention I still had some of Bylina’s campaign binders in my car that I ought to give to him. That was the kind of stuff that needed to be locked up or shredded, so he’d want them back for sure. Once at the truck, Dodge would pull him in, and that would allow me to take his badge and get past security—they’d still recognize me, and so as long as I had the badge I could breeze through—and set off the chemical bombs packed in Coke bottles in my bag. They were powerful things, way more effective than anything Jill had seen me working on. Dodge and I had tested them down at the quarry last week, and those things went off like napalm.

But that was only the part of the plan Dodge knew. His job was to get rid of Fielder, and he still harbored this crazy fantasy that once this was finished we’d drive straight west and live off the grid somewhere in the deep woods of another state, most likely with some of his contacts in Montana. Eventually we’d bring our families out, and it would be cool because Jill knew how to live that way and liked it. He’d floated that idea during the planning stages and I hadn’t contradicted him, even though anybody who really knew me would have known I’d rather die than live in that kind of isolation, hiding from everybody and pretending not to be myself. What I knew was that, one way or another, I wasn’t going to make it out of this event alive. If I fled the building and made it back to the car, well, I had Elias’s gun under the passenger seat. Because once all of this was finished, it wasn’t only Elias who would be reckoned for. In a few days my letter would arrive at the Vogels’ house, and they would finally know that Candy had admitted it to me and Elias, that very night. How she watched Lindsay slip and then slide across that ice, crack and break through, and how the girl had reached her hands out toward her, met her eye, before she went under. And how Candy had just stood there for one minute, two, maybe as many as five, before she yelled to everyone else. Letting the seconds tick by, holding her own breath like a gauge. She told us in a voice so calm that we didn’t really believe her, not then. At the time I thought she was only trying to attach herself to the attention the whole sad story was getting, but I don’t think that anymore. I know her better than that now.

I don’t know what you do with knowledge like that as long as you’re living. You just carry it, I suppose. But if I was going down, I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave this world and take that with me. If this whole thing was about accountability, and Dodge agreed with me on that one, then so be it. Because Candy had her part in this, too, adding that burden to all the other ones Elias had to carry, stacking on her part of that crushing weight. Dodge would not be pleased, not one bit, but that wouldn’t affect me.

Now I could hear the sirens in the distance, plenty of them. I brushed the crumbs off my fingers and sauntered up to the curb to climb in when Dodge came by again. Back in the truck, he asked me, “You ready to do this thing?”

I popped one of the mints into my mouth. “‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,’” I told him. I was quoting Jefferson. “‘It is its natural manure.’”

“Just do it right the first time,” he said. He was driving slowly, scanning the street. “And don’t let it be any of your own blood. We don’t need any complications.”

It was twelve-thirty. I looked out the window and saw, right there, Fielder walking down the sidewalk in the sea of people leaving the building for lunch, hair flouncing up and down from his forehead. He had his laptop bag slung over his shoulder and was holding the strap with both hands.