I swallow down a sob and tick in the code with quaking fingers, then tap 3 to arm the system to Stay. The tiny light flips back to red, and a cold numbness blooms in my chest and spreads across my skin.
We are locked in the house with a gunman.
C A M
3:21 p.m.
“Everything okay?” I look at Flavio, the best general manager I’ve got and GM of the charred remains of the steak shop we’re currently standing in. He’s asked a loaded question if I’ve ever heard one.
I take in the ruins of my flagship restaurant and remind myself to breathe. Faulty wiring, according to the lead firefighter, and in the worst possible spot, next to a giant tub of cooking oil. One tiny spark in a corner of the kitchen that quickly grew into a fireball, licking up the walls and into the empty space above. The flames crawled across the ceiling into the dining room, where noise absorption panels were spread like a nighttime constellation, custom-made sheets of foam and fabric that rained down sparks and fire. By the time the fire trucks got here, the place was completely engulfed.
“No, I’m not okay. It’s like a bomb went off in here. I’m about as far from okay as you can get.”
The tables, the chairs, the custom booths and polished cherry bar, the cut crystal glasses, the trio of art deco chandeliers by the entrance that cost $17,500 a pop. Whatever didn’t go up in flames was hosed with what must have been fifteen hundred gallons of water. It’s like standing in a flooded ashtray.
“I meant with Jade,” Flavio says, swiping a hand down his dark beard. Like most men in the restaurant business, he gives his facial hair free rein—the bushier, the better. I used to complain, but these days hell if I care. “That’s who you were talking to earlier, right?”
“Oh. Yeah, some creep’s been following her around town, but let’s tackle one disaster at a time. What the hell happened here? How did it get this bad?”
“Apparently, the noise panels were highly flammable.” He points to a spot high on the wall to the kitchen, where the first in a web of panels is now a black, smoky blur. “The flames hit that one and poof. The whole ceiling was gone in a matter of minutes.”
I stare at the maze of tangled wires and smoke-blackened insulation that runs along the spine of the building, most of it burned away. The stench, a combination of charred wood and melted plastic, sears like acid in the back of my throat, the inside of my nose, my lungs.
My best moneymaker gone. One hundred and thirteen employees out of a job. Millions of dollars turned to ash.
Flavio kicks a chunk of something aside, burnt wood scraping over glass and stone, a sound I feel in my bones. This place was his main source of income, too.
My chest tightens with a familiar weight. What kind of cocky idiot opens a fifth restaurant when the other four aren’t paid off? What was I thinking, taking on responsibility for all those people? Flavio watches me, waiting for a response, and I have no clue what to say. That I never should have given him a job? That only a fool would trust me with their livelihood? I swallow and turn away.
At the front of the shop, two women with blowouts and shocked expressions peer through what’s left of the plate-glass window. Thanks to the location in the middle of Buckhead’s swankiest shopping district, these ladies are our typical daytime diners. They order hundred-dollar bottles of wine and steak salads they barely touch, and they come in such droves there’s a two-week wait for a 12:30 table.
Scratch that—was a two-week wait.
I yank my eyes away from their disappointed faces, focusing instead on the markings on a far wall. Two giant sooty wings that swoop up and into the blackened ceiling. The pastry prep station. The stainless steel worktops that once stood there have been shoved to the side, a heap of metal and ash. I flip on the flashlight on my phone and move deeper into the darkness. My footsteps are loud in the hushed space, the broken glass and debris crunching under my shoes.
Flavio doesn’t ask what I’m looking at, because he sees it, too.
Ground zero. The source of the blaze.
I take in the ruined chunk of wall, the melted remains of what was once an outlet. Whatever was plugged in there has been burned and melted away. An electrical fire, and in the worst possible place.
“What happened to the alarm?” I say, and I can hear the break in my voice, feel the slow swirl of dread prickling my neck.
The system I paid an obscene amount for, one the salesman guaranteed would protect this place from not just theft but also sudden temperature spikes. And a multiple-alarm fire like this one—the kind that blows out the glass partition between the kitchen and the dining area and pumps a column of black smoke high enough into the early morning sky that some lady walking her dog five blocks away was alarmed enough to call 9-1-1—would come with one hell of a temperature spike.