The Taking of Libbie, SD (23 page)

There was a hole deep in my stomach now, and it was slowly filling with the black bile of guilt. I didn’t like the feeling it gave me, and I wished it would go away. I wished there were something I could do to make it all right. I wished I could put out the fire and rebuild their home, and I wished I could do it in seconds. The more I wished, the angrier I became.

A moment later, the hoses were shut down. Yet the fire still burned. The flames, hot against my face from the beginning, gained in intensity. The wind—the wretched wind had not stopped blowing since I arrived in Libbie—swirled the smoke and blew it into my eyes. I blamed the smoke for the tears that came suddenly. I wiped them with the back of my hand and eased farther away from the fire until I was across the street.

“What the hell?” I said.

A red tanker truck disconnected from the pump truck and sped off. A second tanker quickly replaced it, and a firefighter worked frantically until the hoses were resupplied with water.

“What the hell?” I said again.

“It’s the ol’ tanker shuffle,” a voice said.

An old man leaning on a cane was standing behind me on the sidewalk. He brushed his nearly nonexistent hair with his hand. I drifted back to where he stood.

“What do you mean?”

“We have only one water hydrant in this town that works properly,” he said. “We call it the sacred hydrant, down on Main. So what we hafta do, we hafta shuttle our water tankers back and forth from a fill site to the pump truck, kinda like a bucket brigade. One’s got twelve hundred and fifty gallons; the other holds fifteen hundred. Luckily, the fill site is less than a mile from here, so it won’t be much of a problem. If it were outside of town, this fire, we’d be fucked. As it is…” The old man lowered his head, gave it a slow shake, and raised it again. “Eight-man crew to cover a whole town—it’s ridiculous. Should have fifteen at least. I’d lend a hand, but…” He raised his cane for me to see.

Like everyone else, I kept staring at the fire. It was tragic, yet also quite seductive, almost beautiful.
An enraged elemental beast slaking a hunger so old only stones and gods remembered
. The mystery writer Nevada Barr wrote that. Now I knew what she meant.

I watched the fire crawl up the outside wall of the Danne home. Flames started venting in the open window on the second floor.

“Huh,” the old man said. “That shouldn’t be happening.”

“What?”

“The flames in the window. This here is an exterior fire; fire is burning mostly on the surface, not burning through the wall, you can tell. To spread so rapidly to the second floor like that, it must be feeding off an accelerant of some kind.”

“An accelerant?”

“Yeah. Look. You got black smoke coming off the wall, there. See it? Black smoke, usually that means petroleum-based products. The rest of the fire—that’s white smoke. Even the roof where you have tar paper and oil-based shingles, that’s white smoke.”

“Do you think the fire was set?”

“Looks like,” the old man said. “’Course, I could be wrong. These throwaway houses, the way they’re built now, using all them lightweight construction materials. Used to be, back in my day, builders used dimensional lumber to make your wood frames, had masonry walls, wood floors—there was mass to resist the heat; the building’s support system had a longer life expectancy. That woulda given you time for an interior attack. Go inside to get at the fire without worrying about the damn roof comin’ down on your head. Now, hell, the cheap crap they use cuz they wanna keep the cost down—your plywood and fiberboard and plastics and crap; walls built to carry only as much load as you need to meet code—you just can’t risk it. No, sir.

“Ten years ago, I woulda been the first to say you can’t put out no fire standing outside shooting through windows and holes in the roof. Now, now you gotta use them blitz attack nozzles to overpower the fire, cool the exterior and then go interior. ’Course, if you got someone inside that needs rescuing, you forget all that crap and just go get ’im.”

I stood silently and watched the firefighters go about their business. The old man said the boys knew what they doing, and I guess it must have been true because they managed to knock down the blaze in just over a quarter of an hour. After that it was all about cooling hot spots. My impression was that the water damage would be far greater than the fire damage.

Once the blaze was extinguished to their satisfaction, the firefighters used giant fans to help vent the house of smoke. The old man moved forward, and I went with him. The firefighters and a few neighbors began carrying belongings from the ground floor onto the lawn, where they were covered with a tarp. No one was allowed to go upstairs until an engineer determined if it was safe to use the staircase, although from the look on Rick Danne’s face, I knew that as soon as someone’s back was turned, he would give it a try. A man carrying a large overstuffed chair by himself became lodged in the doorway, and I helped him out. He and I made a few more trips in and out of the house, rescuing furniture, before I actually bumped into Cathy. Her face was smudged with soot, and her hair appeared singed. Her eyes held a kind of wild expression that I had never seen before, as if they were trying to convey too many emotions at once. She stared, and for a moment I thought she did not recognize me. A single word told me otherwise.

“McKenzie,” she said.

“I am so, so sorry,” I told her.

I took a deep breath and waited for the angry words, even blows, that I felt I deserved—I promised myself I would accept them all without complaint or defense. They didn’t land. Long moments passed before Cathy spoke.

“It’s terrible,” she said.

“Yes, it is.”

“He’ll probably get away with it, too, just like he did all those other times.”

She was staring so intently that I found myself taking a backward step.

“The police can’t help,” she said.

In that instant, I knew exactly what she was doing. Cathy Danne was reminding me of the promise I had made Church in the Café Rossini:
If anything happens to anyone in this room or their
property, especially the Dannes—I don’t care if they’re struck by lightning’I will come for you. Not the cops. Me
.

“I’m not the police,” I said.

“I know.”

“Good luck to you, Mrs. Danne.”

She bobbed her head purposefully. “McKenzie,” she said.

Cathy retreated into her home without a backward glance. The old man was still watching from the sidewalk. I thanked him for his courtesy and turned away from the house. That’s when I saw Church’s pal Paulie. He was sitting on the hood of a car down the street and drinking beer from a longneck bottle. I walked up to him. He smiled.

“Guess someone was careless with matches,” he said. “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

“Tell Church to meet me at the Tall Moon Tavern tomorrow night at nine,” I said. “Tell him not to keep me waiting.”

“I ain’t your nigger,” he said.

I grabbed both of Paulie’s legs and yanked hard. His entire body slid off the car and fell straight down. His head banged off the bumper, and the rest of him bounced hard against the asphalt. The bottle shattered and splashed him with beer and glass.

I kept walking, not even bothering to look back.

Sharren was behind the registration desk when I entered the Pioneer Hotel. I asked her if she ever went home. She said a fellow employee was on vacation so she was working double shifts.

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I don’t have anything else to do.”

“Why do you stay here?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“In Libbie. Why do you stay here?”

“Where would I go?”

“Anywhere. Anywhere with a future. There’s no future here. It was used up years ago.”

“You’re upset because of the fire.”

“Am I?”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Who said it was?”

“Everybody knows what happened at the Café Rossini, McKenzie.”

“What is everybody going to do about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“How many fires has that sonuvabitch set over the years? A dozen? More? Guys like Church get away with their bullshit because the people they hurt insist on following the rules even when the rules work against them, and he’s going to get away with this, too, unless—”

“Unless someone breaks the rules just like Church,” Sharren said.

“Yes.”

“What are you trying to talk yourself into?”

I flashed on the look in Cathy Danne’s eyes.

“Not a thing,” I said.

“I hate to think that you would stoop to Church’s level.”

“There would be a difference.”

“Doing wrong for the right reason, is that the difference?”

“Something like that.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Excuse me?”

“The kitchen’s closed. Everything in town is closed at this hour except for a couple of bars. I bet I could rustle something up for you in the kitchen if you wanted. When was the last time you ate?”

“I had something at the clinic this morning.”

Sharren glanced at her watch and shook her head.

“I’ll be right back,” she said. “Watch the desk for me. Give a shout if someone comes in or calls.”

I made myself comfortable in an overstuffed chair when she left. No one did come in, and I was starting to doze when Sharren returned with a club sandwich and a tap beer.

“Evan was just closing the bar, but I got him to pour this for you,” she said.

I thanked her profusely for both the sandwich and the beer and dug in. I didn’t know how hungry I was until I started to eat. She sat in the nearest chair and watched me. After a while, she said, “I thought about leaving, only I don’t know where I would go or what I would find there. It frightens me. If I were younger … Could you just up and leave your home?”

“It would be hard,” I admitted.

“What would make it hard?”

“Leaving the people I love.”

“That’s the thing, isn’t it?”

“Is there someone in Libbie you can’t live without?”

Sharren looked up and to her right as if she were remembering something. “Yes,” she said. “Finally, at last, yes, I think there is.”

Her answer surprised me, and I said, “Oh?”

“You’re thinking about Rush,” she said. “You’re thinking about the times I flirted with you.”

“More than flirted,” I said. “You opened the door pretty wide.”

“I suppose I was testing myself, making sure I was making the right decision. Have you ever done anything like that?”

I thought of Nina. I thought of a red-haired beauty named Danielle Mallinger, the police chief of a small town in southwestern Minnesota that I met months later. I thought of how I didn’t fully and truly commit to Nina until after I spent time with Danny.

“Sounds kind of juvenile,” I said.

“I guess, but you need to be sure, don’t you? It’s about peace of mind. Peace of mind is hard to come by for most people.”

I told her that was probably true.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sunday morning, and the window to my antiquated hotel room was open—when was the last time you were able to open a window in a hotel? Through the window I heard three sets of church bells calling to each other from different corners of the city. Through the window I could smell the lingering smoke and ash from the Danne house fire. Or maybe it was just the clothes I had worn last night and tossed on the floor.

I lay in bed, my hands tucked beneath my head, and stared at the ceiling. I thought about Tracie Blake. She had been a lonely woman. She asked me to help chase the alone feeling away. I understood the alone feeling; I knew about waking up alone and going to bed alone and all the lonely hours in between with the phone not ringing and the e-mail in-box coming up empty. I believed we all knew it at one time or another. Yet I had turned her down, just as I had turned down Sharren Nuffer. I did it for honorable reasons. I did it for Nina, the woman who had chased the alone feeling away for me. That didn’t make me feel any less guilty about it.

I thought about Mike, another solitary soul. He and Tracie found each other. Together they had chased away the alone feeling, if only for one night. But who knows? One night could have become two. Then a week. A month. A year. Maybe it would have been permanent if they had time.

I liked Tracie. I liked Mike. In my neighborhood, they both would have been labeled “good guys”—high praise indeed. Now they were both gone, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I didn’t even know where to start; not that Big Joe Balk would tolerate my kibitzing. He didn’t know me. This was his ground, not mine. My only thought was to keep after the Imposter and see if one thing might lead to another.

Church, on the other hand, was a different matter.

I listened to the bells. When they finally fell silent, I spoke aloud—“Brothers and sisters, the subject of today’s homily is”—and stopped. The Old Testament God spoke of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—proportional justice. The New Testament God preached forgiveness—“Turn the other cheek,” He said.

So which is it? Justice or forgiveness?

He beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil
—so wrote Paul in Romans 13 of the emperor’s policemen.

Et prout vultis ut faciant vobis homines et vos facite illis similiter
, wrote Luke in 6:31—“And just as you wish others to do for you, do also the same for them.”

I decided to let Shakespeare settle the matter:
If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

I don’t even know why I bothered with the internal debate. I had made up my mind when I gazed into Cathy’s eyes, and I confirmed my decision when I found Paulie sitting on the car hood, having a swell time at the expense of the Dannes.

“Fire and brimstone,” I said aloud. “Today’s homily—fire and fucking brimstone.”

Sharren wouldn’t approve. Most of the people I knew and cared about wouldn’t approve—Cathy Danne might even be among them once she had time to think about it. I didn’t care.