Through the Fire (16 page)

The sun slipped behind the high-rises, silhouetting their forms and turning linear edges radiant. I thought of how the workday was ending for most. How folks would make their way through traffic back to their homes and their couches and TVs. They’d see their dog, or their kids, or whatever they had waiting for them. They would draw the curtain on their day and prepare for bed and fall into the twilight existence of sleep, waking to a new day, a new world, with new air and challenges and blessings and all the things that make up a life.

Somehow, I’d awakened in Mexico with a different life, a different set of rules. No longer buoyed by air-bottle bravery or side-slung angels heaving couplings over curbsides. Now I struggled and clawed with fear and trembling through the task I’d once conquered with ease and indifference.

I’d been assigned back to the engine, sure that any confidence Butcher had in me, any respect he’d allowed himself in his toleration of me, had all but faded. I felt the uncertain stares of others, the twisted freak-show curiosity of the half-horrified, half-pity-filled onlooker.

I couldn’t hear the fire anymore.

I was being hunted by it.

Ben worked a hoe with soil-stained hands. His one-hundred-fifty-square-foot garden patch looked out of place behind the station—cornstalks and pumpkin vines beside fuel pumps and chain-link fencing. He straightened when he saw me, sweat glistening across his brow. He wiped his forehead with his arm. A trace pattern of dirt clung in its wake.

I put my hands in my pockets. “Beautiful time of night to garden.”

He sniffled. “Isn’t it?”

“You need a hand?” I said.

He picked up a bag of seed. “I’ll make a shallow trench and you drop one of these in where I show you.”

I poured tan pellets into my palm. “What are we planting?”

“Stuff for next season. This is green cabbage.”

The color drained from the city with the waning light, artificial blinking bulbs and neon tubes becoming the disparate alternative.

“Something’s wrong, Ben.”

“No, you’re doing it fine.”

“No, I mean something’s been wrong. With me. I’m sure it’s obvious.”

He stopped working the dirt.

“I can’t . . .” I looked away. “I don’t know what’s happening.

Everything is chaos. It’s crazy. I feel like the fire . . . is out to get me.”

Sower placed both hands on top of the handle. “Funny you’d say it like that. Because you’ve seemed lately like you’re
trying
to let the fire get you. It’s like you’ve been on this self-destructive rampage, Aidan. It’s not safe for any—”

“Ben, I can’t hear the fire anymore.”

“What about reading the smoke, Aidan? You’re so bent on beating the fire that you’re neglecting to respect it. Like I said, it’s as if you’re—”

“What’s wrong with wanting to beat the fire?”

“Nothing, in essence. But it has to be balanced. Unless something’s changed, you are just a man, Aidan.”

“And fire is just an element.”

“That is created by God.”

“A God who is indifferent to death and suffering.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“It’s not?”

“No, Aidan. It absolutely isn’t.”

“Then why’d He let Dad die?”

He stared at the cornstalks. “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away.”

“Not if I don’t let Him.”

He laughed and shook his head. “I think I’m finally starting to get you.”

“Are you now?”

“You have such a chip on your shoulder. You think you know better than God.”

“That’s not what this is about. You haven’t even been listening. I’m saying I’m off my nut, Ben. I think the fire is out to get me. Me. Personally.”

“And you think you can’t hear the fire anymore?”

“I know I can’t.”

His broad shoulders lifted with a deep breath. “Or could it be that you’ve finally realized that you can’t control it?”

I shook my head. Talking to him had been a mistake.

“Have you seriously considered the opposite?”

I folded my arms. “What opposite?”

“That maybe you
can
hear the fire. That maybe you’re hearing it just fine. That the fire is, in fact, out to get you.”

“You’re funny.” I glanced at the seed in the dirt. “You know what? Forget it.” I turned away.

“I’m just asking if you’ve considered it.”

The white walls of the station stood shadowed and quiet.

“You have a God-given gift, Aidan, just like your father. Things like that are irrevocable.”

Tones.

“Battalion One, Rescue One, Engine One, Engine Two, Engine Three, Truck One with safety officer to a business on fire, multiple reports of heavy smoke coming from the front.”

We screamed down Second toward Wells. A towering column stretched to the sky, atramentous against an achromatic canvas. My backup set of turnouts felt stiff and unnatural, the charred first pair having been succinctly snatched up that morning by the safety officer. I’m just glad he didn’t see my helmet, all blackened and soot stained, the visor tarry and warped at a tented angle.

The rig bounced over an intersection. I clicked the waist belt on my pack. Lowell cranked on his air bottle.

The Jake brake fluttered. Kat pulled past a single-story concrete block structure—Simmon’s Medical Supply. Pitch-colored clouds poured from the front door. An Asian man holding a white shirt by his face stumbled along the sidewalk.

I hopped out and met him. “Is anyone inside?”

He shook his head. “My business. My business.”

I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Are any people in the building?”

“No, no. Stop the fire.” He hacked and coughed. “Stop the fire.”

“Go sit over there,” I told him, pointing down the block.

Lowell met me at the sideboard. “Alley pull?”

“Let’s do it.” I grabbed the big loop and the nozzle. We split ways and paid out the hose. Kat sent water through it lightning quick. It whipped and jerked, and the nozzle pointed, ready for attack. I knelt by the smoke-filled doorway and bled the air from the line.

The front windows stood blackened. Somewhere in its lair the beast slumbered, smoke undulating in tarragon stertor. The sweet acrid scent stayed in my nostrils as I donned my mask.

Breathe.

Breathe.

I saw a serpent uncoiling, lithe and lambent. Its basilisk breath engulfed the threshold.

I shut my eyes.
Read the smoke.

I opened them to see intermittent flare-ups bursting above.

Lowell knelt beside me. “Ready to go?”

“Look at the smoke.”

“What?” He couldn’t hear me.

“Look at the smoke. I think it’s going to—”

Fire erupted, shattering the glass. We tumbled backward. I pulled on the bale and widened the pattern, circling the water around the doorway and then to the windows.

Lowell cursed about the heat. He tucked his helmet near my shoulder, his weight bracing my back.

Engine Three arrived and pulled the larger two-and-a-half-inch line. Behind us Butcher called for a defensive strategy. Truck One elevated their ladder. A cannon stream shot from its smoothbore tip, deluging a thousand gallons a minute.

Surround and drown.

The fire receded, retreating to its lair, roaring and hissing the entire way.

CHAPTER
30

A
frigid breeze breathed through the birches, the morning air crisp on my cheeks outside the Station One lobby. It had rained lightly overnight, leaving the asphalt dark and glistening. Something in it made me think of Christine, the way her hair reflected light like record vinyl, framing her face while she held a Hemingway novel. She’d swap quick coy glances from my dad’s chair in the living room. “Am I your Catherine?” My response always the same. “Yes, Christine Patricia Allen.
You
are my Catherine.”

A forlorn vacuum opened inside me.

What had Blake been doing in her car? For that matter, why was he leaving the Cairo as we all were arriving?

My cell phone vibrated. “Hello?”

“Aidan?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s Julianne.” Her smooth voice cooled my loneliness like salve on a sunburn.

“Hey. How are you?”

“I’ve found something new.”

I pulled out my car keys and switched ears. “With the fire at Chief Youngman’s house?”

“Well, yes and no. I’m at a fire scene right now, and there’s another connection. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before, but this is one of several I’ve documented in the last two days.” She was quiet for a few seconds. “Can you meet me here?”

“Sure. Yeah. Who else is there?”

“It’s just me. I’m over on Wells Avenue.”

I stuck the key in the ignition. “I know exactly where you are.”

A faded red Bronco and a stretch of yellow fire-line tape were the only signs of the department that remained around Simmon’s Medical Supply building. No engines, no truck, no chiefs.

The windows were boarded up. Through the front door I saw Julianne standing, sans lab coat, wearing dark slacks, a white blouse, and dark suit coat. She stared at the burn patterns across the walls.

I ducked under the fire line and walked through the front door, crunching glass shards along the concrete. “Don’t you look the part?”

She gave a measured smile. “I’d much rather be looking through a microscope, believe me.”

I nodded. “Battlefield promotion?”

She let out a quick laugh. “Sort of. Just temporary, you know.

‘Acting Deputy Field Inspector.’ ”

“I see. Do you get to have a gun?”

“No. No. But I’m ready to taser the first firebug I see.”

“That’s impressive. No pepper spray?”

“Oh, I’ve got that, too. I’ll tase ’em and then I’ll pepper spray ’em.”

I chuckled and trapped a drywall nugget under the ball of my foot, scribing a white semi-arc on the floor.

“It’s good to see you again, Aidan.”

I looked up. “You, too.”

She crossed her arms. “I saw news footage of the Cairo fire. I saw you climbing the ladder.”

I bit my cheek and nodded.

“When you went in that room, I didn’t know if you would come out.”

I avoided her eyes. Racks of elongated medical supplies hung frozen in their melted state. “You know, you should probably have a helmet and a HEPA mask in here.”

She creased her eyebrows. “You think I need it any more than you?”

Touché.

She motioned down a hallway. “Come on back here. I’ll show you what I found.”

I followed her to a large back room with a single window on the back wall that lent pale light. The space was empty save for the skeleton frame of a metal filing cabinet sitting in the corner. It looked like Wile E. Coyote with a blown stack of dynamite.

“This,” she said, “was the office.”

“Nothing but ash.”

“Yes. And no.”

“More of nothing to add to the not-so-heaping stack of anti-evidence?”

She wasn’t amused. “This time I’ve managed to find something in that nothing.” She pointed down and made a circular motion. “Take a few steps back.”

I scanned the floor. Encompassing the room’s perimeter, where the cinders had been swept clean, the smooth finished concrete was interrupted by a ring of cracks and chips. “What caused this?”

“Think Johnny Cash.”

“A Boy Named Sue?”

She smirked. “No.”

“What? Okay. The Man in Black?”

She shook her head. “Think what, not who.” She circled her finger, pointing at the floor.

“The Ring of Fire?”

“There you go.”

I studied the spalled concrete. “How?”

She knelt and pinched fine flecks of the aggregate. “Something burned here so hot and so fast that it instantly fragmented the concrete.”

“And the room’s contents with it?”

“Gone. Almost entirely consumed. As if a veritable wall of fire shot up and out, devouring everything in its wake.”

My eyes followed the scorched sediment.

She stepped closer to me. “It seems to have burned out and away from the starting ring. The little that was on the inside here probably didn’t go up until later.” She drew her jacket together. “But it’s not just this. A closer look at the sprinkler system showed that the water flow had been shut off at the riser.”

“Any fingerprints or DNA?”

“Absolutely nothing, so far. Even the tamper alarm is clean and unactivated. Whoever this is, they’re wise to detection methods, both automated and investigative. So I decided to start searching for patterns, and I think I may’ve found some commonalities among the occupancies.”

I played connect the dots in my mind with the recent fires. No picture emerged. “What do you see?”

“This one is the most obvious, but I wouldn’t have made the link except for when you said that house the arsonist targeted two days ago was retired chief Youngman’s. This business here is the primary supplier for oxygen-related equipment to our department.”

“So, both are department related. What about the fire Hartman and I were on?”

“I looked into that. Turns out they are the parent company of our local uniform store.”

I scratched my jaw. “What about the trailer park fire?”

“That I don’t see a connection with occupancy. But I do with geography. Engine One was on the initial attack string for that fire.”

“And it was on C-shift.”

“Right. As roughly ninety percent of the arsons in the last week have been.”

“There was an A-frame fire I went to when I first got back.”

“Which was in District One and happens to be a rental property belonging to another retired RFD chief.”

“And the Cairo?”

“Again, Station One on the first alarm string.” She walked to the window. “I know. The department connection might be a reach. But what we do know for sure is that each of these fires burned hot and fast and left little evidence. And the majority have been on your shift and in your first due area.” She turned and stared at the floor. Shadows cloaked her body. “There’s . . .”

“What?”

“There is something else.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know if I should—”

“Yes. You should. Come on now. You brought it up.”

She swallowed. “It’s about your friend.”

“Who? Blake?”