Violet Darger (Book 6): Night On Fire

by Vargus, L. T.

  “Where is this from?”

  “A little secondhand shop, maybe two blocks down from the Galitis house,” Bishop said. “This is the night before the fire.”

  “How do we know it isn’t just someone that lives in the neighborhood?” Klootey asked.

  Darger aimed a finger at the time stamp on the screen.

  “This says 11 PM. Caroline heard the same thing a few days before at 4 AM.”

  “So?” Luck asked.

  “So, someone in the neighborhood would more likely be on a schedule. If it was the same car at the same times, then I’d consider it’s maybe someone on the night shift, coming home. But to be rolling through at 4 AM and then 11 PM? On week nights? And Caroline said the car idled at the curb for a while before taking off. That doesn’t sound like a local. I think it could be him,” Darger said, then turned to face Bishop. “What do you have the night of the fire?”

  “I don’t remember seeing this car on there, but I’ve been churning through the footage pretty quick. The only reason I remember it at all is that this jag-off—” he pointed at Klootey “—cranked the volume on the computer all the way up when I went to take a leak. Almost blew my eardrums out when that squeaking piece of shit rolled by.”

  Bishop scrolled through the video files, the thumbnails shifting up and then down on the screen.

  “Huh. Looks like we don’t have footage from this camera that night.”

  “Well that’s convenient,” Klootey muttered.

  Bishop shrugged, “It’s a DIY set-up. The shop owner warned me that his wireless feed goes down every few days or so. He has to reset it or it doesn’t record. Sometimes he forgets.”

  “Have you checked him out at all?” Luck asked. “It does seem a little too convenient, is all. He could be worth looking into.”

  “Especially if he owns an SUV with a bad…” Darger eyed Bishop. “What kind of belt was it?”

  “Serpentine belt,” Bishop said. “I had a Chevy Malibu a few years back. Noisy as hell. Camacho’s the one that told me to get the belt fixed.”

  “Let’s check out the feed you’ve got from other cameras, see if we can’t spot this noisy bastard on the night of the fire,” Darger suggested. “It’ll go faster if four of us search.”

  Bishop waggled an elbow at the other computers in the room.

  “Take your pick.”

  Darger and Luck each chose a computer and began sifting through the “night of” footage. Darger spent the next hour staring at video from various traffic cameras surrounding the Galitis scene. The good news was she could narrow her search down to the half-hour during which the fire was set. The bad news was they’d pulled feed from a dozen different traffic cams, and there was no telling which one might have the footage she was looking for.

  After an hour and a half in front of the screen, her eyes stung, and she needed to pee. She’d just rolled her chair back away from the desk when Luck held up his hand.

  “I think I’ve got something.”

  Darger joined the two cops in their huddle around Luck’s monitor.

  He rolled the video clip. It was grainy black and white security feed from the parking lot of an apartment building down the street from Judy Galitis’ residence. Twenty-two minutes before the fire was called in to 911, the same dark SUV went cruising past.

  At least it looked like the same vehicle. Without sound to confirm the squeaking belt noise, it was hard to be definitive.

  “No audio on this feed?” Darger asked.

  Luck frowned.

  “Afraid not.”

  Darger crossed her arms. Still, it was something.

  Luck squinted at the screen.

  “You know, my in-laws had a car a lot like this. A Toyota 4-Runner. I’m not saying it’s the same make and model or anything, but it’s the same size, same general style, so probably from around the same time period. Maybe we can narrow it down to dark, mid-size SUVs from, I don’t know, 2007 through 2012?”

  “Good thinking, Luck,” Klootey said. “There’s only about 8 million vehicles registered in L.A. county. And roughly half of all vehicles sold are SUVs. So with your additional criteria, it should only be another few million to go through. Can’t imagine it’d take more than a decade or two.”

  “Hey, dickhead, at least I’m trying to come up with something useful instead of sending people out on snipe hunts for a laugh.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you ended up getting something from the daughter, did you not?” Klootey said.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Guys,” Darger said.

  They ignored her.

  “So the way I see it, I steered you on the proper path with my keen eye for detail and preternatural sense for working the evidence at hand. Just had a feeling about ol’ Mrs. Pain-in-the-ass, the Klootey tingle they call it, like a spidey-sense type of deal, and thankfully for all of us, I trusted my gut.”

  “You’re kidding me if you think—”

  “Hey, dumbfucks!” Bishop interrupted.

  When he had the attention of Luck and Klootey, he motioned toward Darger’s computer, where she’d brought up a list of 2009 mid-size SUVs with photographs.

  “There’s no fucking way you’re going to be able to ID the car with this. The video’s grainy as shit,” Klootey argued.

  “But Luck is right,” Darger said. “We can narrow it down.”

  She tapped Luck’s screen with her fingernail.

  “Look. It’s got those rail things on the roof.”

  “Roof racks,” Bishop said.

  “Yeah. So, check out this list.” She scrolled through the photos of the mid-size SUVs on her screen. “Only some come with roof racks. And some have them laid out crosswise.”

  “Roof racks can be added aftermarket,” Klootey said. “This is nothing.”

  “Nah.” Bishop shook his head. “It’s not nothing. Come on, Teej. We’ve been at this for hours, and this is the first scrap of anything we’ve found. It makes sense to tease out whatever we can from it.”

  They spent the next twenty minutes shaving their list down, which at times turned into a heated debate, mostly between Luck and Klootey.

  “What about the GMC Envoy?” Luck asked. “It’s got the right roof rack style.”

  Klootey scoffed.

  “No fucking way. The profile is all wrong. Look at how chunky that thing is. No finesse. The SUV in the video is way sleeker.” He leaned back in his swivel chair, feet up on the desk in front of him. “Besides that, the grill on the GMC isn’t right.”

  “You can’t even see the grill in the video,” Luck argued.

  “Yeah, you can.” Klootey leaned forward and poked his finger into the monitor. “Right there.”

  “That’s glare from the other car’s headlights. And would you mind not smearing your sausage fingers all over my screen, please?”

  “Glare, my ass,” Klootey said with an antagonizing smirk.

  After all the bickering, they’d narrowed the possibilities to six models. Not ideal, but it was a starting point. Given the poor quality of the video footage, Darger thought it was better than they could have hoped for.

  Once they were finished with the main thrust of their task here, it seemed all the energy fled the room. Time had flown past, somehow transporting them from the afternoon directly into the night, and all Darger wanted to do was get back to her room to sleep. She had a feeling the same must be true for the others as they packed up to head out in near silence.

  And suddenly, with the sway of exhaustion creeping in, the new lead didn’t seem so promising. Like Klootey had said, they’d only succeeded in narrowing the list to millions of vehicles in the surrounding counties, maybe the high hundreds of thousands if they were lucky.

  “You OK?” Luck said, shaking her out of the spiraling thoughts. She realized that Bishop and Klootey were gone now. The room felt very empty.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Just tired.”

  “Well, let’s get out of h
ere.”

  Chapter 17

  The man stoops in the shadowed place between the parked cars, the place where the streetlights cannot touch. He pours gasoline from a red plastic can into an empty two-liter bottle of Sierra Mist.

  Licks his lips. Nervous. Excited. Alive.

  The fuel trickles into the bottle with a sound a lot like pissing. Loud.

  He swivels his head to see if anyone hears. Sees the glow staring back from all the suburban windows, TVs flickering inside most, but not a soul stirring. Good.

  He turns back to the dark place where the gas sloshes.

  Gasoline is not his favorite accelerant, but it’s what he has handy most of the time. We all make little sacrifices when it comes to our passions in this life.

  Besides. This one won’t be like the church. Nothing quite so grand as all that. This one is just a little warning. A little entertainment. Nothing too serious.

  What do they call it? Firing a shot across the bow. That’s all.

  He walks a block and a half. Rounds a corner. Slows as he moves close to the sports car he means to light up.

  Images of the flames to come flicker in his skull. Bright pictures. Orange smears that engulf all things around them.

  But no. No. Not this one. Small, he reminds himself. And yet…

  Couldn’t it spread? Become something serious? Of course it could. But that part isn’t up to him. It’s up to the wind, up to chance, up to whatever gods watch over this place.

  In the end it is always up to the fire. Always.

  Something nags him. Makes him hesitate a moment. Something he needs to remember. It hits him: He’d stowed the gas can near the driver’s side tire of his SUV. Needs to remember to grab that. Alas, the Sierra Mist bottle won’t be coming back from this journey.

  Now he shuffles forward, the hair on his arms standing up as he moves back into the light. He considers standing. Walking upright like a normal man. But better to stay low, some animal part of him thinks. No feints to normalcy or nonchalance here. Stay in the shadows, strike, and get out. Quick and savage. Like a wolf leaping straight for the goddamn jugular.

  He kneels before the Mustang. Hesitates there a moment. And he gazes upon the house of the owner, or at least the one he thinks is the owner’s. Holds his breath as he does it.

  Blue light brightens and darkens on the wall. But no figure appears there in the window. No threatening silhouette. No vigilant watcher to find him out.

  When it comes to these dark deeds, these dark matters of the heart, the shadows will mostly conceal you, he thinks. If you’re smart enough to let them.

  His heart hammers now in his chest. The level of excitement tingling in every follicle on his head, in the meat of his palms, in the tips of his toes, and all points in between.

  Why did it feel so good to deceive them? To get away with it?

  OK. No more waiting.

  He takes a big breath and twists the cap off the plastic bottle.

  He has to chew his lip to hold back from giggling a little as the first spritz of gas flings out of the bottle.

  * * *

  He still remembers how it all started for him. That first brush with fire, the first taste of the power it wielded without mercy.

  He was 13, and it was just about a month after his dad’s heart attack. Like any true working-class hero, his father had worked himself to death. A lumberjack who died on the job, draped in sweaty flannel. Massive coronary. Dead before he hit the ground.

  The funeral was hard. Pain like he’d never imagined. Loneliness he couldn’t shake. Surrounded by all those people and lonelier than ever. Then, somehow, even after the acute hurt of the wound had started its long, slow fade, things just kept getting worse.

  Homelife got so dreary. Mom crying all the time. Drinking until she passed out. Putting all of her anxiety and guilt on him when she was awake.

  With dad out of the picture, their income dropped to zero. The power company pulled the plug on them within weeks. He ate generic brand cereal, a Cocoa Puffs knockoff, with water instead of milk for every meal.

  And the few friends he had at school all seemed to be away for that stretch of summer. Off at camps or on family trips.

  So he started going out on his bike at all hours. Long rides by himself. Alone. He fled the city, took the twisting roads up into the hills where there were more trees than faces, tried to get as far away from everyone as he could.

  It was there, on a canyon road near Griffith Observatory just after dawn, that he found it.

  He came upon a Porsche smashed into a California sycamore. The front end wrapped around the thick trunk entirely, as though attempting to bear hug it, metal contorted into impossible angles that made him think about all those phony psychics bending spoons. But the little sports car wasn’t just mangled, it’d become a fireball at the end. A blackened shell that wept its plastic contents into dark puddles that hardened on the ground around the accident as well as on the car’s floor.

  Based on the gashes in the mud, they’d taken quite a tumble before landing here, veering nearly sideways, grazing one tree and stripping a good hunk of bark away so a gouged chunk of white flesh lay exposed like a bite mark, before finally reaching that final collision point and bursting into flames. The news reports later estimated their speed to have been in the 120 mph range.

  The driver had been thrown from the vehicle on the impact with the first tree — in some way spared from the worst of it. No seatbelt. His body launched through the windshield — catapulted — and then smashed under the car. The skinny little legs sticking out from under the twisted steel. Probably a quick end. Merciful to a certain degree.

  The woman in the passenger seat didn’t fare so well.

  Her nose was just about smashed flat, a detail strangely discernible even after she’d burned to black char. Most of her teeth lay on the floor below, congealed in the plastic goo that seeped down from the dash as the fire consumed it.

  But the claw marks in one unburnt remnant of upholstery told the real story. She was trapped. Conscious. Terrified. Confused.

  And the fire took her.

  He was looking at the aftermath of what must have been a stunning special effects sequence. Horrifying and disturbing, and in its own way, awe-inspiring. Except this wasn’t movie magic. It was real.

  Everything about the scene was a spectacle, yes, but those torn places in the seat and the curved little scratches near the door handle, those were what took his breath away. Jesus. It reminded him of something that might happen to a rodent or possum or something. Some creature too dumb to avoid traffic or whatever. A groundhog. Not a real live human being.

  After that, he thought about fire all the time. And he learned a word for its effects. Sublime. An awe-inspiring aesthetic experience that is rooted in an elevated quality — in this case, rooted not in the beautiful but in the terrifying. Like experiencing a storm at sea, a tornado, an act of brutal violence like a punch that knocks out teeth, or an explosion. Any of these experiences can overwhelm the senses, make one shudder, fill one with wonder so intense it becomes nauseating. To him, that was what distinguished a beautiful experience from a sublime one.

  Bring on your shock, your horror, your total astonishment. Bring on the sublime.

  But fire? Fire trumps all the rest.

  Fire is destruction in its purest form. Naked energy. Raw power. It devours solid objects. Erases everything it touches. Crisps skin. Melts faces. Brings all to ash.

  He set his first fire out in the hills three weeks after he came upon the little accident. It didn’t do much, and he didn’t see what little it did. He’d splashed some lighter fluid everywhere and lit it. When he heard the whoosh and saw the bright flash, he panicked. Rode his bike away at top speed. Going back the next day revealed just a little patch where the grass had turned brown. Nothing more.

  But he was determined. And he was willing to learn.

  Chapter 18

  Officer Miguel Camacho woke on his couch in th
e dark, gasping for breath. Confused. Groggy. A little frightened.

  What the hell?

  Screaming. Screaming had awakened him. Hadn’t it?

  He listened. Nothing now. A dream, maybe.

  The TV flashed blue light at him, a flicker that brightened and darkened on the walls around him, shifted the tones of the shadows every which way.

  He took a breath. Rubbed his eyes. A little of the alarm drained away as he pieced together what was happening.

  Beer commercials on TV provided the first clue as they gave way to the local news. That put the time somewhere between 11 pm and midnight or so.

  He must have fallen asleep watching Thursday Night Football again. Sheesh. Why were the games on Thursday always so damn boring? Low scoring. Poor execution in all three phases of the game. NyQuil Football, he liked to call it. Tasted terrible and knocked him the hell out.

  The screaming picked up again and snapped his mind away from the NFL. The shrill sound snaked a little chill down the length of his spine, a sensation that reminded him of a dog’s hackles going up.

  He sat forward on the couch. Listened.

  Yes. The screaming. That’s what had shaken him awake in the first place, he remembered now with certainty. Incessant screaming.

  But not the screaming of a human, thankfully. It was that damn Pomeranian over at Gus Miller’s place, Cheeto. Thing went apeshit every time a squirrel came within a few hundred yards of their property. One of those mean little dogs that probably leaped to bite the nose of any idiot foolish enough to try to lean down and pet it. He’d heard Klootey refer to this type of dog as a Scrotum Shredder once. Thinking about that made Camacho chuckle under his breath.

  He stood then, gathered dishes from the coffee table, and took them out to the kitchen and rinsed them in the sink. The shocking cold as he first turned on the water made him think about how much that sleep-warmth had already settled over his body as he dozed in front of the TV.

  He didn’t think he could shake the tiredness, and he didn’t feel like fighting it. Better to get things cleaned up and head to bed. Another Thursday night wasted on the No Fun League.