Fire Season

by Jon Loomis

  “Sure, Rudy.”

  “Then you know that with or without my business manager here, any smack-dealing, decapitating motherfuckers better watch out for me. They’re on my turf out here, and if I want them they won’t even see me coming.” He snapped his big fingers. “Like a tiger in the jungle, Frankie.”

  Coffin yawned. “Okay,” he said. “I tried.”

  “Yay for you.”

  “Rudy.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. There’s more?”

  “I don’t want that shit ending up on the street out here. I want it off the Cape. Entende?”

  Rudy took a deep hit from the joint, held the smoke, let it out. “Frankie,” he said, shaking his big head, “you worry too much. You’ve got to relax yourself.”

  * * *

  Though already quite large, the fire was not moving as quickly as the others had, and the firefighters and their equipment seemed to be working efficiently and well. Lola was there with her camera; Jeff Skillings and Pinsky were handling traffic. The crowd was large and boisterous: the trophy house had been a source of controversy even when it was under construction. Kotowski, especially, had made an issue of it: He’d filed complaints with the zoning board, called the building inspector at 4:00 A.M., picketed the property with homemade signs, shouted obscenities at the construction workers—all to no effect, except to reinforce his image around town as one of its last remaining crackpots. Kotowski stood at the edge of the crowd, grinning wildly in the firelight.

  “Jesus, man, try not to look so happy,” Coffin said. “People will think you had something to do with this.”

  “Your guy beat me to it. God, isn’t it beautiful?”

  It was beautiful, Coffin thought. Flames roared from the second-story windows; orange smoke rose in a vortex of sparks. The thing had been an eyesore—Coffin wasn’t sorry to see it go.

  “Burn, baby, burn,” Kotowski said, as though he’d been listening to Coffin’s thoughts.

  For a second Coffin could almost imagine himself as Kotowski, living Kotowski’s life—full of rage, painting his angry paintings, smoking a little opium on the back deck, paddling around in his kayak, nude except for his conical Vietnamese hat, haunting the rougher, darker corners of Provincetown late at night. Coffin shook his head: it seemed to work for Kotowski, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t work for him. He was going to be a father. And drive a minivan.

  “I’m glad they saved the cat, though,” Kotowski said.

  “They saved a cat? Who?”

  “The firemen—who else? The cat’s over there,” Kotowski pointed. “Those two bald guys are the owners.”

  Coffin walked over to the two bald men. They could have been twins, he thought: nearly identical in height and build—around 5' 9" and muscular—both with clean-shaven heads and the goatee-mustache combinations that pro baseball players all seemed to be wearing in the nineties. One of the men held a cat cradled in his arms like a baby. The cat was wrapped up in a towel, only its head and forepaws sticking out.

  Coffin fished his shield out of his jacket pocket, showed it to the two men. “Detective Coffin,” he said, “you’re the owners?”

  “We were,” the man with the cat said.

  “Sorry about your house,” Coffin said.

  “Are you? You’re probably the only one, then. The rest of these people seem to be having a party.”

  Coffin looked at the crowd. The man with the cat was right: Someone had arrived with a thirty-six-pack of Coors Light, and now many of the onlookers were enjoying a cold beer. Coffin took a deep breath, let it out. “How’s the cat?”

  The man with the cat looked down at the furry bundle. “Ginky says hi,” he said, waving the cat’s black forepaw at Coffin. “He’s a little freaked right now.”

  Ginky coughed. He was a Siamese. His blue eyes were round and manic, his ears were back, and his fur stuck out as though someone had jammed his tail into a light socket.

  “Were you in the house when the fire started?”

  “Justin was,” said the man with the cat. “I went out to dinner at Al Dante’s with a friend.”

  “So what happened?” Coffin said.

  “I had the pan-seared lobster,” the man with the cat said. “My friend Derek had the smoked duck. Total foodgasm.”

  Justin cleared his throat. “He means what happened here, Jason. When the house caught on fire.”

  Jason frowned. “God, I hate that tone of voice. You really think I’m stupid, don’t you?”

  “I don’t think you’re stupid. You just don’t listen sometimes.”

  Jason shook his bald head. “Are you married, Detective?”

  “No.”

  “Good for you. Stay that way.”

  “About the fire,” Coffin said. “Justin, is it?”

  “Yes. I was upstairs in the study, working on my memoir—”

  “He calls it a memoir. It’s mostly just gay porn,” Jason said.

  “It is not gay porn,” Justin said. “It’s a literary memoir with an erotic edge.”

  “That’s what they all say, honey.”

  “Guys,” Coffin said.

  “He’s mad because I ran out of the house without his cat.”

  Jason sniffled a bit. “No, no—you did what most people would have done. I certainly can’t judge you for wanting to save your own skin.”

  Coffin took a deep breath. “So you were upstairs in the study.”

  “Yes. I had the fireplace on and a nice snifter of cognac and I was typing away on my iMac—”

  “One-handed, probably,” Jason said.

  “I’m ignoring you right now,” Justin said, putting his fingers in his ears. “And that’s when I heard someone moving around down in the alley.”

  “About what time was this?” Coffin asked. He had his notebook out.

  “I’m not sure—I was very absorbed in what I was doing. Around ten o’clock?”

  “Absorbed by what you were doing,” Jason said. “Not in what you were doing.”

  Justin rolled his eyes. “Oh for God’s sake. Please, please, please shut the fuck up for just, like, two minutes.”

  “He’s always hated Ginky,” Jason said. He looked down at the cat. “Can you believe he didn’t even try to save you? Can you believe it?”

  Ginky growled a little, deep in his furry chest.

  “Look,” Justin said. “I’m not going to die for a fucking cat, okay? Especially one that poops in my shoes. If that makes me a bad person, then okay, fine.” He threw up his hands—I surrender. “I’m a bad person.”

  “He only poops in your shoes because he knows you hate him.”

  “He poops in my shoes because he’s fucking psychotic.”

  There was a murmur of excitement from the crowd. One of the two pumper trucks had stopped pumping; Walt Macy threw his hat on the ground in disgust. A tall firefighter opened a panel above the truck’s rear bumper and began to tinker with the valves and switches inside it. Meanwhile, the fire seemed to be gathering itself like a lioness, about to charge its prey. Its roar grew louder as it sucked more oxygen into the house. A rush of smoke and sparks exploded from the upstairs windows as the fire found a new fuel source: some delicious couch or carpet, Coffin guessed; some wood sculpture, some antique four-poster bed.

  “Gentlemen,” Coffin said, “please.” He turned to Justin. “When you heard someone in the alley, did you happen to look out the window?”

  “You know, the weird part is that I did look out the window. Usually I wouldn’t—a lot of drunk people use the alley to go out to the beach and pee—so why bother looking, right? But this time I did.”

  “So?”

  “So, I looked out and there was a Tall Ship coming up from the beach, heading toward the street.”

  “Could you describe him?” Coffin opened his hands—a small shrug. “Her?”

  “Not trying very hard. Like, sneakers and tube socks and some kind of kilt thing. Really bad wig—sort of red or purple, almost.”


  “Height? Build?”

  Justin frowned. “You know, I could make a guess, but it wouldn’t mean much. I just caught a glimpse. There wasn’t much light.”

  “Okay. Then what happened?”

  “Then maybe ten or fifteen minutes later I smelled smoke, just a whiff, you know? Then about five minutes after that I looked up and I thought holy shit. Smoke was coming up the stairs—a lot of it. Then the smoke alarms all went off—God, that sound just makes you insane—and I grabbed my iMac and ran downstairs.”

  “You grabbed your iMac?” Jason sobbed, rocking the cat back and forth.

  Justin turned on him. “Look, I was scared, okay? The fucking house was on fire and I was scared. I am sorry I did not try to save your goddamned shoe-pooping cat.”

  “So you ran downstairs. What did you see?”

  “Fire. Smoke—lots of smoke, up around the ceiling. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled out the door.”

  “Where was the fire? What part of the house?”

  “In the kitchen. First floor. It was like the wall was on fire.”

  “Which wall? Can you point to it?”

  “The one by the alley—there. The fire was all around the window.” He pointed to the east wall. There was a small condo village across the alley from the trophy house. Kotowski’s house was to the west.

  “Can you think of anything else that might be important?” Coffin said. “Any little detail we haven’t talked about?”

  “Just that I smelled lighter fluid before I smelled smoke.”

  “Lighter fluid?”

  Justin nodded. “You know that smell—there’s no mistaking it for anything else. I used to smoke, back in the day. Carried a Zippo for years. I got a pretty strong whiff of lighter fluid while I was writing, like it drifted up the stairs. I almost went down to check it out, but I didn’t.”

  “He was too absorbed,” Jason said.

  “Jason, anything?” Coffin said.

  “I think I’m in love with the fireman who saved Ginky,” Jason said. “Did you know he gave him mouth-to-mouth?”

  Justin shuddered. “Ew. Sardine breath,” he said.

  “One of the firemen gave mouth-to-mouth to a cat?” Coffin said.

  “He most certainly did,” Jason said. “That tall, lanky fellow over there.” He waved in the direction of the new fire truck, where two firefighters were trying to restart the pumping mechanism. “Apparently they call him Stretch.”

  “Jesus. Of course they do,” Justin said.

  Coffin gave the two men his card. “Call me if you think of anything,” he said. He scratched his ear—the night was cool but the late-season mosquitoes had rallied, rising up from the salt marsh in a fierce, whining cloud. “Before I forget—did you have a light on in the study, Justin?”

  “Sure—my desk light.”

  “Would it have been visible from outside, do you think?”

  Justin thought for a moment. “Definitely. The study’s in the front corner, facing the street. You’d be able to see it from out here, for sure.”

  Coffin reached out to pet Ginky, but the cat hissed and bared his teeth. “Nice kitty,” Coffin said, putting his hand back in his jacket pocket just as the broken pumper truck throbbed back into action, its limp, unattended hose suddenly stiffening and spurting wildly over the crowd. Stretch closed a valve and turned off the flow of water, and a team of firefighters grabbed the hose at its business end and started to lug it toward the house. Walt Macy spotted Coffin and waved him over.

  “How’s it going, Walt?”

  Macy shook his head, picked his hat up off the ground, flicked a bug from the brim with his forefinger, and put the hat on his head. It was a navy blue ball cap with the letters PFD embroidered in gold above the bill. “What the fuck was I thinking,” he said, “buying an Italian fire truck? Hell, I drove a Fiat in college. You’d think I’d know better.”

  “Looks like your boys are going in,” Coffin said, as the hose-wielding team of firefighters advanced on the front door.

  “We had the upper hand before our pumper went wonky,” Macy said. “Now we’re playing catch-up. We’ll try to starve the fire at its base, but that means putting a lot of water on it in a hurry. Otherwise the whole structure’s going to go—then it’s down to keeping the neighbors from going up, too.”

  “Your boys are looking good tonight,” Coffin said.

  “Well, they’ve been getting plenty of practice,” Macy said. “Honest to God, for a volunteer crew they’re not bad—they’re damned near fearless, I can tell you that. This is some dangerous shit we’re dealing with—a lot of crews would stand back and let this fucker burn. Did you hear about Stretch, here, going in after the cat?”

  “I did. Nice going, Stretch.”

  Stretch ducked his head shyly. “Thanks,” he said. He shrugged. “Probably if I’d thought about it I wouldn’t of gone in. It was pretty hot in there.”

  “I heard you gave him mouth-to-mouth.”

  Stretch nodded. He had deep, parallel scratches on his left cheek. “Yeah,” he said. “By the time I got him out he wasn’t breathing. I figured it was worth a shot.”

  “Good man,” Coffin said, swatting at a mosquito that had bitten his neck. “What was it like—giving mouth-to-mouth to a cat?”

  Stretch thought for a minute, then nodded his head. “Furry,” he said.

  Coffin laughed—a sharp little bark. He turned to Macy. “The owner said he went downstairs and the wall was on fire. That make sense to you?”

  “Exterior wall?”

  “Yep.”

  Macy frowned. “Could be electrical,” he said. “I’m no fire investigator, but I’ve seen plenty of electrical fires that started inside the wall.”

  “The owner said he smelled lighter fluid, like you use in a Zippo.”

  “Well, then, that would imply arson. First one in an occupied structure, right?”

  “I think so.” Coffin yawned, smoothed his mustache. “Sorry,” he said. “Haven’t been getting much sleep.”

  “You and me both, my friend,” Macy said.

  The trio of firefighters were aiming a fat stream of water directly into the trophy house’s open front door—the lead man, holding the nozzle, was down on one knee like a football player in pregame prayer. Gouts of steam poured from the windows, and a loud, continuous hissing complicated the roar of the flames with its sibilant overtone.

  “Listen,” Coffin said. “I don’t mean to tell you your business—but are you sure you want to send those boys inside? Is it safe?”

  “You worried about structure collapse?”

  “I’m worried about all kinds of things.”

  “Collapse is probably not an issue here. I talked to the owners ’cause I thought I remembered when this thing was under construction. It’s got a steel frame—it’d have to, or it’d never support the rooftop pool. They had some firm come in from off-Cape and weld it together.”

  The World Trade Center had a steel frame, Coffin thought. “Okay,” he said. “If you’re not worried, I’m not worried.”

  “Plus, hell—I’d like to win one. So far we’re oh for three.”

  “So if it’s not just a charred shell at the end of the night, that’s a win?”

  Macy pursed his lips, nodded. “That’s about right,” he said.

  The clutch of firefighters had advanced as far as the front porch when Coffin noticed a strange, misty aura above the trophy house’s flat roof, which appeared to be crimped and sagging. He was about to point it out to Macy when the house produced a rending shriek, like a torpedoed battleship breaking up as it sank beneath the waves. The firefighters dropped their hose and ran for the street.

  “Holy shit,” Macy said. “There she goes.”

  The roof crumpled slowly. The right side, where the pool was, inclined gradually toward the center of the house, while the left side drifted outward, steel screaming, welds and bolts popping in clusters, their rattling clangs as they failed like bursts of heavy m
achine-gun fire. The crowd whooped, ecstatic. Coffin could see the harborside edge of the pool as the roof slowly twisted and sank beneath its impossible weight—pool water escaping into the house, a little at first, then all at once a great tsunami roaring through the upper rooms and rushing down the broad interior staircase, the fire protesting with much hissing and steam (fire is a cat, thought Coffin), pool water inundating the second floor—Coffin could see a baby grand piano floating past the windows—water exploding down the stairs into the main entryway and out the front door, driving the onlookers cheering and screaming with fear and joy to the higher ground of Commercial Street. When the two-foot wall of water lost its momentum, it reversed itself and ran down the hill again, much of it streaming back into the smoking wreck of the house. The fire seemed to have gone out.

  Macy took his hat off, scratched his bald head, put the hat back on. “Did that really happen,” he said, “or am I having some kind of episode?”

  “I’m not sure,” Coffin said. “It’s been a long day.”

  * * *

  As the firefighters packed up their gear, Coffin leaned on the rear fender of the unmarked Crown Vic, smoking a cigarette he’d bummed from Pinsky. It tasted terrible. He felt guilty, but he didn’t put it out.

  “Well,” Lola said, standing beside him. “That was exciting.” She reached out, plucked the cigarette from Coffin’s mouth, tossed it onto the pavement, and ground it out with the toe of her boot.

  Coffin looked at her, looked at the crushed remains of his cigarette.

  “Bad for you,” Lola said. “Dad.”

  Coffin sighed. “What a night.” He told her about Tony, and the Fiesta going over the cliff.

  “Poor Tony,” Lola said.

  “Poor Tony? What about my car?”

  “You hated that car.”

  “Then there was the ride home with Rudy and his accountant.”

  “Uh-oh. What happened?”

  “I have a prediction for you.”

  “Do I want to hear it?”

  “Tomorrow morning, someone will open the safe in the clerk’s office and an item will be missing.”