Like readers of European languages everywhere, I headed left. We’re used to starting at the left. Then I realized what I was doing, stopped, and went to the right instead. Walking on the balls of my feet, I stepped into the aisle that was farthest right.
The upper edge of the shelf to my immediate left cut off the pale glow of the lantern. This aisle was almost entirely dark. Each one to my left would be slightly brighter as I worked my way toward the lantern in the center, and then they would get darker as I zigzagged toward the left side of the store, but this was the only one that mattered now, and it was as dark as the inside of my skull.
“Hello,” I said. My voice cracked.
Someone tittered.
From where? The titter bounced around the room. I couldn’t fix its direction. It probably came from the left, but it might have come from directly in front of me.
“Just a couple of guys,” I said in what I hoped was a friendly tone. No response. I had to go down the aisle, but I couldn’t bear the thought that I might walk right past him and not know it, and then he’d be behind me. The one thing I knew was that the titter hadn’t come from behind me. Nothing was behind me but the south wall of the building. I stretched my arms until I could touch the shelves on either side. My fingers encountered grease and dust and cobweb. It took everything I had to keep them out there, but one step at a time I walked the length of the aisle, slowly, arms outstretched, a human scoop hoping it wouldn’t scoop up anything that might decide to kill it.
When I got to the end of the aisle, a stroll that seemed to take half an hour, I pulled my arms in and laughed from sheer relief. I couldn’t help it. Somebody moved, nearer to the center of the store. Somebody squeaked.
Do all the aisles anyway, I told myself. Every damn one of them. As I spread my arms and started up the second aisle, my ankle snagged something, and it broke. Another thread. I had a sudden image of myself in a web. I loathe spiders above almost anything else.
I was a third of the way up the aisle when the pillar of fire bloomed in front of me. It towered six, then eight, feet tall, too bright to look at, and I scuttled backward as fast as I could until I slammed against the wall at the end of the aisle, the end farthest away from the door I’d come in through. As the fire fell, I saw, or thought I saw, someone standing well behind it. He was tall and wrapped in black. The fire died, and I heard the squeaking sound again.
Then I was aware of a wild flapping sound that seemed to come from all over, and in my peripheral vision, which was all that I had left after the brilliance of the pillar of fire, black pieces of paper tore themselves to shreds above me and scattered through the darkness in all directions. Something knocked against the side of my head, and I screamed higher than the girl in a horror movie, and pressed back against the wall as the flapping died away. Something cooed.
The place was full of birds.
It was a bunch of birds and a firework, that’s all. One of those stupid cones that look so nice on the Fourth of July.
“Very pretty,” I said, wishing I hadn’t screamed, wishing I could keep the quaver out of my voice. “Have we got any more of those?” My direct vision was completely gone, the imprinted image of the fire pillar working my retina overtime, a green and red ghost vision that totally blocked out the tiny amount of real light in the room. I put my arms out again and swept the second aisle in a blind run, moving by touch until I was at the other end and I knew it was empty. I turned with my back to the south wall and panted, waiting for my eyesight to return and bring my courage with it.
Had he been standing at this end when the firework went off? My memory said yes, but I couldn’t be completely sure. “Okay,” I said out loud, partly for his ears and partly for the wire. “Okay, then.” Something squeaked, definitely to my left this time.
My feet didn’t want to take the three sideways steps to the left, but I still had control of my feet. I sought reassurance in the fact. “Ready or not,” I said, “I’m coming.”
I could see almost the entire length of the third aisle. The lantern’s light created an edge about three feet down the shelves to my right. It looked empty, but he might be crouched down against the left-hand shelving. I was certain he was to my left, but I knew now that I could hear him move, and I had decided to sweep every aisle. It might not have been much of a plan, but it was the only one I had, and I wasn’t going to abandon it. Hands out again. Test for a thread with the foot. Nothing there, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be one part of the way down.
There was, and this time the fire erupted behind me. It cast brilliant light all the way to the wall, and I pulled in my hands and ran for it while the glare lasted. The birds went crazy again, and I looked up and saw them diving and swooping for refuge among the open rafters, and then the glare died down and we were all back in the almost-dark.
“I liked that,” I said, turning to press my back against the wall. “Keep them behind me. Will you work on that?” I wondered what Hammond and Finch were making of this monologue. Probably asking Schultz to analyze it. The smell of the firework was sharp and pungent and familiar from the summers when I was a boy, and it tickled my nose. I might even have enjoyed it, except that the air was getting smoky, and that canceled out the increased visibility from the lantern. It was only one aisle over, but the air in the aisle in front of me was milky and hard to see through.
“Well, shoot,” I said. “Here we go again.” I touched the shelves and moved down the aisle, more slowly this time, putting out a tentative foot to test for threads before committing myself to a step. Nothing. The aisle was clear, and I got to the end, put my back against the wall again, and sidestepped to find myself staring down the next one, the aisle that had the lantern standing in its center. The air was too smoky to see the black pole on which it stood, but the lantern shone seven or eight feet up, in the center of a soft halo. The door through which I had entered was behind me, and it was closed.
I had left it ajar.
“Nobody there?” I called, before I noticed the thread. It was pinned to the shelf to my left and looped through a bent nail on the shelf to my right, and it disappeared down the aisle into the skim milk of the air. He’d taken a lot of time with this.
“Would you like me to break this one, too?” I asked. “Or can we just talk?” There was no answer, so I leaned down and yanked at the thread with my hands.
Music shattered the air, music so loud that it seemed to gather the smoke into balls and roll them at me. Handel. The Royal Fireworks Music. I covered my ears, knowing that now I couldn’t hear him squeak anyway, and took a step forward.
A cone of fire licked its way toward the roof at the far end of the aisle, and he was standing behind it, tall, wrapped in black, fuzzy, and indistinct though the smoke. Then the cone died.
“Wait,” I said, half-blind again, taking another step. The music boomed out again, and another flare erupted, closer to me this time, and he was there again, just behind it, moving in time to the music, and he was taller than I had imagined he could be, and stick-thin in his black coat. He had one hand out.
As the flame guttered and died, I backed up and tried the door behind me. It wasn’t locked. That was something.
The air was full of smoke now, the lantern only a firefly floating in front of me, and I had just let go of the door when the next cone blossomed, and he was only eight or ten feet from me, impossibly thin, with scraggly straight blond hair that was wrong somehow, on crooked, and a broad grin with very few teeth behind it. He leaned forward, extending the hand toward me. It had something in it. The smile was as crooked as his hair, and the birds cut through the smoke like lunatic confetti in a murderer’s parade.
“Stop,” I said for some reason, and stepped forward.
The cone went off almost at my feet, and I leapt back, and he was right behind it, four feet away this time, baring red puffy gums in a meaningless smile and showing me ravaged skin and empty blue eyes that were paler than ice. He stepped around the cone, so cl
ose that I could hear the rubber coat squeaking over the music, and looked down at me and pressed whatever it was into my hand.
A stalk of fennel.
He leaned down until his mouth was against my ear, and I was scrabbling for the gun in my pocket.
“Ten dollars,” he said. He smelled like a dead cow at the side of the road.
The cone died down, and the store and my mind went black simultaneously. “What? ” I said.
But he was past me then, shaking his head and heading for the door, and I heard him squeaking through the smoke and I turned to watch and then threw up a hand to protect my eyes as he pulled the door open into an impossible blaze of light and squeaked through it and birds exploded through the doorway and into the light, and over the music someone shouted, “Stop or I’ll shoot,” but he didn’t stop, and two loud booms shook the smoke like water in a jar, and he went down.
And I ran through the door into the glare from the headlights of six LAPD black-and-whites and saw him on the broken asphalt, twisted like a scout’s knot gone wrong in the center of what seemed to be a pool of black ice, and I looked around and, with an effort that began at my toes, I did my level best to break Al Hammond’s jaw.
11
Solo
“… A transient,” Captain Finch was saying. “Acid burnout name of Dennis Thorpe. Thirty-four. From Indiana.”
“But not the Incinerator,” Annabelle Winston said in a voice that was, at once, soft and awful.
Finch was already red, but he got redder. “Not,” he said. He looked around. Nobody came to his assistance.
“And why not?” Annabelle Winston’ s voice might have been a whisper, except that a whisper would have carried farther.
“Not mentally capable,” Dr. Schultz interposed, and Annabelle Winston’s head came up. “No long-term cognitive processes left. He was told he could earn ten dollars if he followed the fireworks around and gave the fennel to Mr. Grist here. That’s about the limit of his, uh, capability.” Schultz obviously wished he could have found another word.
She nodded, gazing at Schultz. She seemed to be very far away.
“And then, of course, there are the others,” Finch said, talking like someone who had just had his wisdom teeth extracted.
“Yes, the others,” Annabelle Winston said. She turned toward her meticulously buttoned lawyer. “You know, Fred. The ones who got burned last night, after the police shot Mr. Thorpe. The man.”
No one said anything. She waited. Thirty seconds later, no one had said anything. Hammond had a bandage on his jaw. I had a puffy right hand.
“And the woman,” Annabelle Winston finished, in a voice that would have withered a hedge. “Twelve people,” Annabelle Winston said absently to Fred the lawyer, as though it were the last thing on her mind. “Plus one man in critical condition. Of course, we can’t blame the Incinerator for Dennis Thorpe. The LAPD shot him.”
“That’s enough of that,” Finch said thickly.
“Is it,” Annabelle Winston said without looking at him. “I had understood that Mr. Grist was to give the orders. As opposed to the LAPD, I mean.”
Hammond glanced at me and then looked away. We hadn’t exchanged a word since I’d knocked him facedown into Dennis Thorpe’s blood.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Annabelle Winston said, to her ring this time, “but it was my understanding that Mr. Grist agreed to risk his life in the belief that the Incinerator would not actually meet him, and that he’d been guaranteed that the police would stay out of sight unless he called for help.”
“We misunderstood the signal,” Finch said. “Grist said ‘Wait.’ He said ‘Stop.’ He sounded panicked. We thought his life was in danger.”
“Then isn’t it interesting,” Annabelle Winston said, “that you were able to get all those cars into the parking lot so quickly? I listened to the tapes. Mr. Grist said ‘Wait’ and ‘Stop’ only a few seconds before poor Mr. Thorpe opened the door. Your officers must have driven very fast.”
“They did-” Finch began.
“And they must have been very close,” Annabelle Winston continued in a low alto with an edge like a slap. “Much closer than Mr. Grist had requested that they be, isn’t that right, Mr. Grist?”
“I wanted them in Texas,” I said, still looking at Hammond.
“His life was in danger,” Finch said. I half expected him to spit.
She still didn’t look at him. “No one went into the building. If he’d been a police officer, you’d have had ten men in there the moment he said ‘Wait.’” She looked around the table finally including Captain Finch in her gaze. “But that isn’t the point, is it?” she asked conversationally. “The point is that Mr. Grist thought, and told you that he thought, that the meeting would be a fake. A way for the Incinerator to prove to himself that he could trust Mr. Grist. That Mr. Grist, in short, might be a friend.”
“The psychology of the man,” Schultz said, trying for momentum.
“Dr. Schultz-is that your name?” Annabelle Winston interrupted.
Schultz nodded. He’d forgotten he was smiling, and it made him look like a man between photographs.
“You’re the one with all the degrees in psychology. Mr. Grist is the one who said that the man wouldn’t be there. Cutting through all the condescension of modern medicine, Dr. Schultz, who was right? The psychologist who was sitting comfortably on the other end of the transmitter or the untutored private detective who actually walked into that Doopermart or whatever it was called to test his hypothesis with his life?” She raised both eyebrows on my behalf. “Was the Incinerator there?”
“No,” Schultz said stubbornly, “but he might have been.”
“Who was right?” she demanded, drumming the nails- Chinese red today-on the tabletop. It was the first display of emotion.
“Dennis Thorpe could have been the Incinerator,” Schultz maintained stoutly.
“He still might be,” she said. “Except that the miracle of modern psychology tells us he’s not. And then, of course, there’s the man. And the woman.”
What does she need a lawyer for? I thought.
“You know,” she said, “a million dollars isn’t much to me. I think maybe Bobby should hold his press conference.”
All hell broke loose. Finch slapped his hands on the table, Hammond grunted, Schultz said a sentence that contained many polysyllabic words. Cops conferred.
“Hold it,” I said. To my amazement, everybody held it.
“Um,” I said into the silence.
“He’s being polite,” Fred the lawyer cut in. “You’ll all go home tonight and tuck in your wives and children,” he said into the silence, “and Mr. Grist will go home and wonder where the fire is going to come from. Gentlemen,” Fred the lawyer said, leaning forward against the mass of his buttons, “why shouldn’t my client offer the reward and also offer Mr. Grist the security of anonymity? Surely he’s earned it.”
“It’s not just me,” I said, and Schultz said over me, “He’s the thread.”
“It’s not just me,” I said again. I looked at Hammond, who was still avoiding my eyes. “He sent me a timetable of my movements. He knows,” I said, “where I’ve been and who I’ve seen. It’s possible that he knows who I love.” Hammond turned his wristwatch down toward his palm with a violent gesture, but he didn’t look at me.
“I’m vulnerable,” I said to the room at large, “unless she’s safe.”
“Can you make her safe?” Annabelle Winston said to Finch, giving me a glance I didn’t quite understand, “As safe as he was?”
“We’ll put five men on her,” Finch said. Nobody said anything. “Six,” he said, budgeting into the silence.
“Satisfy Mr. Grist,” Annabelle Winston said, turning away from me at last, “or it’s the press conference and the reward.”
“I don’t know,” I said, “satisfied or not, I don’t know. And I may not decide today. Tell me about the messenger who brought the dance card.” I felt very old and ver
y tired.
“Zip,” Finch said. “A loose call, not a regular account. Paid cash. Told the dispatcher to pick up at Hollywood and Vine.”
“Description?” I asked.
“Street person,” Finch said. “A woman wearing plastic trash bags. A cutout.”
“Did she describe him?” Finch wasn’t going to volunteer much of anything.
“Yeah,” Finch said grudgingly. “She said he looked like an angel. Said he had wonderful manners.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Finch said. He touched a stubby finger to his temple. “Nothing there,” he said.
“The special effects in the building,” I said. “In fact, the building.”
Schultz stepped in. “It hasn’t been used for years,” he said smoothly. “No surveillance. The strings touched off timing devices, rather sophisticated, actually. Stopwatches and cute little mercury fuses. Everything timed to the split second.”
“Mercury fuses?” I asked.
Schultz spread his hands apologetically. “Boy’s had education,” he said.
“So have I, but I don’t know anything about mercury fuses.”
“You said it last time around,” Schultz said. “This freak knows everything there is to know about fire.” He’d been the one who said it, but he was being a psychologist.
“You know,” I said to him, “if you and I could ever wind up on the same side, you might be useful.”
“We are on the same side,” he said, treating me to a forced version of the amber grin.
“I think we can dispense with etiquette,” I said. Schultz fiddled with an unopened pack of Dunhills and looked longingly at Annabelle Winston.
“How long would it have taken him to set it up?” I asked.
“A few hours,” Schultz said. “There are holes in the roof, that’s how the birds got in. He could have done it during daylight, any day this week.”
Incinerator sg-4 Page 13