by Lee Child
Penney stared across at him. “You staying?”
Odell nodded and tried to hide a smile, but couldn’t.
“There’s still a business to run,” he said. “We still need management.”
There was silence in the big corner office. Outside, the hot breeze stirred off the desert and blew a listless eddy over the metal building. Odell opened the brown folder and pulled out a blue envelope. Handed it across the desk.
“You’re paid up to the end of July,” he said. “Money went in the bank this morning. Good luck, Mr. Penney.”
The five-minute interview was over. Odell’s secretary appeared and opened the door to the corridor. Penney walked out. The secretary called the next man in. Penney walked past the long quiet row of people and made it to the parking lot. Slid into his car. It was a red Firebird, a year and a half old, and it wasn’t paid for yet. He started it up and drove the mile to his house. Eased to a stop in his driveway and sat there, thinking, in a daze, with the motor running. Then he heard the faint bell of his phone in his house. He made it inside before it stopped. It was a friend from the plant.
“They can you, too?” the friend asked him.
Penney mumbled his answer so he didn’t have to say the exact words, but the tone of his voice told his friend what he needed to know.
“There’s a problem,” the guy said. “Company informed the bank. I just got a call asking what I was going to do about the payments I got. The bank holding paper on you?”
Penney went cold. Gripped the phone.
“Paper?” he said. “You bet they’re holding paper on me. Just about every damn thing I got. House, car, furniture. They got paper on everything. What they say to you?”
“What the hell do you think?” the guy said. “They’re a bank, right? I stop making the payments, I’m out on the street. The repo man is coming for the car right now.”
Penney went quiet. He was thinking. He was thinking about his car. He didn’t care about the house. Or the furniture. His wife had chosen all that stuff. She’d saddled him up with big payments on all that stuff, just before she walked out. She’d called it the chance for a new start. It hadn’t worked. She’d gone and he was still paying for her damn house and furniture. But the car was his. The red Firebird. That automobile was the only thing he’d ever bought that he’d really wanted. He didn’t feel like losing it. But he sure as hell couldn’t keep on paying for it.
“James?” the guy on the phone said. “You still there?”
Penney was imagining the repo man coming for his car.
“James?” his friend said again. “You there?”
Penney closed his eyes tight.
“Not for long,” he said. “I’m out of here.”
“Where to?” the guy said. “Where the hell to?”
Penney felt a desperate fury building inside him. He smashed the phone back into the cradle and moved away, and then turned back and tore the wire out of the wall. He stood in the middle of the room and decided he wouldn’t take anything with him. And he wouldn’t leave anything behind, either. He ran to the garage and grabbed his spare can of gasoline. Ran back to the house. Emptied the can over his ex-wife’s sofa. He couldn’t find a match, so he lit the gas stove in the kitchen and unwound a roll of paper towels. Put one end on the stove top and ran the rest through to the living room. When his makeshift fuse was well alight, he skipped out to his car and started it up. Turned north toward Mojave and settled in for the drive.
His neighbor noticed the fire when the flames started coming through the roof. She called the Laney fire department. The firemen didn’t respond. It was a volunteer department, and all the volunteers were in line inside the factory, upstairs in the narrow corridor.
Then the warm air moving off the Mojave Desert freshened up into a hot breeze, and by the time James Penney was thirty miles away the flames from his house had set fire to the dried scrub that had been his lawn. By the time he was in the town of Mojave itself, cashing his last paycheck at the bank, the flames had spread across his lawn and his neighbor’s and were licking at the base of her back porch.
Like any California boom town, Laney had grown in a hurry. The factory had been thrown up around the start of Nixon’s first term. A hundred acres of orange groves had been bulldozed and five hundred frame houses had quadrupled the population in a year. There was nothing really wrong with the houses, but they’d seen rain less than a dozen times in the thirty-one years they’d been standing, and they were about as dry as houses can get. Their timbers had sat and baked in the sun and been scoured by the dry desert winds. There were no hydrants built into the streets. The houses were close together, and there were no windbreaks. But there had never been a serious fire in Laney. Not until that Monday in June.
James Penney’s neighbor called the fire department for the second time after her back porch was well alight. The fire department was in disarray. The dispatcher advised her to get out of her house and just wait for their arrival. By the time the fire truck got there, her house was destroyed. And the next house in line was destroyed, too. The desert breeze had blown the fire on across the second narrow gap and sent the old couple living there scuttling into the street for safety. Then Laney called in the fire departments from Lancaster and Glendale and Bakersfield, and they arrived with proper equipment and saved the day. They hosed the scrub between the houses and the blaze went no farther. Just three houses destroyed, Penney’s and his two downwind neighbors. Within two hours the panic was over, and by the time Penney himself was fifty miles north of Mojave, Laney’s sheriff was working with the fire investigators to piece together what had happened.
They started with Penney’s place, which was the upwind house, and the first to burn, and therefore the coolest. It had just about burned down to the floor slab, but the layout was still clear. And the evidence was there to see. There was tremendous scorching on one side of where the living room had been. The Glendale investigator recognized it as something he’d seen many times before. It was what is left when a foam-filled sofa or armchair is doused with gasoline and set alight. He explained to the sheriff how the flames would have spread up and out, setting fire to the walls and ceiling, and how, once into the roof space, the flames would have consumed the rafters and dropped the whole burning structure downward into the rest of the building. As clear a case of arson as he had ever seen. The unfortunate wild cards had been the stiffening desert breeze and the close proximity of the other houses.
Then the sheriff had gone looking for James Penney, to tell him somebody had burned his house down, and his neighbors’. He drove his black-and-white to the factory and walked upstairs and past the long line of people and into Odell’s corner office. Odell told him what had happened in the five-minute interview just after one o’clock. Then the sheriff had driven back to the Laney station house, steering with one hand and rubbing his chin with the other.
And by the time James Penney was driving along the towering eastern flank of Mount Whitney, a hundred and fifty miles from home, there was an all-points bulletin out on him, suspicion of deliberate arson, which in the dry desert heat of southern California was a big, big deal.
—
The California Highway Patrol is one of the world’s great law enforcement agencies. Famous throughout America and the world, romantic, idealized. The image of the West Coast motorcycle cop astride his powerful machine is one of the nation’s great icons. Smart tan shirt, white tee underneath, white helmet, mirrored aviator glasses, tight jodhpurs, gleaming black boots. Cruising the endless sunny highways, marshaling that great state’s huge transient population toward a safe destination.
That’s the image. That’s why Joey Gunston had lined up to join. But Joey Gunston soon found out the reality is different. Any organization has a glamour side and a dull side. Gunston was stuck on the dull side. He wasn’t cruising the sunny coastal highways on a big bike. He was on his own in a standard police spec Dodge, grinding back and forward through the Mojave Desert o
n U.S. 91. He had no jodhpurs, no boots, his white tee was a limp gray rag, and his mirrored shades were cheap Ray-Ban copies he’d paid for himself in LA, which he couldn’t wear anyway because he was working the graveyard shift, nine at night until six in the morning.
So Joey Gunston was a disillusioned man. But he wasn’t bitter. He wasn’t that type of a guy. The way it worked with Joey, hand him a disappointment and he wouldn’t fold up. He would work harder. He would work so damn hard that he would escape the dull side and get the transfer over to the glamour side. He figured it was like paying his dues. He figured he’d work U.S. 91 in a factory-beige Dodge with plastic CHP badging stuck on the doors as long as it took to prove himself. So far it had taken thirty-one months. No news about a transfer to U.S. 101 and a motorcycle. Not even a hint. But he wasn’t going to let his standards drop.
So he carried on working hard. That involved looking out for the break he knew had to be coming. Problem was, the scope for a break on U.S. 91 was pretty limited. It’s the direct route between LA and Vegas, which gives it some decent traffic, and there’s some pretty scenery. Gunston’s patch stretched a hundred and twenty miles from Barstow in the west over to the state line on the slope of Clark Mountain. His problem was the hours he worked. At night, the traffic slackened and the pretty scenery was invisible. For thirty-one months he’d done nothing much except stop speeders and about twice a week radio in for ambulances when some tanked guy ran off the road and smashed himself up.
But he carried on hoping. That Monday night at nine o’clock he’d read through the bulletins pinned up in the dispatcher’s office. He’d copied the details into a leatherette notebook his sister had bought for him. One of those details concerned an APB on a Laney guy, James Penney, arson and criminal damage, believed to be on the loose in a red Firebird. Gunston copied the plate number in large writing so he’d be able to read it in the gloom of his car. Then he’d cruised sixty miles east and holed up on the shoulder near Soda Lake.
A lot of guys would have gone right to sleep. Gunston knew his colleagues were working day jobs, maybe security in LA or gumshoeing in the valleys, and sleeping the night away in their Dodges on the shoulder. But Gunston never did that. He played ball and stayed awake, ready for his break.
It arrived within an hour. Ten o’clock that Monday evening. The red Firebird streaked past him, heading east, maybe eighty-five miles an hour, maybe ninety. Gunston didn’t need to check his leatherette notebook. The plate jumped right out of the dark at him. He fired up the Dodge and floored it. Hit the button for the lights and the siren. Jammed his foot down and steered with one hand. Used the other to thumb the mike.
“In pursuit of a red Firebird,” he radioed. “Plate matches APB.”
There was a crackle on the speaker and the dispatcher’s voice came back.
“Position?” he asked.
“Soda Lake,” Gunston said. “Heading east, fast.”
“OK, Joey,” the dispatcher said. “Stick with him. Nail him before the line. Don’t be letting the Nevada guys get in on this, right?”
“You got it, chief,” Gunston said. He eased the Dodge up to a hundred and wailed on into the night. He figured the Firebird might be a mile ahead. Conceivable that Penney might slew off and head down into the town of Baker, but if he didn’t, then Penney was his. The break had maybe arrived.
He caught up with the red Firebird after three miles. The turn down to Baker was gone. Nothing on the road ahead except fifty-seven more miles of California, and then the state of Nevada. He eased the wailing Dodge up to twenty yards behind the Firebird’s rear end and hit the blue strobes. Changed the siren to the deafening electronic pock-pock-pock he loved so much. Grinned at his windshield. But the Firebird didn’t slow up. It eased ahead. Gunston’s speedo needle was shivering around the hundred-and-ten marker. His knuckles tightened round the grimy vinyl wheel.
“Son of a bitch,” he said.
He jammed his foot down harder and hung on. The red Firebird topped out at maybe a hundred and twelve. It was still there ahead of him, but the acceleration was gone. It was flat out. Gunston smiled. He knew the road ahead. Probably better than a guy from Laney did. The climb up the western slope of Clark Mountain was going to tilt things the good guys’ way. The upgrades would slow the Firebird. But the Dodge had plenty of good Detroit V8 torque. New police radials. A trained driver. Fifty miles of opportunity ahead. Maybe U.S. 101 and a big bike were not so far away.
He chased the red Firebird for thirty miles. The grade was slowing both cars. They were averaging about ninety. The Dodge’s siren was blaring the whole way, pock-pock-pock for twenty minutes, red and blue lights flashing continuously. Gunston’s conclusion was this Penney guy had to be a psycho. Burning things up, then trying to outrun the CHP through the dark. Then he started to worry. They were getting reasonably close to the state line. No way was he going to call in and ask for cooperation from the Nevada boys. Penney was his. So he gripped the wheel and moved up to within feet of the speeding red car. Closer and closer. Trying to force the issue.
Ten miles short of the state line, a spur runs off U.S. 91 down to the small town of Nipton. The road leaves the highway at an oblique angle and falls away down the mountain into the valley. The red Firebird took that turn. With Gunston’s police Dodge a foot off its rear fender, it slewed right and just disappeared straight out from in front of him. Gunston overshot and jammed to a stop, all four wheels locked and making smoke. He smashed the selector into reverse and howled backward up the shoulder. Just in time to see the Firebird cartwheeling off the road and straight down the mountainside. The spur had a bad camber. Gunston knew that. Penney hadn’t. He’d taken that desperate slew and lost it. The Firebird’s rear end had come unglued and swung out over the void. The red car had windmilled like a golf club and hurled itself out into space. Gunston watched it smash and bounce on the rocks. An outcrop tore the underside out and the spilling gasoline hit the hot muffler and the next thing Gunston saw was a belch of flame and a huge explosion rolling slowly a hundred feet down the mountainside.
—
The California Highway Patrol dispatcher told Joey Gunston to supervise the recovery of the crashed red Firebird himself. Nobody was very upset about the accident. Nobody cared much about Penney. The radio conversations back and forward between the dispatcher’s office and Gunston’s Dodge about an arsonist dying in his burning car on the slope of Clark Mountain carried a certain amount of suppressed ironic laughter. The only problem was the invoice that would come in next month from the tow-truck company. The protocols about who should pay such an invoice were never very clear. Usually the CHP ended up writing them down to miscellaneous operating costs.
Gunston knew a tow-truck operator out in the wastelands near Soda Lake who usually monitored the police bands, so he put out a call and got a quick reply. Then he parked up on the shoulder near the turn down to Nipton, sitting right on top of the skid marks he’d made overshooting it, and sat waiting for the guy. He was there in an hour, and by midnight Gunston and the trucker were clambering down the mountainside in the dark, pulling the truck’s giant metal hook behind them against its ratchet.
The red Firebird was about two hundred yards down the slope, right at the end of the cable’s reach. It wasn’t red anymore. It was streaked a fantastic variety of scorched browns and purples. All the glass had melted and the plastic had burned away. The tires were gone. Penney himself was a shriveled carbonized shape fused to the zigzag metal springs which were all that was left of the seat. Gunston and the wrecker didn’t spend too long looking at him. They just ducked near and snapped the giant hook around the offside front suspension member. Then they turned back for the long climb up the slope.
They were panting hard and sweating in the night air when they got back to the tow truck. It was parked sideways on the road, circled by Gunston’s red danger flares. The steel cable snaked off the drum at the rear of the cab and disappeared down into the dark. The driver started up the big d
iesel to power the hydraulics and the drum started grinding around, reeling in the cable, hauling the wreck upward. Time to time, the remains of the Firebird would snag in the brush or against a rock and the truck’s rear suspension would squat and the big diesel would roar until it dragged free.
It took the best part of an hour to haul the wreck the two hundred yards up to the roadway. It scraped over the concrete shoulder and the driver moved the truck to a better angle and sped the drum to haul the wreck up onto the flatbed. Gunston helped him tie it down with chains. Then he nodded to the driver and the tow truck took off and lumbered back west. Gunston stepped over to his Dodge and killed the flashing lights and fired up the radio.
“On its way,” he said to the dispatcher. “Better send an ambulance over to meet it.”
“Why?” the dispatcher asked. “He’s dead, right?”
“Dead as can be,” Gunston said. “But somebody needs to chisel him out of the seat, and I ain’t going to do it.”
The dispatcher laughed over the radio. “Is he real crispy?”
Gunston laughed back. “Crispiest guy you ever saw.”
—
Middle of the night, and the sheriff was still in the station house in Laney. He figured a lot of overtime was called for. It had been a busy day. And tomorrow was going to be a busier day. There was a fair amount of fallout to deal with. The layoffs at the factory had produced unpredictable results. Evening time had seen a lot of drunkenness. A couple of pick-ups had been rolled. Minor injuries. A few windows had been broken at the plant. Mr. Odell’s windows had been the target. A few rocks had fallen short and hit the mailroom. One had smashed the windshield of a car in the lot.
And Penney had burned three houses down. That was the problem. But then it wasn’t a problem anymore. The silence in the station house was broken by the sound of the telex machine starting up. The sheriff wandered through to the booth and tore off a foot and a half of paper. Read it and folded it and slipped it into the file he’d just started. Then he picked up the phone and called the California Highway Patrol.