We’d burned nine by the end of May. Six days from graduation, we burned another one. The next day, we made the newspaper, a small article about what fire officials believed was a pattern of arson. The police had been consulted. Officers on patrol in Tacoma’s North End would be checking alleys.
We went out that night at two A.M. in our black sweatshirts and gloves and ski masks and found a garage on Cheyenne Street only ten blocks from the last garage we’d burned.
Will Wilson went to check if the house was dark.
“Shit,” Teddy whispered to me in the dark. “Shit. This is serious. They’ve got to be watching, Brian. Fuck, Brian, fuck. This is serious, Brian.”
“Well,” I whispered. “Fuck. Well.”
Will Wilson came back, matches in his hand. There were paint cans and a can of paint thinner in the garage. There was also a lawn chair, an old croquet set and a cardboard box full of books. We spread out the junk and books and some boards from the stairs, then poured thinner and gas over it all.
Coe was bouncing on his heels, circling in place.
Will Wilson held a book of matches out to Teddy and me but didn’t look at us. We were all near the entrance, and Will Wilson lit a match and tossed it, then another, the gas catching. Teddy kept looking over his shoulder, glancing down the alley.
“Come on,” Will Wilson said, still not looking at Teddy and me, just flicking matches across the floor, small blue fires now burning in four or five places.
And finally I took a match from Will Wilson. Lit it and threw it because Will Wilson wanted me to. But most of all I lit it because I wanted to be a part of this. I wanted to see what would happen.
Blue flames had spread across much of the floor. A small pool near the books ignited.
I lit and threw another match.
And Teddy was starting to go down the alley and Will Wilson turned quickly, grabbed him hard by the neck, pulling Teddy close to his face. “Come on,” he said quietly and held up a lit match for Teddy.
The books were burning orange and red, the wood catching now. The plastic seat of the lawn chair burning bright, shining on Will Wilson’s face and Teddy’s face and sending a foul smell through the garage.
“Come on,” Will Wilson said, and then smiled and took a high voice. Whining, “This is serious.”
And Teddy did light a match and did throw it then, lighting another and another, tossing each into the already hot fire, the tiny match flames disappearing in the gold and growing light, but Teddy just stared at Will Wilson, not scared, not weak, just staring, Will Wilson holding him by the neck and not once looking at the fire behind him, whining over and over, “This is serious. This is serious”
And then a white police cruiser turned down the alley and hit its lights.
And Teddy’s pool of gas was burning yellow, blue, and white.
We ran. Through alleys, across yards, over fences, and through hedges. Ducking behind houses, running along streets, trying to make our way toward a huge, wooded park where we could hide.
Fifteen minutes later, with two cops on foot behind us, the sirens of three cruisers screaming near us, Will Wilson and I were sprinting toward the park, Teddy and Coe probably already in there, the two of us crossing a brightly lit street, aiming for the low white wall that bordered the park, the park here sweeping in an arc a half-mile around, sloping a few hundred yards deep like a quilt of thick green trees and bushes, stretching three quarters of a mile uninterrupted to the waterfront. And as I ran across that pavement with a cop car skidding to a stop near me, both doors opening, two more men jumping out, I saw the glow of lights from the unseen mills and oil plants five miles away where right then my dad was working.
And I do remember wondering if the police would shoot an arsonist.
Will Wilson and I hit the low fence, stepping off, jumping, floating for that moment, silently flying into the park. We hit trees, then bushes, finally sliding across the wet, steep ground. We were a hundred feet down before I looked back. Another hundred and we stopped sliding, seeing the pinpoint of searchlights waving back and forth above us.
It only took twenty minutes to find the base of the Proctor Bridge, where Teddy and Coe were waiting.
We climbed up the dirt hillside, the bridge’s heavy concrete supports stretching out over our heads, hearing all around us the low, numbing sound of the rain against the leaves. We reached the wide dirt ledge just below the surface of the bridge, the four of us sharing from a bottle of vodka that we had hidden there.
“God,” Will Wilson said, “God.” He somehow seemed so thin in the dark. A bare, hard person drinking next to me. “They were chasing us. Everywhere we went they were chasing us. And it was beautiful.”
The four of us never called anything beautiful.
He told Teddy and Coe how the two of us split off from them, crossing through yards and over fences, and he was drinking and saying beautiful, and finally he sat down in the dirt and I realized Will Wilson was drunk.
And I watched him and I remembered how, when we were running, he’d split off from Coe and Teddy, touched my arm, pulled me with him. Taking the two of us down an alley he knew, toward a street we’d been on a hundred times.
A brightly lit street that led away from the park. Where the three police cars had been waiting.
Will Wilson hadn’t made a mistake. He’d just tried to draw out the chase. To make it more dangerous for me and him.
Will Wilson was getting bored.
I watched him now. Even in the shadows under that bridge, I could see his eyes staring out behind half-closed lids. His usually hard face gone somehow soft. I don’t think I’d ever seen him drunk. I’d seen him drink twice as much, but I’d never seen him drunk.
“It’s coming to an end,” he said slowly. “We’ll get jobs. And sooner than you think, it’ll all come to an end.”
We hear the steps upstairs and my legs go blurry, then numb. I’m pulling in air as slowly as I can, turning left, seeing the door I can run through if the voice comes any closer.
”Colleen?” the voice says. “Colleen?”
Coe is crouched low on the floor. Teddy stands at the door. Will Wilson stands at the foot of the stairs.
But then it is quiet, a door upstairs closing. And I look at Will Wilson and he is smiling.
”Almost,” he whispers. And he smiles even more.
Teddy and Coe are already starting to climb out the window, Will Wilson next. And as I turn to lower myself over the sill, I think about Will Wilson standing at the foot of those steps, Will Wilson like always starting to think of another way, another step, another thing we can do to find something more. And as I drop to the ground I glance back in the house and I see a woman sitting in the dark kitchen off the wide living room, her eyes barely white in the darkness of the house, staring at me as I still hold on to the frame, having watched the four of us wander through her first floor. Not saying a word, Colleen just a silhouette in a far corner chair.
Teddy had come by to pick me up. He wanted to go for a drive. The two of us used to go for drives a few times a week. We were thirteen and neither of us had a license, Teddy using his cousin’s Volkswagen Bug as just me and him went driving around Tacoma.
As we’d turned fourteen, though, I was less interested in driving with Teddy, wanting instead to go by Will Wilson’s house, wanting to see what he had going on. And Teddy always agreed.
We were eighteen now, and it was a few days before we all were going to graduate, then leave for summer jobs in Alaska.
We drove in Teddy’s white Dodge Dart, the June night air swirling cool around us in the car.
And Teddy then quietly told me he was thinking about going to college when we got back from Alaska. Trying to get into Washington State University, in eastern Washington, three hundred miles away.
And as he told me this I nodded and was quiet.
We were crossing along the waterfront at low tide, the wet and salty, heavy bay smell pouring through the windows. And th
e silence, not speaking, it was a kind of answer. Teddy, who’d never thought school was important, needed my encouragement to go to college. Teddy, who seemed bound to Tacoma and Will Wilson as deeply as me, needed my support to leave. Even to Seattle. Especially to eastern Washington. Teddy was trying to make a break. But that night I gave him nothing.
Teddy and I drove up McCarver Hill toward our small houses above Old Town, silently driving past the steplike rows of nice homes, the reflection of the yellow streetlights glowing on the hood, the reflection of a house window sometimes even shining on our windshield. McCarver Hill, which we’d ridden up on our bikes when we were ten years old, back then talking about being little kids, saying, do you remember that bush on that corner where we found that whole box of Popsicle sticks? Do you remember the day we skipped school and walked through that alley and then that alley to cross just an edge of the gulch, going to the waterfront with the sand and the rock crabs? Saying, do you remember the lady who lived in that house, who gave everyone the cocoa on snowy days? Do you remember that kid in the window of that house, how he’d smoke pot and stare, just stare out his window for hours, how he was there at the start of that walk and when we got back? Do you remember racing sticks down this hill in the rain, this very spot on this very block, me and you chasing boats, right here, right there, eight years old and passing through this place, me and you in a race at one hundred and twenty-five miles an hour?
But that night on McCarver Hill, I just stared at the road. And, still, said nothing to Teddy.
The car stopped in front of my house. The engine still running. I was about to open the door when Teddy said quietly, “Will Wilson was blowing up some old toaster this morning.”
Teddy didn’t talk for another moment. I held on to the door handle, thinking Teddy must have something more to say. Will Wilson was always blowing things up.
“And an old gas can,” Teddy said quietly, “and this little black-and-white TV. Two M-8os each. He called me at six this morning. Said he was blowing stuff up. Told me to come over.”
Teddy was leaning against his door, turned as if looking toward me but staring out the windshield toward my house. The light from the radio glowed above my knee.
“It’s like I can’t say no,” Teddy said. “Going over there at six. I’d rather be in bed. But I can’t say no.”
I didn’t say anything, just looked out the window. I could feel Teddy staring. Wanting me to agree.
“He was talking about break-ins and all,” Teddy said, his voice loud now and awkward. “I don’t know. It’s like he’s maybe pushing for something more. When we get back from Alaska.”
I stared ahead, the intersection glowing pale yellow from a streetlight, the roads leading into it all lost in shadows. “Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He was just talking. All quiet like he gets. Taping M-8os to this toaster. He unscrewed the back of this TV. You should have seen that TV go.”
“What was he saying, though?”
“Like, I don’t know,” Teddy said, turning the radio up slightly. “I love this song.”
“Come on, Teddy,” I said.
“Just more, you know? When we’re in the house. Things he’s thinking about for when we get back from Alaska. I don’t know. He blew up an old wooden mailbox. It caught fire.”
I sat in the car, staring at the shadows beyond the intersection. I knew Will Wilson was making decisions. Will Wilson was thinking, wishing.
Will Wilson was getting bored.
Teddy’s face looked a little pained, talking now like he was answering a question. “More,” he said, shrugging. “Just doing more. I’m not sure about it. Like, I don’t know. He was saying stuff. While, like, he was blowing these things up. Six A.M.”
I lowered my head. Saw my feet. “Come on, Teddy.”
“Just saying,” Teddy went on, but getting quiet now and his voice evening out, not struggling. “When we’re in the house. Doing more. I’m not sure about it, Brian. Like, I don’t know, Brian. Like waking people up.”
The four of us leave the houses almost completely undisturbed. Even Coe is always careful to return furniture to its place. I think the owners woke up in the morning and never knew anything had happened, maybe wondered weeks or months later, How long has that lampshade been crooked? Is this where I left my shoes?
Teddy had been wrong. Will Wilson didn’t want to wake people up when we got back from Alaska. Will Wilson didn’t want to wait even that long.
One night later, we were in a house in Old Town, the four of us standing against a wall in the living room, after hours of near silence under that bridge near the park, under there quietly drinking, and I was blurry now, and slowed and focused from all the drinking, watching the lights on the ceiling now, light from the bay that flickered up through the windows, white, white flashes in a room that was dim violet from a streetlight outside, and I think I knew it was different when I saw Will Wilson pull a bottle of bourbon from a liquor cabinet, take a drink, and we’d never drunk in a house, never stolen anything. Coe was smiling, drinking, and I was watching Will Wilson, in his gloves like we always wore, with a ski mask in his pocket this time, and passing the bourbon to me before he put the mask over his head.
“Let’s just see what happens,” Will Wilson said.
And I knew what would happen. Knew we would do anything. Knew we would not stop. I knew we had so lost ourselves to whatever was possible. And so I was watching Coe and Will Wilson move and I was drinking from the bourbon, and I looked around for Teddy. He was staring out a window. And for a moment I thought I’d stay with him. For a moment I thought I’d grab his arm, pull him with me, and we would run from here.
Because I knew I would do what Will Wilson wanted.
And because I knew I wanted it too.
I found Will Wilson and Coe on the second floor, already turning down a hall, at a door in their masks, Will Wilson turning the knob, and there would be chaos soon, and violence, and power and fear and anger, and I drank from the bourbon, still in my hand, drank again from the bourbon and heard the screaming.
Screaming downstairs. People screaming downstairs.
Will Wilson and Coe had gone in the room. But downstairs there were people screaming and alarms going off, and I looked back down the stairs, saw Teddy standing there now, looking up at me, and I was glad he was there, glad and I smiled, at Teddy, my friend, and I saw that a flame had sprung out from his hand, Teddy looking up at me, Teddy flicking matches toward the stairs, the steps going blue, then red, then gold.
He’d poured something on the stairs. He was lighting them on fire.
I could smell the smoke already, the flames climbing toward me, heat all across my body, Teddy disappearing from the foot of the steps, the downstairs turning gold, the smoke alarms screaming up at us, and I ran into the room with Will Wilson and Coe, could see out the window, see people outside, one last person running out of the first floor, and then I remembered someone should have been in this room. But there wasn’t anyone except Will Wilson and Coe, which seemed strange, I thought, and I was drunk and confused and scared, but I couldn’t help but think it, couldn’t believe that Will Wilson had been wrong. There was supposed to be someone in here.
Smoke alarms were going off upstairs too now, all screaming together.
I turned to Will Wilson and Coe, standing in the dark, watching out the hall, Coe bouncing, and Will Wilson looking around now, out the window, toward the hall, saying something I couldn’t hear in the noise of the alarms and the fire now spreading up the stairs.
“How do we get out?” Coe was saying, loudly, and he was bouncing up and down even harder.
Will Wilson turned to me, his eyes staring out of the mask. “Where the fuck is Ted?”
“I don’t know,” I was saying. “We have to get out,” I was saying.
Will Wilson hit me, in the face, so hard and so fast, and I was on the floor and couldn’t hear and couldn’t see and couldn’t breathe.
; I could see him before I could hear anything, blurry and above me and his mouth moving and I’d never been hit so hard.
“Where the fuck is Ted?” Will Wilson was screaming.
I was talking, I thought, saying, “I don’t know,” but I couldn’t hear my voice. Couldn’t feel my mouth or lips.
“How do we get out?” Coe was yelling.
Will Wilson hit me again and it was white and black and gone and there was a smell then, I remember now, a smell of air and water and rain against my face. But in a moment I could see again and the smoke was in the room. The fire in the hall.
Will Wilson was gone.
“He left,” Coe was saying, quietly or maybe I still couldn’t hear. “Oh my god, he left.”
The smoke was getting heavier. The flames had reached the hall. Coe was bouncing against the walls. “How do we get out?” he was saying. “How do we get out?”
I stood and felt the blood across my nose and mouth and my head spun and I threw up, fell down again. I crawled to the window and looked out. There were about five people in the street.
Coe was hitting the wall. Coe was spinning in place. “How?” he was screaming, “how?”
“We have to climb down,” I tried to say, but I still couldn’t hear my voice. “Okay, Coe? We climb and then we run.”
Coe kept hitting the wall. I tried to stand but threw up again, my head spinning and my neck all sickly numb.
And then Coe started running. Through the smoke. Into the hall. Into the flames.
Trying to make it downstairs.
Maybe he was thinking he could make it to the door. Maybe he was afraid to climb. But probably he just wanted to find Will Wilson. To see how Will Wilson would finally make this work.
Once, in a house, I leave Will Wilson in a kitchen as he slowly makes his way through every drawer and cabinet, pass Coe in the dining room climbing across a fireplace mantel. I’m looking for Teddy and find him in the living room, a wide, tall room with windows open onto the bay and the bright ships and the lights of the neighborhoods all around us, and he is climbing up the windows, in bare feet with his toes just balanced on the thin frames of the windows, fifteen feet in the air now, and he is looking out of a skylight, his hands touching the panes of the glass, his face close to the frame.
Harlan Coben Page 5