by Mark Stone
I looked at her for a long moment, trying to find just the right words to respond to a woman who had meant more to me than maybe anyone in my life at one time. Finally, I found them.
“That’s bullshit,” I muttered.
“What?” she asked, her mouth dropping.
“You let me go so you could keep me?” I asked, frustrated and confused. “Do you even believe that garbage, sweetheart? Because I think you’re smarter than that.”
I stepped closer, and she didn’t move to pull away from me.
“You were scared. I get that. Change can be scary, especially when we were just two dumbass kids with our heads in the clouds. But I was a dumbass kid who loved the hell out of you and, if you would have asked me to stay, I would have.”
“And hated me for it,” she answered, so close to me I could feel her breath on my face.
“I couldn’t hate you if I tried,” I answered, my heart jumping hard against my ribcage.
“That’s what my mom used to tell my dad too, Dilly,” she rebuked. “Life is a long time, and it twists you in ways you don’t see coming.”
I sighed. There was no way I could have predicted the future, especially one that would never come to pass now.
Wait. This wasn’t anger. This was something else, something just as primal and passionate. This was the thing I had been missing for twelve years. This was—
“Dilly?” she asked, her voice high and shaking.
“Yeah, Charlie,” I answered, my breath heavy and heated.
“Isn’t that your house?”
Her arm lifted and I followed it.
Turning, I saw a bright orange light and plume of smoke coming from the spot where my old house sat, the spot where my grandfather was very likely asleep in his bed.
The damned thing was on fire.
7
“Call 911,” I said flatly, horror rising in my chest like an angry tide, motioning to Charlotte as I kept my eyes transfixed on the echo of an orange glow and funnel cloud of smoke in the distance.
Though I hadn’t lived there in over a decade, that was my house. It was my home; the home I grew up in, the place where the memories of my mother lived and-more frightening than any of that-the place where my grandfather was most likely sleeping right now.
My heart raced, my palms sweated, and my head spun in a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time. All of my muscles tensed as I took the situation in, preparing to sprint off in the direction of the fire.
Charlotte must have sensed or noticed this, because she grabbed my arm with her free hand, a cell phone pressed against her ear.
“What are you doing?” she asked me with wide eyes. Then, turning her attention back to the phone said, “Hello, I’d like to report a fire at 1515 Milton Sheen Drive.”
She remembered my address, and why wouldn’t she? I had taken her back to my place countless nights during our formative years. Not for the entire night, and certainly not up to my room. My mother was too much of an observant Catholic to ever let that kind of thing slide, but I remembered more than a few nights when Charlotte would come to watch me fix up one of the old boats my grandfather was working on and, if I was lucky, make out in one of them when I was finished.
“Thank you,” she said, swallowing hard, her hand still around my arm. She hung the phone up and repeated her question. “What are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing, Charlotte? I’m going over there,” I answered in a panicked tone.
“But you can’t,” she said, her grip tightening against my bicep. “I know you, Dilly. You’re not just going to run over there and keep your distance like a normal person might. You’re going to go running headlong into that thing like the stubborn ass you are and get yourself killed.”
“My grandfather is in there,” I said, pulling my arm free of her touch. My mouth was dry and my heart was on fire. The idea that my grandfather might die tonight made me feel helpless, but also like I was the only person who could stop this.
“The fire department will be here in ten minutes. The lady just told—”
“What if he doesn’t have ten minutes?” I said, turned and rushed off before she could say another word. There was a time when I loved that woman more than myself, and even now, she only wanted to keep me safe. None of that mattered right now though. The only thing that did was making sure my grandfather made it out of there, and nothing she could say was going to change that.
She yelled something in the distance as I sprinted away, but between the crash of the waves and the way my heart was beating through my eardrums, I couldn’t hear what it was. She was probably telling me to be careful, all the while knowing I wouldn’t.
I chugged along, trying to keep my breath steady and even the way they teach you to in the police academy. I remembered my first day there, the thing my instructor told me would be the most important takeaway of the entire experience.
“If you only remember one thing through all of this,” he’d say. “If you can only take a single piece of advice out there with you to the mean streets of Chicago, let it be this. You have to remain calm, even in the most frantic of situations. No one’s ever been able to help a situation if he or she couldn’t help themselves, and no one’s ever been able to help themselves by blowing their cool.”
I took that to heart back then, and I carried it with me through all of my endeavors as a beat cop and then a detective. Doing now though, as I neared the flames which engulfed my home and felt the sting of the hot smoke in the air, was a different matter altogether.
I had one piece of family left in the world, a solitary person in the entire globe who both shared my blood and thought enough of me to admit it without flinching. I wasn’t going to lose him tonight, not if I could help it.
A horrible thought moved through me, threatening to incapacitate me, as I pushed through the line of palms which separated the backroad I grew up on from the sandy beachfront. What if I was too late? What if he was already dead and all I was going to find was the charred remains of a man who deserved so much better than that?
I swallowed hard, trying to remember what my instructor had told me about keeping my cool and failing miserably. It was too late. Even if I could get in there, which didn’t seem likely right now, there was a good chance my grandfather would be dead already. All I could do was pray he wasn’t.
I looked over. The shed was ablaze too, though the flames hadn’t taken quite the hold on it as it did the house.
“This wasn’t an accident,” I said, looking over at the thing. Two building, both on fire while the ground between them remained untouched. Someone had set these fires. Someone was trying to get to something or someone inside one of these buildings, and whoever it was knew there was chance my grandfather or I would be in either building, even this late.
A surge of newfound anger rose in me, cresting every bit as harsh and savagely as the waves during a storm. It was accompanied by something else though, another feeling, a feeling of hope.
If whoever did this knew there was a chance my grandfather or I might be in the shed, meaning he might be in there right now.
Without another thought, I rushed toward the shed, doing exactly what Charlotte had warned me against.
The flames were tall and forceful, but they weren’t everywhere yet. They had overtaken the door, but the window in the west wall was clear.
Perhaps I was hoping against hope, pulling at the slightest fragment of a possibility that my grandfather was still alive in there. Or maybe I was just fulfilling Charlotte’s prophecy by throwing myself headlong into danger regardless of how slim the chances were. I had to try. I knew there was no way I could live with myself if I just stood back and didn’t do everything possible to ensure my grandfather might survive this.
So I took a deep breath, the last clear one I’d have in a while no doubt, and charged forward.
I needed to move quickly. The fire was spreading and, given the dry nature of the wood which constituted the sh
ed, it wouldn’t be long before the entire thing was engulfed just like the house.
I collided with it, pulling my body up toward the window and feeling the encompassing heat as the flames ate through one of only a handful of places on this earth that my grandfather actually loved.
The window was locked, but luckily this was the west wall. So, instead of having to punch my way through it and braving the broken glass, I just gave the thing a hard nudge with my elbow and it went careening toward the floor inside the shed. This particular window had always been tricky and, regardless of how many times my grandfather and I tried to fix it, we never could get the damned thing stable.
Thank Heaven for small favors, right?
A torrent of smoke poured out at me the instant the window went out. Under almost any other circumstance, it would have been enough to knock me back on my ass. This wasn’t any other circumstance though and, if I didn’t brave this, I might as well say goodbye to any chance of my grandfather surviving until the morning.
Heat assaulted me as I climbed through the window, unbridled and unimpeded by anything now. I didn’t breath, keeping my mouth closed and trying to ignore the burning in my nostrils. I would have to ignore a lot more if I was going to make it through this.
There’s an instinct that people have. It’s probably evolutionary, meant to ensure the survival of the species or some crap like that In the simplest terms, human beings have this intense reaction to danger, a physical need to leave, to run in the other direction.
As a cop, I had learned to, not only ignore that reaction, but to twist it around and use the nervous energy it employed for my own benefit. I had never had any trouble running toward the worst things the world had to offer up in Chicago, but that might have been because all I had to worry about up there was myself. Down here, I wasn’t just a cop. I was a son and a grandson. I was a best friend, and a lost love. I was the prodigal bastard making his pilgrimage back to the lands that spurred him.
And I wasn’t going out like this.
The arsonist, if in fact it was arson as I suspected, had done a thorough job. Mother Nature’s fury was evident all over the shed. Smoke filled my eyes and, because I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, my lungs as well.
I wretched and gagged as I stood, coughing and trying to squint through the fuzzy madness.
Luckily for me, I didn’t need my eyes to make it around this shed. I had been in this place nearly everyday growing up and, given my grandfather’s almost anal need to keep everything in its place, I could be sure not too much had changed.
“Old man!” I screamed, trying to make my voice heard over the raging crackling of flames as they ate through this place. Already slick with sweat, I started to moved.
I was off the west wall, so two more steps would bring me to my grandfather’s work bench. The flames were off on the other side, obviously where the arsonist had begun. Still, as my hand landed on my grandfather’s metal work bench to confirm my placement, it burned like hell.
“Dammit!” I yelled, pulling it away. “Old man!” I screamed again. “Are you in here?”
I moved alongside the work bench, careful not to touch it again and peered as well as I could through the smoke.
A few more steps and then a sharp turn would bring me to the hull of my grandfather’s newest project, the most logical place for him to be. Unfortunately, it would also bring me in spitting distance of the flames, and that meant two things. If my grandfather wasn’t there, he very likely wasn’t in the shed at all, meaning he was lost to me inside the tinder box that had once been my house and two, I wouldn’t have any more time to look for him.
“Old man!” I screamed again, my voice hoarse and choked out with invading smoke. He wasn’t answering, and I was close enough now. If he was here, it meant he was either unconscious of worse.
I moved quicker. The flames were growing at a faster rate than I was moving, and I couldn’t have that. I needed to make sure. I just needed to.
I threw my hand onto what I assumed might be an equally hot hull. Instead, my palm landed on a slumped over body.
My heart sped up even faster as I grabbed the mass with both hands. Spinning it around, I saw my grandfather’s wrinkled, beautiful face through the smoke.
“Old man,” I said, my voice instinctively lower. “Old man, are you okay?”
My mind went to a dark and horrible place. He was old. What if he couldn’t handle the smoke inhalation? What if I was too late?
He moaned weakly in response though, and I clutched him tighter, almost sighing in relief.
“Thank you, Lord,” I muttered, blinking back tears that had nothing to do with the smoke in my eyes.
Without the luxury of a deep breath, I hoisted the man into my arms and moved as quickly as I could toward the west wall. I
A loud snap sounded from above, and a flaming beam fell right into our path. I pulled back sharply as I watched it fall, the heat of it assaulting me all over again. The integrity of the building had been compromised and the roof was coming down. It wouldn’t last much longer.
Taking only a beat to consider my options, I took two steps backward and rushed toward the arched beam. Leaping as high and far as I could with my grandfather in tow, I felt the singe of the flames burn my soles as I traveled over it.
I landed with an insanely painful thud. My burned soles screaming in agony.
Pushing the pain aside, I moved toward the window, my grandfather still in tow.
As I reached it, I wondered how I was going to push him through. I could get him onto the windowsill, but tossing him to the ground afterward might do him harm.
Just like that, a redheaded angel appeared.
“Dilly!” Charlotte screamed, appearing on the other side of the opening.
I balked, angry and surprised that she had taken it upon herself to follow me here after I’d asked her to keep her distance. Having her here, a second person I cared about in a world where almost no one fit that description, meant I had to make sure both of them were safe.
Her dark eyes went wide as she saw me and then even wider as she saw who I was carrying. “You found him,” she said softly. She extended her arms, knowing what I needed without me even having to ask.
“Be careful with him,” I said, hoisting him forward, surprised at how weak my voice sounded.
“Of course I’ll be careful with him,” she answered, grabbing the old man under his shoulders and pulling him as I fed her his lower body and legs. “Now get out of there,” she said. I watched as she laid him on the ground and then felt a close burning against my back. I didn’t need to turn around. I knew what it was. The flames had caught up with me. I was out of time.
I leapt toward the window, only to find Charlotte there, her hands grabbing at my shoulders too. Without me at the other end to help though, she found the weight of me too much to handle.
As I threw myself through the opening, I inadvertently pushed her back. I landed on top of her, pressed against the ground.
Greedily, I slurped up long gasps of fresh air, feeling its healing properties invade my abused lungs.
“I knew you wouldn’t listen to me,” she said, underneath me, her eyes filled with tears.
Pulling away, she looked at me, still angry, still frantic.
“Come on,” she said. “We need to move.”
8
“He’s okay then?” Boomer asked, walking into the waiting room of Landmark Regional Hospital, where my grandfather was being kept overnight for observation.
“He was a little shaken up, and he had a couple of bruises and cuts, but the doctor said it wasn’t anything too serious,” Charlotte said. She had been with me since all of this happened. She even helped me explain things to the doctor, a huge help, given how angry I still was about everything.
“Thank God for that,” Boomer muttered, shaking his head like this was some sort of natural disaster, like there wasn’t a culprit somewhere who needed to be held responsible.
&nb
sp; “We don’t have time for this, Boom,” I said, my nostrils flaring as I stood to meet my friend.
He pulled back in response, his eyes narrowing as he looked me up and down.
“Has anyone checked him out?” he asked, looking over at Charlotte.
“He refuses to be seen. He says he’s—”
“I’m fine,” I answered bitterly.
“Yeah,” she muttered. “He says that.”
“What I don’t understand is what the hell you’re doing here when what you should be doing is dealing with the people responsible,” I spat back. The anger I’d felt about all of this had bubbled up all over again when Boomer walked into the room. I didn’t blame him for anything, but I did expect things from him. I expected the chief of police to act like one, and I expected my best friend to stop at nothing to see justice done.
I’d have done the same for him.
“Where do you think I’ve been for the last two hours, Dillon?” he asked, glaring at me. “I’ve been at your house, talking to the fire department and seeing what they had to say about the whole thing.” He shook his head. “Otherwise, don’t you think I’d have been here?” He pointed to the wall, to the direction where he must have assumed my grandfather was. “That old man didn’t only raise you like a son, Dil. When my dad died, he took both of us under his wing. I’m going to do everything I can. You know that, but the most I can do tonight is wait for the fire department to do their job.”
“You’re going to wait?” I asked, my hands balling into fists at my sides. “You’re seriously going to wait for some report, when the first thing I told you when I called you about this was the reason for it?” I threw my hands out at my sides. “It was arson, Boomer. The goddamned shed was on fire, and so was the house. The ground in between was untouched. Either someone did that, or God sure does like to play weird jokes.”
“I know that, and I believe you, but that doesn’t mean I can run in there and step all over protocol,” he answered, and I recognized in the tone of his voice that he was trying to keep his cool. “The fire department has to deal with the fire. It’s in the damned name, Dil. They have to write up a report about what’s happened. I’ll have it by the morning.”