There Will Be Fire

by Mark Von Kyling

  THERE WILL BE FIRE

  Mark Von Kyling

  THERE WILL BE FIRE

  Mark Von Kyling

  The Book Factory

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  There Will Be Fire. Copyright © 2011 by Mark Von Kyling.

  Published by The Book Factory, an imprint of New Tradition Books.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher. For information go to www.newtraditionbooks.com.

  eBook ISBN–13: 978-0-9845418-4-3

  eBook ISBN–10: 0-9845418-4-5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  To the paranoid.

  1

  Everybody wants to have adventures. Especially when they get past their early adulthood. This is why people have affairs and do other crazy stuff they wouldn’t ordinarily do. Even so, John Parminter wasn’t exactly thinking along these lines when his cell phone rang.

  “Hey, asshole, I’m coming into town,” said the voice on the other end of the line. It was a real blast from the past, except it was now a little hoarser like it had been worn out from the extra years of usage.

  Parminter had been in the process of buying groceries when he had gotten the call. It was from an old friend from high school, Howie Weiss. Parminter was a little surprised to hear from the guy. It had been a while since they had been in contact.

  “Really why?”

  “C’mon, you can’t be serious?” Howie said, sounding like he had just taken a bite of celery. It sounded like he was eating the phone.

  “Oh, yeah, that,” Parminter said before picking up a bottle of Italian dressing. “Well, you don’t sound too terribly broken up over it.” He knew where this would lead.

  “Yeah, but you know that I didn’t really like Raoul. He was just my stepbrother.”

  “I know. So why are you coming back then?”

  “I’m the only relative left besides his wife and she’s in no state to do anything. Somebody’s got to deal with the situation and unfortunately it means once again I have to be faced with that prick.”

  “I see.”

  They chatted a little more, briefly catching up, before agreeing to meet as soon as Howie’s plane arrived.

  Parminter couldn’t believe how he could have overlooked the fact that Howie would probably be coming into town because of what had happened. But then again he had had other things on his mind besides the fire which had killed Howie’s stepbrother.

  It really had been a big deal though and, naturally, it had been all anyone in town could talk about for the past few days. All over the South and much of the rest of the country, it occupied much of the conversations of people just waking up to their breakfasts and morning coffee the day after it happened. This was primarily because the intensity of the fire but also because of the house it had destroyed and the person it had killed.

  The blaze had occupied most of the local news programs all morning and had also been mentioned in the national outlets. When the city made the news, it was rarely for anything other than a puff piece regarding the renewal of the waterfront or a mention of a favorite son. This had been an entirely different sort of event because it had completely destroyed the home of celebrity money manager and accountant Raoul Goldman, Howie’s stepbrother.

  The home had been built a couple of years earlier with much fanfare and had been the subject of many home and design magazines. Even Architectural Digest had done a feature on it and that, in and of itself, was something that wasn’t normally done on houses in this particular area. It was easily the most modern and stylish home anywhere within five-hundred miles. It had been filled with high-end finishes and antiques that had been bought with the sole intention of impressing the easily impressible and offending the hard to impress with their ostentatiousness. The place was both a show place and monument to the kind of person Raoul Goldman was and aspired to be: a nouveau riche celebrity moneyman.

  Some might have considered Goldman to be a shady character, but no one could question his success. Or rather his appearance of success. With his fancy cars and large donations to various high profile charities in the city, he was a hard presence to ignore and when he had announced plans to build his mansion, all the other residents of the tony development were filled with pride that he was going to be living near them. What a feather in their caps it would be to say that they lived in the same gated community as Raoul Goldman, rockstar accountant.

  However, after his architect had made the plans to the house public, the neighbors immediately changed their tune. Not only was his house going to be the biggest in the neighborhood by over three times, the ultra modern and unconventional design was going to severely clash with all the other traditional pre-existing homes.

  In other words, it was going to stick out like a sore thumb.

  But this is exactly what Raoul Goldman wanted. He wanted these people to know that there was a price other than his commission to be exacted for a guaranteed twenty-five percent return on their investments. He wanted them to understand that while most of them might have regarded him merely as their accountant, it was he who had control of their money. Depending on the perspective, he was subtley or unsubtley letting them know who was boss and all the criticisms only fueled his desire to build the house.

  Needless to say, he was able to build his monstrosity and subsequently went on to even more fame as a result of it. The sulking of the neighbors soon subsided once they realized that even though they hated what his house had done to their neighborhood, they could still name-drop and over the short time it existed, the colossal structure actually began to grow on them In fact, some of them even became quite fond of it. Well, at least most of them did. There were some who would not be swayed by Goldman’s glitz. But then the fire happened and it made all the squabbling seem rather childish in retrospect.

  From the news reports, it appeared that the fire had started in the high-end chef’s kitchen. The inspectors couldn’t say for sure, but it appeared that the source of the fire had been something as simple as a potholder catching on fire and then spreading to other parts of the house. The conflagration had been so hot and had moved so quickly that the sprinkler system, which had been installed not only to satisfy the insurance requirements but also to help avoid this sort of thing, had been overwhelmed. It would come out later that Goldman had opted for the cheapest system he could find because he was so confident of his destiny as a grea
t man that he was sure that something like this could never happen to him. Always the accountant, the money he had saved from going with a less sophisticated sprinkler system had been spent on an even higher-end security system which had ironically led to his death.

  When the house had been in the planning stage, there had been some home invasions and rapes in some of the ritzier communities in the area so he had gone for the most radically secure system he could find. He had even flown over experts from Europe to inspect the installation. He wisely knew that the other side of the coin of fame was that it would make him a target for any person who was looking to make a big score. Ultimately, this desire for absolute security had been his undoing because after the blaze had begun, and the fire department had been alerted, the house had been so consumed with fire that he had been unable to disarm the system. It should have disarmed itself automatically, but he had overridden that particular feature due to a malfunction which not only kept turning the system off but also had falsely alerted the fire and police departments four times in the previous week. Oddly enough, the system was scheduled to be repaired the following week.

  Regardless, as a result of the high level of security, the firemen were unable to get into the house to rescue him. It took them over an hour just to get through the reinforced door. By the time they got in, it was too late to do anything except pull his body out. Fortunately, his wife had been walking the dog when the blaze had started and was locked out of the house due to the malfunction. Even if she had been able to go inside, the fire had spread through the house too quickly for her to rescue her husband. He was about twice her size so even attempting to do so would have been suicide on her part.

  There had been speculation about why he hadn’t been able to make it to the panic room. This would have made sense and if he had done so, he would have been saved. However, because of the alarm failure, the door to it had locked prior to Goldman being able to get inside of it.

  As for the dog, whose need for relief had saved the wife, it was run over by a fire truck and subsequently had to be put to sleep. The irony of it surviving the fire only to be killed by the very thing that had come to rescue it was not lost on anyone and this sad detail had been milked for all it was worth by most of the tabloids.

  Luckily for the neighbors, the lots in the community were so large that the fire hadn’t been able to spread to the surrounding houses. If that had happened, a large portion of the city’s real estate value would have disappeared overnight.

  Parminter had been interested just like everybody else, but his attention had been diverted by the fact that he had been involved in a car accident a day prior to the fire. It wasn’t that serious but it had impaired his ability to move around freely. He had been hit while he was out getting the paper by a kid in a Kia. The kid had been too busy texting her boyfriend about something that was terribly important only to her to pay attention to where she was going and had inadvertently swerved into him. Obviously he hadn’t been killed but he had severely bruised his leg and suffered some strained muscles along with some scrapes. The girl was very sorry it had happened and he believed that she was. He hadn’t pressed charges even though moving around was very painful to him but each day brought progress and less swelling. This trip to the grocery store had been his first foray out since it had happened. And this was only because it was a necessity. He was completely out of everything.

  As he finished his shopping, he realized that during the time, he had been sitting on his couch recovering and watching the coverage of the fire, he had forgotten that Howie was related to Raoul.

  Well, not exactly. Frankly, he didn’t think of Howie at all because it had been so long since he had heard from him.

  2

  A few days later, Parminter found himself driving Howie up the winding roads of the mountain to the burned out ruins of the house. Howie hadn’t even wanted to take the time to check in at his hotel even though they had driven past it on the way to the house. He wanted to go directly from the airport to the hotel. He simply couldn’t wait to see the wreckage. To Parminter, it almost seemed as though he wanted to verify that the blaze had actually happened and that Goldman was really dead. Parminter didn’t mind because it was a good day for a drive and besides the hotel was smack dab in the middle of downtown and it was hell to find a parking space. Plus if by some miracle he had been able to find one, it would have been some distance away from the hotel and he would have had to walk quite a bit to get there which he was not quite up to yet. However, he was much less sore now and was driving without too much pain. At least not too much. It still hurt him just a little when his Jaguar required him to brake, but he knew that the discomfort would soon go away. He tried to look at it as physical therapy, but that only helped so much.

  “Let’s go see it,” Howie had said at the airport as he had put his bags into the trunk.

  “Now?”

  “Let’s get it out of the way so we can do some drinking,” Howie said enthusiastically.

  As they sped up the mountain, Howie was in such a hurry that he encouraged Parminter to ignore all red lights and speed limits. It reminded Parminter of something he had said to his girls when they had scolded him for speeding after he had picked them up at his ex-wife’s.

  “Traffic laws are merely guidelines to be followed whenever law enforcement is around,” he had said.

  “What does that mean?” His oldest, Margaret, asked.

  “They’re so you know how fast to drive when there’s a policeman around.”

  The girls had promised to tell their mother on him and he had received a big scolding from her as a result. The fact she was a cop hadn’t been lost on her.

  Parminter continued to drive fast, deftly maneuvering the Jag around the mobile chicanes and keeping at a good pace. As he did so, Howie examined the woodwork and slightly-worn leather in the old car. Parminter had inherited it from an Anglophile uncle about ten years earler and had liked it so much that he accepted the mechanical eccentricities that would have been unacceptable in a more ordinary vehicle.

  “Damn! I would have thought you would have traded this piece of shit off by now,” he said.

  “Why would I do that? It’s a classic.”

  “It’s an eighteen year old Series III. It’s not a classic.

  “Not yet, you mean.”

  Howie laughed. “Well, it is a cool car, I’ll give you that.”

  Parminter was not surprised to see that Howie hadn’t changed that much since high school. He was the same slightly obnoxious but somewhat entertaining loudmouth. The only change was that while he had been chunky and red-faced in high school, he was even more so now but in a more bloated and unhealthy way. And with less hair.

  Parminter had met Howie after his parents had moved to the city from a small town nearby. Because of where he came from, Parminter had immediately been pegged as some sort of country bumpkin even though he didn’t act like one. It had been a little rough at first because he just didn’t fit in anywhere. He was considered a redneck so he was shunned by the more sophisticated set. However, because he wasn’t actually a redneck, the rednecks had shunned him as well.

  But then he had met Howie.

  He and Howie had started talking about baseball in History Class and had become fast friends. This was probably due to the fact that Howie was also sort of an outcast because he was so abrasive and not prone to social subtleties. Once when the captain of the football team had made fun of him for wearing white socks with his khakis, Howie had snuck into the locker room and had taken a dump in his shoes. Aside from the beating Howie had received as a result, it was hilarious.

  They had fallen out of touch after they had graduated and had moved to separate cities. Parminter had moved to California for several years while Howie had gone into his family’s travel business in New York. They had seen each other a few times since, but as with most routines that are established in high school, without a context to force one into doing something like going to clas
s or hanging out at the lockers, the idea of them visiting or even talking to each other had soon fallen away. High school is one of the few places where people with disparate backgrounds and interests can come together on an everyday basis and be friends. There had been no hard feelings though. It was just one of those things that happens to most people.

  While Parminter knew that Howie was Goldman’s stepbrother, he had not thought about it when he had heard about the fire. Besides, Goldman wasn’t someone that Howie had ever really talked about except in the most negative of terms. This was the reason why Howie didn’t seem to be that broken up over his death. Howie’s mother had been married to Goldman’s father briefly in the mid-eighties. Goldman’s father had died fairly soon thereafter of the standard-issue massive coronary event. Before his death, he owned a mid-sized accounting firm in the city which handled the affairs of much of the old money in the area. Both families were fairly upper middle-class with ties to richer families in both New York and Florida. Since Howie and Goldman were both only children with few living relatives, the marriage had linked them together for life.

  It could have been a good thing for them, but Goldman was too much of an asshole for that. Also since his family was slightly more well-to-do than Howie’s, he had always considered Howie to be in somewhat of a subordinate position. He was about five years older than Howie and had never really played any sort of role in his life except to be this looming presence that always had to be consulted before anything could ever be done with the family’s affairs. He had played the polo-shirted and madras plaid wearing bad guy to Howie’s paisley-shirted/pegged pants dork in the John Hughes movie of their childhood. Although in reality, Howie was an overweight and golf shirt/khaki wearing version of this character.

  In any case, Raoul had been the cool popular guy and never let the fact that their parents married change how he treated people like Howie. Goldman and his friends had done things to Howie that would seem like good clean hazing if it had occurred in a frathouse or locker room, but would otherwise seem very homoerotic. Howie had never forgotten it or forgiven it. Parminter had only met Goldman a few times when he was a teenager and had gone over to Howie’s house to practice guitar—badly. Naturally, Goldman had asked Howie if he was his boyfriend and had told them not to bunghole each other on his bed. Goldman was one heckuva guy.