by Jack Lynch
“If the dog isn’t where I can grab him fast, I won’t have a prayer,” I warned her. “The heat’s too intense.”
She nodded her understanding. I trotted down onto the finger pier alongside the houseboat nearest the fire and dove into the Bay. It was chilly, but I’d been in worse. I was heartened when I heard more sirens pulling into the parking lot on shore.
I’m not an expert swimmer. I nearly drowned in a YMCA pool in Seattle when I was a boy, and sort of lost interest after that. I never learned to breathe right, so I couldn’t do the standard strokes the way they were meant to be done. I had variations that kept my head above water. It was just enough to get the job done so long as the distance I had to go wasn’t too far. I momentarily wondered about the roaring fire overhead. Burning stuff would probably begin falling into the water soon. I ducked my head beneath the surface from time to time to cool it off. I felt I was sweating in the water I swam in.
I made a loop to come up on the girl’s houseboat from the rear. I didn’t see any sign of the dog. I called out his name a time or two. Maybe he was already barbecued. The plank deck of the houseboat was about three feet above the water line. There wasn’t any ladder down to the water that I could see, and the hull curved sharply inward toward the center keel. I could just reach the decking and a post supporting the railing around the craft. I pulled myself up and heaved over onto the deck. It was blistering hot there.
“Here Buddy, here Buddy. Come on, boy—where are you, dummy?”
He barked down at me from above. The girl hadn’t told me the crazy animal was up on the little top story. It had its paws on the ledge of an open window. The dog’s fangs were bared, and he barked down at me viciously. I had expected a dog named Buddy to be small and cuddly. This beast should have been named Thor.
I tried to peer through the gloomy interior of the boat. Inside was the kitchen. The door into the rest of the boat was closed, acting somewhat as a fire shield. It was smoky in there. It wouldn’t hold back the flames much longer; in fact, the back end looked ready to ignite from combustion any moment.
I backed to the rail again and tried to calm the dog, yelling its name and assuring it. The dog wanted none of that. He barked like I’d started the fire.
On one side of the housing there was an eighteen-inch walkway. Part way down it, a wooden ladder was bolted into the side of the structure, leading to the upper house. I started up. The ladder ended at a sliding aluminum window sash. The dog was there now, barking through the window at me. I managed to slide the sash open. The dog snapped a time or two, but backed off each time just before making contact. He was a frightened animal, but down deep he was chickenhearted, and I thanked my lucky stars. I stuck my head inside and barked back at him. He went over into a corner and tried to disappear, but kept barking. He was beginning to get smoke in his lungs. His bark was turning raspy, and it must have hurt him some.
I went through the window and tried again to calm the dog. He was too terrified for that. I saw that he had a collar on him. That might come in handy. Up close, he was one of the ugliest-looking dogs I’d ever seen. Kind of lunky-large, but you couldn’t even guess at the combination of breeds that went into him. He was black and short-haired, with a miserable-looking head. He looked like he didn’t belong anywhere.
There was a loud whoosh below me. I didn’t need to see down there to know what had happened. Gasses building up in the rear end of the boat beneath us had exploded into flames. Smoke was beginning to curl up from the floor. We were in a sort of study with books on the wall and a workbench along one side, but there also was a small couch beneath the window I’d come through, and it had a couple of blankets on it. I grabbed one of them and wound it around one arm to make a defensive cushion. I considered letting the dog take a bite of the arm and then try to knock him out by hooking a fist into the side of his head, but he looked so distraught now I thought it might cause a fatal shock to his system. No sense taking back a dead dog and laying it at his owner’s feet.
I stuck out the cushioned arm. The dog snapped but he didn’t make contact. I tried to soothe him again, then held up the blanketed arm to mask his eyes from my other hand. Then I grabbed him by the collar and backed over to the couch and window. He wasn’t snapping any longer, but he resisted by lowering his haunches and whining. I shook off the blanket and grabbed the dog around the middle, then climbed part way onto the outside ladder. His whine had grown mournful. I paused a moment, still perched on the window sill. I tried to calm the dog, patting it and speaking softly.
“Whoa, old boy. Good Buddy. It’ll be all right. If you weren’t so stupid, this would be a lot easier.”
Flames were licking toward us along the outer wall of the boat. In another moment the whole thing would be in flames. I swung the rest of the way through the window and started down the ladder as best I could with one arm still around the terrified animal. His legs kicked feebly; otherwise, he was relatively placid. Maybe he was going into shock. The noises he made in his throat were the sort of thing that could keep you awake nights for years after.
I could manage little more than a fingernail grip on the ladder with the hand that circled the dog. I had a couple of near misses before I lost my grip altogether. We were halfway down.
“Hang on, boy!” I shouted, kicking away from the side of the boat. We went over backward, head first into the water. I lost my grip on the dog the second we hit the water. I surfaced and looked around for him.
Buddy learned that he could dog paddle. He was dog paddling as fast as his clumsy paws would take him, around toward the burning end of the pier. No dog could be that dumb, but this one was. I put on my improvised crawl. I’m good for short spurts with it. It was enough to get me close enough to reach the dog’s little stump of a tail. When I grabbed him, he voided something into the water. I didn’t know what it was and tried not to dwell on it. I grabbed his collar and swung him back into the right direction. At least he was willing to continue paddling in the new direction.
It turned out to be a long paddle for a man of my limited abilities. I was tiring by the time we had circled back to the rear of the boat. And we were too close to it. It looked ready to start dropping burning timbers onto us. I tried to get us back out from it, but it was slow going. Buddy had pulled out ahead of me and was actually giving me a slight assist. The dog was all right after all, I figured. It just needed strong direction, like a lot of us.
There was a new sound from the fiery boat behind us. It was water, now hitting the burning structure and creating a cascade of steam. The firemen had arrived at last. I could see half a dozen figures struggling with nozzles and lines just back from the charred end of the pier. They had stopped the advance of flames. One team was drenching structures nearest to the burning houseboats. Others were spraying the stream of water onto the girl’s boat. They had given up for lost the home across the pier from it. It was gutted, and the flames were weakening as it fell into itself.
And then I heard another sound, from a pier farther off in the night. It was a more familiar sound to me, and oddly out of place in this sort of emergency. It was a shotgun blast. It was followed by a second. I quit swimming and squinted across the water. The smoky night was too gloomy for me to tell what was happening. The dog was confused by my lack of motion. He was paddling to keep himself afloat, but he looked over his shoulder at me, as if to ask, “What now?”
“Come on,” I told him. We started back toward the finger pier that I’d dived off what seemed like a long time before.
ELEVEN
The dog’s owner was waiting on the finger pier, along with the other couple who’d been up on the main pier earlier. I boosted the pooch onto the dock, and he shook himself off. The girl with the lank, blonde hair picked up Buddy and carried him up the ramp. He was a big armful but the girl didn’t mind that, nor the fact that he was sopping wet.
The bearded man leaned over and gave me a hand up onto the small finger pier. He shook his head.
; “Don’t know how you did it. Thought you were pretty foolish to try, myself.”
“I’m half inclined to agree with you. Don’t know how anybody can love a mutt not any brighter than that one is.”
He went on up onto the pier ahead of me and called to somebody on one of the nearby houseboats, getting permission for me to go aboard and change. It was a lot gloomier up there. The gutted boat was little more than glowing embers by now. The firemen were knocking down what flames remained on the girl’s boat, and the fire on the pier had been extinguished. Some people were beginning to straggle back toward their homes. The neighbors loaned me a towel and ushered me into a small room illuminated by candlelight. I dried off and got back into my clothes, except for the wet undershorts. I wrung them out and stuffed them into a pocket.
Back out on the pier, I found Shirley talking to the other couple and the girl still clutching the dog to her. I reached out to give Buddy a pat. He growled and snapped at me.
“Buddy, no!” cried the girl.
Shirley introduced us. The girl’s name was Ellen.
“I really appreciate what you did, Mr. Bragg,” the girl told me. “Buddy is an important part of my life right now. Where did you find him?”
“In that loft area on the top deck.”
“How did you get up there?”
“The outside ladder. It wasn’t easy, but we managed. Personally, I think if I had a dog that dumb, I’d…” I let the sentence trail off. The dog growled at me again.
“Did you say you were asleep when it started?” Shirley asked her.
Ellen nodded. “I dozed off in front of the TV. I must have heard the fire and woken. The end of the pier out front was burning; then I realized almost a whole wall of my own boat was on fire. Flames seemed to be exploding everywhere at once. I barely got out myself.”
I took Shirley aside from the others. “I want to check out a couple of things. Will you be here much longer?”
“Probably not. But I don’t know that I want to spend the night at my place, after this.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t think this was an accident, do you?”
I glanced over at the smoldering hulks at the end of the pier. “I hadn’t given it much thought up to now.”
“I’ve given it a lot of thought.”
“Anyway, if you’re not out here when I get back, I’ll go back to your place.”
She nodded, and I started back down the pier. I went to the parking area, picking my way over hoses and around fire trucks to my car. I got out a flashlight and started out the pier that the shotgun blasts seemed to have come from.
The pier was older than the others, and in pretty rundown condition. Not nearly as many houseboats were tied up to it, and most of them were on the shoreward half. There was just one craft tied up near the end. The pier was small, squat and low in the water. I couldn’t see any lights on.
I walked out the rest of the way to the end. There I found some sort of utility shed. It was locked. I started back, trying to gauge whether the shotgun blasts might not have come from the pier closer to where the fire was. It didn’t seem possible. If it had, I probably could have seen one of the muzzle blasts, even from down in the water. I was pretty sure it had come from the pier I was walking on, but there was nothing to show what might have happened.
I went back out on the pier the fire had been on. Only a few stragglers among the houseboat owners were still outside. Most had returned to their darkened boats to turn in or to relive things over flickering candles. I wondered how long it would take the local utility company to string another power line.
The smell of wet, charred wood permeated the end of the pier. Men were inspecting the blackened ruins with powerful lamps. I found the fellow who seemed to be in charge, a tall man in a white helmet, wearing fire gear.
“Any idea yet what caused it?”
He ran a light over me before replying. “You live here?”
“No, I was visiting a friend.”
He turned back to the smoking hulk that had been totally destroyed from the water line up. “There won’t be any keeping it a secret anyhow,” he told me. “Somebody, or probably more than one person, started it deliberately, and they didn’t care who found out about it. We fished half a dozen jerry cans out of the Bay. They’d had gasoline in them. You can still smell it in the ruins, as well. Whoever did it gave things a good dousing, both of the craft here and the pier as well.”
“That would take a pretty vicious person. A lot of people might have been hurt.”
“Exactly,” said the fireman. “This wasn’t some nut who wanted to cause a little excitement. Whoever did this wanted people to die.”
I made my way slowly back up the pier, wondering what had become of the burned-out couple and the girl Ellen. Taken in by neighbors, I supposed. On the pier across from me, the man somebody had called Charley was still hunched down over the outboard motor at the rear of the small firefighting barge. He never had gotten the motor going. It looked now as if he was trying to dismantle it.
When I got back to Shirley’s boat, I found her over by the windows, her arms hugging herself, staring out at where the fire had been. I was starting to shiver some. She noticed and went into the kitchen to pour me a snifter of brandy. I took it thankfully and sipped from it.
“What were you doing?” she asked.
“I went out on one of the other piers to check out a sound I heard when I was in the water, but I didn’t find anything. Good brandy.”
“Why don’t I have some?” she asked herself, heading back to the kitchen.
“Incidentally, you were right,” I told her. “The fire was deliberately set.”
She stopped in mid-stride on her way back to the lounging area. “How do you know?”
“I asked the firemen. They found several empty gas cans that had been tossed into the water. There was a strong aroma of gasoline at the end of the pier.”
“That does it,” she said, putting her snifter on the table and crossing to her bed. She pulled out a small airlines flight bag from beneath the bed and began putting things into it.
“What are you doing?”
“What I always do when I’m scared. Panic. I’m going to abandon ship, at least for the night. If I tried staying here, my eyelids would be frozen wide open till dawn.”
“Where will you go?”
She shrugged. “Your place, if you’ll have me. A motel, if you won’t.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be. This is an emergency. You got room?”
“Yeah, I got room.”
“Good. Finish the brandy. Let’s go.”
I suggested we take both our cars, so we’d have freedom of movement in the morning. I got into mine, and she put herself and the flight bag into an old gray Volkswagen bug. It was only about a two-minute drive up to my place. She followed me out of the lot and up Bridgeway to the fork that put us onto Caledonia. I swung right, up the hill, and turned onto Bonita. She was never more than a few yards behind. When I parked, her bumper tapped my own. She was out of the car before I was. By now, she was the one who was shivering. We went down a few concrete steps and crossed the small patio to my lower apartment.
“We should keep the noise down,” I told her, unlocking the door. “Another guy lives above me.”
She nodded and went inside. I turned on lights and pumped up the heat at the wall thermostat. Shirley glanced around the snug quarters and gave a curt nod of approval. If laid out end to end, the place would have been about the same size as her own.
“Can I use the head?”
“It’s off the kitchen.”
She found the proper door, turned on the lights and went in. I picked up a few loose things lying around here and there, then went out and poured myself a bourbon. When Shirley came out, I offered her one and she accepted. While I was pouring it, she peeked into the doorway opposite the kitchen from the bathroom.
“Bedroom,” I told her. “That s
ofa in the living room opens into a bed. It even has fresh bedding on it at the moment.”
“I was prepared to sleep on the floor,” she told me, taking the drink and carrying it in to the sofa. I joined her there.
“Do you take in strays like this often?”
“Not too often. But it happens now and then. In emergencies.”
She nodded, and tossed her mane of long hair over one shoulder. “I appreciate this, Pete. I’m pretty independent most times, but when I get a good scare, like tonight, my courage goes right out the window. I don’t like to be hurt.”
“Why do you think somebody would start the fire purposely?”
“To get us out of there.”
“You think the Shores people had something to do with it?”
“Who else?”
“But I’ve met some of those people. You can think what you want about them, but the developer, Anderson, and their attorney have established reputations in the county. They might try to hog-tie and strangle you in a court of law, but—arson? I don’t think so.”
Shirley moved her head in a way to indicate it didn’t matter what I thought. “For the past few months, ever since it became pretty clear we weren’t welcome in the Basin any longer, there’s been a pattern of harassment and intimidation. We’ve had power outages, missed garbage collections, a million and one other little things. They want us out, and if you ask me, the fire was just a heavier hint. And there’ll be more.”
“Not another fire?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But there’ll be something, and eventually somebody’s going to be hurt. The fire was just the most extreme example so far. Two, maybe three weeks ago, there was a jive-talking black dude down to see Beamer. We also have a dear, sweet old man named Soldier who works on the docks.”
“I’ve met him.”
“He’s a little retarded and hard to understand, but he’s a lovely man. But this black dude, when he was leaving, got into some sort of row with Soldier. I don’t know what started it. I wasn’t even there at the time. But I’m told he taunted Soldier something awful, imitated this funny way of speaking he has and danced around him some. He finally got Soldier so mad that he took a couple of swings at the dude. The black dude avoided them easily enough and finally pushed Soldier into the Bay, then stood there laughing at him. Told him he was a crazy old man, and said he should be in a rest home.”