by Rob Brunet
He wiped his hands on the leaves of a young maple tree, put the knapsack on his back, slung the shotgun over his shoulder, and walked away. He said, “Goodbye, you stupid bastard. Thanks for letting me use the shitter.”
Danny’s lawyer motioned to the purple plastic chair next to her. In the hallway outside the meeting room, the chairs were bolted to the cement wall.
“We’ve got a few minutes until they call us in,” she said. Linette Paquin had a way of placing undue emphasis on seemingly random words when she spoke—a tic that only got worse the more nervous or excited she became. Danny figured it had something to do with having spent too many years studying the equally random Criminal Code.
The first day he’d met her, Linette told him she never really focused on defense work. “Real estate, wills, a little corporate is what I prefer, but we all have to pay our dues in this business. Social responsibility and all.” Danny didn’t much like having a disinterested twit as defense lawyer but the alternates proposed by Legal Services had been no better.
She was less dangerous than the dweeb who only wanted to compare notes on keeping lizards as pets because he had three geckos in a terrarium—“I’m telling you, every day I come home and my kitty is laying on the lid, soaking up the heat from the light, and tap-tap-tapping the glass with her paw. One of these days, she’s going to get at them, I’m sure of it. What did you feed your lizard?”—or the greasy gray-haired guy who reeked of gin before lunch—“Trust me, pal, I know how to deal with these gangster types. What we have to do is convince the coppers that you’ll wear a wire, see, and then you get all on the low-down and whatever and get them talking about where the money may have gotten to—you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to—and then they’ll get some real long time and you’ll get packaged off on witness protection—I know a guy, you’ll see, you’ll meet him soon—now, about that bag of money...”
So, he had stuck with Linette Paquin and prayed a lot.
They had worked out a deal on Lester. Manslaughter, arguing that the burial effort with Terry had been an act of public decency. They got lucky, catching a judge who was a serious cat-person. “Son,” he said. “I’m giving you a three-to-one credit for your pre-sentencing time because I think those fools on Peterborough council need to outlaw those darn Pit Bulls.” Shooter was a Rottweiler, but who was he to argue with a judge?
And now his time was nearly done.
“You can expect three months of day parole,” Linette told him. “Should have been six, but, well, you know, scheduling this meeting was hell. They’ll move you to Frontenac first. Have to be in minimum security for unescorted daily.”
Danny grunted.
“Do you have anyone on the outside that can help you find a job?”
“I’m kind of short on references.”
“What about your mother?”
“I haven’t heard from her in nearly a year.” Danny recalled Skeritt’s words scrawled on a birthday card: “Life’s a beach. Your mother’s fine.” She hadn’t paid him a goodbye visit. He prayed she was okay.
The door clanged open and some guy in a suit waved them in. Danny shuffled through, trailed by his professional help.
Fourteen
“What’s up, Wort?” Judy Jackman jiggled the empty leash. Normally her tawny Lhasa Apso would scamper to her side as soon as he heard the silver chain rattle. Instead, he barked in a voice much larger than his body and ran ahead.
“Wort. Heel. Heel, boy.” Judy was flabbergasted. Top of his class in obedience school, her dog was extremely well-behaved and never caused her the least bit of trouble. She didn’t mind his barking at all, and resented it when her more opinionated friends said Wort was yappy.
Maybe someone’s at our house, she thought. But that couldn’t be. The Big Bald Lake Environmental Action Committee meeting wasn’t until tomorrow and she hadn’t ordered anything from L.L. Bean in weeks. For a moment, she worried her dog might have heard hunters in the bush; there had been blasts on and off all afternoon, a couple of which had been far too close for comfort. “Wort. Come. Heel. Sit. Oh, damn.” Judy shuddered and looked nervously around as if there might actually be someone nearby to hear her swear. “Oops,” she said, giggling at herself, and ran after the tiny yapping dog.
At the corner, Judy expected Wort to cut across the light brush and head up the hill to her log cabin. When he passed the dirt path which served as her driveway, she started to worry. Then she smelled smoke and worried more.
Wort was running toward Ernie McCann’s. It wasn’t hard to tell this was more than a barbeque. Could Ernie be burning leaves again? The smoke didn’t smell right.
“You heel, boy. Wait up!” She came over the rise and saw smoke pouring out of Ernie’s cottage. Wort had stopped fifty feet short and stood there barking at the flames. As Judy stumbled past him, his bark changed to a growl, then a whine, but he would go no further.
Twenty feet of garden hose lay coiled next to the vegetable garden. It was connected to a pair of rain barrels raised six feet off the ground. She turned on the spigot and aimed the weak stream at the smashed living room window.
“Ernie, are you in there? Ernie McCann! Can you hear me?” she shouted. She choked as rancid steam engulfed her. She moved around to the door where the air was clearer. But when she pulled the door open, a hot humid blast sent her sprawling backward.
Wort barked louder. He sniffed her leg as she struggled to her feet and retreated from the burning cottage. She pulled her mobile phone from a vest pocket.
“911 Emergency,” said a woman’s voice. “Do you need Police, Fire, or Ambulance?”
“Ernie’s place is on fire and I don’t know where he is.”
“Where are you now, Ma’am? Have you left the building?”
“But I don’t know if Ernie’s inside.”
“Are you inside the burning building, Ma’am?”
“No. I’m outside. I have a hose.” Wort barked. “And I can’t see Ernie. He won’t answer when I call.”
“You can’t see? Get out of the building.”
“I am outside the building.” Wort barked loudly. Whenever Judy got excited, he joined right in.
“Ma’am. I can’t hear you over that yapping dog. Is the dog on fire?”
“MY DOG DOES NOT YAP.” Judy would have slammed down the phone if it had a cradle to slam into.
“I’m sorry, Ma’am. Can you move away from the dog so I can hear you?”
“Wort. Good doggie. Shhh...Nice doggie-woggie.” Wort sat down, whining, and thumped his tail in agitation.
“Please tell me where you are located.”
“Outside. I told you. I’m outside Ernie McCann’s and it’s BURNING.”
“And where is Ernie McCann’s, Ma’am?”
“In Lakehurst. Well, it’s Buckhorn really but more Lakehurst on the map.”
“I’ll need you to be a little more specific. The Fire department is being dispatched now—to Lakehurst. Do you have an address?”
“Uh, yeah. It’s—well it’s right across the road from 2311 Century Lane. That’s my house.”
“Thank you. Are you safe where you are now?”
“IT’S ERNIE WHO’S NOT SAFE. AREN’T YOU LISTENING?”
“The fire department is on its way. Please don’t try to be a hero, Ma’am. Just move back from the fire and wait for help.”
Judy aimed the water at the living room window again. She called out, “Ernie. Are you in there? Can you hear me? ERNIE?”
Ernst McCann was silent.
Wort whined. Just a bit.
The pager buzzed softly. Terry reached out and managed to turn it off with his left big toe before his hump buddy noticed. She panted something about him putting out her fire. Terry didn’t want to disappoint.
The pager was standard issue for volunteer firemen and was the one piece of official equipment Terry was allowed to carry with him all the time.
“Ooh, Terry, bang down my door. Ooh, yeah. Ooh, yeah, I’m bur
ning up, baby.”
He couldn’t believe this one. Since becoming a volunteer fireman, Terry had been milking the sex appeal that came with the job as much as he could, but this bombshell from New Jersey was as hot as they came.
The idea of joining the volunteer fire department had come up when Terry had discussed life options with a social worker three years before. He’d just been released after being held about five months for his part in the burial of Lester Freeden. The charges had eventually been dropped — something to do with all the beans he spilled in those long conversations with Officer Ainsley and his pals. At the detention center, Terry had learned CPR, the highest certification he’d ever received for anything. It was hardly enough to get a job as a doctor, but he wasn’t about to put it to waste. He remembered the night he got arrested; the firemen looked to be having way more fun than the cops. As it turned out, Terry had been more than a little underwhelmed by the level of appreciation he received for his part in that particular event, but it inspired him to serve society. The fringe benefits were pretty darn good, too.
The pager buzzed a second time and Terry punched it again with his foot. It stopped, but it slid a couple of feet across the floor of the cabin cruiser in which Terry was busily banging another man’s wife.
The other thing Terry had schooled in while at the detention center was a little line of thievery that had become quite lucrative since his release. His cellmate had described it to him as they lay in their bunks at night.
“Tourists.”
“What about ’em?” Terry had asked.
“Endless supply. They keep coming. They keep moving. They’ve got cash. They’re distracted. Fish in a barrel.”
“You mug tourists for a living?”
“Mug them? Too much work. I go through their suitcases ’n stuff, lighten their load.”
“You break into hotel rooms?”
“Too risky. Cameras in the hallways. Besides, anything of value is usually in the safe.” He leaned his head down from the top bunk, the vinyl-covered mattress squeaking as he did. “I do boats.”
“Boats?”
“Uh huh. People moor them along canals and stuff, get drunk, wander out for dinner in town. Lotsa time they party on each other’s yachts. It’s pretty easy to slip into most cuddies.”
“What do you get from boats?”
“Not much. Fancy electronics, fishing gear, booze. Every so often, I get lucky and hit some jewelry or a stash of cash. The trick is not to take too much. Just pick up a couple of things and most of the time, people won’t even notice they’re missing anything until they’ve moved upstream. Then, maybe they think it fell overboard or they can’t figure out which town they were in when it disappeared. Let’s face it. Who’s gonna spoil their vacation by turning around and boating back to file a police report.”
“Still, you got busted. You’re here.”
“Yeah, this is the third time I’ve been pinched. I gotta do about four months. Only drag is I’m missing the heavy season right now. I been running the scam up and down the Rideau Canal for near on five years. Maybe it’s time to look for different digs. I’m thinking maybe Europe, except I gotta be careful—some of those places make you do real time, even for stealing and stuff.”
Terry’s fundamental laziness being stubbornly hard to shake, he had borrowed the scheme upon release. The locks along the Trent-Severn meant a steady supply of summer tourist income. They also created a transient atmosphere that extended into most of the local towns, with the rental cottages, summer residents, and no shortage of seasonal trailer parks. It was a heyday for a single man with every intention of staying that way. As long as he wasn’t overly fussy about how unattached the women were, Terry could get laid on a regular basis, especially in the days following a forest fire, while the patina of being a fireman made him smell rather like a hero.
So it was that when Terry Miner’s pager buzzed even more loudly to announce the fire at Ernie McCann’s shack, the volunteer fireman was wrapped up in the sheets below deck on a thirty-three-foot Sea Ray. The Sea Ray, the sheets, the open bottle of champagne, and even the Stan Getz CD playing in the background all belonged to man named George Meade. At the precise moment the pager buzzed, however, Mr. Meade’s third wife, Cindy, belonged one hundred percent to Terry Miner—or at least that’s how it looked to him.
“What’s...that...noise,” Cindy managed to puff out. Terry didn’t stop.
“Fire,” he said.
“Huh? Uh...fire...oh, so...Terry!”
Without leaving the bed, Terry tried to reach the pager again, but he had kicked it too far. On the fourth buzz, it changed pitch and screeched loudly. That was enough for Cindy.
“Get—off—ME.” She shoved him hard and panted as he slid to the floor.
Terry rolled over and grabbed the pager, turning it off and swearing. The address on the pager was 2311 Century Lane, Lakehurst: less than two kilometers from the locks and a good deal further from the fire station. He figured he’d better go straight there.
“Shit. Gotta go. Someone’s on fire and I gotta snuff ’em out. Catch you tonight, okay?” He pulled on his jeans and, not finding his own T-shirt, grabbed one of George Meade’s from where it hung on a peg near the captain’s bed.
“Can’t, Sweetie. George’ll be back to the boat tonight. How about next Tuesday? He’s going fishing at his buddy’s cottage for a couple or three days.”
“Nearly a week without you?” Terry made puppy dog eyes.
Cindy pulled him back to bed. “I’m so lucky to have my very own fireman,” she cooed.
“Mmmmm, my li’l sex machine. See ya Tuesday.” Terry kissed George Meade’s third wife goodbye.
His car was parked at the side of the road at the top of the hill next to the locks. He strode up the hill with pride and purpose, doing his best to look heroic in an everyday sort of way. Then he jumped in his somewhat dented baby blue Ford Fiesta, cranked the FM stereo to max volume, and drove away in a shower of dust. He honked at everyone he passed, flashing stern looks and his volunteer fireman’s salute.
Buckhorn boasted a population of eighteen hundred in summer but that fell to just four hundred twenty during winter. When he first joined the volunteer fire brigade, Terry figured it would let him get to know some local folk a little better, give him a good reputation—especially with the ladies—and maybe earn him a free beer now and then at the Legion. Besides, how many fires could happen in a town of four hundred twenty people? Plenty, it turned out.
Winters in Buckhorn were cold and there wasn’t a whole lot to do except snowmobile. Cold and boredom are a lethal combination, he learned. People tended to stay inside and drink by the woodstove. The drunker they got, the more likely they were to shove just about anything burnable into their stoves rather than head outside to split logs. And if they did venture out into the minus thirty cold, they were prone to grab oversized logs and cram them in, with every intention of shoving them the rest of the way just as soon as they burned down to size.
When an alarm sounded in January, Terry and the rest of the crew could pretty much count on arriving at the scene to find a half-crazed yokel in long johns, running around in the snow shouting, “Damn thing just exploded, eh! Right in front of my eyes. Kaboom! Burning coals all over the floor. Darn good thing I was awake, eh?”
Spring and fall fires, on the other hand, were often false alarms—the result of neighbors ratting each other out for unannounced drum fires used to burn leaves and branches. City folk up for the weekend got especially twisted out of shape when decent people used a little fire to clean up their properties. Those calls were just plain irritating for Terry—busting up a perfectly good day—typically a Saturday or a Sunday—and hardly worth the effort of suiting up.
In summer, there were mostly two kinds of fires. The ones Terry preferred were the campfires out of control down by the locks. A big bonfire in a Hibachi meant someone was having one helluva party. Once the fire was brought in line, there was no rule
that said volunteer firemen couldn’t stay behind for a few brewskies. Terry had woken up more than one morning on the roof of a houseboat, bleary-eyed, head pounding from the hot morning sun, still wearing his regulation rubber boots.
The other kind of summer fires were the worst fires of all: forest fires. As a volunteer fireman, Terry would never get the glory jobs like trekking into the forest to cut a new fire line, never mind flying the water bomber. Instead, he spent days slogging along the edge of the fire, running errands for the real firemen who worked for the province, and missing whole weeks of hanging out by the locks ripping off tourists.
Fortunately, Terry had felt under the weather the couple of times he had been called to fight a forest fire. As a volunteer fireman, there was no sick pay to collect, but nothing’s perfect.
This particular fire could be for real, he figured. The barrel burns were mostly done for the season, and it was a waterfront address, so it was even less likely to be a forest fire. Pulling up to 2311 Century Lane, he was far from disappointed. Not only was this a real live cabin fire. To boot, a good-looking lady was spraying it down with a garden hose. Bonus.
At first Judy mistook the young man in the bright green “A Knotter Yot” T-shirt for the pizza delivery boy. The one who still owed her ten dollars for gas money borrowed three months earlier. When he swaggered over and asked, “Where’s the fire, ma’am?” she stared at him blankly. Wort had barked at his arrival and now he followed the man closely, barking non-stop.
“Hey, down boy. I’m a fireman,” Yot Boy said. He bent over and extended his hand to pat the dog’s head. Wort snapped. He pulled back and flashed Judy a smile full of teeth. “My name is Terry.”