Fire Season (10 page)

“No thanks,” Coffin said. “Weed makes me paranoid.”

“Just 'cause you're paranoid,” Rudy said, “doesn't mean they ain't out to get you.”

“There's another thing,” Coffin said.

“How's your girlfriend?” Rudy said. “Something sexy about 'em when they're knocked up—they get so
female
, you can almost smell the estrogen. You're not sticking around here, are you, once the baby's born?”

“Of course I'm sticking around,” Coffin said. “Where would I go?”

“You could go anywhere.” Rudy waved the joint, then puffed at it to keep it lit. “Sell the house, take the money and run. Even with the market down the place is still worth a few hundred grand. This is no place to raise a kid, Frankie. Trust me—I know.”

“Tell me about 376 Bradford Street, Rudy.”

Rudy shrugged. “I owned it. Some fucknut burned it down. What do you want me to say? I didn't do it?”

“Sure. Humor me.”

“Look, Frankie,” Rudy said, black eyes gazing up at Coffin from the Town Car's dark leather interior. “I'm a businessman. And the first rule of business is, shit happens. Second rule is, when shit happens, money always changes hands. Know what the third rule is?”

“Rudy—”

“The third rule of business, Frankie, is that when money changes hands, make damn sure you get your share.” Rudy pinched out what was left of the joint between his thumb and forefinger and flicked it out the window. “You know the weirdest thing about pregnant chicks?”

“Rudy, for Christ's sake—”

“Their asses get square. One day their asses are nice and round like always, next day”—Rudy snapped his fingers—“square. It's one of the great mysteries.”

“Oh my God.”

“Nice meeting you,” Loverboy said. He levered himself back into the purring Town Car, shifted into reverse and let it roll in a slow, backward arc onto Shank Painter Road.

“Don't let your meat loaf, Frankie,” Rudy called, the window gliding silently shut, the big car surging forward and disappearing around the bend, going much too fast.

*   *   *

Jamie was fresh from the shower, a big white towel still wrapped around her head. Coffin stood behind her, kissing her neck, both hands on her belly's taut bulge.

“You know the weirdest thing about being pregnant?” Jamie said, standing naked in the bedroom.

She was gorgeous, Coffin thought. He cupped her breasts: They were heavy and full, the nipples big, suddenly brown.

“Tell me,” Coffin said.

“I haven't seen my pubic hair in three weeks—and I guess I won't see it again 'til after the baby's born. Freaky, right?”

The whole day had been full of these odd echoes, Coffin thought—now a little replay of his encounter with Gemma, but without the complicated agenda. He brushed Jamie's dark pubic ruff with his fingertips. It had grown luxuriant in the last month or so, longer and thicker, spreading nearly from hip bone to hip bone. “Still there,” Coffin said, “and then some.”

“I kind of gave up on the hedge-trimming,” Jamie said squirming her hips a little against his hand. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

Coffin rolled her clitoris gently under the tip of his middle finger. “Works for me,” he said. “Variety is good.”

Jamie sighed, squirmed her backside against him. “What you're doing right there?
That's
good,” she said.

Coffin changed directions.

“That, too,” Jamie said, taking a sharp little breath.

“See?” Coffin said. “Variety.”

*   *   *

“Well,” Coffin said later. “No Frank aversion this time.”

“That's the good news,” Jamie said.

“There's bad news?”

Jamie yawned. She was lying on her side, covers pulled up to her chin, Coffin spooning behind her. “You know that nesting thing women are supposed to do when they're pregnant?”

“Yeah?”

“I think it's kicking in.”

“Uh-oh.”

“How are you with paint?”

“Choosing or applying?”

“I choose. You apply.”

“It's not my best thing, but I'll get the hang of it.” Coffin yawned, tried not to doze off.

“Frank?”

“Hmm?”

“I know this is your mom's place and everything.”

“But.”

“But how would you feel about, you know, making some changes?”

“Great.”

“I mean, it's kind of
dark
in here, all this mahogany and oak—and all these chairs are crazy uncomfortable. I'm thinking sell some of the antiques. Get some new furniture that human beings can actually sit on.”

The stuffed owl on top of the wardrobe stared down at them, ear tufts awry, something like outrage in its yellow glass eyes.

“Can we get rid of the taxidermy, too?” Coffin said.

“Everything but the goat.”

“Did you not tell me two weeks ago you got the feeling the goat was looking at your ass?”

“
You
told
me
that your dead father was haunting that thing. I'm not selling your father's ghost on eBay.”

“Can I ask a practical question?”

“How are we going to pay for all this great new stuff?”

“Bingo,” Coffin said.

“Did I ever tell you about my trust fund?”

“You said it was small—no big deal.”

“It was. Ten years ago.”

“And now?”

“Well, my grandfather wasn't really a good investor. He just bought stock in companies that made cool stuff. And he thought Apple was kind of cool.”

“Holy crap.”

“So he bought a couple thousand shares of Apple for, like, twenty dollars a share.”

“Can we get a car? I hate my car. Nothing fancy—just a nice Lexus, like Mancini's, but bigger.”

“Frank. The money's for the baby.”

“Babies need cars.”

“I was thinking minivan.”

“Oh my God,” Coffin said. “I'm going to be a guy who drives a minivan.”

*   *   *

It was late, almost 2:30
A.M.
, and Officer Pete Pinsky was lonely, cold, and bored. He sat in his squad car at the corner of Standish and Commercial streets, trying to keep warm. He'd thrown on a lightweight uniform jacket as he was leaving Town Hall—it had been warmer then—but the temperature had dropped in the last hour or so, and the wet fog had rolled in. Worse, the squad car's heater wasn't working again, and
that
wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't for the no-smoking rule, which, Pinsky knew, actually meant “no smoking unless you roll the window down.” Late, dark, lonely, too cold for October, no traffic, nobody walking or riding a bike—just the fog blowing around like wet laundry on a clothesline. Pinsky took a drag from his cigarette and tried to keep his teeth from chattering. What he wanted to do was start the car and drive home to his fiancée, LaWonda, who would cook him up a shrimp étouffée, give him one of her patented massages, and then love him long and strong until he begged her to let him sleep.

Love, he thought, was the biggest mystery of all. He'd grown up the one half-Jewish kid in his school in Pomeroy, Ohio—never even knew any black people, straight as an arrow, always had the hots for the cute, blond cheerleader types who never gave him the time of day. And now he was engaged to a drop-dead gorgeous, black, six foot four inch, preoperative transsexual who was hung like a mule and cooked like a Creole angel. Only love could do that to a man, Pinsky thought. Only love. His tenth high school reunion was coming up—he couldn't wait to take LaWonda back to Meigs High School in Pomeroy and show her off.

There was no sound except the slight crackle of static from his police radio, the slop of the harbor waves on the town beach—somewhere a faint clinking sound, rhythmic, the wind talking in one of its thousand voices. Then someone rapped on the passenger window, and Officer Pinsky nearly crapped his drawers.

“Hey, cop,” a man said. It was Ticky, one of the local homeless men. He was a brain-rotted alcoholic, a gluehead, skinny, scruffy, and stinky. His face always looked to Pinsky like it had been stuck on to someone else's head and didn't fit right—it twitched and rippled uncontrollably, with no connection to whatever it was that Ticky might be saying or thinking.

“Jesus, Ticky,” Pinsky said. “Try not to sneak up on a man like that.”

Ticky laughed a high, warbling laugh. “Did I scare ya, cop? Ha?” He held up two fingers—the universal gesture. “Hey, you ain't got a spare smoke by any chance?”

“You're starting to annoy me, Ticky,” Pinsky said. “Go pass out somewhere, why don't you.”

Ticky put his face close to the half-open window. “I'm just messin' with ya, cop,” he said. “But listen—somebody left the door to the Fish Palace open a couple inches. Thought I'd better tell somebody, else I'd prob'ly get blamed for it.”

“I'm moved,” Pinsky said, “by your dedication to public safety.”

“Gotta take a piss,” Ticky said. He staggered off into the fog, heading for town beach.

“Try not to freeze to death,” Pinsky called after him.

He climbed out of the car, straightened his hat, took his baton from the rack inside the squad and slipped it into its holster. “'Cause I'm the guy has to frickin' clean it up if you do,” he said to himself.

*   *   *

The Fish Palace's glass front door was, indeed, open a couple of inches as Ticky had said. Pinsky ran a finger over the door frame; it was bent outward under the latch—somebody'd sprung it with a pry bar. Despite the ADT sticker in the front window, no alarm had sounded.

It was very dark inside; a dim wash of ambient streetlight filtered in through the big rear windows, and Pinsky could just make out the silhouettes of a few chairs that had been turned upside down and placed on top of the tables.
So's they can vacuum
, Pinsky thought. The shadows were very deep, and the long, windowless kitchen, which stretched to his left between the front door and the dining room, was pitch-black. The hair on the back of his neck prickled. He crouched down, listening. There was almost no sound—just the burbling of the water filters in the big lobster tank, a few feet ahead and to his left.

Pinsky slid his big Maglite out of its loop. “Police!” he said, with as much authority as he could muster. “Anybody in here?” There was no reply, no sound except for the lobster tank's faint gurgle, no movement anywhere in the dark restaurant. He clicked the Maglite on, panning its beam in a slow arc across the dining room. The Maglite flickered, dimmed, died.

“Oh, shit,” Pinsky said. “Not
now,
for Christ's sake.” It was one of those moments, he thought, where you feel like you've got an extra sense, like a shark: sharks could “see” electromagnetic fields, he knew, he'd seen it on the Discovery Channel. The magnetic field in the Fish Palace was seriously screwed up—the pried-open door, the dying Maglite—and just now the feeling that somebody was definitely
looking
at him. He stood, felt for a light switch, but couldn't find one.

“Fuck, man,” he said. He gave the Maglite a shake and the beam came back, weak and intermittent. He keyed his shoulder radio. “Marge?” he said, half whispering.

The dispatcher's voice crackled into his earpiece. “Pinsky? That you?”

“Yeah, listen—I'm down at the Fish Palace. Somebody pried the door open and I'm inside. I don't think there's anybody in here, but the lights ain't working and the whole deal just don't feel right. Send over a backup unit, would you?”

“That's a ten-four. Sergeant Winters is on. She's checking an alarm call up at the Heights. I'll have her run right over.”

Pinsky took a deep breath. It was in the kitchen, he thought. Whatever it was that was watching him. The big open kitchen that customers passed on their way to the dining room; the kitchen with its big commercial ranges and refrigerators, everything in stainless steel, oversized copper-bottomed pots and pans hanging from metal racks overhead. The workspace was separated from customer traffic by a wide counter, where the cooks plunked down the finished orders—steamed lobster, watery corn, microwaved potato—hefted on big trays by the waitstaff and delivered to tourists wearing plastic bibs. Pinsky stood on his tiptoes, trained the Maglite behind the counter as well as he could, aiming it down toward floor level—nobody back there, he was pretty sure. The Maglite dimmed to almost nothing, came back.

“Come on, baby,” Pinsky said. “Don't die on me now—you've got a fucking lifetime guarantee!”

Nobody back there,
he thought, but still, he could feel it
—somebody's looking at me.
The lobster tank burbled. The lobsters. Pinsky laughed. “The fucking
lobsters
,” he said, training his flickering light on the tank.

It was a big tank, maybe four feet long by three feet wide and two feet deep, standing behind and slightly above the counter, about halfway between the front door and the dining room. It was full of murky water; the filtering system bubbled fervently.

Dozens of lobsters strode around in its depths, climbing over one another or staring with bright bead-eyes out at the red-haired police officer with his flashlight. They varied in size from little pound and a quarter chix to a few venerable giants of five pounds or more. They seemed excited: waving their antennae, bonking each other with their banded claws. Three or four swarmed slowly over a melon-sized object that rested on the tank's slimy bottom. In the split second before Pinsky dropped his sputtering Maglite, killing it once and for all, he realized that the thing in the lobster tank was a human head. It wore glasses. Its expression, he would remember even years later as he told the story yet again to his fellow officers, seemed remarkably bland.