Fire Season (32 page)

There was a flurry of shouts from the rear parking lot: a young, strident voice yelling, “Police! Get down!” and then, “Stand up, Duval!”

“Bangs!” Coffin said, running out to the parking lot, two steps behind Lola. “He got him!”

Bangs appeared from behind a rusty Dodge van, a young man in tow, head down, hands cuffed behind him. “Got your boy,” Bangs said, grinning. “He came running out the back door just after you went in. We had a little foot pursuit, but I nabbed him.”

The young man looked at Coffin, then at Lola. He was slender, fair-skinned. His black hair was long and straight. “That's not him,” Coffin said.

“Oh, shit,” Bangs said. “Seriously?”

Lola nodded. “Yep. Wrong guy.”

“Okay,” the young man said, shaking his head sadly. “Maybe you believe me now, ha?”

Coffin tilted his head. “You check his pockets?”

Bangs nodded. “No weapons, no drugs. Wallet, keys, iPhone.” He handed the young man's phone to Coffin.

“Let's get the cuffs off him,” Coffin said. “You got some ID, sir?”

Uncuffed, the young man took out his wallet, produced a driver's license. His name was Goran Milovanovic; he lived in Eastham.
Serbian,
Coffin thought.

“Why'd you run, Goran?” Coffin said.

“I don't want trouble,” he said. “I see cops, I get the fuck out.”

“Visa expired?” Coffin said.

Goran nodded.

“Where's Maurice?”

“He called, says he's sick. Asks if I can cover. I need the work—I say okay.”

“How's your day been so far, Goran?”

“I don't understand.”

“Would you say it's been a good day so far?” Coffin asked. “Or maybe not so great.”

“I'm in dirty parking lot with three cops. I tore my pants. Not so good.”

“I can make it a little worse,” Coffin said. “Or I can make it a little better. Which would you prefer?”

Goran shrugged. “Better would be nice.”

“You still have Maurice's number on your cell?”

Goran nodded. “Of course.”

Coffin handed him the phone. “Call him. Tell him the boss gave everybody a nice bonus and his check is sitting here waiting for him. Tell him yours was three hundred bucks, but you think his is more.”

“Okay, but he won't believe this.”

“What would he believe?”

“Boss is pissed he's not here—he comes in right now or he's fired.”

“Must be some boss,” Coffin said, handing Goran his iPhone. “If he shows, we never saw you. No ICE.”

“Terrible boss,” Goran said, “but the animals, I like. They are very sad.” He touched the iPhone's screen a few times, held the phone to his ear.

Coffin looked at Lola. They waited.

Goran's eyebrows went up. “Maurice,” he said. “It's Goran. Pete comes to store and he's not happy. He says you got to come in. Yeah, man, I know. I'm just telling you what he said—you got to come in or he's letting you go.” Goran paused, frowned, lowered the phone.

“Well?” Coffin said.

Goran pursed his lips, looked down at the rip in the knee of his jeans, nodded slowly. “He says Pete can go fuck himself. He says everybody can go fuck himself.”

Coffin held out his hand. “Let me try.”

Goran handed him the phone. Coffin touched
REDIAL
and waited. The phone rang once, then again. A voice said, “Hello?”

“Maurice,” Coffin said. “What's up?”

There was a long pause. “Who is this?” Maurice said, finally.

“This is Frank Coffin, with the Provincetown police. Listen, Maurice—we need to talk. It's important.”

There was another pause, then a burst of static.
Maurice must be in Provincetown,
Coffin thought.
The rest of the Cape has good reception.

“Coffin,” Maurice said, when the static had cleared. “Time's up.” And then he hung up.

“What'd he say, Frank?” Lola said.

“Time's up,” Coffin said, the hair on the back of his neck prickling. “Whatever that means. I think he's back in P'town—the reception was terrible.”

“Sounds like P'town,” Goran said. “Reception there always sucks.”

“That's 'cause the closest tower's in Truro,” Bangs said. “P'town won't let anybody build one.”

Coffin handed Goran his iPhone, and a business card. “Thanks for your help, Goran. Call us if you hear anything from Maurice. Sorry about your pants.”

“It's okay,” Goran said, looking at the card, then down at his jeans. “I never liked these pants.”

*   *   *

Maurice was wearing his mother's red wig, an old surf-green muumuu, Converse sneakers. He'd parked his friend's Nissan just down the street from Coffin's place. It was a shabby little house—shingles curling with age, slight sag in the roofline—hardly worth burning. But it was the right distance from town center, he thought, and the neighboring houses were easily close enough that they, too, would be at risk. The fact that Coffin was a cop would mean that every fireman and cop in town would be there, trying to help. And that, he knew, meant that his last fire—the big fire he'd been planning all along—would be off to a roaring start before anyone could respond.

He opened the glove box. His plastic squeeze bottle of Ronsonol lighter fluid was still there, of course, and his long grill lighter with the flexible neck. He'd decided to switch from gasoline to lighter fluid after nearly incinerating himself at the church fire. Somehow the gas he'd poured in the sanctuary had ignited while he was still inside: a spark, maybe, or a pilot light. The resulting fireball had literally blown him out the door, singeing his eyebrows, leaving him dazed for a few moments, flat on his back in the oyster-shell parking lot. He'd been lucky—picked himself up, dusted himself off, melted out of sight down a dark side street, circling back twenty minutes later to watch it burn.

The lighter fluid was better, easier to control. It was too bad, he thought, that he was almost done. He was starting to enjoy his work. He was starting to get good at it.

*   *   *

Coffin's phone burst into a shrill fusillade of “La Cucaracha.” He wrestled it from his jacket pocket, where it was stuffed along with his keys, a wad of Kleenex, and a plastic bottle of zinc soft chews. He looked at the screen: It read,
HOME
.

“Jamie?” Coffin said.

“Frank, where are you?”

“We're in the car. Heading back from Orleans. We had a close call with a Serbian dog groomer.”

There was a rush of white noise. “What?”

“Sorry. It's been a weird day.”

“It just got weirder, Frank. The nursing home called.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Your mom's had a stroke, Frank. About an hour ago, they said. I'm really sorry.”

“How bad is she?” Coffin said.

“She's conscious, but right now she can't talk, and can't move her left side.”

Coffin said nothing for a long moment. Lola glanced at him, glanced back at the road.

“Frank?” Jamie said. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Coffin said. “Yeah. I'm okay.”

“The nurse said you might want to come see her,” Jamie said. “You know. Soon.”

Coffin nodded. “Okay. We'll be there in a few minutes. I'll have Lola drop me off.”

“Bad news?” Lola said, when Coffin had stuffed his phone back into his pocket.

Coffin leaned back. The Crown Vic was just cresting the hill at High Head, the view opening up dramatically: the silver mirror of Pilgrim Lake on the right; North Truro, Provincetown Harbor, and the curve of waterfront on the left. “Yeah. My mother had a stroke. About an hour ago.”

“Oh, Frank,” Lola said. She reached over, put a hand on his shoulder. “How is she?”

Coffin shook his head. “Not good. The nurse said I'd better hurry and come in.”

Lola turned on the flashers and stepped on the gas. The Crown Vic surged forward, the g-force pressing Coffin back in his seat. The Days cottages whipped by, thin, blue slices of harbor flashing between them. He watched the speedometer rise: by the time they passed the first Provincetown exit at Snail Road they were doing 110. They reached the Conwell Street exit a few seconds later, and Lola whipped the Crown Vic around a dump truck, roared through the red light, passed two Tall Ships on bicycles, and took the left onto Conwell at just under 70. Four seconds later she took a hard, sliding right onto the crushed oyster-shell surface of Cemetery Road. There was a quick blur of gravestones, and by the time Coffin could take a breath and let it out they'd pulled up in front of Valley View, trailed by a rolling cloud of dust.

“Holy shit,” Coffin said, gripping the armrest, heart pounding. “Where'd you learn to drive like that?”

Lola shrugged. “The army,” she said. “It was part of the MP training.”

Coffin climbed out of the passenger seat. “Put the department on alert. I'm pretty sure Maurice is in town, and he sounded like a man with a plan. We want to talk to every short, stocky guy in Provincetown who's wearing a red wig.”

“Any other week, that'd only be three or four guys,” Lola said.

Coffin straightened, took a deep breath, let it out. “This is going to suck,” he said.

Lola leaned over, looked up at him through the open passenger door, blue eyes bright in the Crown Vic's dim interior. “We take care of the family, Frank,” she said.

Coffin nodded. “Yep,” he said. “That's what we do.”

*   *   *

Coffin's mother was gaunt and pale. The left side of her face was locked in a snarling grimace; the right side seemed composed, at rest. Her right eye tracked Coffin as he walked into the room and sat down by her bedside; the left eye stared straight ahead. Kimberly, the fat nurse, was making some notes on a chart. A portable heart monitor beeped from its tall stand. An IV bag hung from another stand, behind the head of the bed. The two prongs of a slim oxygen hose were fitted into Coffin's mother's nostrils. Her right eyebrow arched; her right eye stared at Coffin, glinting. She gripped a ballpoint pen in the claw of her right hand—a pad of Post-it notes lay on her lap.

“We're not taking heroic measures, per your mother's orders when she was admitted,” the nurse said. “We're giving her oxygen and saline, as you can see, and we may start her on IV blood thinners to try to prevent a recurrence once we've determined whether the stroke was the result of a clot or a hemorrhage. Otherwise we're just letting her rest, poor thing.”

“How is she?” Coffin said. “I heard about the paralysis.”

“Well, yes, the initial paralysis is quite severe. We don't know the full effects yet—she seems alert, and she's been writing us notes, as you can see.”

Coffin's mother had stuck a Post-it note onto the edge of a rolling tray at her bedside. The note was written in a spidery, barely legible hand. It said,
Fuck off.
Coffin's mother pointed at the note with her pen, then pointed at the nurse, then pointed back at the note, her good eye glinting ferociously.

“Maybe she wants you to leave,” Coffin said.

“Gee,” said the nurse. “You think?”

When the nurse was gone, Coffin patted his mother's good hand. “I came as fast as I could, Ma,” he said.

His mother nodded, picked up the pad of Post-its. She wrote slowly, laboriously. She peeled the Post-it from the pad and stuck it to Coffin's sleeve.
Kill me
, it said.

Coffin closed his eyes, opened them again. “Ma, you know I can't do that. This is awful, what's happened to you—but I can't kill you.”

His mother stared at him for a long, unblinking ten seconds, then scribbled another Post-it, writing more quickly this time. She peeled it off the pad, stuck it to his shirtfront.
Pussy,
it said.

*   *   *

On his way out, Coffin stopped by Branstool's office. It was empty—the furniture was gone, the carpet appeared to have been freshly shampooed. He passed the nurse's station on the way to the front door. He dug his phone out of his pocket, about to call Lola.

A beeping alarm sounded behind him, coming from his mother's hallway. Two aides appeared from the dining room and walked swiftly toward the noise. The nurse at the station turned and trotted after them. Coffin followed them down the hallway at a half-run. By the time he got to his mother's room, it was over. Her face looked frozen—head thrown back, mouth wide-open, eyes already starting to haze. The aides and nurses stood around her bed. One of the aides turned off the heart monitor, and the alarm stopped its shrieking. The ballpoint pen lay on the floor. Coffin felt a wave of dizziness; his peripheral vision narrowed. One of the nurses was holding his mother's hand.

 

Chapter 20

Coffin walked home through the graveyard, the last bright leaves drifting down around him, into the silver-green grass. He passed the Coffin family plot: his father's gravestone, his brother's, his grandfather's and great-grandfather's. His father had been lost at sea, his brother was MIA in Vietnam and was presumed dead. Now his mother was gone. They were all gone.

The sunset was putting on its usual light show, the sky streaked in lurid shades of magenta and gold. Ten feet away, a crow perched on an alabaster headstone. It stared at Coffin with a bright, malicious eye.

“Ma?” Coffin said. “That you?”

The crow tilted its head and made a low chuckling sound. Coffin could see its black tongue moving inside its beak. Then it hopped from the gravestone and flew over his head, wings beating, pushing its feathered weight into the wind.

“Happy trails, Ma,” Coffin said, watching the crow dwindle and disappear over the treetops. “Happy trails.”

*   *   *

Coffin paused outside his house. There was a new Toyota minivan parked at the curb. It was tomato red, and very shiny. Its grille curved upward in a cartoonish smile. Coffin sighed. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It's a
happy
minivan.”