Heaven's Fire (8 page)

"
I’m sorry, Pat." Simon hoped Sadie Firenze hadn't watched the close-up. That would be too much for anyone, but especially for a sixty-year-old woman who had devoted her life to the man on the screen.
"
I'm hoping, though, that some of the film can help us figure out what happened.
"

Pat lifted his head.
"
Any
theories
yet? I mean from what you have seen?
"

"
I think the lift charge failed for some reason.
"
What that reason was, Simon couldn't say yet. He hoped he would know more when the results came back from the few samples he was able to gather on the barge.

Tudy was nodding, seeming to buck up a bit.
"
That’s what I told you, Pat, you see? Your father, he went back, thinking he had to relight it.
"

"
That’s the way it looks,
"
Simon agreed, pulling out a notebook.
"
I need to know
about the shells. Can you give me the actual date the blue
one
was made?
"

Pat got up to pull
a
calendar off the bulletin board next to the coffee machine and bring it to the table.
"
Let’s see.
"

He was squinting at the calendar, trying to make out the scribbling.
"
Jesus, Dad’s handwriting is
getting..."
Pat didn’t glance up at his accidental use of the present tense, but Simon saw his face flush,
"...
was
getting bad. I think it says Channel 8 was here to tape on May 28. That would be it.
"

"
But the stars,
"
Tudy interjected,
"
we made the stars in March or April maybe.
"
He turned to Simon for the first time.
"
They have to be made when it’s cool. We make them in the spring and store them, then we just put everything together when the TV was here.
"

The stars were the color, the guts of the fireworks shell. Their size was determined by the diameter of the shell they were going into.
"
How big were the stars for the sixteen-inchers?
"
Simon asked.

Tudy closed one eye as he thought, looking like an Italian Popeye without the "musckles."
"
Oh, I think an inch, maybe? The stars were okay, though, we used them in the twelve-inchers, too.
"

"
Even the blue?
"

Pat leaned forward on his elbows.
"
No, you’re right. Not the blue. We saved the blue stars for that one shell.
"

Simon looked back and forth between them.
"
What was in them?
"

Pat answered with a casual shrug, but the irritation in his voice contradicted it.
"
Potassium chlorate. Dad didn’t think anything else
, anything new,
would do.
Color w
asn’t blue enough
for him
, or bright enough.
"

Simon
who'd
half-expected
Pat's
answer,
shook his head
.
"
B
ut potassium chlorate
? Jesus.
"

Pat just shrugged again.
"
You couldn’t tell the old man anything, Simon. He lived in the past.
"

That was the truth. On both counts. "Your dad made the blue stars?
"

"
Like I said last night, he didn’t trust anybody else with them from start to finish." The phone rang and Pat got up to answer it. "This better not be Mrs. Fetcher from the Waverly again, or I'll go over personally and take her dog out," he muttered.

"Between me and you, Simon," Tudy said, picking up the conversation where they'd left it, "I don’t think Pasquale wanted his kids messing around with the chlorate. Nasty stuff.
"

Tudy fixed his eyes on Simon's.
"
But it wouldn’t have caused the ex
plosion we saw
. You know that, and I know that.
"

Tudy was probably right, though when potassium chlorate was mixed with the other ingredients in a shell, it formed copper chlorate--an unstable chemical, especially when it got wet.

And Pasquale had taken it out on a barge on Lake Michigan.
H
umid
day,
to boot. Humidity could wreak all kinds of havoc with explosives.
"
Do you have any more of the blue stars around, Tudy?
"

Tudy pushed away from the table.
"
You want I should go get some for you?
"

Simon shook his head.
"
We'll put one in the day box before I leave and an Explosions Enforcement Officer will be out to pick it up." Simon had no intention of carrying a star around with him in the Explorer.

Bam.
Pat hung up the receiver hard, nearly knocking the smudged plastic base right off the wall. One of his guys walked by the door, looked in to see what the noise was, then kept right on walking. A wise decision.

"
Great,
"
Pat said, "now we’ve got OSHA
in our hair
, too.
"

"
You got to expect that, boy,
"
Tudy said, standing up.

OSHA--the Occupational Safety and Health Administration--was the federal entity responsible for worker safety and would be doing a full investigation.

Pat turned on Tudy.
"
I know, dammit, but we’ve finally recovered fr
om the accident with Uncle Frankie
and now it’s going to start all over again. The bastards are already going after our shows.
"

Since everyone else was standing, Simon got up, too.
"
Which bastards?
"

"
Which? Our competitors. Gustafsen for one. He's
been on the phone to
our customers
this morning, already, full of
sympathy
, offering his help in case--quote--
'
Firenze can't
fulfill
y
our contract
under the sad circumstances
.' Unquote.
"

Pat picked up the calendar on the table and shook it at them.
"
My father’s not even cold. Hell, Ray’s body hasn’t even been found and these bastards are already picking over their bones.
"

Tudy flinched at the word
"
body.
"

"
Let’s
all
go for a walk." Simon said quietly.

*****

"Been swimming, huh?"

Jake looked up as Luis flopped down in the chair next to her. She'd arrived at the station shortly after eight a.m. to dupe the tapes Aamot wanted, and try to do some research for Martha. "Try" being the operative word. She'd already had five telephone calls--two from Martha, one from Neal, one from Cara, the morning producer, and one heavy breather--all nearly three hours before she was scheduled to begin work at eleven.

Her own fault, of course. She regularly came in early and left late, meaning everyone at the station was used to her being
in the production suite and
at their beck and call at all hours. She'd have to retrain them when she had time.

But first, Luis. "How
do
you know I was swimming?" she asked, feeling her
hair to see if it was still damp
.

"Easy--you swim every day. But besides that," Luis reached out and touched her on the cheekbone below the right eye. "Goggle eyes. Big time."

Jake backed away and felt the indentations around her eyes for herself. She'd been experimenting with different brands of swim goggles for nearly two years now and all of them left rings that lasted varying lengths of time after her swim.

"Apparently the Gecko Goggles are no better than the SuperSwimmers," she muttered.

Luis laughed. "Aww, I don't know. I think
these
rings are particularly cute on you." He leaned back casually in the chair, hands clasped behind his head. "I used to dive back in high school--was really good at it, if I do say so myself. You dive, Jake?"

My, my, weren't
we
dripping in charm and self-confidence all of a sudden. "Only feet first," she said dryly. "Okay, spill it, Luis. "Why so chipper?" she asked.

"I was on-air with Neal this morning, and I just got a call from CNN wanting to use my footage of the explosion."

"You'll have to get Gwen's permission," Jake
cautioned
. "I'm not sure what the network will say about an affiliate sharing tape with another network."

"Right, I know." Luis leaned forward in his chair, his head nodding up and down like a bobble-head doll. "But this is so cool, Jake. Suddenly it's like I'm a star or something."

A shooting star, Jake thought. But let the kid enjoy his five minutes of fame, even if it did come at the cost of at least one and probably two lives.

"
Once
Gwen says okay," Luis continued, "I'm going to need the close-up I shot of the old man. They used the fire in the box thing this morning, but Neal said Cara couldn't find the stuff I shot of Firenze getting blown up."

Hence Neal's call this morning. And Cara's. Jake apparently was alone in thinking the tape of Pasquale at the mortar was too graphic to be shown on the air. Everyone
may have
looking for it, but Jake had stashed the m
aster in a file drawer
under "F" where she could find it, but nobody else could.

"Cara must have just missed it on the dupe," she lied
, thinking about her chances of persuading Gwen that the footage shouldn't be used. Or shared. Probably slim to none, given the ratcheted-up level of television violence these days.
"I'll
find
it."

And she
would
. What she did with the thing, though, she couldn't promise
.

"It's really important, Jake." Luis was bouncing his right leg up and down now. "That tape could make my career."

Jake put her hand on Luis's knee to stop the bouncing before it sprang up spasmodically and blackened his eye. "Relax Luis,
I
--"

Just then the phone rang and she picked it up,
grateful for the interruption
. The relief lasted until she heard Martha
Malone
's voice on the other end. "Jake, I need that info on the earlier Firenze explosion now. Now!"

Yikes. The whole place
should be
on Ritalin. "Yes, Martha," she said
,
as she turned to her computer.
"I have it in front of me."

Jake scanned the computer screen. "This is interesting. This Simon Aamot guy was the investigator on that accident, too."

As she spoke she saw Luis sneak out the door, on tiptoe, like Martha was going to climb right through the handset. Some days Jake wouldn't put it past her.

With Luis safely gone, Jake pulled a videotape out of a file drawer and pushed it into a slot on the console. "That's Aamot, pronounced..."

*****

Simon, Pat and Tudy walked out to the
process building
in silence.
O
ne of three
spokes radiating
out from the barn
, the building
was
really
a metal shell with a concrete floor. No chemicals were kept
there
, and the place had to be completely cleaned out after each use. If heat was needed in the winter, it was steam or hot water--nothing with an automatic pilot light to spark an explosion.

Inside, the space looked like any workshop, and smelled of fresh wood, paper and glue. Long wooden tables ran down the center of the room and a sink occupied one corner. In another
corner near the door, stood a set of what looked like window screens.

"
You mix in here?
"
Simon asked. Mixing was sifting the dry chemicals of the stars together. Pasquale had called the formulas he used for his stars
"
recipes,
"
and the process did resemble baking in a way.