Slow Burn (34 page)

1 grabbed Dixie by the belt and pulled her along with me. Everyone was moving south at top speed,
running like game before a brushfire.

They needn't
have worried. The fire never got that far. Both helicopters roared at full
throttle now, moving straight up into the sky, nose to nose, their pinwheel
rotors no more than thirty feet apart as they rose above the buildings.

Below the
deafening din of the choppers, Jack's ton of genuine "don't weigh a
thing'' lava rock had been ripped airborne by the violent updraft of heat waves
and rotor blades, forming a rapidly rising funnel cone of superheated material
swirling around the air like locusts, rising higher, reaching to keep up with
the machines, mushrooming far out over its central core. The air around me was
suddenly hot and filled with debris; something hit me above the right eye with
a sharp, searing pain and then again in the ear.

I grabbed a
tablecloth from a linen cart, threw it over Dixie's head and tumbled us both to
the ground, where we lay shivering like penitents, bowed beneath a withering
hail of small, hot rocks.

Somewhere in
the great beyond, Cotton Mather was grinning. This might not be the exact
equivalent of the Old Testament fire and brimstone, but it was close enough for
government work.

"Jumpin'
Jesus!" I heard Dixie yell.

It ended as
suddenly as it had begun. Robbed of the pull of the rotors, the rubble reached
the apex of its flight, lost momentum and then rained quickly back to earth.
And to think, the fun was only beginning.

Jack had been
right. Nothing held a heat charge like lava rock. If those little suckers were
any cooler coming down than they were going up, you could have fooled those of
us who were in attendance that day.

Acrid
smoke
began to fill the pocket beneath the tablecloth. I jumped to my feet,
hauling Dixie up with me as I went. The act of standing up slid one of
the little boogers down
between my ankle and my shoe. I screamed and tore at my foot. I wanted
desperately to tell Dixie that her hair was on fire, but the agony of
my ankle
rendered me speechless. I hopped about on one foot, adding my agonized
roar to
the deafening collage of screams, curses and shouts that filled the
air. The
ground around me was littered with smoldering tidbits. Sitting down
would
involve weeks in intensive care.

I was screaming
through my teeth before I got the shoe off and shook the little red marble to
the ground. Dixie stood with her hands to her mouth, watching me without
comprehension, small blue flames rising from the top of her head.

"Jesus, Dixie, your hair's on fire!" I shouted, looking wildly around for something with
water. Dixie knew better. She reached up with her hand, grabbed the blond mane
and threw it to the ground, where it flared into a fair-sized blaze. For
reasons I'll never understand, Dixie and I stood side by side and stomped at
that tawny pelt of flaming follicles as if the future of the race depended on
putting the sucker out. Shock, I guess.

"That was
my best hair," she said as we stood back and admired our melted,
smoldering handiwork.

Behold, the Nagasaki cat.

I can only
speak to what was going on inside the fence. Over the next two weeks, everyone
in America probably saw more of the carnage out in the street than I did. Weeks
of feature stories milked every drop of coverage from that ten minutes of utter
chaos. If I never see that shot of Clarissa Hedgpeth trying to extinguish her faux-fur
jacket again, it will be too soon. Or the one of the horse cop jumping his
mount over a cowering line of wide-eyed demonstrators. Or the countless shots
of what the newspeople came to call the

"hotfoot
hoedown." Hell, that one made a fortune for a couple of wily entrepreneurs
who later spliced together the best shots. They showed shocked people standing
openmouthed in the street, relieved to be alive, the camera catching them just
as one of the atomic embers ate through their shoe and into their foot, then
adding dance music appropriate to whatever frenzied jig the poor soul danced.
For a while there, the direct-mail TV ad for the Hotfoot Hoedown video was on
damn near as often as Dorf Goes Fishing.

Inside the
fence, things were just as bad. Three tents were fully engulfed by flames. Jack
and Candace emerged from beneath the mayor's table, their faces smudged and
wondering. Hard Hat peeked out once, but stayed put. Hard to blame him.

Two figures
were running our way. Bart Yonquist, Dixie's purse still swaying on his arm,
skidded to a stop in front of us.

"Get Dixie out of here," I said.

Bart took her
by the elbow and trotted her off into the smoke.

To my left,
Rickey Ray had vaulted the scorched earth and was barreling toward Jack and
Candace. Jack opened his mouth as if to ask Rickey Ray just where in hell he'd
been when the shit hit the fan, but Rickey Ray wasn't listening. He scooped
Candace Atherton into his gnarly arms - and hotfooted it back from whence he
had come, traveling, if anything, faster than he had on the way in. Even though
Bart and Dixie had a ten-yard head start, they finished a fading second through
the side door of the restaurant.

Jack stood
dumbfounded for a moment and then wobbled out into the middle of the yard,
turning in circles, as if his mind refused to absorb the extent of the
devastation. Smoke was beginning to rise from beneath his right foot. I was
debating whether to tell him or not when the smell of burning grass pulled my
head around.

The rustic hay
bales spread about and on the cattle truck were fully engulfed in flame,
burning from the inside out as if embers had been driven directly into their
centers. Directly through the fence, the front most pile spat and cracked as it
gained internal momentum. Above the shimmering heat waves and the smoke, the big
rig's chrome gas cap was still visible.

I sprinted for
the far end of the lot and the gate to the alley. The 4-H contingent was no
more than forty yards removed from the front bumper of the truck. If a couple
of hundred gallons of diesel fuel went off in their faces, there wasn't going
to be much left.

Grabbing a
metal post to slow my momentum, I whipped myself around the corner and
staggered headlong down the alley. Whoever had set out the hay had hung his
baling hook from the rearview mirror. I snagged it on the way past, walked all
the way beyond the pyre, putting my back to the street, and drove the hook into
the side of the uppermost burning bundle. In a single motion I lifted the bale,
got my shoulder behind the handle and followed all the way through, sailing the
bale out over the barricade into the street.

By the time I
repeated the process six more times, the hairs on the back of my hook hand were
gone, my right ear was burned shiny and I had a small fire smoldering in the
collar of my shirt. A symphony of sirens now rose above the human roar and the
snapping of flames. The air smelled like roasting vegetarians.

Jack sat
astride the linen cart, his shoe in his hand. Across the yard, several fire
extinguishers were belching out white clouds of flame retardant. Those tents
that had not already been completely consumed were no longer showing flames.
The sirens grew closer. I leaned back against the truck and took a deep breath.
And the truck moved. Not a little, a lot. As if shaken on its springs by some
giant hand. And again the big rig shook, rocking from side to side on its
springs. And then the sound of rushing air, and it rocked from front to back.

The street was
filled with flashing lights and hoarse cries.

I walked to the
rear of the trailer, grabbed the handles on the ramp with both hands and backed
up until the ramp dropped into its notches.

I dropped the
ramp and went up the incline to the door, pulled the handle over and up and,
using both hands, roiled the door up and open.

The big fella
still had the chalk marks on his beautiful black hide. He didn't like the smoke
or the sirens one bit. His nostrils were flaring and his big brown eyes rolled
in his head. I grabbed the dangling end of the lead and said, "Bunky, my
man, I think we best be getting you the hell out of here." I don't care
what anybody says, he knew what I meant.

He must have, because
he followed me down the ramp and out into the alley like a house-trained dog.
His big black hooves clopped on the cement as we walked up the alley together.
When we came abreast of Jack, I pointed to the bull in wonder.

"Bunky,"
I said.

"Damn
right," said the Jackster, massaging his foot. "Paid over three
hundred grand for that bag of guts; you didn't really think I was gonna eat
him, did ya? Keniiist. The Jack-alope ain't crazy, ya know."

I decided not
to tell him his wallet was smoking.

I heard a joke
once; the premise was that Heaven was getting so overcrowded that only those
people whose last day on earth had also been the worst day of their entire
lives could be admitted. On the first day of the new policy, Saint Peter spent
the morning rejecting every applicant and then broke for a noon bite.

When he
returned from lunch, three guys were in line. The first fellow stepped up.
Saint Peter says, "Okay, what's your story?"

The guy says,
"I was sure my wife was having an affair, so I.snuck home early from work
one day. There she was, in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, looking
guilty. I searched the apartment like a madman, high and low, but he wasn't
there. Then, just out of luck, I looked out the window, and there he was,
hanging from my downstairs neighbor's fire escape. I ran in, got my ball peen
hammer, climbed down and beat his fingers. He fell, but some shrubbery broke
his fall, and he wasn't dead. I was still so crazy I ran back up, grabbed the
refrigerator and threw it down on him. It killed him, but carrying a
refrigerator was too much for my heart, and I dropped dead/'

Saint Peter is
moved. "that’s really terrible," he says. "Go on. You can go
in." The next guy stepped up. "Let’s hear it," says Saint Peter.

"You won't
believe this," the guy says. "I'm on my fire escape working out one
afternoon. I'm doing some chin-ups to build upper-body strength when all of a
sudden my upstairs neighbor comes running down the stairs with a hammer. He
starts pounding on my fingers. I fall, but get lucky and land on some bushes.
I'm just lying there, thanking the Lord I'm not dead, when next thing I know, I
look up and there's a refrigerator coming at me. It broke my neck." '
Saint Peter is again moved and the man is admitted to Heaven.

When the third
guy stepped up, Saint Peter says, "Whatever you've got to tell me better
be real good." The guy leans in close.

"Okay,
Peter," he says. "Picture this. I'm hiding naked in a refrigerator. .
. ."

The search
warrant was the refrigerator of my day. I limped up the ninth-floor corridor
toward my room with the hole in my sock exposing a seeping burn the size of a
quarter, an ear which had already begun to blister and a fifty-dollar Ralph Lauren
pullover with half the collar - burned off. I'd been subjected to fire and
brimstone, and was in all likelihood going to appear prominently in tomorrow's
morning editions, leading a bull down Marion Street on a leash. It was a sight
which I personally find somewhat lacking in the kind of hard-bitten image I
generally prefer to cultivate. My hopes to save a modicum of media attention
for my client had been an abject failure. After this afternoon's rain of fire,
Le Cuisine Internationale would be lucky to make the travel section. I'd been
prodded, deposed, medically inspected, had my grievous injuries declared minor,
been unable to extricate my car from the worst traffic jam in Seattle history
and thusly forced to walk back to the hotel, where I find, taped to my door, a
search warrant authorizing the SPD to pillage my hotel room. Not only that, but
they'd left the place a mess. Is that a Kelvinator I see coming down? Frost
Free? Automatic ice maker?

The red numbers
on the digital clock said it was three twenty-three in the afternoon. I could
have sworn it was later; I felt like I'd been on a three-day binge. I pushed
the door toward closed, walked across the room and sat down on the foot of the
bed. I braced my hands behind me on the bed and leaned back into a stretch; I
yawned and rolled my neck. A cramp began to tense one of the muscles in my
lower back, so I lay all the way down on the bed and put my hands behind my
head. I yawned again.

I was hanging
from that fire escape, moving from hand to hand as my upstairs neighbor beat my
fingers to jelly. Bang, bang, bang . . .

The clock read
five-fifty, I was in a strange room and somebody was beating on the door. It
seems simple enough now, but it took me a full minute to put it together. As
the door swung open, I remembered I hadn't closed it all the way. I rose. It
was Rowcliffe.

"I hope
I've not disturbed you, sir," he said.

"No,
no," I said. "Come in."

He stood with
one foot in the room and the other in the hall.

"What’s
the matter?" I asked.

"Ifs Sir
Geoffrey."