The Fireman (26 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

Book Four
Marlboro Man

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

1

From the diary of Harold Cross:

June 18th:

THE GIRLS IN THIS CAMP ARE A PACK OF LESBIAN BITCHES AND IF THEY ALL BURNED TOMORROW I WOULDN’T GIVE A SMOKY FART.

THE WORD FROM SF IS THEY’VE GOT 2500 PEOPLE ALIVE IN THE PRESIDIO WHO HAVE THE ’SCALE AND NONE OF THEM ARE BURNING. FUCK THIS BULLSHIT. I’M GOING TO MAKE AN ANNOUNCEMENT IN CHURCH TOMORROW. SOMEONE NEEDS TO TELL THESE IGNORAMUSES YOU DON’T HAVE TO WORSHIP IN THE HOLY CHURCH OF CAROL STOREY’S SACRED PUSSY HAIRS TO LIVE. ANY RELEASE OF OXYTOCIN WILL TELL THE ’SCALE IT’S FOUND A SAFE HOST.

IF I HEAR ONE MORE ROUND OF “SPIRIT IN THE SKY” OR “HOLLY HOLY” I’M GONNA PUKE. WE COULD SHUT DOWN THE SPORE JUST AS EASY WITH ONE BIG CIRCLE JERK. A GIANT COMMUNAL CIRCLE JERK, AND CAROL’S PRETTY LITTLE HAND RIGHT ON THE ROD. HER DADDY CAN FRIG HER WHILE SHE FRIGS ME, THAT’S WHAT SHE REALLY WANTS ANYWAY.

I HAVEN’T WRITTEN A NEW POEM IN DAYS. I HATE THIS PLACE.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

2

Harper read just the one page in Harold’s notebook, picked at random, then flipped through some others. She glimpsed doodles of boobs and bush, saw some words in dark block lettering: sluts whores bitches cunts. Harper had never met him, but felt she understood Harold Cross pretty well. She thought a collection of Mr. Cross’s poetry would probably go nicely alongside a copy of
Desolation’s Plough
.

She turned back to the entry from June 18th and let her gaze linger on that one sentence:
ANY RELEASE OF OXYTOCIN WILL TELL THE ’SCALE IT’S FOUND A SAFE HOST.
She folded the notebook shut, slapped it against her thigh, and put it in one of the drawers . . . then, after a moment, took it out again.

The drop ceiling was made of big white squares of particleboard. She had to stand on a chair to reach them. Harper lifted one ceiling tile and pushed the notebook up and out of sight. Not as good as hiding it inside an anatomical model of the human head, but it would do for now.

She could not have said who she was hiding it from. Perhaps it was only that Harold had been hiding it himself, which meant he thought there was someone who would take it away if he or she had a chance.

As she was pushing the chair back where she found it, she noticed blood on her knuckles, staining the fingers of her right hand. Tom Storey’s blood. She washed it off in icy water, watched pink swirls chase one another down the drain in candy-cane stripes.

Father Storey slept on his back, the top of his head bandaged in a cap of clean white gauze. The dusty windows above let in milky rays of sunshine. Like Father Storey himself, the daylight seemed tired out, hardly there. But the sheet was tucked under his chin, not pulled over his face. He had lasted the night. That was no small triumph.

Harper was woozy with exhaustion, but the baby wasn’t going to let her sleep. The baby was hungry. What the baby wanted was a deep, warm, buttery bowl of Cream of Wheat, drowned in maple syrup. Food first, sleep after.

As she walked over the snow along a path of wobbling pine boards, through knee-high mist, she tried to remember what she knew about oxytocin. It had a nickname, “the cuddle hormone,” because it was released when a mother held her baby—released in mother and child alike. Harper thought about crawling through that smoke-filled drainpipe and singing to the infant she hadn’t seen yet and how it had shut down the ’scale.

Your brain gave you a fix of oxytocin when you hugged, when you received a round of applause, when you sang in harmony with someone and the singing was good. Strong communal experiences produced it like nothing else. You could get a dose from a good experience on Twitter or Facebook, too. When lots of people retweeted something you said or commented on a photo, they were throwing the switch for another squirt of oxytocin. Why not call it the social networking hormone, then? That was better than “cuddle hormone,” because—because—

She couldn’t remember. There was something else about oxytocin, something important, but it had been too long since she had done the reading. For some reason, though, when she shut her eyes, she was picturing soldiers in desert fatigues and jackboots, cradling M16s. Why that? Why did oxytocin also make her think of crosses burning in the Mississippi night?

The cafeteria was padlocked from the outside and there was plywood nailed up in the windows. The place looked shut for the winter. But Harper had helped out enough in the kitchen to know where the key was hidden, hanging on a nail under the steps.

She let herself into the spacious dusty dimness. The chairs and benches were all turned upside down on tables. The kitchen was gloomy, everything put away.

Harper found a tray of biscuits in the oven, covered with Saran Wrap. She took a tub of peanut butter from one of the cupboards, and was crossing the room to fetch a butter knife, when she almost stepped through an open trapdoor into the cellar. A slanted wooden ladder led down into a darkness that smelled of earth and rodents.

She was frowning at the open hole when she heard a curse from below, followed by a soft thud, as if someone had dropped a flour sack. A man groaned. Harper stuck half a biscuit in her mouth and started down.

The basement was crowded with a lot of cheap steel shelving, plastic jugs of vegetable oil and sacks of flour packed onto them. Set into one wall was a walk-in freezer, the thick metal door open about half a foot and light shining out. She called “Hello,” but didn’t manage much more than a croak, had a throat full of dry biscuit. Harper crept to the massive door and poked her head inside.

The convicts were on tiptoes against the far wall. They were handcuffed together, the chain looped over a length of pipe located almost seven feet off the floor, so they had to stand there, each with an arm raised, like students trying to get teacher’s attention.

She had seen one of the prisoners before—the big man with the queer yellow eyes—but the other was new to her. The second man could’ve been as young as thirty or as old as fifty, rangy and awkwardly built, with a high forehead that brought to mind Frankenstein’s monster and a close-cropped cap of black hair, threaded with strands of silver. Both men wore thick woolen socks and the schoolbus-colored jumpsuits.

The man Harper had met the night before grinned to show pink teeth. His upper lip was split open in a nasty gash and still drooling blood. The room had a rank stink of meat gone bad. Pools of gore had dried on the concrete, beneath rusted chains that had once suspended sides of beef.

Ben Patchett sat in a straight-backed wooden chair, his head between his knees. He looked like someone trying not to be sick. A battery-powered lamp sat on the floor next to a lumpy dish towel.

“What’s going on here?” Harper asked.

Ben lifted his head and stared at her as if he had never seen her before.

“What are you doing here? You ought to be tucked into bed.”

“But here I am.” She was surprised at the mixture of aloofness and calm she heard in her own voice. It was not a tone she used with friends, but the one she reserved for irksome patients. “These men are suffering from exposure. Hanging them from a pipe wouldn’t be my recommended course of treatment.”

“Oh, Harp. Harper, you have no idea what—
this
guy. This guy here—” Ben said and gestured with his gun. Harper hadn’t noticed until now he was holding it.

“Me?”
said the prisoner with the bloody mouth. “Oh, yeah,
me
. I might as well ’fess up. I got sick and tired of dangling from this fuckin’ pipe while shithead here shouts at me. I let my bad mood get the better of me and tried to attack his gun with my face. It’s a shame you had to interrupt us. I was just getting ready to assault his boot with my nuts.”

Ben glared. “I didn’t do a thing to you wasn’t self-defense.” He looked at Harper. “He kicked me to the ground. Tried to stomp my head in, too.”

“Self-defense, huh? Is that why you brought the towel full of rocks down here? You anticipated you’d have to defend yourself with ’em and your thirty-eight wasn’t good enough?” said the bleeding man.

Ben blushed. Harper had never seen a grown man blush so hard.

She sank to one knee, folded back a corner of the towel on the floor. It was full of white rocks. She looked up, but Ben wouldn’t meet her eyes. She peered over at the man with the busted mouth.

“What’s your name?”

“Mazzucchelli. Mark Mazzucchelli. Lot of guys call me the Mazz. Lady, no offense, but if I had known this was what you meant when you said you were going to rescue us, I think I would’ve said thanks, but no thanks. I was dying just fine where I was.”

“I’m sorry. None of this should’ve happened.”

“You got that right, Harper,” Ben said. “Starting with the moment this fella decided to bash in Father Storey’s head and run. Couple of guys found him trying to boost one of our cars, blood all over him.”

“
Old
blood. Christ, it was
old
blood. Anyone could see it was old blood. Why would I attack this Father of yours anyway? Dude just saved my life. What would I get out of killing him?”

“His boots,”
Ben said. “The ones you had on when we caught you running. His boots and his coat.”

The Mazz looked at Harper with aggrieved, pleading eyes. “The guy, this Father of yours, he
gave
me his boots when he saw I didn’t have any. Coat, too. He gave ’em to me because I couldn’t feel my feet what for the cold. Is that the kind of guy you pay back with a rock to the head? Look, I’ve been tellin’ this dude, I told him. The holy Father and I came back ahead of the other two boats. He was nothing but good to me. He gave me his boots and coat, ’cause he saw I couldn’t stop shivering. When we got to shore, he led me into the woods. We walked, I don’t know, couple hundred feet. Then he pointed at the church steeple and said stay on the path and in another minute or two I’d come to the chapel and there would be people to help me. He said he wanted to go back and make sure everyone else got to shore okay. I offered to give him his boots back but he wouldn’t take them. And . . . all right. Look. I don’t
know
none of you. I saw the chapel, but I also saw a perfectly good Buick parked around behind it, and I thought,
Shit, maybe I ought to go someplace where I
do
know people.
I didn’t mean anything by it. I didn’t know the car belonged to anyone.”

“That’s right. You didn’t know it belonged to anyone. And the world is just full of free cars. They’re like picking daisies at the side of the road,” Ben said.

“The world is fulla free cars
now,
” said the Mazz. “On account of a person relinquishes ownership of their wheels after goin’ up in fuckin’ smoke. There’s probably a thousand cars in this state ain’t no one ever gonna claim.”

Harper stepped toward the convicts. Ben leaped up and caught her wrist.

“Don’t. I don’t want you near him. Stay behind me. This guy—”

“Is in need of medical treatment. My arm, please, Mr. Patchett.”

He seemed almost to flinch from the formal use of his name. Or maybe he was flinching from her tone: calm, patient, but impersonal, quietly in charge. He let go of her arm, and if there was unhappy surprise in his face, perhaps it was because he understood he was letting go of his control over the situation as well. He could argue with Harper, but not with Nurse Willowes.

He looked past her to the prisoners. “You touch her—either one of you—I won’t be using the
butt
of the gun on you, understand?”

Harper came close enough to the Mazz to smell his breath: a metallic odor of fresh blood. She leaned in to inspect his pink teeth.

“You won’t need stitches,” she said. “But I’d like to get a cold compress against your mouth. How are your feet?”

“Been a while since I could feel them. Gilbert is worse. Gil can hardly stand.” He gestured with his head toward the other convict, who had not spoken yet. “And my hands . . . the cuffs . . . I got no circulation.”

“We’ll get those right off. Mr. Patchett?”

“No. They stay on.”

“You can cuff them to something else if you think it’s necessary, but you can’t keep them like this, in a stress position. That has to stop. Whatever you think they’ve done, it doesn’t justify abuse.”

“I’ll tell you about abuse!” cried the Mazz. “Keepin’ us strung up here is the least of it! You ought to hear how I wound up with a busted mouth. See, I could take being locked up with my arm coming out of the socket, and I could take no food, nothing to drink, and no rest. What made me lose my composure is the feeling like maybe I need to have a crap. This one says he’d be glad to help me with that, soon as I start answering his questions the way he wants ’em answered. He said the next thing to come out of my mouth better be something good. I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I spat in his fat cop face. Then he smashes me one. He would’ve hit me again, but I put my knee in his stomach and dropped him on the floor, which just goes to show I can whip his ass with one hand cuffed behind my back.
Literally
.”

Ben said, “Why don’t you shut up before—”

“Before you give a handcuffed man another pistol whipping, Mr. Patchett?” Harper asked quietly.

Ben shot a startled, embarrassed glance at Harper, an expression that made her think of a sixth grader caught looking at a dirty picture.

“Shoot,” he whispered. It was obvious he didn’t want the convicts to hear him, but the acoustics of the bare metal room made a private conversation impossible. “Now, Harper. Come on. It wasn’t anything like that. I cuffed ’em there because it was the easiest place, not to cause suffering. The towel full of rocks—that was just to scare them. And this guy tried to stomp my head in, same as he stomped in Father Storey’s skull. I was lucky to get clear. I can’t believe you’d take his word over mine. I have to think that’s hormones talking.”

“I don’t care which of you is telling the truth,” she said. It was an effort to keep the anger out of her voice.
Hormones
. “My concern is medical. This man is injured and can’t remain hung up like he is. Get him down.”

“I’ll let him down. But he can wear the cuffs right into the crapper.”

The Mazz said, “Fine by me. Long as you promise to wipe my ass when I’m finished. And I better warn you, brother, this one feels like it’s going to be wet.”

“That’s not helpful,” Harper said.

“Copy that. Sorry, ma’am.” The Mazz cast his gaze downward, but a smile teased the corners of his mouth.

“What about you?” Harper asked, turning to the man who hadn’t spoken. “Gilbert. Do you need to use the facilities?”

“No, thank you, ma’am. I’m fairly constipated. I’ve been buttoned up for several days now.”

This was met by a moment of silence and then Harper laughed. She couldn’t help it. She could not even say why it was so funny.

“Gilbert. What’s your last name?”

“Cline, but you can call me Gil. I don’t need the bathroom, but I’d commit any number of crimes for a bite to eat.”