The Fireman (29 page)

“No power, asshole,” said the Marlboro Man. “A Porsche is just a half ton of worthless iron if there’s no gas in the tank.”

“Ah, fuck. Good point, Marlboro Man! I wasn’t thinking!” He pushed the cabinet door shut.

“There’s some breaking news.”

Neither of them spoke for a few moments. She heard the gurgle of whiskey splashing into the glass, swallowing, and reverential sighs.

When Marty spoke again, his voice was pitched low. “He’s kinda scary, don’cha think?”

“Who? Public Works?”

“Yeah. Jakob. With that burn on his neck. That black hand—cooked right in the skin. And his eyes, you know? Like dusty old glass. Like doll’s eyes.”

“Listen to you. You’re practically Lord Byron, with the similes.”

“Tell you what. I think he’d rather find the Fireman here than his wife. I think he’s got a bigger hard-on for him then he does for the runaway bride.”

“There ain’t no Fireman.”

There was an uneasy silence.

“Well,” Marty said. “Marlboro Man . . .
someone
burned his neck. And the other night? Eighty guys saw the devil, two stories high, down by the police station.
Eighty guys
. And Arlo Granger, in the fire department, he wrestled with some dude in the smoke. Some dude with a British accent, dressed up in a fire helmet and everything. Arlo would’ve kicked his head in, except the Fireman had friends, like five friends, and they ganged up on him . . .”

“I know Arlo Granger, and that guy is a fuckin’ liar. He told me once that he got backstage at a Rush concert and snorted coke with Neil Peart. I
wish
the guys in Rush snorted coke. Maybe it would amp ’em up and they’d try playing some real rock and roll for once, instead of that limp dick prog rock bullshit.”

“My cousin is in the National Guard. Amy Castigan, you’ve hung out with Amy—”

“Amy . . . your cousin Amy . . . maybe. Yeah, I think she sucked my dick once.”

“Yeah, yeah, me, too, but listen,
listen,
Marlboro Man. Amy was manning the checkpoint on the Piscataqua Bridge back in September, middle of the night . . . and she sees this red blaze coming up the river. Like someone shot a rocket at them. Her and the other guys hit the deck and just in time, too. This giant fuckin’ bird of flame, thirty feet from wingtip to wingtip, dive-bombed ’em. It dived so close, the sandbags caught fire! And while Amy and the guys in her unit were duckin’ for cover, a car ran the checkpoint and some burners escaped into Maine. That was him, too! That’s what he does! He’s figured out how to weaponize Dragonscale, man.”

“That’s one possibility,” the Marlboro Man said. “The other possibility is your cousin is the biggest fuckin’ ho-bag on the East Coast, and someone ran the checkpoint while she was treating her entire unit to the Amy Castigan blow-job special. There ain’t no Fireman. And Satan didn’t turn up at the police department last night. People see things in flame. Freaky faces and stuff. That’s all.”

Harper thought, inevitably, of the girl in John’s furnace: Sarah Storey, she was sure. The Marlboro Man could believe what he liked, but sometimes the face in the fire really
was
someone looking back at you.

Boards and plaster sheeting slid and thumped in the stairwell.

“Nothing,” Jakob said. “Nothing and no one. I told you. If someone had been here, there’d be tracks. She’s six months pregnant. I doubt she can go a hundred paces without running out of breath.”

“That is a fair point, squire,” said the Marlboro Man. “My ex, when she was pregnant, if she wanted anything—cigarettes, beer, ice cream, anything—she’d make me get it, even if it was only in the next room.

“Sorry the psychic flash didn’t work out. But at least you found the Balvenie. We can take it with us. That’s five hundred dollars a bottle, so drink it slow.”

“What’s the hurry? Have a couple drinks and I’ll polish you off in a game of pool.”

“I’d need more than a couple before that would happen,” Jakob said.

“Want to wager on it?”

“With what? Money isn’t what it used to be.”

“I win, you have to go upstairs and find me a pair of your wife’s panties,” said the Marlboro Man.

“If
I
win, you have to wear them,” Jakob said.

“Hey, what if
I
win?” Marty asked.

“What if you invent a cure for fuckin’ Dragonscale? What if you didn’t laugh like a thirteen-year-old girl with the hiccups?”

Marty laughed like a thirteen-year-old girl with the hiccups.

“Who breaks?” Jakob said.

There was a loud crack as one ball struck a dozen.

“Is this single elimination?” Marty asked. “Or best of three?”

“Whatever,” said the Marlboro Man. “I don’t have any place to be.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

6

A powdery snow granulated the night. She drifted through a frozen darkness, her nostrils stinging from the cold. The light had been failing when she entered her house. Now, six games of pool later, it was who knew when—nine? ten?—and her legs were cramped from the hours she had spent balled up in the cupboard space behind the tinted glass door.

Jakob had been better at pool but the Marlboro Man was superior at holding his drink. The fat man—from his voice alone, Harper felt sure he was at least three hundred pounds—had left with a pair of her undies in his coat pocket, whistling “Centerfold.” She waited at least thirty minutes to crawl out of her hiding place, half believing Jakob and his new friends would still be there, silently waiting for her. They had left the empty bottle of Balvenie upside down in one of the side pockets.

She should’ve been wretched, choking on sobs, or quaking helplessly in shock. Instead, Harper felt buzzed, as if she had just skied a slope at the very edge of her ability, taking turns faster than she had ever taken them before. She had heard of adrenaline highs, but wasn’t sure if she had ever had one before. She was hardly aware of her legs carrying her forward.

Harper didn’t know where she was going until she got there. She wandered right past the entrance to Camp Wyndham—past the chain hung between the stone monoliths, past the burned-out wreckage of the bus—and followed Little Harbor Lane until it switched to gravel. In another hundred feet it turned into a boat ramp, angling down into the lapping foam of the Atlantic.

And there was the Fireman’s island. A quick clamber over a stone breakwater, a two-minute walk along the shingle, and she came in sight of Camp Wyndham’s dock.

She had promised Allie she would be back in two hours. It had been maybe twice that. Harper dreaded facing Allie, who was likely in trouble by now, and who almost certainly had spent the evening sick with worry. Harper decided solemnly to do whatever was necessary to make amends, to make it up to her

But Allie would have to worry a little longer. Harper had left John Rookwood on his island all alone for three days, with smashed ribs, a sprained elbow, and a wrist that had been seriously dislocated. He was her whole reason for slipping out of the infirmary. It would be a poor joke to head back without seeing him.

Besides. For all Allie’s talk about how they were going to start making examples out of people who broke the rules, Harper couldn’t take any of it too seriously. To Harper, it was elementary school all over again. There were rules, of course, and consequences for breaking them . . . but rules and consequences alike were applied by the grown-ups to the kids, and Harper was a grown-up. A student might get a demerit slip for running in the hall, but if someone on staff broke into a jog, presumably they had a good reason. Ben might be annoyed with her, but she would talk to him and smooth everything over. She was no more threatened by his authority (or Carol’s) then she would’ve felt threatened by a teacher. It was not, after all, like anyone was going to make her write
I will not leave camp without a permission slip
a hundred times on the chalkboard.

She rowed across a heaving liquid darkness. She felt a kind of slow tidal rocking inside her as well, as if she herself contained a smaller sea.

Harper knocked on the doorframe of the Fireman’s shed.

“Who’s that then?”

“Harper.”

“Ah! Finally. I warn you, I’m not dressed.”

“I’ll give you a minute.”

She took a deep breath of damp, salted, frozen air, let it out in a trickle of white fog. She had never poked around his island, not really, and tramped up the great central dune for a look from the highest point.

It wasn’t much of a rock. A couple acres long, shaped like an eye. One central ridge ran along the island lengthwise, with the Fireman’s little shed built into one side of it. At the southern tip was the ruin of a guesthouse, a collapsed rectangle of carbonized beams poking out of a layer of snow no deeper than a bedsheet. She was momentarily surprised by the sight of the boat: it stood just above the pebbly shingle on the eastern face of the island, a thirty-five-foot-long sailboat resting in a stainless steel carriage, the deck covered by a taut white tarp. But then Father Storey had mentioned a boat out here, had talked about taking it on a search for Martha Quinn. If the snow kept falling, soon it would just look like a part of the landscape, one vast white dune to tower over the others.

The cold was making her cheeks numb. She tracked back down the sand and let herself into the Fireman’s shed without knocking. stamped her boots and rubbed her hands, shaking off snow.

“Willowes! I’ve never been so glad to see another human face! It feels like a car is parked on my chest. I haven’t been in so much pain since Guns and Roses broke up.”

“Sorry,” she said. She dropped the cloth shopping bag she had brought with her. “Busy day.”

She opened her mouth to tell him about Jakob and the Marlboro Man and almost being discovered, then caught herself.

He was sitting on his cot, and he still wasn’t wearing a stitch, except for the sling she had made out of a canvas quiver. His only gesture to modesty was the bedsheet bunched up in his lap and pooled around his hips. His skin was scrawled all over with the devil’s handwriting in black and gold. The bruises beneath the ’scale had darkened to shades of blackberry and pomegranate. It hurt her in her own chest just to look at them.

“You still aren’t dressed,” she said.

“Well,”
he said. “I wasn’t sure I should bother. Aren’t you going to examine me? Seemed a lot of effort to go to, just to take it all off again. And where have you been? I’ve been stranded on this muddy blob of sand for
days,
with no one to talk to but myself.”

“At least you were having conversations with someone who thinks you’re clever.”

He fixed the cloth shopping bag with a rapacious glare. “There better be morphine in there. And cigarettes. And fresh-ground coffee.”

“I
wish
I had morphine. In fact, we’ll have to talk about that.”

“Cigarettes?”

“I don’t have any cigarettes for you right this instant, Mr. Rookwood,” she said, choosing her words with care. This was not a lie—but it was also not strictly honest. Harper was becoming practiced at such evasions. “Look at it as an opportunity to quit before the smokes kill you.”

“You think smoking is going to kill
me
? When
I
smoke, Nurse Willowes, it’s other people who need to worry about their health. There better be fresh coffee then.”

“I brought you some wonderful loose teas—”

“
Tea!
You think I want tea?”

“Why not? You’re English.”

“And so you think I drink
tea
? What, do you imagine I used to wander around in the London fog in a deerstalker cap, talking to my mates in iambic pentameter? We
have
Starbucks, woman.”

“Oh, good. Because I also have a few packets of Starbucks instant.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“Because you’re such an amusing man to disappoint. How about I put on the kettle and you at least put on some pants? I don’t recall any below-the-waist injuries that require a medical opinion.”

He swept a foggy gaze around the floor, reached with one bony foot for his fireman pants.

She took a deep breath to tell him about going home—and then sidetracked herself again, saying, “Did you always want to be a fireman? How long have you been dressing like one? Since childhood?” That was the adrenaline talking. She wondered if this was how people felt after skydiving. Her hands had a tremor.

“Not at all. I wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to wear leather pants and spend weekends in bed with stoned fashion models and write songs full of pretentious riddles.”

“I didn’t know you were musical. What instrument did you play?”

“Oh, I never got around to learning an instrument. Seemed like too much work. Also, as my mother was deaf and my father a bully, musical education wasn’t a priority in my family. The closest I ever got to the rock star life was selling drugs.”

“You were a drug dealer? I don’t think I like that. What drugs?”

“Hallucinogenic mushrooms. Seemed a sensible way to turn a profit on my degree in biology. Mycology had always been my field of study. I sold a form of psilocybin called Smurfpecker that was quite blue, quite popular, and quite delicious with eggs. Do you want to split a Smurfpecker omelet with me sometime, Nurse Willowes?

She turned her back on him, to give him privacy so he could pull on his pants. “The Dragonscale—that’s a kind of spore. A fungus. You must know a lot about it.”

He didn’t reply. She glanced back and his face was composed into a look of benign innocence. He wasn’t even trying to pick up his pants. They were still snarled around his feet. It irritated her that he wouldn’t get dressed. It made him more of a creep than she had hoped he would be. She looked away once more.

“Is that why you can control it? Use it? Keep from burning alive like you’re coated in asbestos? Is it because you understand something about it other people don’t understand?”

He made a soft humming sound and said, “I’m not sure I understand the ’scale so much as I’ve helped it to understand
me
. The pans are in the box under the furnace.”

“Why do I need a pan?”

“Aren’t you going to make us eggs?”

“You have eggs?”

“No. Don’t you? In that grocery bag of yours? For God’s sake, Nurse Willowes, you must’ve brought me
some
goodies!”

“I am sorry to say I did not bring you eggs or French roast or morphine. Instead I hiked three miles and nearly walked right into a Cremation Crew to get a brace for your elbow and tape for your wrist. My ex-husband among them.” She felt an unexpected prickle in the back of her eyes that she refused to let become anything more. “I also brought you some great loose tea because I’m nice and I thought it would cheer you up and I haven’t even asked for thanks. All I’ve asked is for you to put on your pants, but you won’t even do that, because I assume you get off on being naked and seeing if it rattles me.”

“I can’t.”

“Can’t
what?
Can’t say thanks? Can’t apologize? Can’t show basic human courtesy?”

“I can’t put on my pants. I can’t bend over and pick them up. It hurts too much. And you’ve been very kind and of course I should’ve said thanks. I’m saying it now. Thank you, Nurse Willowes.”

The contrition in his voice deflated her in some way. She was coming down off her adrenaline buzz now, a tide receding to reveal the fatigue beneath.

“I’m sorry. It has been a long couple of days. And I just got through the worst part of it. I went back home to salvage some supplies and Jakob turned up, with a crowd of new friends. One of them was that bully on the radio, the Marlboro Man, the one who’s always bragging about all the burners he’s executed. I had to hide. For a
long
time.”

“You went home? Alone? Why didn’t you send someone?”

“Who? The Lookouts are all kids. Starved, overtired kids. I didn’t feel like putting one of them at risk. I couldn’t send you, not with your ribs like they are. Besides, I knew where to look for the things I wanted. It just seemed to make more sense to go myself. You didn’t tell me what happened to my house.”

“That your ex decided to remodel with a two-ton snowplow? I felt like you had lost enough for one week. Why pile on? Are you all right?”

“I was . . . scared. I heard them talking about me. They talked about you, too.”

“You don’t say!” he said. He sounded pleased.

“Yes. They talked about a man with weaponized Dragonscale, someone who can throw flame, and who goes around dressed as a fireman. They couldn’t decide if you were real or an urban legend.”

“Ah! Halfway to being a rock star at last!”

“Mostly they talked about things they’ve done to people who are sick. The Marlboro Man keeps track of the numbers for the whole Cremation Crew, was talking about who’s killed the most overall, who’s murdered the most in one day, who killed the ugliest girl, who killed the hottest girl. It was like he was talking about the stats for his fantasy baseball team.”

The Marlboro Man had praised Jakob for “busting his nut” on New Year’s Day. It was several minutes before Harper realized the Marlboro Man was not talking about sex, but murder. Jakob had used his Freightliner to T-bone a Nissan with a sick family in it, a man, a woman, and their two children. The car had been pancaked. The bodies came squeezing out of the wreckage like toothpaste, or so the Marlboro Man said. Jakob had accepted the Marlboro Man’s praise without comment, expressing neither pride nor horror.

What a curious thing: to think the man she had married, a man she had loved and been devoted to, had gone on to commit murders. Had killed and meant to kill again. Eighteen months ago, they had spent their nights cuddled on the couch, watching
Master of None
.

“I was scared I’d start shaking and they’d hear me. They’d hear my teeth chattering. Then they left, and when I knew I was okay—that I was going to leave the house alive—I—I felt—like someone threw a grenade at me and then for some reason it didn’t explode. I walked out of there with my head full of cotton fluff and my legs all rubber. Aren’t you going to give me a talking to?”

“For being an idiot and blithely walking right into trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Naw. I can’t think of two qualities I admire more in a person. Glad you came back, though. I haven’t had coffee in days.”

When she turned around, the Fireman was yawning, a fist covering his mouth and his eyes squeezed shut, and the sheet had dropped to show the line of his hip. Harper was surprised by her own reaction to the sight of his scrawny, hairy self, the dense pelt of hair on his sunken and battered chest. She felt an immediate twitch of physical want, florid and absurd, where there had been none a minute before.