The black stink of smoke.
Salt air and smoke burned Steve’s eyes.
An unfamiliar shiver tickled over his scalp, sinking its fangs at the base of his skull.
Steve’s old Dodge complained as he drove through Marvis’s neighborhood. He paused at a red light, skipped it because traffic was light and he was in a hurry.
Before today, this neighborhood hadn’t existed for him. It wasn’t on his beat. But he had come here before his trip to the camera shop, searching for Marvis Hanks. At the time he hadn’t noticed anything besides the simple fact that Marvis wasn’t at home. But he had been another man then, more machine than human. Now he recognized how lifeless and depressing these streets were.
The Dodge’s muffler rattled as he came around the corner. Just ahead, lights flashed on the roofs of police cars and fire trucks, and Steve’s pupils shut down. The emergency vehicles were parked in front the third house on the left side of the street. Marvis Hanks’s house.
Steve pulled to the curb. Thin curls of smoke rose from the roof line. The firemen ignored them, busily connecting their hoses from a fire hydrant near the house. Their work was finished. Maybe Marvis Hanks was finished, too. Steve found himself hoping that were the case. He wasn’t ashamed of the thought. He had felt something for Marvis’s father, not Marvis. It would suit him fine if every bit of April’s nightmare was transformed into charred rubble this very night. The larger of the two fire trucks pulled away. A couple of firemen sagged on the rear bumper of the other, talking and sharing a cigarette, while two others entered the house with flashlights and axes. Steve turned his attention from the fire crew to the policemen. Three cars were on the scene, but it was a little hard to see what his brother officers were up to because everyone who lived on the street was in the street, watching the action. He picked out a uniform who was standing on a small rectangular lawn across the street from Hanks’s house. A heavyset black man was talking to the cop. The man held a baseball bat in his right hand. The cop took the bat away from him. The black guy pointed across the street, and Steve glanced over. As people moved away from the fire truck, and Steve saw another cop talking to a kid in a black leather jacket.
The kid from the bar. Steve was out of his car in an instant, skirting the big black guy and the cop holding the ball bat. “Damn right, I hit him,” the black guy said. “I’m sitting in my living room, and I see this guy and a couple of other…maybe three others…run up and throw bricks through my neighbor’s window. And then I saw that one of ’em had some bottles that was burning, and he tossed them through the window before I could even blink.” He shook his head. “Explosion came too fast. Screams didn’t even last a second. But those boys didn’t get away fast. They stood there watching the damn fire like they was proud of what they’d done, and I was all over one of ’em…the one you got over there. I would have had the others but…”
Steve walked away, not wanting to hear the rest of it. He crossed the street, avoiding the kid in the leather jacket. He didn’t want the kid to point him out, or mention anything about the offer he’d made in the bar.
He wanted to find out about Marvis Hanks.
Christ. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Hanks was playing around with the pretty young thing that came to the bar. He got too rough with her. Maybe he always did that, or maybe he’d had a particularly bad day.
Steve smiled sourly. Another emotion added to his repertoire. Welcome, compassion. He pushed the feeling away. Even though he was a rookie in matters of emotion, he knew that his compassion, in this case, was badly misplaced.
Okay, Hanks had a bad day. Well, he was probably due more than a couple. And then he made the mistake of taking his bad temper out on someone who knew how to play rough.
Steve crossed Marvis’s lawn, which was now a muddy swamp. He wished that he had Ernest Kellogg’s bright yellow galoshes. A fireman tried to stop him, but Steve flashed his badge.
“He’s okay,” came a voice from the garage.
Steve recognized Sergeant Rafer Williams’s rasping baritone. The previous winter, he had worked swing shift under Williams. Rafer smiled and they shook hands.
“Johnny-on-the-spot, huh, Austin? I just got here myself. Don’t tell me you’re turning into one of those nuts with a police radio.”
“No. I was just passing by. I went to high school with the guy who lived here.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah…he okay?”
Rafer shrugged. “The boys tell me that there’s a body in the house. Crispy critter. Right in the living room. Poor sucker didn’t know what hit him. Molotov cocktails we think.” He pointed. “Anyway if the corpse is your man, he ain’t close to okay. Punks threw the cocktails right through the front window there. Fire boys say that things got going quick-the basement was full of chemicals and stuff.”
“Marvis Hanks ran a photo shop.”
“That’s the story huh?” Williams paused a beat.
“ Marvis Hanks? You don’t mean the guy was Marvis Hanks’s boy?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn. Me and his daddy went back some. There was a time when we were the only two black guys on the force. Hanks was kind of a cold fish, not a social guy at all, but he was a helluva cop.”
“Yeah,” Steve agreed. “He was my training officer.”
They stood there for a minute. Rafer lit a cigarette, and Steve was surprised to find that the stink of the little cancer stick bothered him more than the raw odor of burnt wood.
Across the street, the black guy laughed and the cop who was interviewing him smiled. The kid in the leather jacket was cuffed and shoved into a police car. For the first time, Steve noticed the girl with the swollen eye sitting in another car, all alone.
The ambulance that had been on scene pulled away from the curb, empty. Flecks of granite-colored ash danced off the vehicle as it picked up speed, drifting to the street like dirty snowflakes, but a few hung in the air long enough to hit the windshield of a black sedan that pulled smoothly into the driveway.
The guy who exited the sedan wore jeans, tennis shoes, and an old Grateful Dead T-shirt.
“Here’s the coroner,” Williams said. “Let’s get this over with.”
The three men entered the house. Williams and the coroner, whose name was Vince Ching, held flashlights. Puddles of oily, wet soot pooled on the floor. “Damn,” Ching said. “Here goes another forty bucks. I’m still stupid enough to answer a call wearing white tennies. You’d think I hadn’t been doing this shit for fifteen years.”
“What you guys need is a uniform,” Rafer said.
Ching nodded. “Maybe we could get black cloaks and skull masks. Scythes, too. A whole squad of grim reapers.”
Rafer laughed. “Well, anything would be better than that tie-dyed shit.”
“Don’t start.” The coroner pinned his flashlight between his arm and ribs while he slipped on a pair of rubber gloves. The gloves made snapping sounds, like giant rubber bands.
Rafer’s light swept the floor. It was a small room, and he found the body soon enough. “I’ll never get used to this,” he said.
Steve stared at the body. It lay in a pool of water.
Calling the thing a crispy critter was an understatement. The corpse was slick black from head to foot, and it looked like it would flake away to nothing if anyone tried to move it. Worst of all, the arms were drawn up, as if the corpse had been trying to ward off an attack at the moment of death.
“Jesus,” Steve whispered. “Look at the arms…you think he saw it coming?”
The coroner shook his head. He was on his knees, next to the corpse. “No. It’s called pugilistic attitude. Flesh burns and muscles tighten. The arms curl up. It’s a completely natural reaction.” He paused. “And it’s not a he. It’s a she. And yes, she probably did see it coming. Death by fire isn’t instantaneous, and neither is it pleasant.”