Instead of knocking, he reached for the door handle.
Unlocked.
He twisted it and pushed the door open six inches. He remembered his police classes. “Police officer!” he bellowed. “Come on out!”
The only response was the continued muffled pleas.
He pushed the door a little wider. “Police!” He tried to think of something else to say, something dramatic, but nothing came to mind. “Show yourself!” was the best he could do.
Donnie pushed the door open wide. It was then that the smell hit him. Gasoline and rotten eggs. At first he thought it was the pungent smell of a body left in the sun after being toasted with high explosives, then he recognized it for the more suburban smell it was: leaking propane. “Jesus,” he said.
“Help me!” came the voice.
Donnie looked over at Susan Terry. “Hang back,” he said.
“No fucking way,” she replied. She placed one hand over her mouth and nose, the other on her weapon.
In a half-crouch, two hands on his weapon, Donnie stepped into the trailer. He saw the fan moving back and forth, but that wasn’t the motion he was trying to find-human motion: a gun being raised, a knife brandished.
“Please, please, please…,” came the cries.
He could tell they were coming from what he guessed was the bedroom. Still hunched over, he went to the door, stepping past typical clutter and debris, almost choking with the smell.
Carefully, Donnie put his hand on the door handle. With his gun hand, he gestured Susan Terry to a position behind him. Then he slowly pulled the door open.
Gunshot.
First explosion.
Andy Candy half-shouted, half-screamed. The sound was not a recognizable word. Moth stiffened, nearly frozen in place, ducking down, partly shielding Andy with his body.
A second explosion ripped the air with a ferocity that astonished them.
Moth realized he was yelling, a torrent of obscenities fueled by shock and fear. If his first instinct had been to cower and cover Andy Candy, his second was to lift his head, driven by fascination: Whatever was happening seemed almost like something on a movie screen in front of him.
He could see that the rear of the trailer was billowing smoke and that flames were shooting out of the roof. Windows were shattered.
Moth hesitated, almost as if he was hypnotized. Then he shouted, “Stay here!” and shocked himself by rising up from the relative safety provided by the car and racing toward the burning building. He tossed his arms over his head, as if he expected fallout from the explosions to rain down on him.
Andy Candy didn’t do what he said. As soon as Moth dashed forward, she ran in a crouch to the passenger door of the patrol car and jerked it open. The radio microphone was hanging from a hook in front of her. She bent in, throwing herself across the seat, seized it, pushed down on an activation switch-just as she had seen done in dozens of television shows-and began shouting:
“We need help! Help!”
A voice immediately came over the radio. “Who’s this?”
“We were there this morning… with the officer out at the trailer by the river…” Her words were jumbled, confused, but there was no mistaking her tone.
“What’s happened?” It was a woman’s voice, but she seemed calm, which shocked Andy.
“An explosion. There’s a fire. We heard a gunshot…”
“Where is the patrolman?”
“I don’t know. He’s still inside.”
A third explosion shook the air.
“Are there injuries?”
Andy Candy didn’t know, but there had to be. “Yes. Yes. Send help now.”
“Stay where you are. Police, fire, and ambulance on the way,” said the disembodied radio voice.
Andy looked up. What she saw was Moth fighting his way into the flames licking around the trailer’s front door. “No!” she shouted, as he disappeared from sight.
The first blast had driven Susan Terry back, slamming her viciously against a bureau, fracturing her arm in two places, leaving her dazed. The second explosion seemed to scorch the air above her, superheated with flames, turning the inside of the trailer into a furnace. She realized she was in immense pain and almost on her back. Everything she could see was spinning, obscured by smoke and fire. At first she thought Donnie the policeman was dead, a few feet away from her. She reached out for him, but her right arm wouldn’t move, and her left waved uselessly in the air. She wondered, Am I dying? Here? Now?
Things were moving in slow motion, and she saw the policeman stir, as if he’d been able to fight off unconsciousness. She saw him push to his knees. This was an astonishing act of strength, she thought, because she knew she couldn’t do this. She wanted to close her eyes and give in to the heat and the rising noise echoing in her ears. Freight trains and jet engines.
When he crawled toward her, she had trouble deciphering what was happening. She knew she was in shock, but what that actually meant eluded her. She choked on smoke, coughed, thought she could no longer breathe, and wondered whether she had screamed. She could see the policeman’s lips moving, and he was clearly shouting something important, but what it was seemed impossible to figure out, as if every word was in a different language.
And then she felt herself move.
This confused her, because she knew she hadn’t been able to give her arms, legs, body any directions. None of her muscles were responding to anything. She felt limp, rubbery, as if every tendon in her body had been severed by the force of the first explosion, and she imagined that perhaps she was already dead.
It took her a moment to realize that Moth had seized the back of her shirt and was tugging her toward the entranceway. The pain in her arm was suddenly violent, as if someone was pounding her relentlessly, hammering sharpened stakes into her skin, and she howled. The sudden hurt mingled with her cries, redoubling when Donnie the policeman grabbed her shoulder. Almost like a pair of lifeguards rescuing an exhausted swimmer caught in the waves, he and Moth dragged her toward safety. Susan could not see the doorway. All she could see were red and yellow flames racing like meteor showers across the trailer ceiling, a Jackson Pollock of fire.
Death, she thought, can be beautiful.
She had no understanding that in that instant her life was actually being saved.
40
One of the cops called him a hero, but he didn’t think that was true. Fool was probably closer to the truth, although when he had a second to think about it, Moth was unable to identify the exact moment when his foolishness began. It certainly preceded running into the burning trailer and helping to haul Donnie the policeman and Susan Terry out of the flames. Perhaps, he considered, it dated to when he’d gone to see Jeremy Hogan, but that didn’t seem right, either. For a moment, Moth decided that his journey into naïveté started when he had called Andy Candy, but neither was that completely correct.
He continued to work backward through all that had happened, and he decided it must have been triggered the moment when he found his uncle’s body and immediately fell so precipitously off the wagon. This idea made him shake his head, and finally he insisted to himself that everything had begun when he broke up with Andy Candy in high school so many years earlier. That was where his foolishness had taken root and flowered-although he noted ruefully that Uncle Ed the shrink would undoubtedly have dated its start much earlier and blamed it on demanding, absent, and unwittingly cruel parents.
A young woman EMT with a pleasant smile and confident manner bandaged his hands and told him that even though they didn’t seem that bad, he should see a doctor promptly because burns were tricky.
He doubted he would do this, except that Andy Candy, standing beside him, said, “I’ll make sure he goes.”