On the way to Steve’s house Friday morning we noticed that the white Crown Victoria was no longer parked at the curb by our hill. Instead, it was back in the driveway at the Manning’s house. I wondered when George Manning had come to retrieve it and return it to his house, and if he had reported his wife missing.
When we got to Steve’s we found him sitting on his front step, eating a bowl of cereal. Frisbee was lying on the front lawn with his eyes closed, his chin on one front paw.
The weather had cooled some, giving Southern California a much needed reprieve from the heat. The temperature was in the mid eighties and a feeble breeze was blowing the tail end of a set of snow white clouds out east toward Arizona.
We stood there a moment, in front of Steve, before Jason said, “Hey.”
Steve scooped up some of the colorful, round cereal bits and shoved them in his mouth with a loud smack. It wasn’t until he was done chewing that he returned the greeting.
“Hey.”
It was awkward at first, the three of us standing there, the bitter scent of burnt grass still fresh in the air. We had all been the best of friends for years and now we couldn’t think of what to say to one another, but Jason tried anyway.
“How you been?” he asked.
Steve seemed to mull the question over as if he might have been wondering the same thing about himself.
“Okay, I guess,” he said after a time. “Haven’t been sleeping much, you know.”
We did know. Jason and I had both been having trouble getting to, and staying asleep. For the last two nights I had been having nightmares. Not the Dark Dreams with the bubbles but dreams of houses burning and screaming children trapped inside. Every time I’d bolt awake from one of those dreams I’d find Jason sitting on the edge of his bed, watching over me, crying. I think it was a little bit for Amber and little bit for what we’d done.
“I stay up at night and look out Jackie’s window while she sleeps,” Steve continued. “She doesn’t know about it. I keep thinking for some reason that we got the wrong person and the real killer is going to show up and get her.” He shook his head as if trying to disperse the unpleasant thoughts to the breeze like dandelion fluff.
“Steve?” I asked in a whisper. “Are we going to get in trouble for what we did? Do you think they’ll catch us?”
He set the half empty bowl down at his feet and thought a long time. When he was ready he said, “I don’t know. I hope not,” and was silent for a bit again but I saw his eyes getting wet. “I left the BB gun up there. I remember setting it down on an old tire when I went to get the flashlight you’d dropped. I never picked it back up.”
At first I didn’t know exactly why he was so upset about losing the gun and wondered if it held some sort of sentimental value for him. But then it hit me.
“Your fingerprints?” I asked.
All he could do was nod as a single tear ran down his face. He said, “If it comes down to it, I’ll tell them it was all me. I won’t say you guys were with me or anything. I don’t think anyone could prove that you were there.”
“Steve,” Jason said, “that’s not going to happen. Everything’s going to be fine.”
But just as he was getting the last words out, Frisbee lifted his head and sniffed in the direction of the two police cars coming down Cottonwood. One was a black and white patrol car, the other an unmarked, blue sedan.
“Oh, God,” Steve moaned as we watched them pull up to his curb.
Jason and I stiffened at the site, feeling that this was the trouble we’d been expecting for the last couple of days. We took a few steps toward Steve’s house as the three officers exited their vehicles.
Only one of them wore a uniform. The other two were in Polo shirts and slacks. But they both wore badges hung from silver chains around their necks. The uniformed officer stayed back at his patrol car and the two casually dressed men walked straight up the grass to us. Frisbee laid his head back down and closed his eyes and when I glanced at him I could have sworn he had a small grin on his muzzle.
“Hi there, boys,” said the first officer. He was a small man, maybe five and a half feet, thin at the shoulders and clean shaven. His partner, who had a dark, bushy mustache and looked like he could kill a horse by intimidation alone, stood ten feet back.
“My name is Sergeant Bower and I’m with the Corona Police Department,” said the smaller man. “But I guess you kids probably knew that when you saw the cars coming down the street.”
We looked at one another, trembling.
The next time he spoke I knew we had been busted and that they knew everything about us and what we’d done.
“You kids set that fire up the street?” Sergeant Bower said, casually, as if asking about the weather. Right then, all I could think was that we were screwed. That at any moment they would turn us around and slap the cuffs on.
But just then my brain corrected itself because he hadn’t said ‘set,’ he had said ‘see.’ You kids see that fire up the street?
The relief washed over me immediately.
Steve said, “Smelled the smoke. Our parents wouldn’t let us go up there to look. They said we’d get in the way of the firemen.” At least Steve had heard him correctly.
“Your parents are very smart to look after your well being like that,” Bower commented. “It was a hell of a blaze. Oops, sorry. Heck of a blaze.”
We found out later that the fire from the house had spread out and engulfed the entire field that surrounded it and part of a copse of orange trees. It also managed to hop Fullerton and catch the field (where the Tree was) on fire as well. Our new fort was now nothing but a pointy, black trunk and ash. In all, thirty-six acres of open fields and orange groves burned that day, reduced to black char.
Sergeant Bower took a moment, pulled a notebook out of his back pocket and asked Steve, “Son, what’s your name?”
Jason and I looked at our friend and saw terror in his eyes, thinking we’d been caught.
“Steve,” he said.”
Bower nodded. “Steve Hanel?”
Now it was Steve’s turn to nod.
“I see,” said the Sergeant. “Steve, do you have a brother by any chance?”
Again, Steve nodded.
“Okay, now, is his name Jacob Hanel?”
Steve was about to answer him when his mother opened the front door and stepped out in her bathrobe.
“What’s going on here?” she asked the officer at her stoop. “Can I help you?”
Sergeant Bower straightened up from Steve and focused his attention on Mrs. Hanel. His gorilla sized partner stood motionless behind him, arms folded.
“Ma’am, I’m Sergeant Phillip Bower of the Corona Police Department. I need to speak to your son, Jacob. Is he here?”
Mrs. Hanel’s hand reached up to keep the collar of her robe shut when she realized what she was wearing.
“He’s in his room sleeping,” she explained. “May I ask what this is about?”
Bower scratched his chin and winced, thinking of the most elegant way to talk to her. In the end he just said, “Ma’am, is Jacob a smoker by any chance?”
She kept her stare steady with Bower’s, thinking, and said, “Yes, he is. He picked the filthy habit up from watching his father. It wasn’t form me, I assure you.” She added this last part as if she had been accused of her son’s nicotine addiction and added, “I still don’t understand. Is he in some sort of trouble?”
“Well, Mrs. Hanel, that’s what we’d like to find out,” Bower said. “As you already know, the fields up on Magnolia and Fullerton were wiped out by fire a couple days ago, along with an empty house. Now, while the investigating team was sifting through what little remained of the house (looking to determine the cause of the fire), they came upon a silver lighter with your son’s name on it. He is the only Jacob Hanel in Corona. We were able to trace him through school records to this address.”
My thoughts immediately shifted back to the wee hours of Wednesday morning when Steve had t
hrown the firework inside the garage at the abandoned house. He had used Jacob’s Zippo to light it and when he was done he’d wiped the lighter on his shirt and dropped it on the ground at his feet.
Mrs. Hanel’s jaw dropped and her hand clutched tighter to her robe. “Do you think Jacob was responsible for the fire?” she asked.
“Well, ma’am, that’s what we’d like to find out,” Bower said. “We’d just like to ask him a few questions to determine his whereabouts that morning.” He finished with a smirk that said he wasn’t telling her everything. “Would you mind waking him and asking him to come outside?”
She stood for a few seconds, as if dazed, and turned and headed back inside. Sergeant Bower smiled at us and walked back to the meat slab with the mustache and whispered something we couldn’t make out. Then he pointed to the uniformed officer by the street, snapped his fingers and waved him over.
Bower and his partner walked back over to us and he said, “Boys, would you mind stepping over onto the grass by your dog please?” pointing to a spot next to Frisbee.
We did as we were asked and a minute later Jacob opened the front door in his boxer shorts and a tank top. He was saying something to his mom that we only caught the tail end of.
“…couldn’t you just tell them to fuck off? I’m fucking sleeping.” He turned and looked out at the three policemen standing before him, his hair disheveled, eyes puffy from sleep. “Yeah? I help you?”
Sergeant Bower said, “Jacob Jeremy Hanel?”
With a puzzled look on his face, Jacob replied, “Yeah. Who wants to know?”
The big, plain clothed cop immediately reached out and grabbed him by the arm and shoulder, twisted and threw Jacob to the walkway without so much as a grunt. Jacob, on the other hand, grunted plenty but still managed to whine, “The fuck did I do?”
Sergeant Bower ignored his question and instead started reading him his Miranda rights as his partner put him in handcuffs.
“Jacob Hanel, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”
You know the rest.
They lifted Jacob to his feet and drug him kicking and cursing into the back of the patrol car. By the time they had closed the door on him, he was crying like a baby.
Frisbee Page 69
