At a stop light he massages the back of his neck. Feels how long the day has been in the way those muscles ache. Long hours. Days that bleed into each other.
Sometimes he thinks the fires are a way to divide the days. The big blazes he sets mark an ending of a chapter so a new one can begin. Burn out the old way of things, the old way of thinking, bring this little piece of time to ash, and start over. The phoenix can only rise from the ashes, right? So burn the fucker down, another piece of the endless city, another piece of the endless night.
Change. Transformation. A chemical reaction set in motion by his lighter’s flame.
The city wants a spectacle? This he can provide. Over and over like endless sequels. This franchise is going strong. The future is bright. White hot, you could say.
See your city on fire. See your city dead. A breathtaking display. Step right up, folks. This one’s not to be missed.
Here the violence seems to be for excitement. For entertainment. The fires serve as just another dramatic set piece in the place that cranks them out endlessly. Action. Thrills. Something exciting, something visceral every ten minutes or you’ll lose the audience. Them’s the rules.
Now the scenery outside changes. The glitz of Hollywood replaced by the industrial look of the rougher outlying neighborhoods.
Driving through Compton and Watts at night gets the heart pumping. Danger. Chaos. Confusion. Sets the adrenaline coursing in the blood.
Everyone knows the history. Bloods and Crips. The Mexican Mafia. The 18th Street Gang. MS-13 with their charming motto: rape, control, kill. It’s been estimated that in total there are over 120,000 gang members in L.A. alone.
The gang violence isn’t what it was years ago, when gangs ruled certain neighborhoods mostly unchecked, contested blocks of the city essentially turned to war zones. But the gang presence remains even so, the threat still palpable when he hurtles through the turbulent neighborhoods. A doomed feeling circulating in the air. Something desperate, a danger he can feel like a vibration, a violence he sometimes thinks he can smell, some bodily musk hanging over them in a cloud.
In the summer, especially, you can hear the restlessness bubble over every few blocks in the rough places. Music blaring. People yelling. Fighting. Worse. The sound and fury of this place coming unblocked, coming unglued, ready to get hands-on with the next motherfucker who makes eye contact, itching to lose control.
Every summer night, the pedestrians pour out onto the streets and linger there. Wandering souls. Purposeless and plentiful. So many people living right on top of each other. What better for them to do than bash each other’s brains in? To fight over the scraps.
And still, there is something funny about all of it, too, he thinks. Funny in a morbid way. Tragedy and comedy go hand-in-hand, don’t they?
Funny like a razor in an apple on Halloween.
After Robert Kennedy took that bullet behind his ear at point-blank range, fragments of skull shot all through his brain. Still conscious, he lay on the floor of a hotel kitchen, dying. He asked if everyone was OK and was told yes. “Everything is going to be OK,” he turned and said to no one in particular. He got quiet after that. When they brought his wife to him, he made eye contact with her and seemed to recognize her, but he still said nothing.
As the EMTs loaded him onto a stretcher, he finally spoke again. He said, “Don’t lift me.” Those were his final words.
See? Funny.
But it fits once again. The morbid story suits this place, and it suits him. He loves the thrill. Loves the violence. Lives for it. Finds it disturbing and hilarious all at once.
Driving down through L.A. with that threat of harm all around, he feels alive. Alert. All the way awake. He can breathe it in the smog, taste it on his tongue, hear it in the voices raised in the ghetto each and every night.
You don’t find that trapped behind a desk in some bullshit suburb, bored to fucking death.
So he drives on. Presses deeper into the night.
And he pictures the hills on fire. The flames turning everything red and bright. Soon. Soon it becomes real again.
It’s a spectacle the people crave, and a spectacle he will give them.
Chapter 21
Darger didn’t sleep well that night. Too many thoughts raced through her mind as she replayed the interview with Camacho again and again.
It was just before dawn when her phone rang the next morning, a thin line of amber light already brightening the eastern horizon.
Seeing Luck’s name on the screen, Darger skipped past the formality of a standard greeting.
“What do you have?”
Not missing a beat, Luck said, “Chief Macklin had his people go back through the list of potentially disgruntled or otherwise unstable former police and fire employees.”
Darger bounced her foot up and down with impatience. This was not news. It was the plan they’d come up with last night, after talking with Camacho.
“Yes. And?” she said, struggling to keep her tone cordial.
She needed some damn coffee.
“We found a guy. Ivan Sablatsky. 26 years old. Lives about a third of a mile from Camacho. Maybe a two or three-minute jog if you know the shortcuts through the alleyways and whatnot.”
“And I bet he does.”
“Yep,” Luck said.
“What’s his history?”
“He was a short-lived member of the Los Angeles Fire Department. Station 12. He actually passed the initial psych test, made it to the probationary period and then washed out when he failed a random drug test.”
“Drug of choice?”
“Cocaine. He claimed it was a one-time thing, but the department has a zero-tolerance policy, so that was it.”
“And what does he do now? Does he have a job?”
“Yeah, but it’s a weekend-only gig. He drives a forklift at the Anheuser Busch plant.”
“And what about a dark SUV?”
“He’s got a 2014 Mercury Mariner. A little newer than we were thinking, but it’s the right body type and has the roof racks that run parallel to the length of the car. Only the thing is, it’s sort of a silvery-blue color.”
“How dark?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t call it dark at all. But it’s hard to say what it might look like at night, under street lights or on crappy CCTV camera footage.”
“What about his family life?”
“Divorced. And get this: the house he lives in is actually owned by his sister. We don’t think she lives there, though. It’s listed in the county registry as a rental property.”
Darger nodded to herself. It wasn’t perfectly consistent with the part of her profile that said he may still live with a parent or guardian, but it was close. One step away.
“Do we have any background on his childhood?”
“Not yet. I made it clear that any inquiries into his background should be done very discreetly to avoid spooking him,” Luck said. “Oh, but we did get one other thing. He’s got a DUI on his record. Happened about a month after he was dismissed from the fire department.”
“Everything else seems to fit,” Darger said. “The problem is it’s all circumstantial at the moment. I can’t imagine LAPD managed to get a search warrant on any of this.”
“Nope. We’re stuck in limbo until we get something solid on him.”
“So what’s the plan? Surveillance?”
“For now, yes. Three shifts, two cars per shift.”
Darger ground her back teeth together. She knew watching and waiting was their best shot, but it was slow and tedious. She’d rather they bust down this Sablatsky guy’s door and toss his place. He probably had a whole treasure trove of pyro gear in his garage. But there were always those pesky things called Due Process and Probable Cause.
“If we can catch him in the act of starting a fire, that’d be pretty rock solid,” she said. “Where should we meet up? My rental is probably a little more inconspicuous than your Lexus. I can pick you up.”
Luck cleared his throat.
“Well, there’s a bit of a snafu with that. I tried to sign us up for a few shifts, but Chief Macklin more or less told me he’d prefer that we tag along with the locals versus manning our own vehicle.”
“What?”
“I think he’s worried the FBI will try to horn in on his collar.”
Darger made a disgusted noise. One thing she hadn’t missed while she was away from the FBI was all the interdepartmental dick-measuring.
“Anyway, I’m about to head out with a team for the morning rotation. I put you down as a third wheel with Klootey and Bishop for this afternoon, three o’clock to eleven. But we can swap if you want.”
“Nah, that’s fine with me,” she said, figuring Luck would have more time to spend with his kid if he kept to normal hours. “Call me if anything goes down.”
“Will do.”
Chapter 22
Sunglasses shield his eyes as he walks into the diner and takes his typical seat in a booth in the back corner. He doesn’t remove the knockoff Ray-Bans, even though the interior of the building is well shaded. Better to keep covered up.
This diner always smells like wood shavings, a pungent stench that seems to change along with seasons. In winter, the odor strikes him as being just like sawdust, dry and a little sharp. It shifts in the summer, though, to something earthy and damp, dank like that red mulch people spread around the plants outside of dentist offices and the like.
When the waitress comes around, he doesn’t even need to speak.
“Your usual, I presume?” she says, smiling.
He nods. Watches her.
Betsy. He is always conscious of her body when she’s near. Preoccupied with her physicality. He wonders sometimes if she can sense that in her subconscious mind, if she can feel it like a disturbance in the atmosphere, something aggressive or dangerous or alien in her presence. Something wild. Something… something wicked this way comes.
She jots a little flourish on her pad, pen flicking in her fingers, and then her eyes come back to his.
“Any big plans for today or just the S.O.C. — same old crap?”
“Same old for me. What about you?”
“Working. Sleeping, waking, and working again. You know how it is, I’m sure.”
He nods again.
“Can I ask you something?” he says, almost surprised to hear the words coming out of his mouth.
“Sure, hon. Ask away.” Again she smiles when she says it, lips all sheening with lip gloss. Moist.
“What’s the deal with grits?”
Her eyelids flutter. He’s surprised her.
“What’s the… deal with them?”
“Yeah, I mean, I see them up on the sign every time I walk in here. Bowl o’ grits. $1.99. But I’ve never had ‘em. Don’t really understand ‘em. Like… what do you put on them?”
She laughs a little, nodding now.
“Butter. That’s how I like them. Some people go the sweet route — add syrup or brown sugar or whatever, sometimes honey, but I prefer the savory presentation. Add a little salt, some butter, or maybe some bacon or cheese.”
“And you have ‘em with breakfast or what? Kind of like oatmeal?”
“Well, they’re sort of like if you made oatmeal out of corn, but I like grits better with dinner. Shrimp and grits. Chicken and grits. Stuff like that.”
“Damn. I’ll have to try them.”
Again, she laughs, and her tongue flicks out to touch her teeth.
Flashes in his imagination fight for control of the movie screen in his skull.
Part of him sees the two of them together. Naked flesh mashing together. Body parts entwining. Lips enfolding. Hips working.
Another part sees gasoline spritzed over her face. Glugging out of a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and gushing over her dome. Drenching her hair. The chemical vapors visible as shimmers in the air all around. Her eyes blinking, open so wide, eyelashes all wet. She whimpers a little. Shivers. Bound at the wrists. And the flame of his lighter presses closer, closer, closer.
“You don’t want to change your order, do you hon?”
Her question shatters his fantasy. Draws him back to the present. Confuses him.
“What?”
She gestures at the pad of tickets in her hand.
“I’m asking if you want me to change your order. Bring ya some grits instead of the usual?”
Their prior conversation comes back to him, feels far away after the intrusion of fantasy images.
“Oh. No. No, maybe next time.”
“Well, all right. I’ll be right back with that coffee and pie, Jim.” He can hear the wetness on her lips now. Little smacks. Subtle but there.
Jim. That’s how she knows him. It isn’t his real name. Just the nondescript placeholder he uses whenever he’s off work. Out in the metropolis. Among the people. It provides a way to be anonymous as he explores the city. Pokes around it like it’s a hornet’s nest. A way to keep the life he lives out here separate from his other life.
Jim. An alter ego in a lot of ways.
Jim could do anything, be anything, totally free to pursue whatever impulses bubbled up from his subconscious. Totally unblocked.
Jim. A character. A piece of work. An unlikely protagonist to our tale.
Jim. A lone wolf. A man who does as he pleases, who pursues his desires no matter how dark they might get.
Because we all have primal urges, dark impulses that come spewing out of the places in ourselves where our eyes can never go, the parts of our brain leftover from those initial stages of evolution, the wild animal trapped in there, held back.
Sexual desires.
A lust for violence.
A variety of bodily appetites, concerns, and preferences.
A way of seeing the physical world, looking right through the niceties, the social framework, the agreed-upon lie that defines daily life in modern civilization. Sizing this place up in a dead-eyed way, seeing what’s really there, what’s real.
The lizard brain. That’s what some people call it. The limbic system. An emotional part of the brain so ancient it cannot process language, and ironically enough the place where the human animal makes its decisions. He heard some egghead go on about it in some YouTube video, a fancy lad with an accent he could never quite place.
But be it from a fancy source or not, the concept makes sense enough to him. Trust isn’t based in words. It isn’t rooted in reason. It isn’t even a choice. You trust someone or you don’t. It’s a feeling. Inevitable. Untouchable. Something happening to you, not something you control.
Betsy swoops back with the aforementioned pie and coffee. Smiling as always. Inviting.
He tries to look down her shirt when she sets the mug and plate in front of him. No joy. The green fabric of her sweater crawls a little too tall up her chest. Blocks out his eyeball’s advances.
Still, he can see the shape of her, and that’s something. That’s plenty.
When he gazes at her, he gazes on all of femininity. Stands in awe of it. Wants only to worship it. To sacrifice himself to it in some violent ritual.
If she notices his leering, she shows no signs of it. Smiling as ever. Lips so wet she could dab them three times with a paper towel and they’d still be moist as hell.
Here in this diner, Jim is a known entity. A regular. A familiar face. He didn’t plan it this way. He typically prefers anonymity, wants to interact with the people while remaining disentangled. Unknown and unknowable.
But he sensed the opposite happening here with Betsy, and he let it happen. Liked it in a weird way.
Perhaps it was Jim who liked it, Jim who let it happen.
Jim. The wild card. Unpredictable. The mysterious stranger looking out through his eyes.
And he wonders of Betsy for the first time: Does she always make sure to wait on him for the tips? Or could it be something else? Something more?
He sips the coffee. Considers adding a little plastic cup of c
reamer and decides against it. It’s good today. Not at all acrid like it sometimes gets, none of that burned note that lingers on his tongue. Must be freshly brewed. Not having cooked down into black sludge on the goddamn burner for four hours does wonders for its flavor.
He severs the pointy tip of his slice of apple pie with the side of his fork, spears it, and shovels it into his maw. Delicious as always. Some burst of spice in there he can never quite identify. Something exotic, maybe. Nutmeg or some fucking thing his family could never afford.
Betsy catches his eye from behind the counter. Her smile faltering for the first time that he can remember.
He follows her gaze to the TV mounted in the corner above the counter, and what does he see?
Fire. His fire.
The flames lick out from the doors and windows of the blackening church. Melting. Consuming. Chewing it up.
Firemen in the foreground of the shot spray jets of water in every orifice of the structure, but the endless streams seem powerless against the destructive orange engulfing this place. Producing a little steam here and there but reducing the shriveling destruction of the church not at all. The news producers must love this footage as much as he does, as often as they keep playing it.
“Ain’t that awful?” Betsy says to no one. He can hear the fear in her voice, the somber melody, the tiniest tremble to her words.
“Hell of a fire,” Jim says, shaking his head. He can’t help but smile a little.
She looks at him, then. Really looks. That scared expression still adorns her face, corners of the mouth turned down, a sag around the eyes that seems to carry much worry.
And for a second, he thinks maybe she sees him. Looks through the artifice to see him for real. Fears him. Knows the awe-inspiring power that he wields. And maybe that excites her. Compels her. Confounds her. Arouses her.
“It’s just so visceral,” she says. “So horrific. Dying that way.”
She shudders as she says it, and he can see how stimulated she is, body wavering just like the shimmer of those gasoline fumes in his imagination.
And Jim wants something. Jim wants something bad.
Violet Darger (Book 6): Night On Fire Page 12
