Time is the Fire

by Connie Willis

  “Sorry,” Hunter said.

  “Can’t we get this stuff from the police report?” Segura asked.

  “There wasn’t a police report,” I said. “It wasn’t a crime to kill a dog when Aberfan died.”

  It was the right thing to say. The look of shock on their faces was the real thing this time, and they looked at each other in disbelief instead of at me. They asked a few more questions and then stood up to leave. I walked them to the door.

  “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. McCombe,” Hunter said. “We appreciate what a difficult experience this has been for you.”

  I shut the screen door between us. The Amblers would have been going too fast, trying to beat the cameras because they weren’t even supposed to be on Van Buren. It was almost rush hour, and they were in the tanker lane, and they hadn’t even seen the jackal till they hit it, and then it was too late. They had to know the penalty for hitting an animal was jail and confiscation of the vehicle, and there wasn’t anybody else on the road.

  “Oh, one more question,” Hunter said from halfway down the walk. “You said you went to your first assignment this morning. What was it?”

  Candid. Open. “It was out at the old zoo. A sideshow kind of thing.”

  I watched them all the way out to their car and down the street. Then I latched the screen, pulled the inside door shut, and locked it, too. It had been right there in front of me—the ferret sniffing the wheel, the bumper, Jake anxiously watching the road.

  I had thought he was looking for customers, but he wasn’t. He was expecting to see the Society drive up. “He’s not interested in that,” he had said when Mrs. Ambler said she had been telling me about Taco.

  He had listened to our whole conversation, standing under the back window with his guilty bucket, ready to come back in and cut her off if she said too much, and I hadn’t tumbled to any of it. I had been so intent on Aberfan I hadn’t even seen it when I looked right through the lens at it.

  And what kind of an excuse was that? Katie hadn’t even tried to use it, and she was learning to drive.

  I went and got the Nikon and pulled the film out of it. It was too late to do anything about the eisenstadt pictures or the vidcam footage, but I didn’t think there was anything in them. Jake had already washed the bumper by the time I’d taken those pictures.

  I fed the longshot film into the developer. “Positives, one two three order, fifteen seconds,” I said, and waited for the image to come on the screen.

  I wondered who had been driving. Jake, probably. “He never liked Taco,” she had said, and there was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice. “I didn’t want to buy the Winnebago.”

  They would both lose their licenses, no matter who was driving, and the Society would confiscate the Winnebago. They would probably not send two octogenarian specimens of Americana like the Amblers to prison. They wouldn’t have to. The trial would take six months, and Texas already had legislation in committee.

  The first picture came up. A light-setting shot of an ocotillo.

  Even if they got off, even if they didn’t end up taking away the Winnebago for unauthorized use of a tanker lane or failure to purchase a sales tax permit, the Amblers had six months left at the outside. Utah was all ready to pass a full-divided bill, and Arizona would be next. In spite of the road crews’ stew-slowed pace, Phoenix would be all-divided by the time the investigation was over, and they’d be completely boxed in. Permanent residents of the zoo. Like the coyote.

  A shot of the zoo sign, half-hidden in the cactus. A close-up of the Amblers’ flag-trailing sign. The Winnebago in the parking lot.

  “Hold,” I said. “Crop.” I indicated the areas with my finger. “Enlarge to full screen.”

  The longshot takes great pictures, sharp contrast, excellent detail. The developer only had a five-hundred-thousand-pixel screen, but the dark smear on the bumper was easy to see, and the developed picture would be much clearer. You’d be able to see every splatter, every grayish-yellow hair. The Society’s computers would probably be able to type the blood from it.

  “Continue,” I said, and the next picture came on the screen. Artsy shot of the Winnebago and the zoo entrance. Jake washing the bumper.

  Red-handed.

  Maybe Hunter had bought my story, but he didn’t have any other suspects, and how long would it be before he decided to ask Katie a few more questions? If he thought it was the Amblers, he’d leave her alone.

  The Japanese family clustered around the waste-disposal tank. Close-up of the decals on the side. Interiors—Mrs. Ambler in the galley, the upright-coffin shower stall, Mrs. Ambler making coffee.

  No wonder she had looked that way in the eisenstadt shot, her face full of memory and grief and loss. Maybe in the instant before they hit it, it had looked like a dog to her, too.

  All I had to do was tell Hunter about the Amblers, and Katie was off the hook. It should be easy. I had done it before.

  “Stop,” I said to a shot of the salt and pepper collection. The black and white Scottie dogs had painted red-plaid bows and red tongues.

  “Expose,” I said. “One through twenty-four.”

  The screen went to question marks and started beeping. I should have known better. The developer could handle a lot of orders, but asking it to expose perfectly good film went against its whole memory, and I didn’t have time to give it the step-by-steps that would convince it I meant what I said.

  “Eject,” I said. The Scotties blinked out. The developer spat out the film, rerolled into its protective case.

  The doorbell rang. I switched on the overhead and pulled the film out to full length and held it directly under the light.

  I had told Hunter an RV hit Aberfan, and he had said on the way out, almost an afterthought, “That first shoot you went to, what was it?”

  And after he left, what had he done, gone out to check on the side-show kind of thing, gotten Mrs. Ambler to spill her guts? There hadn’t been time to do that and get back. He must have called Ramirez. I was glad I had locked the door.

  I turned off the overhead. I rerolled the film, fed it back into the developer, and gave it a direction it could handle. “Permanganate bath, full strength, one through twenty-four. Remove one hundred percent emulsion. No notify.”

  The screen went dark. It would take the developer at least fifteen minutes to run the film through the bleach bath, and the Society’s computers could probably enhance a picture out of two crystals of silver and thin air, but at least the detail wouldn’t be there. I unlocked the door.

  It was Katie.

  She held up the eisenstadt. “You forgot your briefcase,” she said.

  I stared blankly at it. I hadn’t even realized I didn’t have it. I must have left it on the kitchen table when I went tearing out, running down little girls and stewed road workers in my rush to keep Katie from getting involved. And here she was, and Hunter would be back any minute, saying, “That shoot you went on this morning, did you take any pictures?”

  “It isn’t a briefcase,” I said.

  “I wanted to tell you,” she said, and stopped. “I shouldn’t have accused you of telling the Society I’d killed the jackal. I don’t know why you came to see me today, but I know you’re not capable of—”

  “You have no idea what I’m capable of,” I said. I opened the door enough to reach for the eisenstadt. “Thanks for bringing it back. I’ll get the paper to reimburse your way-mile credits.”

  Go home. Go home. If you’re here when the Society comes back, they’ll ask you how you met me, and I just destroyed the evidence that could shift the blame to the Amblers.

  I took hold of the eisenstadt’s handle and started to shut the door.

  She put her hand on the door. The screen door and the fading light made her look unfocused, like Misha. “Are you in trouble?”

  “No,” I said. “Look, I’m very busy.”

  “Why did you come to see me?” she asked. “Did you kill the jackal?”

&n
bsp; “No,” I said, but I opened the door and let her in.

  I went over to the developer and asked for a visual status. It was only on the sixth frame. “I’m destroying evidence,” I said to Katie. “I took a picture this morning of the vehicle that hit it, only I didn’t know it was the guilty party until half an hour ago.”

  I motioned for her to sit down on the couch. “They’re in their eighties. They were driving on a road they weren’t supposed to be on, in an obsolete recreation vehicle, worrying about the cameras and the tankers. There’s no way they could have seen it in time to stop. The Society won’t see it that way, though. They’re determined to blame somebody, anybody, even though it won’t bring them back.”

  She set her canvas carryit and the eisenstadt down on the table next to the couch.

  “The Society was here when I got home,” I said. “They’d figured out we were both in Colorado when Aberfan died. I told them it was a hit and run, and you’d stopped to help me. They had the vet’s records, and your name was on them.”

  I couldn’t read her face. “If they come back,” I said, “you tell them that you gave me a ride to the vet’s.”

  I went back to the developer. The longshot film was done. “Eject,” I said, and the developer spit it into my hand. I fed it into the recycler.

  “McCombe! Where the hell are you?” Ramirez’s voice exploded into the room, and I jumped and started for the door, but she wasn’t there.

  The phone was flashing. “McCombe! This is important!”

  Ramirez was on the phone and using some override I didn’t even know existed. I went over and pushed it back to access. The flashing lights went off. “I’m here,” I said.

  “You won’t believe what just happened!” She sounded outraged. “A couple of terrorist types from the Society just stormed in here and confiscated the stuff you sent me!”

  All I’d sent her was the vidcam footage and the shots from the eisenstadt, and there shouldn’t have been anything on those. Jake had already washed the bumper. “What stuff?” I said.

  “The prints from the eisenstadt!” she said, still shouting. “Which I didn’t have a chance to look at when they came in because I was too busy trying to work a trade on your governor’s conference, not to mention trying to track you down! I had hardcopies made and sent the originals straight down to composing with your vidcam footage. I finally got to them half an hour ago, and while I’m sorting through them, this Society creep just grabs them away from me. No warrant, no ‘would you mind?,’ nothing. Right out of my hand. Like a bunch of—”

  “Jackals,” I said. “You’re sure it wasn’t the vidcam footage?” There wasn’t anything in the eisenstadt shots except Mrs. Ambler and Taco, and even Hunter couldn’t have put that together, could he?

  “Of course I’m sure,” Ramirez said, her voice bouncing off the walls. “It was one of the prints from the eisenstadt. I never even saw the vidcam stuff. I sent it straight to composing. I told you.”

  I went over to the developer and fed the cartridge in. The first dozen shots were nothing, stuff the eisenstadt had taken from the backseat of the car. “Start with frame ten,” I said. “Positives. One two three order. Five seconds.”

  “What did you say?” Ramirez demanded.

  “I said, did they say what they were looking for?”

  “Are you kidding? I wasn’t even there as far as they were concerned. They split up the pile and started through them on my desk.”

  The yucca at the foot of the hill. More yucca. My forearm as I set the eisenstadt down on the counter. My back.

  “Whatever it was they were looking for, they found it,” Ramirez said.

  I glanced at Katie. She met my gaze steadily, unafraid. She had never been afraid, not even when I told her she had killed all the dogs, not even when I’d shown up on her doorstep after fifteen years.

  “The one in the uniform showed it to the other one,” Ramirez was saying, “and said, ‘You were wrong about the woman doing it. Look at this.’”

  “Did you get a look at the picture?”

  Still life of cups and spoons. Mrs. Ambler’s arm. Mrs. Ambler’s back.

  “I tried. It was a truck of some kind.”

  “A truck? Are you sure? Not a Winnebago?”

  “A truck. What the hell is going on over there?”

  I didn’t answer. Jake’s back. Open shower door. Still life with Sanka. Mrs. Ambler remembering Taco.

  “What woman are they talking about?” Ramirez said. “The one you wanted the lifeline on?”

  “No,” I said. The picture of Mrs. Ambler was the last one on the sheet. The developer went back to the beginning. Bottom half of the Hitori. Open car door. Prickly pear. “Did they say anything else?”

  “The one in uniform pointed to something on the hardcopy and said, ‘See, there’s his number on the side. Can you make it out?’”

  Blurred palm trees and the expressway. The tanker hitting the jackal.

  “Stop,” I said.

  The image froze.

  “What?” Ramirez said.

  It was a great action shot, the back wheels passing right over the mess that had been the jackal’s hind legs. The jackal was already dead, of course, but you couldn’t see that or the already drying blood coming out of its mouth because of the angle. You couldn’t see the truck’s license number, either, because of the speed the tanker was going, but the number was there, waiting for the Society’s computers. It looked like the tanker had just hit it.

  “What did they do with the picture?” I asked.

  “They took it into the chief’s office. I tried to call up the originals from composing, but the chief had already sent for them and your vidcam footage. Then I tried to get you, but I couldn’t get past your damned exclusion.”

  “Are they still in there with the chief?”

  “They just left. They’re on their way over to your house. The chief told me to tell you he wants ‘full cooperation,’ which means hand over the negatives and any other film you took this morning. He told me to keep my hands off. No story. Case closed.”

  “How long ago did they leave?”

  “Five minutes. You’ve got plenty of time to make me a print. Don’t highwire it. I’ll come pick it up.”

  “What happened to ‘The last thing I need is trouble with the Society’?”

  “It’ll take them at least twenty minutes to get to your place. Hide it somewhere the Society won’t find it.”

  “I can’t,” I said, and listened to her furious silence. “My developer’s broken. It just ate my longshot film,” I said, and hit the exclusion button again.

  “You want to see who hit the jackal?” I said to Katie, and motioned her over to the developer. “One of Phoenix’s finest.”

  She came and stood in front of the screen, looking at the picture. If the Society’s computers were really good, they could probably prove the jackal was already dead, but the Society wouldn’t keep the film long enough for that. Hunter and Segura had probably already destroyed the highwire copies.

  Maybe I should offer to run the cartridge sheet through the permanganate bath for them when they got here, just to save time.

  I looked at Katie. “It looks guilty as hell, doesn’t it?” I said. “Only it isn’t.”

  She didn’t say anything, didn’t move.

  “It would have killed the jackal if it had hit it. It was going at least ninety. But the jackal was already dead.”

  She looked across at me.

  “The Society would have sent the Amblers to jail. It would have confiscated the house they’ve lived in for nearly twenty years for an accident that was nobody’s fault. They didn’t even see it coming. It just ran right out in front of them.”

  Katie put her hand up to the screen and touched the jackal’s image.

  “They’ve suffered enough,” I said, looking at her.

  It was getting dark. I hadn’t turned on any lights, and the red image of the tanker made her nose look sunburned. />
  “All these years she’s blamed her husband for her dog’s death, and he didn’t do it,” I said. “A Winnebago’s a hundred square feet on the inside. That’s about as big as this developer, and they’ve lived inside it for fifteen years, while the lanes got narrower and the highways shut down, hardly enough room to breathe, let alone live, and her blaming him for something he didn’t do.”

  In the ruddy light from the screen she looked sixteen.

  “They won’t do anything to the driver, not with the tankers hauling thousands of gallons of water into Phoenix every day. Even the Society won’t run the risk of a boycott. They’ll destroy the negatives and call the case closed. And the Society won’t go after the Amblers,” I said. “Or you.”

  I turned back to the developer. “Go,” I said, and the image changed. Yucca. Yucca. My forearm. My back. Cups and spoons.

  “Besides,” I said. “I’m an old hand at shifting the blame.” Mrs. Ambler’s arm. Mrs. Ambler’s back. Open shower door. “Did I ever tell you about Aberfan?”

  Katie was still watching the screen, her face pale now from the light blue One-Hundred Percent formica shower stall.

  “The Society already thinks the tanker did it. The only one I’ve got to convince is my editor.” I reached across to the phone and took the exclusion off. “Ramirez,” I said, “wanta go after the Society?”

  Jake’s back. Cups, spoons, and Sanka.

  “I did,” Ramirez said in a voice that could have frozen the Salt River, “but your developer was broken, and you couldn’t get me a picture.”

  Mrs. Ambler and Taco.

  I hit the exclusion button again and left my hand on it. “Stop,” I said. “Print.” The screen went dark, and the print slid out into the tray. “Reduce frame. Permanganate bath by one percent. Follow on screen.” I took my hand off. “What’s Dolores Chiwere doing these days, Ramirez?”

  “She’s working investigative. Why?”

  I didn’t answer. The picture of Mrs. Ambler faded a little, a little more.

  “The Society does have a link to the lifelines!” Ramirez said, not quite as fast as Hunter, but almost. “That’s why you requested your old girlfriend’s line, isn’t it? You’re running a sting.”