by Ninie Hammon
She tried again to rouse Seth.
“Seth! Seth, can you hear me? Answer me. Seth. Seth!”
Nothing. His head dangled on his neck, limp. The blood from the wound in his hair streamed down the sides of his face and dripped off the cleft in his chin onto the front of the silver straight jacket of duct tape across his chest.
Billy Joe moaned. He was lying on his side on the floor where Seth had placed him, next to the whiskey barrel beside the front door.
“Bije, Bije! Listen to me. Open your eyes.”
Correction—eye. His right eye was completely swollen shut. And so was Sarabeth’s left eye. Between the two of them, they only had one functioning set. She almost laughed; hysteria, first cousin to panic.
And panic was crawling around inside her, a rat gobbling up her guts. She realized she was crying. Tears were streaming down her face, even out of her swollen eye, and her body was shaking. But she wasn’t making a sound. The silent tears themselves terrified her and she began to scream.
“Help! Help me! Please, somebody. Help us!”
Who was there to hear? On the little bit of road she could see from her vantage point, she’d watched the train of fire trucks barrel up the hillside. Everybody was focused on the fire. No one would pay any attention to the Quart House. Why would they? It was the distillery that was burning.
And somehow, that fire was going to come for her. Bubba’d said so. Bubba, the man who’d murdered her father. Bubba’d said the fire would burn her alive. How it was to happen, she couldn’t figure out. There was only grass on the hillside stretching up to the warehouse. Did he expect a grass fire to catch the stone-walled Quart house on fire? Even she could see the wind was blowing the other way, across the hill, not down it.
But Bubba Jamison had promised, and she was certain he wasn’t the kind of man who’d break a promise like that.
Darrell Hayes waved off the EMT’s effort to bandage his left arm where he’d been grazed by one of Jimmy Dan’s bullets in the gunfight.
An ambulance crew had already taken the sheriff’s body back into Brewster, but two other ambulances, one from Brewster and another from Bardstown were hanging around in case some of the firemen needed assistance. It was an EMT from Bardstown who noticed his arm was bleeding, but the last thing Hayes wanted was a tidy white bandage on it. He wanted the bloody wound to show! He’d held Bubba’s pistol up beside his left shoulder and fired, meant to barely graze himself but the bullet had plowed a furrow half an inch deep across the top of his arm. It hurt! He wanted people to see it.
There were cops everywhere now, must have called in half the troopers out of the Columbia State Police post’s 11-county area. Some of them were from the Elizabethtown post, too. All the Sheriff’s Department deputies were there as well, but they weren’t doing a lot of policing and nobody expected them to. They were all too torn up over the death of Sonny Tackett.
After Hayes moved Sarabeth’s car, he and Bubba got the fire going good, with a gallon of gasoline poured on the old wood floor of Flying Ebony. Then Bubba drove away and left Hayes on the side of the road next to the covered bridge where he finally got radio coverage—you know how it is in the knobs!—to call for assistance. The fire had spread so fast the smoke was attracting gawkers like a hound dog attracts fleas 15 minutes after they’d pushed the warehouse door closed.
Deputy Jude Tyler had been the first law enforcement officer to respond to Hayes’ desperate radio call. He lived only a few miles away and he’d come roaring up with lights flashing and siren wailing. That’s how you responded to a Code 10-99—officer needs assistance. He’d taken the sheriff’s death hard, real hard. When he got over the shock, he’d bawled like a baby. Hayes had put his arm around the big man’s shoulders and had to fight to keep from crying himself.
He’d already told his story three times. To Tyler and to a second deputy when he showed up a little while later. And to the first trooper on the scene. He’d have to tell it a whole lot more times, of course, but he had it down. The story was sound.
And that story was going to cost Bubba Jamison a king’s ransom! Hayes intended to demand $500,000 for his contribution to Bubba’s master plan. Deposited in his name in an offshore account he’d set up years ago to stash the money he made as a mole. He had his own plan all worked out. Soon as things died down, he was going to take early retirement from the state police, tell folks he just couldn’t do it anymore, not after his good friend Sonny Tackett had died in his arms and all. They’d understand. Truth was, he’d always hated the holier-than-thou sheriff, was glad he was the one who got to put a bullet in him.
Hayes hadn’t made up his mind where he’d retire. Somewhere warm, with beaches and good fishing. Just give him a bucket of sunscreen, a straw hat and sunglasses and he’d be set to live the rest of his life in luxury.
The other officers had the scene under control. They’d blocked the road half a mile up in both directions. Of course, people just left their cars parked along the roadside, got out and walked. No way could you keep people away from this pyrotechnics display.
The crowd probably numbered 300 or 400 people now. But crowd control was not an issue. The only access to the distillery grounds was across the covered bridge. The Rolling Fork River, plus the 6-foot rock fence on the distillery side of it all the way around the property, kept the gawkers in check. People just stood on the road in front of the bridge, looked up the hill and watched the show. They’d be telling their grandchildren about seeing it. The biggest event in Callison County history—that’s what Bubba’d called it.
It was Craddock’s job to contain the fire to the warehouse where it started. Simple task; tall order. Two other warehouses sat on each side of Flying Ebony. Lt. Gibson and Black Gold on the uphill side; Citation and Black Star on the downhill side. All four were at risk, but the two closest to the road were Craddock’s primary concern—keep the fire out of Citation and Lt. Gibson and it wouldn’t spread to the distillery. And to the other eight warehouses.
The wind had shifted slightly, was no longer blowing due east—left to right across the hillside. It was tapering a little south now, downhill, which put Citation and Black Star in greater danger. Craddock decided to concentrate his limited resources and manpower on Citation.
He turned and shouted to the men he’d set in position with hoses trained and ready. “Wet it down!”
Streams of water shot up into the sky and down onto the tar roof of Citation, already so hot the water turned instantly into steam.
The heat was more fierce than any blaze the firemen had ever fought. The air was so superheated it scorched their noses and mouths every time they inhaled. In their double-layered Kevlar jackets, the firefighters felt like baking potatoes popped into the oven for supper.
Assistant fire chief Harold Baxter reached up to adjust his helmet.
“Jeeze!” he whispered under his breath, “Jeeze, Louise!” He concentrated on what the chief was saying, refused to think about his helmet, which was warping in the heat.
“Harold, take a dozen men and hose down the inside,” Craddock said.
The man nodded and gestured for the other firefighters to follow. They dragged hoses from the hydrant next to the distillery office through the big door on the front of Citation. Half the 12-man crew went down the center aisle of the warehouse to the back wall, spraying the racks of barrels as they went; the other half stood near the doorway and fired water up at the ceiling.
The assistant chief and his men had only been in the warehouse a couple of minutes though, when the metal siding on Flying Ebony suddenly disintegrated, shooting a wall of fire 60 feet into the air. Even with the wind bending the flames the other direction, fire leapt across the space between the two buildings and ignited the tar roof on Citation.
“Get out of there, Harold!” Craddock shouted through a megaphone so hot the metal burned his lips. “Get your men—” The megaphone in his hands squealed and went dead.
The men inside the warehouse had
not heard Craddock’s frantic command, but they saw smoke suddenly billow down from above. An edge of flames licked through the old wood ceiling and they didn’t need to hear the fire chief’s warning to know they were in danger.
“Out, now!” Baxter yelled.
The men dropped hoses and nozzles, abandoned $17,000 worth of equipment and raced for the door as the building filled with thick, black smoke that reeked of burning tar. The firemen barely escaped with their lives.
Within minutes, Black Star’s roof caught, too.
All of a sudden, Flying Ebony collapsed. With a mighty roar that launched whiskey barrels and flaming debris hundreds of feet into the air, Flying Ebony imploded. The sides fell in, the roof crashed down and the crushed whiskey barrels inside squirted burning alcohol in every direction, hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid flames spewing out toward all four of the other warehouses. And toward the firemen, scrambling to move their defense line back.
The walls on Citation burst into flames and doubled the size of the fire. Black Star quickly tripled it. Flames shot 20 stories up into the sky.
The flaming alcohol that gushed out of the inferno of Flying Ebony morphed like dragon’s breath into rivers of fire, molten lava that flowed toward the other two burning buildings. Flowed around them, downhill from the dying warehouse. Toward the Quart House below.
Seth opened his eyes. The world was all wrong so he closed them again. He was having trouble catching his breath; there was something tight around his chest. And that smell. Something was burning.
His eyes popped open and he jerked his head up. The pain in the back of his skull hit him so hard he couldn’t suck in the next breath. The thoughts in his mind were in a blender and he chased madly after first one and then another, trying to catch one of them long enough to think it.
He groaned.
“Seth!” A voice near him spoke his name. Sarabeth!
“Can you hear me? Listen to me, Seth. Stay with me! Don’t pass out again.”
He turned toward the sound. The movement slammed a baseball bat into the back of his head and he felt sick. Dizzy. He used every bit of the will he could summon to fight the darkness on the edge of his vision, a black mat framing a picture that threatened to close up around him
“Talk to me, Seth!”
“Sarabeth.” That was all he could manage, just the one word. But it was enough. Just saying her name focused and centered him. The spinning world slowed down, the blackness receded and light flooded his sight and his mind.
“Can you see me? Look at me.”
As soon as he did, it all came back to him. Detective Hayes in his office pulling a gun and Seth thinking at first it was a joke. Bubba. He hit Sarabeth!
Sonny!
The memory of the gunshot, of Sonny’s head disappearing as he slid down out of Seth’s sight, was a blow that took so much breath out of him he almost blacked out again.
He’d lunged at Hayes. The world was blank after that.
But it was blank no longer. A two-second survey of his surroundings brought another groan. Look at her, taped up to a post.
“Seth McAllister, if you don’t say something I’m going to scream.”
“Don’t do that.” His voice was weak and breathy. “You wouldn’t want to upset the neighbors and have them call the police.”
“Seth. Double Springs … look.”
Then he focused for the first time on the view out the big picture window on the front of the Quart House and he stopped breathing altogether.
A nightmare inferno had taken over the hillside above them. Flying Ebony was a ball of flames that stretched as tall as the building itself up into the sky, belching out a cloud of black smoke that rose up beyond his vision.
The roofs on Citation and Black Star were burning, too.
Then with a sudden, thunderous crash, Flying Ebony collapsed. The implosion shot flames in every direction, hurled fireballs into the sky and squirted out geysers of flaming bourbon. It looked like a blow torch had been turned on Citation and Black Star. Within seconds, they went from flaming roofs to writhing fireballs.
Seth watched rivers of flaming bourbon from Flying Ebony edge around the other burning warehouses, ooze into the space between them and around the ends of them, encircling them in fire.
And the lava of burning bourbon, three streams of it, began to flow down the hillside.
“Seth?”
It was all he could do to drag his eyes away from the conflagration to look at her. The slight movement of his head made him dizzy and the world spun.
“Bubba told me what was going to happen but I didn’t understand.” She nodded toward the window. “He said we’d get to watch death come for us. That’s why he tied us up here like this. He wanted us to see the fire coming down the hill to burn us alive.”
She stopped, took a couple of breaths, but still could only manage a hoarse whisper. “We’re going to die.”
He wanted to comfort her, to tell her it wasn’t so, that something would happen, that somebody would come. But he didn’t believe it and neither would she if he said it.
“Seth, I’m scared.”
It wasn’t a very manly thing to say, but it was reality. “I’m scared, too.” Their eyes met and locked; they drew strength from each other, two stands of wire wrapped together.
Chapter 28
Ben wasn’t really surprised when Sarabeth was late to supper. She was often late. When you were a newspaper editor stuff just came up. News happens, she always said. She was probably off covering a car wreck somewhere.
Supper was usually at five o’clock. She was an hour late. The boys sat in the living room of the big, quiet house, waiting. They tried to carry on normal conversation, tried to talk about college. Ben really would be going, once Jake told the police his story. And Jake was on his way to the Marines! But neither could keep his mind on chit-chat for long and soon the room grew silent.
Another hour passed before Jake finally said what Ben was thinking.
“You think something’s wrong? She’s not here and she hasn’t called.”
Ben looked at the dark police scanner on the mantle. He hated the thing, always kept it turned off unless Sarabeth was home. It squalled and squeaked and made all manner of weird noises. Then sudden bursts of static would interrupt voices in garbled police-speak dispatching unit this and that to code something and something else. It was massively annoying. But he stepped to it now and switched it on, thinking maybe it would give a hint to Sarabeth’s whereabouts.
It gave more than a hint. Within seconds, it was clear where every police officer, fire fighter and rescue squad member in a 10-county area was located. Double Springs was burning. No wonder Sarabeth was late to supper!
Jake and Ben dashed to the front porch. The northern sky was dark, like a storm was moving in. That couldn’t possibly be smoke!
“Come on!” Ben said. “And bring those pictures of Doodlebug with you. I want to know if Sarabeth sees the same thing in them we do.”
The boys hopped into Jake’s Jeep Wrangler and tore through town toward Ballard Springs Road. Ben was excited. He’d only once gone with his sister to cover a fire. It had been a simple house fire, but it had been amazing and sobering. He’d stood with the other on-lookers behind the fire line, looking at hell through the front window, flames eating the room, devouring the curtains and the couch and the pictures on the wall.
As soon as they cleared the last street and headed out of town, they could see a gigantic black pall hanging over the knobs around Cade’s Crossing. It rose thousands of feet into the air, like a mushroom cloud after a nuclear detonation.
They quickly discovered they weren’t the only ones rushing to see the fire. Traffic was as thick as a crowd on their way to a football game. A half mile from the distillery, a Kentucky State Police trooper stood in the road turning cars around and sending them back the way they came. Most people simply drove back down the road until they could find a place to park on the roadside,
got out and started walking. Ben and Jake pulled over before they reached the trooper and joined the throng.
Above them, helicopters hung in the air like dragon flies, swooping down as low as they dared so the news cameramen inside could film the scene. Ben wouldn’t have wanted to be up in one of those choppers in this wind.
It was impossible to judge the size of the crowd when Ben and Jake turned the final bend in the road and could see the fire on the hillside. There must have been thousands of people. Like the other onlookers, they stopped in their tracks when they could finally see the fire itself. It was an sight neither of them would ever forget.
Sweat dripped into Chief Craddock’s eyes and made them water. He thought about his wife, peeling onions.
“I might as well think of something sad,” Betty’d always tell him, “’cause I’m already crying. No sense wasting a good cry.”
Maybe he ought to go ahead and cry, too.
Stretched out before him as far as he could see was an inferno that defied description. The Family Five were ablaze, belching flames 35 stories high and smoke thousands of feet into the air. The TV news helicopters were reporting that you could see a black smudge on the horizon from 40 miles out.
The gigantic writhing fireball of burning alcohol on the hilltop produced tornadoes of flames that danced in the air above it. When walls and roofs collapsed, the crushed barrels shot out geysers of whiskey that squirted up into the sky until they hit a pocket of oxygen, then ignited in explosions of red-orange flames.
The furnace heat of the blaze radiated out 300 yards in every direction. Blistering, unbreathable air bubbled the paint on the pumper truck they’d had to abandon, and exploded the tires.
All they could do was fall back in the face of the flames’ advance. They couldn’t fight such a monster. Even with almost 100 firefighters at his disposal, from 20 different departments, Craddock had been unable to save a single warehouse. They’d just gone up one after another—all five of them had burned.
