He raced back to the first alarm box and pulled on his shoes, which he’d left there. He snatched up his revolver, stepped over a border of azaleas, waded through bloom-laden primrose, and splashed through a couple of puddles on a concrete walkway.
Only then did he realize the rain had stopped falling during the few minutes he had been in his apartment. The ficus and palm trees were still dripping, as was the shrubbery. The wet fronds and leaves were bejeweled with thousands of tiny ruby reflections of the growing fire.
He turned and, like his neighbors, looked back at the building, ” startled to see how fast the blaze was spreading. The apartment above his was engulfed. At broken windows, bloody tongues of flame licked across the remaining teeth of glass that bristled from the frames. Smoke billowed, and dreadful light pulsed and sputtered against the night.
Looking toward the street, Harry was relieved to see that fire trucks had entered the sprawling Los Cabos complex. Less than a block away, the sirens began to die, but the beacons kept flashing.
People had rushed into the street from other buildings, but they quickly got out of the way of the emergency vehicles.
An intense wave of heat drew Harry’s attention to his own building again. The blaze had broken through to the roof.
As in a fairy tale, high upon the shingled peak, fire like a dragon was silhouetted against the dark sky, lashing its yellow and orange and vermillion tail, spreading huge carnelian wings, scales scintillant, scarlet eyes flashing, roaring a challenge to all knights and would-be slayers.
11
Connie stopped for a pepperoni and mushroom pizza on the way home. She ate at the kitchen table, washing the food down with a can of Coors.
For the past seven years, she had rented a small apartment in Costa Mesa. The bedroom contained only a bed, a nightstand, and a lamp, no dresser; her wardrobe was so simple that she was easily able to store all of her clothes and shoes in the single closet. The living room contained a black leather recliner, a floor lamp on one side of the big chair for when she wanted to read, and an end table on the other side; the recliner faced a television set and VCR on a wheeled stand. The dining area in the kitchen was furnished with a card table and four folding chairs with padded seats. The cabinets were mostly empty, containing only the minimum pots and utensils for cooking quick meals, a few bowls, four dinner plates, four salad plates, four cups and saucers, four glasses — always four because that was the number in the smallest set she could find to buy — and canned goods. She never entertained.
Possessions did not interest her. She had grown up without them, drifting from one foster home and institution to another with only a battered cloth suitcase.
In fact she felt encumbered by possessions, tied down, trapped. She owned not a single knickknack. The only artwork or decoration on the walls was a poster in the kitchen, a photograph taken by a sky-diver from five thousand feet — green fields, rolling hills, a dry riverbed, scattered trees, two blacktop and two dirt roads narrow as threads, intersecting in the manner of lines on an abstract painting. She read voraciously, but all her books were from the library. All videotapes that she watched were rented.
She owned her car, but that was as much a machine of freedom as it was a steel albatross.
Freedom was the thing she sought and cherished, in place of jewelry and clothes and antiques and art, but it was sometimes more difficult to acquire than an original Rembrandt. In the long, sweet free-fall before the parachute had to be deployed, there was freedom. Astride a powerful motorcycle on a lonely highway, she could find a measure of freedom, but a dirt bike in the desert vastness was even better, with only vistas of sand and rocky outcroppings and withered scrub brush rolling toward the blue sky in all directions.
While she ate pizza and drank beer, she took the snapshots out of the manila envelope and studied them. Her dead sister, so like herself.
She thought about Ellie, her sister’s child, living up in Santa Barbara with the Ladbrooks, no image of her face among the pictures but perhaps as much like Connie as Colleen had been. She tried to decide how she felt about having a niece. As Mickey Chan suggested, it was a wonderful thing to have family, not to be alone in the world after having been alone for as long as she could remember. A pleasant thrill shivered through her when she thought about Ellie, but it was tempered by the concern that a niece might be an encumbrance far heavier than all the material possessions in the world.
What if she met Ellie and developed an affection for her?
No. She wasn’t concerned about affection. She had given and received that before. Love. That was the worry.
She suspected that love, though a blessing, could also be a confining chain. What freedom might be lost by loving someone — or by being loved? She didn’t know because she had never given or received any emotion as powerful and profound as love — or as what she thought love must be like, having read of it in so many great novels. She had read that love could be a trap, a cruel prison, and she had seen people’s hearts broken by the weight of it.
She had been alone so long.
But she was comfortable in her solitude.
Change involved a terrible risk.
She studied her sister’s smiling face in the almost-real colors of Kodachrome, separated from her by the thin glossy veneer of the photographic finish — and by five long years of death.
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: “It might have been!”
She could never know her sister. However, she could still know her niece. All she needed was the courage.
She got another beer from the refrigerator, returned to the table, sat down to study Colleen’s face for a while longer — and found a newspaper obscuring the photographs. The Register. A headline caught her eye: SHOOTOUT AT LAGUNA BEACH RESTAURANT… TWO DEAD, TEN WOUNDED.
For a long uneasy moment she stared at the headline. The paper hadn’t been there a minute ago, hadn’t been anywhere in the house, in fact, because she had never bought it.
When she’d gone to get a fresh beer from the refrigerator, her back had never been turned to the table. She knew beyond doubt that no one else was in the apartment. But even if an intruder had gotten in, she could not possibly have missed seeing him enter the kitchen.
Connie touched the paper. It was real, but the contact chilled her as deeply as if she had touched ice.
She picked it up.
It stank of smoke. Its pages were brown along the cut edges, feathering to yellow and then to white toward the center, as if it had been salvaged from a fire just before it burned.
12
The crowns of the tallest palm trees disappeared into roiling clouds of smoke.
Stunned and weeping residents moved back as firemen in yellow-and-black slickers and high rubber boots unrolled hoses from the trucks and pulled them across walkways, flowerbeds. Other firemen appeared at a trot, carrying axes. Some were wearing breathing apparatus so they could enter the smoke-filled condominiums. Their swift arrival virtually insured that most of the apartments would be saved.
Harry Lyon glanced toward his own unit, at the south end of the building, and a sharp pang of loss stabbed through him. Gone. His alphabetically shelved collection of books, his CDs neatly arranged in drawers according to type of music and then by the artist’s name, his clean white kitchen, carefully nurtured houseplants, the twenty-nine volumes of his daily diary which he had been keeping since he was nine (a separate journal for each year) — all gone. When he thought of the ravenous fire eating its way through his rooms, soot sifting over what little the fire didn’t consume, everything glossy turning mottled and dull, he felt nauseous.
He remembered his Honda in the attached garage behind the building, started in that direction, then halted because it seemed foolish to jeopardize his own life to save a car. Besides, he was the president of the homeowners’ association. At a time like this he ought to stay with his neighbors, offer them reassurance, comfort, advice about insurance and other issu
es.
As he holstered his revolver to avoid alarming the firemen, he remembered something the vagrant had said to him when he was pinned against the wall, the breath knocked out of him: First everything and everyone you love… then you!
When he thought about those words, considered the ramifications of them, profound fear crept spider-quick through him, worse than any fright he’d known so far, as dark as the fire was bright.
He headed for the garages, after all. Suddenly he desperately needed the car.
As Harry dodged firemen and rounded the side of the building, the air was filled with thousands of glowing embers like luminescent moths, swooping and fluttering, adance upon the spiraling thermal currents. High on the roof a cataclysmic crack was followed by a crash that jarred the night. A hail of burning shingles clattered down on the sidewalk and flanking shrubs.
Harry crossed his arms over his head, afraid the flaming cedar shakes would set his hair on fire, hoping that his clothes were still too damp to ignite. Slipping out of the firefall unharmed, he pushed through a wet iron gate still cold from the rain.
Behind the building, the wet blacktop was sequined with glass from exploded rear windows, spangled with puddles. Every mirrored surface swarmed with copper and claret images of the bright tempest raging on the roof of the main building. Glowing serpents slithered around Harry’s feet as he ran.
The back driveway was still deserted when he reached his garage door and yanked it up. But even as it was swinging out of the way, a fireman appeared and shouted at him to get out of there.
“Police!” Harry replied. He hoped that would buy him the few seconds he needed, though he didn’t pause to flash his badge.
Falling embers had seeded a few flames on the long garage roof. Thin smoke filled his double-wide stall, trickling down from the smouldering tar paper between the rafters and the shingles.
Keys. Harry was suddenly afraid he had left them on the foyer table or in the kitchen. Approaching the car, coughing because of the wispy but bitter smoke, he frantically patted his pockets and was relieved to hear the keys jingle in his sportcoat.
First everything and everyone you love…
He reversed out of the garage, shifted gears, drove past the fireman who had shouted, and escaped the far end of the driveway two seconds before an approaching fire truck would have turned in and blocked it. They nearly kissed bumpers as Harry swung the Honda into the street.
When he had driven three or four blocks with uncharacteristic recklessness, weaving through traffic and running red lights, the radio snapped on of its own accord. The vagrant’s deep, raspy voice echoed from the stereo speakers, startling him.
“Gotta rest now, hero. Gotta rest.”
“What the hell?”
Only a static hiss answered him.
Harry eased up on the accelerator. He reached toward the radio to switch it off, but hesitated.
” Very tired… a little nap…”
Hissing static.
“… so you have an hour…”
Hissing.
“…. but I‘ll be back…”
Hissing.
Harry kept glancing away from the busy street ahead, at the lighted dial of the radio. It glowed a soft green but recalled to him the radiant red eyes — first blood, then fire — of the vagrant.
“…. big hero… just walking meat…”
Hissing.
””… shoot anyone you like… big man… but shooting me… never the end of it… not me… not me….”
Hissing. Hissing. Hissing.
The car passed through a flooded depression in the pavement. Phosphorescent white water plumed like angels’ wings on both sides.
Harry touched the radio controls, half expecting an electric shock or worse, but nothing happened. He punched the OFF button, and the hissing stopped.
He didn’t try to run the next red traffic light. He eased to a stop behind a line of cars, struggling to sort through the events of the past several hours and make sense of them.
Who you gonna call?
He didn’t believe in ghosts or ghostbusters.
Nevertheless he was shivering, and not merely because his clothes were still damp. He switched on the heater.
Who you gonna call?
Ghost or not, at least the vagrant had not been hallucinated. He wasn’t a sign of mental breakdown. He was real. Not human, perhaps, but real.
That understanding was strangely calming. The thing Harry feared the most was not the supernatural or the unknown — but the internal disorder of madness, a threat that now seemed to have been replaced by an external adversary, bizarre beyond reckoning and terrifyingly powerful but, at least, external.
As the light changed to green and the traffic started moving again, he looked around at the streets of Newport Beach. He saw that he had headed west toward the coast and north from Irvine, and for the first time became consciously aware of where he was going. Costa Mesa. Connie Gulliver’s apartment.
He was surprised. The burning apparition had promised to destroy everyone and everything he loved before destroying him, and all by the break of dawn. Yet Harry had chosen to go to Connie before checking in with his own parents in Carmel Valley. Earlier he had admitted to a keener interest in her than he had previously been willing to acknowledge, but perhaps that admission had not exposed the true complexity of his feelings even to himself. He knew that he cared for her, though the why of his caring was still in part a mystery to him, considering how utterly different from one another they were and how tightly closed upon herself she was. Neither was he sure of the depth of his caring, except that it was deep, more than deep enough to be the biggest revelation in a day filled with revelations.
As he passed Newport Harbor, through the gaps between the commercial buildings on his left, he saw the tall masts of yachts thrusting into the night, sails furled. Like a forest of church steeples. They were reminders that, like many of his generation, he had been raised without any specific faith and, as an adult, had never managed to discover a faith of his own. It wasn’t that he denied the existence of God, only that he could not find a way to believe.
When you encounter the supernatural, who you gonna call? If not ghostbusters, then God. If not God… who you gonna call?
For most of his life Harry had placed his faith in order, but order was merely a condition, not a force he could call upon for help. In spite of the brutalities with which his job brought him into contact, he continued to believe, as well, in the decency and courage of human beings. That was what sustained him now. He was going to Connie Gulliver not merely to warn her but to seek her counsel, to ask her to help him find his way out of the darkness that had descended upon him.
Who you gonna call? Your partner.
When he stopped at the next red traffic light, he was surprised again, but this time not by what he found within himself. The heater had warmed the car and chased away the worst of his shivers. But he still felt a hard coldness over his heart. This newest surprise was in his shirt pocket, against his breast, not emotions but something tangible that he could fish out and hold and see. Four shapeless dark lumps. Metal. Lead. Though he could not begin to grasp how they had wound up in his pocket, he knew what the objects were: the shots that he had pumped into the vagrant, four lead slugs misshapen by high-velocity impacts with flesh, bone, and cartilage.
13
Harry took off his jacket, tie, and shirt to clean up as best he could in Connie’s bathroom. His hands were so grimy they reminded him of the vagrant’s hands, and required vigorous lathering to come clean. He washed his hair, face, chest, and arms in the sink, sluicing away some of his weariness with the soot and ashes, then slicked his hair back with her comb.
He could not do much with his clothes. He wiped them with a dry washcloth to remove the surface grit, but they remained somewhat spotted and heavily wrinkled. His white shirt was gray now, fouled by a vague perspiration odor and the heavier stench of smoke, but he had to put it on again be
cause he had no other clothes into which he could change. In memory, he had never allowed himself to be seen in such a disheveled state.
He attempted to rescue his dignity by securing the top button on his shirt and knotting his tie.
More than the dismaying condition of his clothes, the condition of his body worried him. His abdomen was sore where the hand of the mannequin had rammed into him. A dull ache throbbed in the small of his back and did not fade altogether until it reached halfway up his spine, a reminder of the force with which the hobo had slammed him into the wall. The back of his left arm, all along the triceps, was tender, as well, because he had landed on it when the hobo had thrown him out of the hallway into the bedroom.
While he had been on the move, running for his life, pumped up with adrenaline, he hadn’t been aware of his various pains, but inactivity revealed them. He was concerned that his muscles and joints might begin to stiffen. He was pretty sure, before the night was out, he would need to be quick and agile more than once if he hoped to save his butt.
In the medicine cabinet he found a bottle of Anacin. He shook four into the palm of his right hand, then capped the bottle and put it in a jacket pocket.
When he returned to the kitchen and asked for a glass of water with which to take the pills, Connie handed him a can of Coors.
He declined. “I’ve got to keep a clear head.”
“One beer won’t hurt. Might even help.”
“I don’t drink much.”
“I’m not asking you to mainline vodka with a needle.”
“I’d prefer water.”
“Don’t be a prig, for Christ’s sake.”
He nodded, accepted the beer, popped the tab, and chased the four aspirin with a long cold swallow It tasted wonderful. Maybe it was just what he needed.
Dragon Tears Page 14
