California Fire and Life

by Don Winslow

  “How about the smoke?”

  No question about it, no hesitation.

  “Black.”

  “Mr. Meissner,” Jack asks, “do you know where the rest of the family was?”

  “It was Nicky’s night with the kids,” he says. “A blessing.”

  “They’re divorced?”

  “Separated,” he says. “Nicky’s been staying with his mother.”

  “Where does she—”

  “Monarch Bay,” he says. “I told this to the police when they were here, so that they could notify.”

  Except, Jack thinks, Bentley tells me they’re still looking.

  “I feel for the kids,” says Meissner. He sighs one of those sighs that come only from advanced age. The man has seen too much.

  “In and out. In and out,” Meissner says. “Chess pieces.”

  “I know what you mean,” Jack says. “Well, thanks, Mr. Meissner.”

  “Howard.”

  “Howard,” Jack says. Then he asks, “Do you know why they were separated? What the issues were?”

  “It was Pamela,” he says sadly. “She drank.”

  So there it is, Jack thinks as he watches Meissner walk away. Pamela Vale has a night without the responsibility of the kids so she gets hammered. At some point she lets Leo out to go pee, forgets he’s out there and ends up in bed with a bottle and some cigs.

  So Pamela Vale is drinking and smoking in bed. The vodka bottle tips over and most of the contents spills onto the floor. Pamela Vale either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. Then, with a burning cigarette still in her hand, she passes out. The sleeping hand drops the cigarette onto the vodka. The alcohol ignites into a hot flame, which catches the sheets, and the blankets, and the room fills with smoke.

  Normally it would take ten to fifteen minutes for the cigarette to ignite the sheets. Ten to fifteen minutes in which Pamela Vale might have smelled smoke, felt the heat, woke up and stamped her foot on the cigarette and that would have been that. But the vodka would ignite instantly, at a much greater heat than a smoldering cigarette—enough to ignite the sheets—and because she’s passed out she never has a chance.

  It’s the smoke, not the flames, that kills Pamela Vale.

  Jack can picture her lying in bed, passed out drunk, her respiratory system working even though her mind has shut down, and that respiratory system just sucks in that smoke, and fills her lungs with it, until it’s too late.

  She suffocates on smoke while she’s asleep.

  Like a drunk choking on his own vomit.

  So there’s that small blessing for Pamela Vale. She literally never knew what hit her.

  They had to scrape her off the springs, but she was dead before the intense heat merged her flesh into the metal. She never woke up, that’s all. The fire broke out, her system inhaled a lethal dose of smoke, and then the fire—fueled by all her belongings and her home—became fast and hot and strong enough to melt the bed around her.

  An accidental fire, an accidental death.

  It’s one of those cruel but kind ironies of a fatal house fire. Cruel in the sense that it chokes you with your own life. Takes those crucial physical things—your furniture, your sheets, your blankets, the paint on your walls, your clothes, your books, your papers, your photographs, all the intimate accumulations of a life, a marriage, a physical existence—and forces them down your throat and chokes you on them.

  Most people who die in fires die from smoke inhalation. It’s like lethal injection—no, more like the gas chamber, because it’s really a gas, carbon monoxide, the old CO, that kills you—but in any case you’d prefer it to the electric chair.

  The technical phrase in the fire biz is “CO asphyxiation.”

  It sounds cruel, but the kind part is that you’d sure as hell prefer it to burning at the stake.

  So there it is, Jack thinks.

  An accidental fire and an accidental death.

  It all fits.

  Except you have the sooty glass.

  And flames from burning wood aren’t blood red—they’re yellow or orange.

  And the smoke should be gray or brown—not black.

  But then again, Jack thinks, these are the observations of an old man in bad light.

  He carries Leo back to the car. Opens up the trunk and digs around until he finds an old Frisbee he left in there. Gets a bottle of water from out of the front seat and pours some into the Frisbee. Sets Leo down and the little dog goes right for the water.

  Jack finds an old Killer Dana sweatshirt in the trunk and lays it on the passenger seat. Rolls the windows halfway down, figuring that it’s early enough in the morning that the car won’t get too hot, and then sits Leo down on the sweatshirt.

  “Stay,” Jack says, feeling kind of stupid. “Uhh, lie down.”

  Dog looks at Jack like he’s relieved to be getting some kind of order and settles down into the sweatshirt.

  “And don’t, you know, do anything, okay?” Jack asks. Classic ’66 Mustang, and Jack’s spent hours refurbishing the interior.

  Leo’s tail whacks against the seat.

  “What happened in there, Leo?” Jack says to the dog. “You know, don’t you? So why don’t you tell me?”

  Leo looks up at him and wags his tail some more.

  But doesn’t say a word.

  “That’s okay,” Jack says.

  Jack deals with a lot of snitches. Seven years in the Sheriff’s Department and twelve in insurance claims and you deal with a lot of snitches. One of the ironies of the game: you rely on snitches and at the same time you despise them.

  Another plus for the dog column.

  Dogs are stand-up guys.

  They never snitch.

  So Leo says nothing except for the fact that he’s alive. Which sets off this sick little alarm in Jack’s brain.

  What Jack knows is that people will never burn the pooch.

  They’ll burn their houses, their clothing, their business, their papers—they’ll even burn each other—but they’ll never torch Fido. Every house fire Jack’s ever worked that turned out to be arson, the dog was somewhere else.

  But then again, Jack thinks, so were the people.

  And Pamela Vale was good people.

  Raising all that money to save the Strands.

  So let it go.

  He peels off the overalls and the rest of it.

  The house inspection will have to wait for a little while.

  You got two kids going through a divorce, then their mother dies and their house burns down. Better get them their dog.

  Small consolation for a shitty deal.

  9

  Goddamn Billy Hayes strikes a match, cups his hands against the breeze and lights his cigarette.

  He’s sitting on a metal folding chair in the cactus garden outside his office at California Fire and Life, claim files in his lap, reading glasses on his nose and a Camel in his lips.

  The cactus garden was Billy’s idea. Since the People’s Republic of California banned smoking in the workplace, Billy has been the company chairperson of COSA, the California Outdoor Smokers Association. He figured since he spent most of his time out in the courtyard anyway, it might as well be someplace he liked, so he had it rebuilt as a cactus garden.

  If you need to talk to Billy and he isn’t in his office, he’s outside sitting on his folding chair, working on his files and sucking on a stick. One time Jack came in on a Sunday night and moved Billy’s desk out there. Billy thought that was just about as amusing as filtered cigarettes.

  Billy came from Tucson twenty years ago to head up Cal Fire and Life’s Fire Claims Division. He didn’t want to come, but the company said it was “up or out,” and up meant coming out to California. So here he is, sitting out among the ocotillo and barrel cactus and the sand and the rocks amidst the aroma of sage, tobacco and carbon monoxide coming off the traffic streaming by on the 405.

  Goddamn Billy Hayes is a small man—five-six—and so thin he looks like one of those
dolls where there’s just wire under the little clothes. Got a sun-shriveled tan face, a silver crew cut and eyes as blue as Arctic ice. He wears good blue suits over cowboy boots. Used to keep a .44 Colt holstered on his belt—back when he had a few arson losses on some mob-owned buildings in Phoenix, and the Trescia family intimated that if he didn’t pay up maybe he’d have an “accident.”

  Here’s how Billy handles that.

  Goddamn Billy walks into young Joe Trescia’s real estate office with the .44 in his hand, pulls the hammer back, sticks the barrel up under young Joe’s nose and says, “I’m about to have me one hell of a goddamn accident here.”

  Five wise guys standing there—scared too shitless to reach for their own hardware because it’s clear this little nut ball would splatter Joe Jr.’s brains all over the wall. Which would make Joe Sr. very unhappy, so they just stand there sweating and saying silent prayers to St. Anthony.

  Young Joe looks up the blue steel barrel at those blue steel eyes and says, “I’ve decided to look elsewhere for our insurance needs.”

  But that was the old days, and they don’t let you do that kind of thing anymore, especially not in California, where it would be deemed inappropriate. (“I mean, goddamn it,” Billy said, relaying the story to Jack one night over Jack Daniel’s with beer chasers, “in a state where they won’t let you smoke, you know they ain’t gonna let you splatter some greaseball’s brains all over the wall.”) So the pistol now sits on the top shelf of Billy’s bedroom closet.

  What we got now instead of guns, Billy thinks, is we got lawyers.

  Not as fast, but every bit as lethal and a hell of a lot more expensive.

  Only thing more expensive than having lawyers is not having lawyers, because what insurance companies do these days—in addition to selling insurance and paying claims—is they get sued.

  We get sued, Billy thinks, for not paying enough, paying too slow, paying too fast, but especially for not paying at all.

  Which is what you got to do when you got an arson, or a phony theft, or a car accident that didn’t really happen, or even a dead insured who isn’t really dead but who’s slurping piña coladas in Botswana or some such goddamn place.

  You gotta deny those claims. Say, Sorry, Charlie, no money; and then of course they sue you for “bad faith.”

  Insurance companies are scared shitless of bad faith lawsuits.

  You end up spending more on lawyers and court costs than you would have just to pay the goddamn claim, but goddamn it, you just can’t go around paying money you don’t owe.

  Another Goddamn Billy dictum: “We don’t pay people to burn their own houses down.”

  Unless, of course a judge and/or jury disagrees with you.

  Finds that you “unreasonably” denied the claim or paid less than you should. Then you’re in bad faith and you’re also neck deep in a downwardly swirling shitter, because they hit you with not only the “contractual damages,” but also “compensatory damages,” and—if they really hate you—punitive damages.

  Then you do pay your insureds to burn their own house down, and you also pay them compensatories for the pain and anguish you caused them, and you pay a few million in punitive damages if the scum-sucking, bottom-feeding goddamn plaintiff’s attorney has managed to whip the jury into a froth about how mean and nasty you were to the poor insureds who burned their own goddamn house down in the first place.

  So it’s entirely possible—possible, shit, it’s happened—to deny a $10,000 theft claim and get popped for a cool mil in a bad faith judgment.

  You get the right lawyer, the right judge and the right jury, the very best thing that can happen to you in your whole life is that your insurance company denies your claim.

  Which is why Billy sends Jack Wade out on the Vale loss, because Jack is the best adjuster he’s got.

  Goddamn Billy’s thinking these thoughts while he’s looking through the Vales’ homeowner’s policy and what he sees is that this loss is a beaut: a million-five on the house itself; $750,000 on personal property, propped up with another $500,000 in special endorsements.

  Not to mention a dead wife.

  With a $250,000 life policy on her.

  All of which is why he handed this one to Jack Wade.

  He knows Jack, so he knows that whatever else happens, Jack is going to do the job.

  10

  Here’s the story on Jack Wade.

  Jack grows up in Dana Point, which in those days is a small beach town with a couple of motels, a few diners and surf to die for. In fact, so many surfers actually die for the surf that the beach gets the nickname Killer Dana.

  Jack’s old man is a contractor so Jack grows up working. Jack’s mom is a contractor’s wife so she gets it: as soon as her little boy is big enough to hold a hammer he’s on jobs with his dad after school, weekends and summers. Jack’s seven years old and he’s holding the hammer for his dad until his dad reaches back and then smack, that hammer’s in Dad’s palm because little Jack is on the job. He gets bigger he gets to do bigger stuff. Jack’s thirteen, he’s in there tacking framing, hanging Sheetrock, toeing in footings. He’s sixteen he’s on roofs nailing down the shingles.

  Jack works.

  When he isn’t working he does what every other kid in Dana Point does—he surfs.

  Learns this from his old man, too, because John Sr. was one of the early guys out there on a longboard. John Sr. was out there riding a Dale Velzy ten-foot wooden longboard in the days when surfers were considered bums, but John Sr. doesn’t give a shit because he knows he works for a living and bums don’t.

  This is what John Sr. tells Jack like maybe only a million times on the beach or on the job. What he tells him is, “There’s work and there’s play. Play is better, but you work to earn the play. I don’t care what you do in this world, but you do something. You earn your own living.”

  “Yeah, Dad.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” John Sr. says. “But I’m telling you: you do the job, you do it right, you earn your paycheck. Then the rest of your time is yours, you don’t owe anybody shit, you don’t owe any explanations, you have paid your way.”

  So Jack’s father teaches him to work and to surf. Turns him on to all the good stuff: In-N-Out Burgers, Dick Dale & His Del-Tones, tacos carne asada at El Maguey, longboards, the beach break at Lower Trestles, the old trailer park at Dana Strands.

  Young Jack thinks it might be the most beautiful place in the world, this long ridge overlooking Dana Strand Beach. The trailer park has been closed for years; all there is now is a few decrepit old buildings and some trailer pads, but when he’s up there among the eucalyptus and the palms which overlook the gorgeous stretch of beach that curves into the big rock at Dana Head, well, it’s the most beautiful place in the world.

  Young Jack spends hours there—hell, days there—on the last undeveloped hillside on the south coast. He’ll surf for a while, then hike up the ravine that leads up the bluff and slip under the old fence and wander around. Go sit in the old rec hall building where they used to have Ping-Pong tables and a jukebox and a kitchen that put out burgers and dogs and chili for the trailer park patrons. Sometimes he sits there and watches the lightning storms that crash over Dana Head, or sometimes he sits up there during the whale migration and spots the big grays moving north up the coast. Or sometimes he justs sits there and stares at the ocean and does nothing.

  His dad doesn’t let him do a lot of nothing. John Sr. keeps him pretty busy, especially as young Jack gets older and can handle more work.

  But sometimes when they’ve finished a big job they take the truck down to Baja and find some little Mexican fishing village. Sleep in the back of the truck, surf the miles of empty beach, take siestas under palm trees in the ferocious midday heat. In the late afternoon they order fish for dinner and the locals go out and catch it and have it ready by the time the sun goes down. Jack and his dad sit at an outdoor table and eat the fresh fish, with warm tortillas right off the grill, and drink ice-
cold Mexican beer and talk about the waves they caught or the waves that caught them or just about stuff. Then maybe one of the villagers gets out his guitar, and if Jack and his dad have had enough beers they join in singing the canciones. Or maybe they just lie in the back of the truck listening to a Dodgers game through the crackle of the radio, or just talk to the background of a mariachi station, or maybe just fall asleep staring at the stars.

  Do a few days of this and then drive back to el norte to go back to work.

  Jack graduates from high school, does a couple of semesters at San Diego State, figures that ain’t it and takes the test for the Sheriff’s Department. Tells his dad he wants to try something different from Sheetrock and 2 by 6s for a while.

  “I can’t blame you,” says his dad.

  Jack aces the written exam, and he’s bulked up from the construction work and the surfing, so he gets on with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Does the usual gigs for a few years—serves papers, picks up fugitive warrants, does car patrols—but Jack is a smart kid and wants to move up and there’s no spot in Major Crimes so he applies for fire school.

  Figuring that if you know construction you got a jump on destruction.

  He’s right about this.

  He rips fire school.

  11

  “Prometheus,” the little man in the tweed suit says.

  Jack’s like, Pro-who? And what the hell does it have to do with fire?

  The lecturer acknowledges the blank stares of the class.

  “Read your Aeschylus,” he says, adding to the general puzzlement. “When Prometheus gave fire to mankind, the other gods chained him to a boulder and sent eagles to pick at his liver for all eternity. If you consider what man has done with fire, Prometheus got off easy.”

  Jack had expected fire school to be taught by a fireman—instead he has this tweed-jacket professor named Fuller from the chemistry department of Chapman mumbling about gods and eternity and telling the students in a thick Irish accent that if they don’t understand the chemistry of fire, they can never understand the behavior of fire.