“I always wondered what the hell this woman Florence had to do with anything. And I was there for, what, a week?”
The guy with the Lexus pulled his feet inside the car and shut the door. I caught sight of the poodle. His nose was just above the crest of the water, the ball in his mouth slowing his progress. A little wake formed behind him in the greasy sea-water. I mourned the expensive upholstery inside the Lexus.
The first boom was almost subterranean—too low for the human ear. The girl with Yellow Pants whipped her head around like a startled herbivore. The inside of the Lexus was filling up with beautiful orange-red blossoms, a turbulence of roiling flame that broke like a wave against the tinted rear window. The car began to rock back and forth. The rear window splintered into a jagged web woven by a drunken spider.
I heard someone yell something. It came from the stairs that ran along the side of the deck. It was a familiar voice. The poodle stopped swimming and looked up at the car. The girl with Yellow Pants reached for her white wine. Disorientation swept the deck.
There was something about the color of the flame. I ran to the edge of the deck to get a closer look. Yellow Pants huffed at me as I shoved his chair out of the way.
I heard Jackie Swaitkowski again, yelling my name. By then I knew what was going on with the flame. I thought I was probably out of time, but there was nothing left to do but leap over the railing above the stairwell, almost landing on Jackie, who was down there staring at the car, pressed against the wall with the back of her hand stuck to her mouth. I grabbed a handful of her shirtfront. She yanked back involuntarily.
“Move.”
When she saw it was me, she stopped resisting. I pulled her up the staircase, shouldered open the main entrance to the restaurant, and slammed into the cigarette machine that filled the vestibule just inside the door. The air began to glow a soft, flickering yellow.
“Sam?”
I pulled her around the pay phone and rack of brochures that also clogged the vestibule and shoved her inside. The place was almost empty. A man with a thin black moustache was behind a glass counter standing in front of an old-fashioned cash register. Below were rows of breath mints and kid-sized candy bars. He was staring at the brilliant, fuzzy glow from outside that was flooding the interior of the restaurant, one hand feeling around the top of the counter for the telephone.
We plowed over a sign that said “Please Seat Yourself” and made for the back of the room. The path was blocked by a table filled with Happy Hour hors d’oeuvres and crudites. Jackie tried to pull away from me.
“What the hell are you doing?”
I tightened my grip on her shirt and threw her over the table. She slid across the surface through buckets of buffalo-style chicken wings and big glass bowls filled with green peppers and celery sticks. I put my hands under the table and flipped the whole thing over on its side. A big fist of air punched from behind, and a glittering spray of glass that felt like electric sleet washed my back as I vaulted the overturned pine-slab table.
It was heavy enough to save us from being flayed alive by the hurricane of pressure-treated beams and floor joists, window frames, Cinzano umbrellas, ashtrays and Long Islanders that blew in from the Windsong deck.
—
Some time after that a small woman with short cropped black hair was pulling at my fingers. They were woven together behind Jackie’s head, which I was holding off the ground. The woman was speaking only to me, since Jackie had her eyes closed. Or one eye for sure. The other was too mashed up to tell.
The woman said something to me, but I couldn’t hear her. I shook my head.
“It would be helpful if you let me examine her, sir,” she shouted.
The big slab table had saved our lives, but hadn’t stopped the blast debris from swirling down on top of us. A piece of something, maybe the big glass salad bowl from the appetizer table, had slammed into the side of Jackie’s face. I didn’t see it happen, but I saw the result. When the short woman found us, I was telling her why baseball was never the same after the advent of free agency, and checking her breathing periodically by putting my cheek down next to her nose.
I let the short woman move her hands down under Jackie’s head as I moved mine under her neck. She used her thumb to pull open Jackie’s good eye, into which she shot the beam of a tiny flashlight. When she was done she poked around Jackie’s chest with a stethoscope. While she was doing that another medic ran up with an elaborate- looking plastic thing in tow that he threw on the ground with a clattery smack. Without looking up, the short woman shot out an order that caused the guy to turn on his heel and run off.
“What about the others?” I asked, but she didn’t answer me, and I didn’t want to ask her again until she was ready.
She eventually looked at me.
“Sorry?” she asked.
“The others. On the deck. What about them?”
“How many were there?”
“I don’t know. Five?”
She went back to Jackie, gently folding her hands down by her sides and configuring the plastic thing into the brace it was obviously meant to be.
“I’ll tell the recovery people. Locate parts for five,” she said.
“Parts?”
“I really need you to let me work, sir.”
She put her soft little hands on my wrists and I let go. That’s when I realized I was listening to my breathing from inside my head, and the sound of a little dog barking frantically in the distance.
I lay back and looked up at the sky, still a lovely pale blue, with a faint hint of pink and purple from the sunset over on the western horizon and the flickering remains of the fire on the edge of the docks, seagulls drifting into view, wondering what all the commotion was about.
TWO
JOE SULLIVAN was the kind of guy directors always cast as a cop—thick around the middle, bullet-shaped head upholstered in blond crew-cut hair and dotted with small, close-set eyes. That he was, in fact, a cop didn’t help. Always wore a cynical, half-bored, half-suspicious expression to match the big Ford patrol car and tough cop sunglasses. Smith & Wesson short-barrel .38 and a walkie-talkie on his belt. Starched shirts and spit-polished shoes. Natural defenses.
I was up on a ladder when he pulled into my driveway. It was mid-afternoon and the sun was parked directly over the Little Peconic Bay. There was just enough haze in the air to diffuse the light and contain the fuzzy summer heat. A seasonal southwesterly was blowing hard enough to move the leaves on the trees along the back of the property, but not enough to dry off sweat or clear the air. Eddie, the mutt that shared the house with me, was curled up under the scraggly rhododendron that flanked the side porch. I was in a white T-shirt and cut-offs, work boots and white socks. The tool belt and nail apron cinched around my waist dragged the cutoffs uncomfortably down on my hips. I had a framing square in one hand and a hammer in the other. I was trying to grow a third hand to hold a level when I heard Sullivan’s car crunching up the gravel drive. I’d already set the ridge beam, now secured by two temporary sixteen-foot two-by’s. At least I hoped I had. The top angle on the first rafter seemed right, but there was something wrong with the bird’s mouth notch where it joined the plate. So maybe the top angle really wasn’t as good as I thought it was.
“Yo, Sam,” Sullivan called from below. “What’re you doing?”
I took the two framing nails out of my mouth.
“Raising high the roof beams.”
Eddie staggered out from under the rhododendron to say hello. Normally he’d have hopped up to a visitor with a sort of sideways, wagging bounce, but the heat had undermined his social skills. Sullivan squatted down to scratch his ears.
“Those ain’t beams,” he yelled up to me. “Beams’re horizontal. Those’re rafters.”
“Take that up with Seymour.”
