Oh God the heat the heat the heat I’m on fire I’m on fire help me Jesus Christ help me I’m on fire
The first thing Steve Kilduff saw was the orange glow flickering through the windows of the house.
He hand just turned onto the Five-Hundred block of San Amaron Drive, and when he perceived the glow at two hundred yards he knew that the house was on fire. Intuitively, he sensed that it was Drexel’s house, that it was Number 547, even though he was still too far away to read the number and to determine accurately the make and color of the sports car parked in the drive. His foot came off the accelerator and touched the brake, and the long conical beams of his headlights picked up the outline of a car parked in front of the house and picked up, too, the figure of a girl in a plastic raincoat standing immobile on the sidewalk, looking back.
And that was when the front door burst open and the man on fire came hurtling out.
Kilduff. thought: My God, my God, my God! He knew that it was Drexel, knew with that same intuitive certainty that it was Drexel and that Helgerman had been responsible, had gotten to Number Five. He saw the burning man, Drexel, veer to the left, stumbling over the land scaped front yard, through bottle brush and barrel cactus and Joshua trees, across the drive at the rear of the sports car—and his foot came crashing down hard on the brake. The machine slewed violently sideways, the rear end coming around on the rain-slick macadam street, the front wheels skipping up over the low curb. Kilduff was out of the car before it had rocked to a full stop, out and running after Drexel, no indecision, no weighing and considering, he wasn’t thinking at all; he was reacting, reflex, instinct, military training, pulling off his overcoat as he ran along the sidewalk, past the girl in the plastic raincoat. She was screaming, hysterical; and fifty yards away, bulling through a low thin hedge, Drexel was screaming with a different kind of hysteria. The night was alive with vibrating nightmare sounds.
Kilduff had the overcoat off now, and he closed the gap between himself and Drexel to twenty yards ... fifteen ... ten. They were on a wide expanse of neighboring lawn, on a cushiony surface dotted with rain ponds that glistened dancing silver highlights in the scintillation from the fanning, clinging flames. Kilduff overtook Drexel and threw the overcoat around him, the screams piercing his skin like long sharp needles, and pulled him down onto the wet grass. He held the overcoat around him, trying to smother the flames, his hands locked together at Drexel’s belt, feeling the heat scorch his body through the heavy cloth. And then they were rolling over and over through the cold, wet grass and Kilduff was able to gain his knees beside Drexel, smelling the stench of burned hair and burned flesh, and vomit came up into his throat and gagged him. He pulled the overcoat back, and the flames had given way to rising puffs of blackly acrid smoke; but Kilduff kept rolling him back and forth on the puddled grass for a long, long time.
When he finally stopped, he could hear screaming again, from close behind him, and he knew it was the girl in the raincoat. He shut his eyes and opened them again and looked down at the charred, smoking body, looked down at it long enough to confirm what he already knew —that the man was Larry Drexel—and then he turned away and let the vomit come boiling out of his throat.
Light flooded over him as he rose to wipe his mouth, and a frightened woman’s voice said, “I’ve called the police and the fire department—is that Mr. Drexel, is he dead?—oh dear Lord, I saw him running on fire...”
“Shut off that light,” Kilduff said. “Shut it the hell off.”
The light went off, and there was the sound of a door slamming. Kilduff got his arm under Drexel’s head and lifted it up; with his other hand he found one of the wrists, still hot, and probed for a pulsebeat. He couldn’t find one, and he thought that Drexel was dead; but then he realized the two terrible black-white things which had once been eyes were staring at him and somehow seeing him, somehow recognizing him, and the black gashed thing which had once been a mouth was working around a protruding tongue. Dry, brittle sounds came out, the sounds of twigs snapping in the darkness of a forest, and after that there were words, unrecognizable at first, but Kilduff put his ear very close to Drexel’s mouth and he could understand some of them.
“Helgerman . . . listen . . . Helgerman . . . ”
Kilduff wanted to vomit again. He wanted the girl behind him to stop screaming. He wanted to turn and run, get away from there, far, far away. But he said, “Don’t try to talk, Larry,” in a voice that was strangely gentle, strangely calm. “Don’t try to talk.”
But Drexel’s mouth continued to work, and the brittle sounds that became words reached Kilduff’s ears again. “Helgerman . . . dead . . . long-time dead.”
And the brittle sounds ceased, and there was a single, barely audible, undeniably final exhalation of breath, and the blackened lump of flesh which had been Larry Drexel died shuddering in Kilduff’s arms.
Orange Thursday
14
Thursday morning, 3:45 A.M.
Twin Peaks lay quiet and empty under an enveloping shroud of high, drifting fog and thinly cold rain-mist. The steep, winding expanse of Caveat Way was very dark, with only a single, pale-aureoled street lamp burning a half block from where the seemingly empty Ford Mustang was parked between two other cars.
But in the shadowed driver’s seat, slumped down beneath the wheel until his eyes were on a level with the sill of the closed window, the limping man sat nervously waiting. On the seat beside him lay the American Tourister briefcase, the catches unfastened, the .44 Ruger Magnum resting just inside the joined halves. His eyes were watchful, probing now and then the silhouetted darkness which blanketed the glass entranceway to Orange’s apartment building diagonally across the street.
He remained absolutely motionless, save for a soft, quick, nervous drumming of his fingers on the steering wheel. As he waited, he let his mind drift briefly to the recent events in Los Gatos.
He hadn’t seen the actual immolation of Green, but the sweeping wall of fire flashing toward him had been enough; Green had not survived the holocaust. As for his own escape, he had accomplished that without incident. It had taken him only a matter of seconds to clear the stone-and-mortar wall at the rear of the patio and to make his way quickly down the bank to the creek bed. No one had seen him, he was certain of that. The dead-end street had still been as dark and deserted as when he had left it, and the cross-street was likewise void of traffic when he took the rented Mustang onto it moments later. He had debated driving around to San Amaron Drive to see first-hand what had happened, but had decided against that almost immediately; there was no use inviting unnecessary risk.
So it had all gone very nicely.
Now there was only the problem of Orange.
As he had driven back toward San Francisco, the limping man had considered his original plan. He did not care for the fact that Orange lived in an apartment in a well-populated area; not at all like Green, who lived in a residential neighborhood that afforded such safety factors as the swallowing darkness of the creek bed and the walled-in patio and the dead-end street. Reaching Orange in the sanctity of his apartment building, in the limiting surroundings of San Francisco itself, would be dimcult—perhaps even foolhardy.
But Orange had to die—tonight, no later than dawn if at all possible.
He had considered the choices, the potentialities, and that fact was irrefutable. The proximity of Orange to Yellow and Green demanded the urgency, for there was no way of knowing if Orange knew of Yellow’s death—he wouldn’t know of Green’s as yet—or of the deaths of Blue and Red and Gray. There was no way of determining if Orange suspected strongly or even mildly that he, too, was a target. The idea would certainly have occurred to him if he
