Burning Man

Alan Russell Burning Man

PROLOGUE:

HELLFIRE AND DOGS OF WAR

Even before I pressed down hard on the gas, Sirius was aware that something was up. The dog knew me better than I knew myself. The dividing window between us was open, and he pushed me with his muzzle. Sometimes he begs treats off me that way, but he wasn’t looking for a handout this time.

“Whaduya want?” I asked in a Brooklyn accent three thousand miles removed from my own.

He rested his muzzle on my shoulder and I felt his hot breath on my neck. “Doggy breath,” I told him, but he wasn’t shamed at all.

“All right,” I said. “It could be a big call, a really big call. This might be your chance to make Rin Tin Tin look like a pussy.”

I moved my head to get a look at him, and he took that as an invitation to give me a lick.

“Cops don’t kiss other cops,” I told him, wiping away his slobber.

His eyes were sparkling. That’s what Jenny noticed when I first brought him home. “Look at his sparkling eyes,” she said. “They look like little stars.”

“Twinkle, twinkle,” I had said to her.

“What’s his name?” she asked.

The dog had kept his reserve with me for most of our first day together, but from the moment he and Jenny met they acted as if they were twins separated at birth.

“His name is Serle,” I said, curling my lip and using my most authoritarian German accent.

“What’s that mean?”

“Armed,” I said, “as in armed and dangerous.”

The way he was already cuddled up in Jenny’s arms didn’t make him look very dangerous. “That won’t do,” she said. “His name is Sirius.”

“You can’t be serious?”

Jenny ignored me. The dog’s ears had perked up when she dubbed him Sirius, no doubt because it sounded like Serle. “Just look at your sparkling eyes, Sirius,” Jenny had said.

She named him after the Dog Star, the brightest star in the night sky. It wasn’t a name exactly in keeping with LA’s furry finest. His peers had names like Duke, Jake, Rico, Bravo, Tango, and, of course, Joe Friday.

The dog nudged me again. The traffic was beginning to slow us down and Sirius was anticipating my next move. “All right,” I said and flipped on the siren. Sirius added to the sound effects with a few high notes of his own. One of the occupational hazards of being a K-9 cop is loss of hearing because of your partner’s barking and howling.

I probably should have given him the German command of Nein or Pfui, but instead I said, “Shut up, Elvis.” Sirius had been born and raised in Germany, but three years in California had him well on his way to becoming a surfer dude. He knew my slang well enough and stopped his howling.

The siren had its Moses-like parting effect, and once we were able to navigate through the blockage of traffic I flipped off the horn. Most of LA’s K-9 units work out of Metropolitan Division, which means on any given shift we can be called out to handle situations over an area of 470 square miles. No one puts more miles on its cars than a K-9 unit does. When the call had come in, we were dispatched because we were the closest to Benedict Canyon.

The city of Los Angeles is rife with canyons, with neighborhoods built up and around them. Benedict Canyon is an affluent area, and its residents usually feel far removed from urban LA. The ravine starts in the Hollywood Hills and drops down in a north-to-south direction, ending in Beverly Hills. Even small homes in the BC area usually command seven figures. Residents are enthusiastic about their special enclave, but occasionally snakes slither into paradise. Decades earlier, the Manson Family visited a house in Benedict Canyon on a fateful August night and when they left, five people were dead, including the actress Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant.

As if on cue to that bad history, the wind began to whistle and wail. To my right I caught a glimpse of a huge shadow moving past a streetlamp, and turned to see a body-sized palm frond drop from the sky. As the branch struck the street, I could hear its impact even through the squad car’s closed windows. The Santa Ana winds were blowing again, and it was a good thing LA was living up to its stereotype of not being a pedestrian town. No one was out walking, and those in their cars looked as if they just wanted to get home safe and sound. It was on nights like this that it was easy to imagine being back in the Old West. LA is the largest city in the country, but during Santa Ana conditions dust devils do their spinning, and tumbleweed can often be seen rolling on its streets. I had seen neither tumbleweed nor devils yet, but the night was young.

In that morning’s LA Times there had been an article on the Santa Ana winds, which had been blowing for much of the week. The article had quoted from Raymond Chandler’s story “Red Wind,” describing those hot “winds that curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” Chandler had said that when the Santa Ana winds blew through, anything can happen.

My partner was ready; he wagged his tail.

It was too dark to see much of the dusty movement of the hot air being funneled down through the canyons, but I could feel its surge. Every so often my squad car rocked back and forth as if it was being shaken by the draft of some big rig. The blow was pushing everything in its path, an unseen big, bad wolf huffing and puffing. Down the street I could see traffic lights throwing their colors around. It was like looking at the light show of a kaleidoscopic lighthouse. Nobody I knew liked Santa Anas-except for the serial murderer the media called the Santa Ana Strangler.

The Santa Ana winds blow hardest between November and March, and over the last two windy seasons the Strangler had strangled eleven women, each taken during a Santa Ana condition. Some of the tabloids were calling his murders “Gone with the Wind.” Only minutes earlier there had been a hot call. A woman in Benedict Canyon had fought off an attack by a masked man with a garrote. Neighbors had heard her screams, and their pounding at the door had driven off the woman’s assailant. Her attacker had been spotted fleeing into the darkness of the canyon.

In the distance a fire truck’s siren called out, and then a few moments later another joined in, and then there came the sounds of a third. Sirius’s ears were up and at the ready. I could tell he was considering joining the chorus, so I said, “Don’t even think about it.”

One of his two ears wilted.

I lowered the window and sniffed. A hairy muzzle joined me in that pursuit. Somewhere not too far away a fire was burning. Santa Ana winds and fire are a fearsome combination. As a patrolman, I had worked evacuations of neighborhoods during a few bad burns and been a reluctant witness to the winds whipping up the fires. It wasn’t a detail I had ever liked. Up close you could see why Santa Anas are called the “devil winds.” The Spanish word for Satan is Satanas; some believe “Santa Ana” is just the anglicized Satanas. The hot winds don’t come from the desert, it is whispered, but from hell.

Sirius offered a throaty growl to all the unseen demons. If the demons had any sense, they fled the scene. Jenny had always been convinced the dog was privy to a world lost on us poor humans, and not just because some of his senses are so much more keen than those of any of us Homo sapiens. Jen and I used to laugh when Sirius tilted his head and cocked his ears, as if listening to a voice. Sometimes he’d even carry on conversations with that voice, making pleased and excited sounds. “Sirius is talking to God,” Jenny would say; her tone was always playful, but I could never tell if she was kidding or not. Jenny thought Sirius was special.

The sirens were all converging on one spot: the same place where I was going. I was waved through several checkpoints; a cordon had been set up around the area. Even from two blocks away the smoke was bad, and where