and her smile says that she knows it's sexy and she looks down at the bulge in his pants and says, 'I make you hard, huh?'
'Yeah.'
'Good,' she says. Then smiles and says, 'What I've got for you, baby…'
She's not kidding.
You can take all those classroom definitions of fire, Jack thinks, but you don't know about heat until you have Letty del Rio swirling on you. He reaches up to touch her breasts but she grabs his hands and pushes them down on the bed and holds them down while she keeps moving on him. She's focusing his attention to just where she wants it; it's like, Once you' ve been in here, you're never going to want to be anywhere else. You are home, baby. And when he's about to come, she reaches underneath him and lightly strums — later she'll call this her 'Mexican guitar' — and while he's coming she's talking dirty in Spanish.
She's not only gorgeous and smart, she's tough and hardworking and ambitious and she gets it. Like, they're necking on his couch in the trailer when the scanner squawks about a fire on a houseboat, and after a minute Letty sighs Go ahead because she knows Jack has never done a boat fire before. Letty's so cool she's even there when he gets back and she lets him tell her all about it.
Some of their dates, they go to the shooting range together where Letty invariably beats him and then busts his balls about it all through dinner, telling him that because he lost and she won he has to do anything she says when they get home.
' Any thing,' she says, touching his dick with her toe. Then she starts murmuring en espanol what she wants him to do to her, and when he asks her what it all means she says, 'You just start doing. I'll let you know when you get it.'
She's so cool she goes down to Mexico with him and sleeps in the back of the truck he borrows from his dad, and when they get back she says, Sweetie, that was wonderful. Next time, a hotel.
Pretty soon they're spending all of their off time together. They go to the beach, to movies, they go out to clubs and dance. They make love and talk about cases. They talk about marriage and kids.
'I want two kids,' she says.
'Just two?'
'What? I'm Mexican, I'm supposed to want ten?' she says. 'I'm one of those modern Mexican women. I read Cosmo, I read Ms., I give head. Two kids, you can help me make them.'
'No, I'm one of those old-fashioned Anglo men,' Jack says. 'You have to marry me first.'
'Maybe,' she says. 'But if you want to propose to me, I want the dinner, the flowers…'
Jack starts saving for a ring.
So he has a place, a car, a woman.
And a job he loves.
Wakes up and goes to sleep to the sound of the ocean, sometimes sweetened by the sound of Letty's breathing.
Then Kazzy Azmekian's carpet warehouse burns down.
It's a big freaking fire, so they put two guys on it.
Jack and a more experienced guy.
Brian Bentley.
26
The Atlas Warehouse fire is an arson.
Jack's in there doing his inspection and what he sees are a bunch of cleaning rags left by a baseboard heater, but he's also smelling enough gas fumes to get you through New Jersey on Empty.
The night watchman, some poor old semi retired guy from a second-rate rent-a-cop company, doesn't get out. Probably asleep in there or something, and of course the smoke detectors have been disabled, so the guy dies from smoke inhalation.
So you got an arson and a murder, maybe second-degree but still a murder, and so Jack wants the arsonist bad.
Jack and Bentley are in the burned-out building doing their inspection when an old Mexican gentleman walks up to them and says that he heard that a man had died, and he wants to do the right thing.
Jack's bowled over.
Like, here they are standing in the black hole of this used-to-be-a-building and this man walks up like a ghost. White suit, white shirt, and carefully knotted tie — Jack figures the man must have dressed up to come talk to the police because he thinks it's an important thing to do. The man just walks up and introduces himself.
'I'm Porfirio Guzman,' he says. 'I saw what happened.'
Mr. Guzman lives in the apartment building across the street, hears a noise about three in the morning, looks out his window and sees a man come out of the warehouse, throw gasoline cans into his trunk and drive off.
'Can you describe the man?' Jack asks him.
Guzman got a good look at him. And the car. And the license plate.
'I see him toss the cans into his trunk,' he says. 'A few moments later I see the flames.'
Jack learns that Mr. Guzman is sixty-six years old. Takes tickets at a local movie theater, pays his rent. Quiet voice, distinguished-looking, a real gentleman.
'Are you willing to testify to this?' Jack asks.
Guzman looks at him like he's crazy.
' Si,' he says. 'Of course.'
He'll make a hell of a witness.
Except the guy he fingers is Teddy Kuhl.
Jack and Bentley bring Mr. Guzman in to look at pictures and he picks out Teddy Kuhl. Teddy's the leader of a crew of white biker trash that does odd jobs for the so-called businessmen who own shit like the Atlas Warehouse. Teddy and his crew do the odd collections, extortions, vandalism, protection, arson, and murder.
The second Jack sees Mr. Guzman point at Teddy's picture and nod his head, Jack knows that Kazzy Azmekian had his own place burned down. He also knows he has a problem, because if Guzman makes a statement or takes the stand he's going to get killed.
A dead-solid lock.
'We can't let him testify,' Jack says to Bentley.
'He don't, we have no case.'
They have an arson but no arsonist.
'He does testify,' Jack says, 'he's dead.'
Bentley shrugs.
Jack's brooding on this all the time they're going out to pick up Teddy. This is not a difficult thing to do. If Teddy's not out actually committing some hideous form of nastiness, he's on the third stool from the door at Cook's Corner in Modjeska Canyon, either planning some hideous form of nastiness he's about to commit or celebrating some hideous form of nastiness he just did. Anyway, Jack's working on the situation as they go over there, jerk Teddy off his stool, cuff him, and take him back to the station. By the time they have Teddy in the interview room Jack knows what he needs to do.
Get a confession.
Jack grabs a cup of coffee and then goes into the room to work him.
Teddy's a real asshole. He even looks like a real asshole. Long blond hair thinning in front. A purple sleeveless T-shirt to show off his arm muscles. Couple of tattoos, one of which appears to be an anatomically correct teddy bear in a state of arousal. He's even got jailhouse tattoos on his fingers, which when interlocked together spell out L-E-T-S-L-O-V-E.
Jack turns on the tape recorder and asks, 'Is it Kuhl like in 'cool' or like in 'mule'?'
'Teddy Cool.'
Jack says, 'A warehouse burned down last night, Teddy Cool.'
