carports along the back. She wasn’t worried that she would wake up any of the other tenants. Each carport had a cage at the rear of it where people stored things, and behind that was the laundry room. The first room where anybody slept was one floor up, and it was Judith Nathan’s.
She drove her Acura far across town to the foot of Catherine Hobbes’s street. Then she parked it a block away in a line of cars that seemed to belong to people asleep in a row of big old apartment buildings. She put on her backpack, walked to the foot of Catherine Hobbes’s street, and began to climb.
The houses along the way were all dark and silent. After a minute of walking she began to feel again the peculiar sensation that had comforted her as a child, that the world was empty except for her. In the flat places downtown there were always people out and driving around, businesses with lights on. But up here on the winding, tree-shadowed street where people were all asleep, she was alone.
Judith had walked these same steps a number of times since she had arrived in Portland, but now the feeling was different. She was taking possession of the place. The neighborhood had moved into the few hours of late night when all of the people had fallen into unconsciousness.
She walked along comfortably even though her small pack was heavy. She was used to exercising and jogging long distances. The weight of the pack made her breathing seem louder to her own ears, but she took the extra weight in her thighs and calves instead of her back, so it wasn’t a strain.
Judith reached the row of houses along the crest of the hill and sat down on the curb across the street to study them. She yawned to be sure her ears were clear and she was hearing every sound. It was two forty-five A.M., and the silence was still unbroken. When she felt ready, she stood and noticed that up here along the ridge there was a slight breeze. Good. That would help.
Judith walked across the street slowly, careful not to disturb the perfect quiet. She climbed the steps beside Catherine’s house and walked around to the back door. She looked in the window at the kitchen. It was pretty. The color of the walls seemed to be a pale yellow, but it was difficult to tell the exact shade in the darkness. She could see that here, as in most houses, there were no smoke detectors in the kitchen, where cooking would continually set them off. Judith took off her pack, pulled out a can, opened the spout, and poured charcoal starter on the door and the wooden footing below it.
Judith poured the rest of the can of charcoal starter on the clapboards of the house, letting extra pools of it soak into the sills of all the windows. She put the empty can back in the backpack, opened another, and kept going along the side of the house, searching for the things she had noticed in previous visits. When she reached the narrow door set into the wall outside the house, she slowly and cautiously opened it to verify that it covered a gas water heater. She took the adjustable wrench out of her backpack, unhooked the gas line from the heater, and closed the door. Then she poured some charcoal starter on the door and the walls beside and below it.
She tried to keep a steady stream of charcoal starter going as she walked beside the house, soaking the lowest few rows of clapboards. Whenever a can was empty she put it back into the pack and opened another. She took her time, trying to be thorough. There was a front entrance at street level that she knew opened into a narrow hallway with a side entrance to the garage. From there an interior staircase climbed to the living areas on the upper floor. She had glimpsed it the night when she had watched Catherine pull her car into the garage and open the door to go upstairs. Judith poured a whole can of charcoal starter on and around the front entrance and another on the garage door.
Judith still had a couple of cans left, so she used them on the wooden clapboards along the side of the house as she made her way again along the steps up the hill to the back door. Then Judith put on her pack. It felt incredibly light now. She took out her matches, and listened once more to the world. She could hear nothing, not even a distant swish of traffic from the city below.
Judith wanted to do this in a particular way. She wanted the fires in the back of the house to burn unnoticed for a time. She would light them first, beginning with the one that would block the back door and eat its way into the kitchen, where there were no smoke detectors. After a time the fire would spread to the petroleum-soaked wood on the sides and front of the house, blocking the other exits. They were the lowest parts of the house and they faced the river, where the wind was coming from tonight. Once the back of the house was engulfed, the fire in front would run right up the stairs to meet it.
She struck a match, listening to the scrape and then the hiss as the match head flared. She dropped it into the pool of charcoal lighter that had dripped to the foot of the back door. The wet fluid lit and the flames began to flicker up the surface of the wooden door. She moved a few paces and lit the next match, which she held against the lowest clapboard where it met the concrete footing below.
The saturated boards began to flare up, and the flames moved along the back of the house more quickly than she was walking: Judith had overdone it. The flames were running along ahead of her now. She stopped, turned, and hurried along the back of the house the way she had come. She had no time to go the long way, because the little house was already ablaze. The flames were blistering and peeling the layers of old paint to get to the dry wood beneath, then blackening it and beginning to devour it.
Judith trotted down the steps beside the house toward the street. She could feel the breeze making the short hairs along her hairline move, and she knew she had to escape. The fire was moving too quickly. Judith reached the bottom of the steps. She had to block the front exits, or it would all go wrong, so she struck another match and dropped it in front of the garage door. She watched flames unfurl from it, rolling up the surface of the garage door.
Judith whirled and started down the street. The flames were bright and yellow now, and her shadow stretched ahead of her on the empty asphalt of the street. She began to trot. She needed to get away from the neighborhood before the fire trucks and police cars came up that road. She had trotted only a few paces before she realized that the faster she went the better she felt, so she broke into a run, pumping her arms and pushing off with the balls of her feet.
The sidewalk was too treacherous, a series of tilted blocks and cracks to catch her feet, so she moved to the middle of the street. She sprinted, dashing for the first curve that would get her out of the light of the fire. She made it around the first corner and the light was dimmer. She ran hard for a few seconds, but then the light seemed to get brighter again.
Judith turned to look behind her. It was a set of headlights brightening the trunks of trees. She could hear the car coming fast. The car stopped a few feet from her and the driver was out, crouching behind his open door. He had a gun in his hand. “Hold it.”
She said, “What? What do you want?”
The man said, “You. I’ve been waiting for you, honey. I’ve been watching, and waiting, and here you are.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Calvin Dunn,” he said. “Put the knapsack down and step away from it.”
Calvin Dunn. That was the name in the newspapers, the man who had killed Tyler. She knew that she had no choice except to do what he said. She set the backpack down on the street and took a few steps away from it, stepping to the side to get the light of the burning house behind her, trying to see Calvin Dunn’s eyes.
They were focused on her. He said, “All right. Stop there.” She could see the fire’s reflection in his eyes, the glow flickering on the retina. Calvin Dunn took two steps from the car. His eyes moved to the backpack.
Judith’s right hand slipped into the pocket of her raincoat and grasped the pistol. She sensed from a slight change in his posture that Calvin Dunn’s brain had registered his mistake. She saw the eyes flick back to her and his body begin to tense, trying to raise his gun.
She fired through her pocket. The round hit his chest, but he didn’t go down, so she leapt to the side. He fired at her, but she reached the barrier of a parked car. She heard Dunn running too, so she popped up and fired. This time when she hit him, he slowed as though the loss of blood was weakening him, so she fired twice more. He toppled to the pavement, and she stepped closer to fire into the back of his head.
The return of the silence seemed to waken her, and she began to run again. She took a half dozen steps down the center of the street, her gun still in her hand, before she remembered the backpack. She couldn’t leave it lying on the pavement beside Dunn’s body. She turned and ran back, snatched up her pack, and dashed down the street carrying it. She saw the end of the street bathed in light from the streetlamps, and she pushed the gun back into her pocket and ran toward the light. When she reached the bottom of the hill she tried to slow down, but her legs refused to obey her. She ran until she was around the corner and at her car. She fumbled with the keys for a second or two, but got it started and drove.
