“No shit?”
“Yeah…he okay?”
Rafer shrugged. “The boys tell me that there’s a body in the house. Crispy critter. Right in the living room. Poor sucker didn’t know what hit him. Molotov cocktails we think.” He pointed. “Anyway if the corpse is your man, he ain’t close to okay. Punks threw the cocktails right through the front window there. Fire boys say that things got going quick-the basement was full of chemicals and stuff.”
“Marvis Hanks ran a photo shop.”
“That’s the story huh?” Williams paused a beat.
“ Marvis Hanks? You don’t mean the guy was Marvis Hanks’s boy?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn. Me and his daddy went back some. There was a time when we were the only two black guys on the force. Hanks was kind of a cold fish, not a social guy at all, but he was a helluva cop.”
“Yeah,” Steve agreed. “He was my training officer.”
They stood there for a minute. Rafer lit a cigarette, and Steve was surprised to find that the stink of the little cancer stick bothered him more than the raw odor of burnt wood.
Across the street, the black guy laughed and the cop who was interviewing him smiled. The kid in the leather jacket was cuffed and shoved into a police car. For the first time, Steve noticed the girl with the swollen eye sitting in another car, all alone.
The ambulance that had been on scene pulled away from the curb, empty. Flecks of granite-colored ash danced off the vehicle as it picked up speed, drifting to the street like dirty snowflakes, but a few hung in the air long enough to hit the windshield of a black sedan that pulled smoothly into the driveway.
The guy who exited the sedan wore jeans, tennis shoes, and an old Grateful Dead T-shirt.
“Here’s the coroner,” Williams said. “Let’s get this over with.”
The three men entered the house. Williams and the coroner, whose name was Vince Ching, held flashlights. Puddles of oily, wet soot pooled on the floor. “Damn,” Ching said. “Here goes another forty bucks. I’m still stupid enough to answer a call wearing white tennies. You’d think I hadn’t been doing this shit for fifteen years.”
“What you guys need is a uniform,” Rafer said.
Ching nodded. “Maybe we could get black cloaks and skull masks. Scythes, too. A whole squad of grim reapers.”
Rafer laughed. “Well, anything would be better than that tie-dyed shit.”
“Don’t start.” The coroner pinned his flashlight between his arm and ribs while he slipped on a pair of rubber gloves. The gloves made snapping sounds, like giant rubber bands.
Rafer’s light swept the floor. It was a small room, and he found the body soon enough. “I’ll never get used to this,” he said.
Steve stared at the body. It lay in a pool of water.
Calling the thing a crispy critter was an understatement. The corpse was slick black from head to foot, and it looked like it would flake away to nothing if anyone tried to move it. Worst of all, the arms were drawn up, as if the corpse had been trying to ward off an attack at the moment of death.
“Jesus,” Steve whispered. “Look at the arms…you think he saw it coming?”
The coroner shook his head. He was on his knees, next to the corpse. “No. It’s called pugilistic attitude. Flesh burns and muscles tighten. The arms curl up. It’s a completely natural reaction.” He paused. “And it’s not a he. It’s a she. And yes, she probably did see it coming. Death by fire isn’t instantaneous, and neither is it pleasant.”
Words spilled from Steve’s mouth. “I knew the guy who lived here. His name was Marvis Hanks. Single guy… Are you sure this isn’t him?”
The coroner’s smiling face bobbed in a circle of illumination cast by Rafer Williams’s flashlight. Ching said, simply, “This isn’t Marvis Hanks, pal. I can tell a boy from a girl.”
Steve’s knees wobbled, but neither flashlight was aimed in his direction and no one noticed. He recovered enough to ask, “Anyone else in the house, Rafer?”
“No,” the sergeant said. “Not that we saw. The basement’s a swamp though. The chemicals were really burning down there, and the fire boys sluiced it down pretty well. Water heater was down there, too, and it was spilling water until we got the main turned off. We’ll have to check again but-”
“Damn,” Ching said. “Will you look at this.”
Rafer Williams redirected his flashlight beam. “Sweet Jesus. Who…what kind of a man would do something like that?”
The corpse’s jaws were drawn wide, locked, straining around a billiard ball. The cheeks had split like jerky and curled up, receding to eye level like slashed window shades. The billiard ball was singed and slightly melted, but the number eight was still visible between two rows of stark white molars that were bordered by blackened gums.
Ching whispered, “I’ve seen things, but…”
“My God,” Williams said. “The things that happen on a quiet little street like this one. After all these years, I still hate havin’ my nose rubbed in it. What do you think, Austin? What kind of a guy was Marvis Hanks’s boy, anyhow?”
Suddenly, Rafer Williams realized that he was talking to himself. “Steve?” he called. “Hey, Austin, where’d you go?”
Two flashlight beams swept the room.
Steve Austin was gone.
Steve swore at himself. At his hesitation. Paying attention to the stupid questions that danced in his head had done this to him. If he had lost everything because of that… If he had lost April…
He couldn’t believe it. Life had given him a second chance, and now-
Steve threw open the garage door and flicked on the light. The door to his fortress of solitude hung open. The top hinge was broken. The varnished oak was scarred, splintered. Steve stepped into the room.
Life had given him a second chance, and now it was gone. All his life he had wanted to break the distance. He had longed to feel the way other people felt, see things the way they saw them. He had wanted to smash the barrier that separated him from those simple emotions. But he had never imagined that the distance that cut him off from others also protected him from the world. It kept him from trusting. Kept him from believing lies and false promises.
And Hanks had promised him. Marvis had sworn to stay away from April. But he hadn’t done that.
Steve stepped over Doug Douglas’s corpse. The girl from the land of dreams and nightmares was gone. The empty husk of April Destino leaned at an odd angle in the far corner. It didn’t look like something broken; it just looked like something dead.
There was a note pinned to the dreamweaver’s cheek:
ONE CHEERLEADER FOR ONE MOVIE SEE YOU AT SKYVIEW
Skyview. The cemetery. For the first time since childhood, tears filled Steve’s eyes.
“You lying bastards,” he whispered.
To have seen April like that, in Marvis Hanks’s house. Burned down to nothing. Pugilistic Attitude… shit, he didn’t care what the coroner had called it. He knew that April had died shrinking from her nightmare, just as he knew that he would forever picture her lying there in a filthy puddle of her own oily ashes, an eight ball jammed in her mouth.
To have seen her there, like that. To see her here, like this.
To see her dead twice.
It was all his fault. Things had really gotten away from him. He should have shot Marvis Hanks dead behind the counter at the camera shop. He should have broken every bone in Bat Bautista’s body with his tonfa. Instead,
