Burn

was on her back, and Brant was curled on his side as if napping, his head cradled in the crook of his arm.

Carver got down on his hands and his good knee, his stiff leg trailing behind him, and crawled over to Marla. When he was a few feet from her, he stopped. Her eyes were open and not seeing anything. Brant’s eyes were open, too. He seemed to be staring directly at Marla, but he wasn’t.

The black pall was swirling lower, and Carver’s breath rasped as he drew in smoke-tainted air that felt hot inside his chest. He could hear flames crackling, and the heat was searing. He reached out a hand to grab Brant’s wrist, imagining with some strange reflexive responsibility to a client that he might be able to drag the body outside and save it from the fire. But he saw the hair on his own forearm sizzle and blacken, and he withdrew his hand and began crawling toward the door.

Something rolled painfully between his left palm and the floor, almost causing him to fold over onto his side. Then he realized it was his cane. He jammed its tip against the floor and tried to stand and make better time, but the air was much hotter even a few feet above the floor, the smoke so dense he began gagging and coughing immediately and had to drop back down. Holding the cane out in front of him, he dragged himself on his elbows and good knee toward where he thought the door must be, knowing that if he lost direction in the smoke, he was dead.

The cane jerked around in his hand, and at first he thought someone was trying to snatch it away from him. Achilles Jones, somehow still alive! Like in one of those protracted Hollywood thriller endings when the villain is presumed dead but keeps getting back up.

Then a voice said, “Come on! This way, goddamnit!”

Carver laced his fingers and held tight to the crook of the cane with both hands as a powerful force drew him forward. Hands clutched his shirt, then his upper arms, and he let himself be dragged outside. One of his moccasins came off, then the other.

He rolled onto his back, staring up at the stars and trying to suck in the sweet nectar of clear night air. But he couldn’t seem to get any. He coughed three times, then he began to choke.

Something was placed over his mouth and nose. A figure in a yellow slicker was bending over him. “Easy now! Easy, bub! Breath in easy. …”

The tightness in Carver’s throat slackened, and he began drawing cool oxygen into his lungs through the mask held by the firefighter staring calmly down at him with the dark, sad eyes of a martyr. More figures in yellow slickers were milling around him, and he saw streams of water being played over the fire. Several additional pieces of firefighting equipment had arrived, along with police cars. Marla’s neighbors on Jacaranda Lane were clustered on the other side of the street, held back by a uniformed cop with his arms spread wide. The way Jones had spread his arms when he’d come at Carver for the kill.

“He’s yours,” the firefighter who’d been holding Carver’s oxygen mask in place said. Then he stood up and passed from sight.

White-clad paramedics were over Carver now, working him onto a gurney. He tried to sit up and tell them he could walk, but they gently eased him back down. “This yours?” one of them asked, holding the cane out where he could see it while the other fastened the oxygen mask’s strap behind his head. He nodded, and the paramedic placed the cane next to him on the gurney, beneath one of the straps that were now holding Carver fast, his arms at his sides. He felt himself levitating then, and being rolled feet first across the hard ground toward where bright lights were flashing red, blue, yellow. .

Ambulance doors swung open wide, as if waiting to embrace him. The gurney jerked and tilted a few degrees as its wheels were folded up so it could become a simple stretcher again and be slid inside. Weakness rushed over Carver like a dark wave, and the ambulance seemed to swoop and whirl crazily, making him dizzy.

The hell with it, he thought. He closed his eyes and concentrated on drawing in sweet, sweet oxygen. He was addicted. It was impossible to get enough of it. Fire, earth, water. . Didn’t precious air have to be in there somewhere?

The hell with it, he thought again, hearing the ambulance doors slam shut somewhere off in the distance. He’d puzzle it all out later.

Breathing in.

Breathing out.

That was all that mattered now.

40

Carver sat in the hard oak chair in McGregor’s office. It had been two days since the fire. His injured ribs were wrapped again, though this time not in a support but with a thousand yards of flesh-colored Ace elastic bandage fastened to itself with metal clips.

A multiline phone chirped and flashed yellow lights on Mc shy;Gregor’s desk, but he ignored it and the calls were answered elsewhere.

Two detectives Carver had noticed when he’d walked past the booking area were joking and laughing loudly out in the hall. McGregor unwound from his desk chair, strode to the door, slammed it hard, then stalked back behind his desk and sat down.

The laughing and joking got softer then ceased altogether.

McGregor absently inserted a forefinger in his ear, rotated it for what seemed a full minute, then wiped the finger on his shirtsleeve. In the hot, confining office, his body odor was probably enough by itself to make a suspect confess.

“The deal was that we share information,” Carver reminded him.

McGregor grinned and probed the gap between his teeth with his tongue. “Deal? Deals with shitheads like you don’t count. They’re like putting poison out for roaches. On the other hand, if I wasn’t to tell you how this mess of yours wound up, you’d be sniffing around like a cur smells a bitch in heat, being a pest all the longer.”

“You have a poetic way of putting things.”

“Well, it ain’t gonna rhyme, but here it is: Marla was shacked up in Orlando with a guy named Dan, fella who customizes vans so the suckers think they got a rolling Taj Mahal. She’d known him for a while and they had an on-again, off-again thing going. He knows nothing about her being stalked or anything else. Only knew she was a lively piece of tail. He says she left his apartment the evening of the fire but didn’t say where she was going.”

“What about the fire?”

“Arson squad says it was set with an accelerant, probably gasoline, since there was a metal gas can in the debris. There wasn’t much left of the bodies. The autopsy report says each was shot, probably fatally, before the fire got to them. No way to know which of them started the fire, or who shot who first. My bet would be on Brant. Though the place was rented, so Marla might have torched it.”

“What about the guns?” Carver asked, marveling at the idea of a penny-wise murderer-arsonist.

“We found only one gun, or what was left of it. A thirty-two revolver.”

“Two corpses,” Carver said, “only one gun.”

“That’s right. You pass the fucking math test.”

“So where’s the other gun?”

“Who knows and who gives a shit?”

“I don’t and I do,” Carver said. “Were all the bullets thirty-twos?”

“No way to say for sure. The heat of the fire melted them down. Messed up the gun, too. There was no way to run ballistics tests. Way I see it, there might have been only one gun to begin with, and Marla and Brant got shot when they were struggling over it. Or their deaths might have been the result of a murder-suicide pact. Anything’s possible. After all, you never found out what the fuck was going on between them. If there ever was another gun, it must have got lost in the confusion of the fire. Or maybe it got stolen later. Lots of people at the scene, poking around.”

Carver folded his hands over the crook of his cane and leaned forward in his chair, saying nothing.

“Like I said,” McGregor told him, “anything’s possible. And since we got nobody to charge, the case is fucking closed.”

“The way you like them,”