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  “We’ve got two reporters out now, and my editor asked me to stay here and coordinate with the field reporters,” she said. “Not my choice, but I’m going to have to stay here.”

  “This is insane,” I said. “Three of them burning at once?”

  “Hate to be a pessimist,” Amy said, “but do you really think it’s going to stop there?”

  “Maybe not.” Even as I said it, I realized I was wasting time standing here talking to the neighbors. “Shit, Amy—you’ve got the list of all the Neighborhood Alliance homes right there, the one you sent me.”

  “So?”

  “Well, it looks like someone’s working their way through the same list, right? Opportunity knocks.”

  “You’re going to try to catch up with whoever’s doing this?”

  “You said it yourself, Ace—it’s probably not going to stop at three. And there’s a chance I might be able to get ahead of this guy.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Amy read the list to me and I wrote the addresses down with a pen and paper borrowed from one of the neighbors watching the fire. Then I hung up and returned to my truck. The first house on my list that wasn’t already in flames was on Erin Avenue, a few blocks north of Clark and not far from Mill Park. There was another house on Erin, too. I figured I’d start with the one near the park and then move east.

  Soon I was far enough away from the other fires that the sirens seemed distant, and the neighborhood was quiet despite fairly heavy traffic. I made a right turn onto Erin Avenue and slowed down, watching the house numbers and looking for the right one.

  Chaos was coming from behind me. I pressed the brake pedal all the way down, bringing the truck to a jarring halt, and leaned out the window, listening. A lot of shouting joined by fresh sirens. A car behind me honked, and I pulled forward about twenty feet before making a hard left turn into a narrow alley. I put the truck in reverse and looked in the rearview mirror, waiting for an opportunity to back out and change directions, but then I said the hell with it and threw the truck into park. I figured the police had more important things to deal with right now than worrying about towing a truck out of an alley.

  By the time I reached the sidewalk I could see the smoke. It wasn’t the house near the park, which stood somewhere to my left, but the house that was farther east along the avenue. I broke into a run.

  It was a one-story house, smaller than any of the others that were already burning, and this time I’d arrived early enough to see the flames at work. They crackled and roared as they licked out of broken windows and through the eaves of the roof. Inside, something collapsed, and the noise of the flames swelled with a sound of ecstasy, a primal monster bent on destruction.

  There were no fire trucks yet, just two cops working out of one battered cruiser, shouting at the crowd to stay back. One man was in the middle of the street, refusing to move, and when the cop ordered him to get back on the sidewalk, he shouted an angry response.

  “That’s my house next door, man! If this thing spreads, it’s going to get my house!”

  “The fire department will get it under control,” the cop answered, placing a firm hand on the angry man’s chest. “Now, sir, please go to the other side of the street.”

  “Hell with that,” the man said, knocking the cop’s hand off his chest and running back across the street and into the house that stood no more than twenty feet from the burning home. The cop swore and ran after him while his partner turned to the crowd, hands up. It was Jack Padgett.

  I stood and stared at him as he shouted orders at the onlookers, his partner pursuing the man who’d run for the house. Padgett was in uniform, stalking about the street confidently, tall and strong and angry.

  I moved back down the sidewalk and called Joe again.

  “There’s another house burning,” I said when he answered, “and guess what cop is down here working the crowd.”

  A pause. “Padgett?”

  “Uh-huh. Kind of strange, him turning up at the scene like this, don’t you think?”

  “You know how long he’s been down there?”

  “No.”

  Joe grunted. “I don’t like this, Lincoln. If I were you, I’d get the hell out of there.”

  Padgett had calmed the crowd and was now gazing up the street. I was standing out in the open, and he saw me. For a moment our eyes were locked.

  “Shit,” I said. “He’s looking right at me. I’m going to hang up now, clear out of here, and check on the other houses.”

  Joe was issuing another warning when I disconnected the call. Padgett was walking toward me, but his head was turned, looking for the other cop who’d been with him. I hesitated only briefly before turning and walking back down the street. Any confrontation with Padgett could wait. This fire was a lost cause; the house by the park might not be.

  I had to dodge people as I moved down the sidewalk. Word of the fires was clearly spreading quickly through the neighborhood, drawing people out into the streets. I heard one man insisting the fires were the work of street gangs; another woman was screaming about a gas leak.

  I went down the sidewalk and across the street, toward the park, my gun still holstered on my spine. I was counting the house numbers, and I saw I was getting close. There it was, two houses down. I approached the porch, slipping my hand along my spine, close to the gun. My eyes were locked on the dark windows at the front of the house, looking for movement.

  Those windows blew out with a roar just as my foot touched down in front of the door.

  A shower of glass rushed past me, hard pebbles that didn’t feel sharp even as they opened up my flesh. I dropped to my knees as the first wave of heat followed the glass. Flames surged out of the broken windows and up the front of the house. I covered my head with my hands and began to roll backward, away from the heat.

  I made two complete rolls and half of a third before I fell off the porch and onto the lawn. As soon as I hit the grass, I began to clamber away from the house, moving on my hands and knees but trying to keep my face as low as possible, close to the cool earth and unexposed to the terrific heat behind me. Across the street more people were shouting; the crowd that had turned out to see what all the commotion to the east had been about was now drawn to the west by the new house in flames.

  I went about twenty feet on the ground before finally rising and running across the street. The neighbors parted as I arrived, keeping their distance as if I had sprinted out of a quarantined plague camp. They watched me warily as I dropped onto my ass on the sidewalk and sat facing the fire, breathing heavily. My forearms were covered with long scratches from the glass, and blood was beginning to soak portions of my shirt.

  “You all right, fella?” one woman asked, concern in her face. I just nodded.

  “What were you doing over there?” said another voice, this one heavy with suspicion. “That house is vacant. What’s going on? There are fires going all over the neighborhood.”

  I twisted my neck and looked behind me at the speaker, an overweight man with red hair and a face covered with freckles. I could see the other bystanders react to his words; expressions changed from surprise and concern to suspicion and anger.

  “What were you doing over there?” someone else echoed. “That house has been empty for a year. How’d a fire start in it?”

  I braced the heels of my hands against the sidewalk and pushed off it, getting back to my feet. As I did, my shirt slid up my back a bit, and the woman who’d asked me if I was all right screamed.

  “He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!”

  Chaos. Half of the bystanders ran immediately, not bothering to look for the gun or linger long enough to see if there was true cause for alarm. Two or three others simply joined the first woman in shouting, and the man with the red hair and freckles made a clumsy lunge at me, arms outstretched like a child running to hug his mother. I spun away easily and dipped under him, came up with my shoulder in his solar plexus, a football lineman’s move. All the breath left
his lungs in one choked gasp and he staggered back as I stepped free.

  “Somebody get a cop!” another man yelled, and then I heard a woman misinterpret this and shout that someone had just shot a cop. By the time the police did get there, they’d have a hell of a time extracting the truth of the situation from that group. But if one of those cops was Padgett, I had no desire to wait around. I began to run.

  My truck was only a block or two away, still parked in the alley, but I was running away from the crowd, which took me in the opposite direction. I decided it would be best to stay on foot and try to move as fast as possible. Five houses were burning in the neighborhood now, and if the son of a bitch responsible stuck to the houses on my list, there were just two more to go. I wondered if Padgett would be turning up somewhere else along the list.

  I ran back across the street and past the park, ducked in behind a house, and got the Neighborhood Alliance list from my pocket. My fingers left streaks of blood on the paper as I unfolded it.

  I had a good idea of where to go next. The first fire had been the farthest east of any of the homes, and the two on Erin Avenue had also gone up in east-to-west fashion. Whoever was doing this was working for speed and efficiency, moving through the houses systematically, working his way west.

  The closest house left on my list was to the southwest, on West Fortieth, between St. Mary’s Cemetery and Trent Park. If I ran hard down Fulton to Clark, I might be able to make it.

  ______

  If the second house on Erin Avenue was the smallest I’d seen on the list, the house on West Fortieth was probably the largest. According to the recorder’s-office list Amy had faxed me, this was the last house Anita Sentalar had acquired. It was an old home, set back from the road a little deeper than the neighbors, composed of three stories of faded paint and broken windows. A front door looked out over a short porch, but after my last experience I decided to avoid the front steps and take a look around the back.

  The house faced west, and the south side was bordered by a sagging chain-link fence. A narrow driveway led past the house on the north side, ending in a detached one-car garage.

  I walked down the driveway, my legs trembling beneath me from the long, fast run I’d made. A streetlight was at the front of the house, but at the rear it was quite dark. I had a flashlight in the truck, but the truck was too far away to do me any good now. I approached the back of the house.

  Everything about the property was still and quiet, and those qualities were accentuated by the commotion raging to the north and east. By comparison, this stretch of the neighborhood now seemed like a ghost town. I looked around the yard carefully and saw nothing. The back door looked solid, and there was no sign anyone had broken in. Maybe I’d been wrong in my assumption of where the next fire would be set, or maybe whoever was responsible for them had stopped at five. With the gathering police and fire attention, not to mention the crowds on the streets, it wasn’t an unreasonable idea.

  I had nearly convinced myself of that when I stepped closer to the back door and saw a single pane of glass was missing from the window that made up the top half of the door. I slipped my arm through it and found the lock easily. I twisted it and then tried the knob. It didn’t turn, which meant the door had already been unlocked.

  I took three steps back from the house and gazed up at the dark windows, looking and listening for any sign of movement, of someone inside. Nothing. I reached behind me and took the Glock out of its holster, then switched it from my right hand to my left and reached back inside to unlock the door.

  Inside, the house smelled musty. I took a few tentative steps, shuffling my feet instead of lifting them and lowering them, because I couldn’t see what lay ahead. Using this technique, I moved forward, out of the small entryway and into what appeared to be a kitchen. Here I paused for a few seconds and allowed my eyes to adjust to the lack of light. When I could see well enough to make out large obstructions, I began to move forward again. At the doorway I stopped and slid my palm up and down the wall, searching for a light switch. I found it, but when I flicked it up, nothing happened. The electricity was out in the house, probably killed by a long-inactive account.

  I moved through an empty living room and came to the steps, started up them. The first flight of steps ended on a narrow landing, and above it a hall led away to what I assumed were bedrooms. I was on the landing when I heard a shuffling noise, a slight rush of movement, then a gentle thud. I knelt and listened for another sound. Just when I was convinced there would be no more, I heard another thud, this one even softer than the first, followed by a jingling noise.

  I was halfway up the steps, staying low and leading with my left hand, when something rushed at me. I shouted and brought the Glock up, my finger tense on the trigger, as a large cat bounded down the steps. It leaped over my shoulder and landed gracefully on the steps behind me, turned and meowed loudly. A metal tag on its collar glinted in the thin beam of light from the street, no doubt the source of the jingling I’d heard. The cat gave me one more yowl, then cut left and disappeared.

  “Holy shit,” I said, taking a long, shaky breath and sagging against the wall, every muscle in my body trembling with tension. No wonder the thuds had been so soft—the cat probably weighed about ten pounds. I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, the sweat stinging in cuts and scratches left from the glass shards, and then stood up, ready to move on now that I’d courageously driven the cat away.

  I found the rest of the house empty, left, and went back out to stand in the yard. Now what? Should I wait to see if someone arrived or continue moving through the list? After a moment’s debate, I chose movement over patience. Joe wouldn’t have been surprised.

  The last house on my list was on Newark Avenue, near Trent Park. Like the previous one, it was empty, dark, and still. The back door was locked. Until I kicked it in.

  I cleared the lower level and walked for the stairs. This was the darkest house yet, and I didn’t see the steps clearly until I ran into the banister with my shoulder. Like the rest of the house, the steps were wooden and old, and when my weight settled on each one, there was a soft creaking, like farmhouse shutters swinging in a gentle breeze.

  At the top, I moved quickly down a short hall and found two closed doors. I opened one and stepped in, cursing the darkness. There wasn’t enough light from the street to help in this house. I felt around the wall until my hand hit a sink. This would be the bathroom. I stepped back into the hall and pulled the door shut, then tried the next one. A bedroom.

  Something creaked beneath me, and I tensed up immediately, then relaxed and laughed softly. Hadn’t I learned anything from the cat? No need to overreact. The laugh died fast as I heard more sounds from below and realized that someone had entered the ground floor of the house, walking confidently, without fear of making noise.

  I stayed in the bedroom for a minute, listening to the clomping steps beneath me and wondering if the intruder would try to come up the stairs. Then I eased the door open, gently as possible, and stepped back into the hall. My night vision had adapted, and I could see the steps clearly. I moved toward them, my left hand searching the wall for the railing. Just as I found it, I became aware of something that scared me far more than the cat had—a heavy smell of kerosene coming from the ground floor of the house.

  Fear is a product of the senses. I’d experienced fear many times, but before it had always been the result of something seen or felt physically. This new sensation, of standing alone in the dark and literally smelling danger, froze me for a moment. I stood on the stairs with my right hand on my gun, my left tight on the railing, feeling like an animal in a cave, sniffing the air for signs of hostility. Then my brain finally kicked my body into gear, and I started down the stairs much faster than I’d come up them. I was no longer worried about proceeding quietly; my only priority now was getting out.

  I made it all of four steps before flame touched fuel somewhere below me. There was one loud puff, like a gust of
air forced out of a plastic bag, followed quickly by a crackling roar. I reached the landing just as the flames crawled up the walls of the ground floor, and for the first time I saw the dark old house illuminated. The front door was partially obstructed by flames, but I knew that my best chance—my only chance—was to rush through them, hit that door, and pray I could find the lock and turn it quickly.

  In the interest of speed, I tried to leap from the middle landing all the way to the bottom of the steps, intending to hit the ground running for the door. I didn’t make it. My leap carried me down about seven of the ten steps, and it turned out to be a poor idea. The old, rotten wood that had creaked so ominously under me on the way up the steps broke with this much greater impact. My left foot slid across the surface, free, but my right foot plunged into the step between the shattered boards and sank up to the ankle. It caught and held as my weight and momentum continued forward, and I went down hard.

  I hit the floor with my hands held out to keep me from landing directly on my face, and the Glock slid free and skittered across the floor toward the flames. My kneecap connected with the edge of the bottom step, and a current of pain rode through my leg, followed instantly by a numb sensation. The flames from the walls were spreading across the floor now, toward the stairs, and I was on my stomach, pinned by my ankle.

  Rolling away from the flames and lifting my arms to cover my face, I jerked my numb leg, trying to wrench my foot free. One of the broken boards cut a furrow in my flesh, but I didn’t get loose. For the second time in just a few seconds I felt like an animal: first smelling danger in the dark, now caught with my foot in a trap.

  Something moved to my right. I rolled back onto my left shoulder, sending another wave of pain through my ankle as it twisted against the pressure of the boards that held it, and tried to stretch my hand out for the gun. I couldn’t see anything now because I couldn’t bear to keep my eyes open this close to the searing heat of the fire. All around me was the smell of fuel and burning wood, and an incredible, oppressive heat.