Incinerator

10

“It’s a phone booth at the corner of Los Angeles Street and Sixth,” I said to the second button on my shirt. I turned right through the heavy downtown traffic, feeling all the muscles in my back bunch and jump independently. They made me think of the frog’s leg through which we’d passed electricity in high school biology. It had bunched and jumped, too. And it had probably wanted to be on that ceramic tray about as much as I wanted to be driving through downtown L. A. at 8:25 on a Saturday night, on my way to a waltz with the Incinerator.

The wire tucked into the back of my jeans was about the size of an audiocassette. It bulged against the base of my spine, feeling bigger than a Cadillac Eldorado. Something no thicker than sewing thread connected it to the second button in my shirt.

“I’m slowing,” I said, trying not to move my lips and feeling like a fifth-rate ventriloquist. “Traffic. I may be late to the phone booth.”

No one answered, but, of course, no one could. I had to take it on faith that someone was on the other end. I might be able to meet the Incinerator wearing a concealed microphone, but I certainly couldn’t do it with a plug in my ear.

“It’s construction,” I said. “I’m going to be late.” I heard the unsteadiness in my voice. I went on, nevertheless. “Are the ground rules straight?” I asked no one who could answer. “Remember that it could be a trick,” I added, thinking about Prometheus. “It could be that he just wants to see if I’ve got cops with me. You don’t move unless I tell you to.” Trying not to move my lips, I sounded to myself like Humphrey Bogart. “Anybody moves, Al, I’m in Des Moines. This is the last pass, as far as I’m concerned.”

The traffic started to roll. I pressed Alice’s accelerator in the direction of fate.

We’d started the preparations on the previous evening, three minutes after I got the dance card. I’d called Hammond at home-with certain misgivings-to tell him about it. He’d been awake and morose and drunk, but he sobered up in seconds.

“You’ll need a wire,” was the first productive thing he said.

“And how are you going to get it to me? Al, I’m being watched, remember?”

“A girl. Have I got a girl for you. Got a great little wire, too, real hi-fi.”

“Al,” I said, backing up one giant step, “why do you assume that I’m going?”

“You want this geek preserved in amber,” Hammond said. “Same as me.”

“Well, I’m not going,” I said. “Not unless I make the rules.”

“Your rules,” he said instantly.

“I need to talk to Finch,” I said, although I knew it would piss Hammond off. “And Schultz. Why isn’t Schultz sleeping in the guest room?”

“You should write for TV,” Hammond said. He despised TV. “On the phone at ten, okay?”

“And Schultz,” I’d added unwisely.

“I heard you the first time,” Hammond said, banging the phone down.

The ten o’clock conference call with Finch, Hammond, and Schultz had been punctual, short, and unsatisfying.

“Goes without saying,” Finch said gruffly. “You call the shots.”

“No shots,” I said. “That’s the point. Nobody pulls a gun, nobody moves, nobody shows himself, unless you hear me ask for it.”

“Don’t worry,” Finch said. “You’re the boss.”

“Al?” I said.

“Yo,” Hammond said.

“You’re my guarantee.”

“Hell,” Hammond said, in spite of his injured feelings, “I’m your friend.” There, his tone told me, I’ve said it.

I looked at my bare feet. They would, I thought, catch fire easily. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go, and I’ll wear the wire. But nobody moves unless I give the word.”

And the wire had arrived at eleven the next morning, carried in the purse of a female police officer who looked no older than sixteen, dressed in a T-shirt and strategically slashed jeans, and the Incinerator had called at seven-fifteen and had said nothing more than “Dumpster at the Fernwood Market.” He’d hung up, leaving me looking at the phone. If I’d ever heard the voice before, I couldn’t place it.

Taped to the side of the dumpster facing away from the street, I’d found a tightly folded square of paper, no more than an inch on any side. It said SIMEON on the side facing me, in shiny gold lettering. It gave me precise directions to a pepper tree in Reseda Park, in the Valley. On the trunk of the tree in Reseda Park, a monstrous pepper that was methodically killing the grass beneath it, was another note, riven to the bark with a hatpin. It said, YOU’RE A GOOOOD

DRIVER, SIMEON. CAREFUL AND COURTEOUS. PHONE BOOTH, CORNER OF THIRD AND LOS ANGELES, downtown. Downtown. At the periphery of Little Tokyo. On his territory.

I’d driven quite a way before I called those directions in. I was having second thoughts about virtually every aspect of my life, and not least about my decision to involve the cops in this meet. I knew no one had me in visual surveillance-Finch had promised that the cars would use parallel streets and remain out of sight until and unless I yelled for help. I could, I reasoned, just stop calling in and meet the Incinerator alone, assuming that he’d actually be there, which I didn’t think he would be. I was pretty sure that he’d be positioned very carefully somewhere where he could see me, but I couldn’t imagine someone who preyed on the immobile having the recklessness to risk it all on a guess about my character. He just wanted to know whether I was friend or fuel. He would materialize in the flesh at the next contact, or the one after that.

On the other hand, what if I were wrong? So I called in when I was most of the way downtown and felt briefly grateful that I wasn’t wearing an earpiece and didn’t have to listen to the cops swear and scramble for position across the broad L.A. Basin.

The phone booth where I was supposed to wait for a ring and then do anything the Incinerator told me to do was one of those stingy little waist-high spatter shields, standing bravely on a corner that the homeless had claimed for their own. I leaned against it, wishing my legs were steadier, and it rang.

“Hello?” I said, forcing my voice downward from the tenor pitch it seemed determined to assume.

“Hello, Simeon,” the Incinerator said. “Remember me?”

“No,” I said.

“Aaahh,” he said. “That’s not polite. Not considering how well I remember you.”

“Memory,” I said. “It’s so selective. In what context should I remember you?”

I heard a chuckle. “Not very flattering,” the Incinerator said.

“When I see you,” I heard myself saying in the earpiece.

“Well, of course,” he said. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? A couple of guys, getting together. Hashing over old times.” He laughed.

“So,” I said, “where?”

“Let’s not rush into this, no matter how eager you are to see me. You’re not being followed, are you?” The voice was somehow both light and heavy, insubstantial and menacing at the same time.

“You know I’m not.”

“And no wire?”

I leaned my head against the plastic and smelled my own sweat. “No wire,” I said.

“Peachy,” he said. “Just a couple of guys. Go to the park. Los Angeles and Second. Sit on a bench.”

“Los Angeles and Second. A bench,” I said into my second button.

“You were quicker in the old days,” the Incinerator said forgivingly. “A bench, you know? Something you sit on.”

“And do what?” I asked.

“And sit,” the Incinerator said. “Sit until the gods call for you.” He hung up.

The park at Los Angeles and Second was an open-air motel, a local branch of the Motel Zeroes that have opened all over America, patronized by those who can’t afford a bed with a roof over it. Most of the benches were full. Some of them were occupied by people who could still sit upright. Alice was parked half a block away.

For credentials, I’d visited the local brown-bag store and bought a gallon jug of Thunderbird. When I swung my bottom aggressively against the woman at the left-hand end of the bench closest to the curb, she said, “Hey.” I handed her the jug, which I’d already opened, and said, “Shhhhh.”

“You bet,” she said, taking the wrinkled bag and its contents. “How you doing, brother?”

“After you, sweetheart,” I said. “After you. Then I’ll be doing just fine.”

She opened the bag and swallowed many times. “Thunderbird,” she said appreciatively. “Sweet and awful. What do you want?” She handed the bag back to me.

“Just sitting,” I said, looking for cops. “What do you want?”

“A bath,” she said promptly. “I’d sell my soul for a bathtub with no drain in it.”

“Why no drain?” I said, pretending to drink from the bottle in the bag and then deciding what the hell and drinking quite a lot of it.

“Because I could get clean and die at the same time,” she said.

“You don’t want to die,” I said. It was just a reflex.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t want to die dirty.” She gave me a sidelong glance. She was cleaner than Hermione had been, but her gray hair hung matted at her shoulders. She wore an old man’s coat and somebody else’s skirt and nylon stockings rolled halfway down her calves. I felt like Beau Brummel. “How long you been out here?” she asked.

“Not so long,” I said.

Someone pressed something between my collar and the back of my neck. By the time I could turn around, he or she was gone.

“Man or woman?” I asked the old lady.

“Who?” she said.

“Keep the bottle,” I said, getting up.

“You got a tub or a shower?” she called after me.

THE DOOPERMART, the note said, in the glare of Alices’ overhead light. SECOND AND ALVARADO. YOU’LL LIKE IT. THE SOUTHERN DOOR IS OPEN. IT’LL BE NICE TO SEE YOU.

“It’s something called the Doopermart,” I said into my button. “I’m supposed to go in through the southern door.” My mouth was so dry that I could hear my tongue and upper lip clicking like billiard balls. “Let’s remember the rules, okay?”

Second Street took me across a long-disused stretch of railroad or streetcar tracks, lined with buildings of old, grimy brick, four or five stories tall, with faded signs painted on them and plywood over their windows. Once they had been factories, or vegetable warehouses, or even hotels. They all had the same dismal Edward Hopper rectangularity, the blind sadness of buildings with no one in them, buildings that have been given over to the tenancy of spiders and rats and warp and rot.

It was fully dark by the time I reached Alvarado, but it was still hot, and I was soaked in sweat. None of the buildings had lights on inside them, and the only illumination came from Alice’s headlamps and two streetlights, one that I was passing on the left, and one that gleamed in front of me. The one in front of me shone down on a big, low barn of a building with picture windows facing onto the street. The windows had been painted black. A market. Probably the last time it had seen life was in the sixties, when some counterculture entrepreneur had painted THE DOOPERMART across its front and set up business, selling whatever a Doopermart sold-organic vegetables, perhaps, incense, and macrame yarn.

A rutted and broken parking lot surrounded the building on three sides, faded paint lines indicating where the pigeons were to leave their vehicles before they went inside to get plucked. One of the sides of the building that faced the parking lot was the south side. There was, as the Incinerator had promised, a door set into the center of the southern wall, the only door or window to interrupt the blankness of the wall. It was ajar. I had to look at it, then close my eyes and look in its general direction without focusing to see that a very thin, pale light fell through it. The light was cold and chalky and not at all reassuring. It looked like the phosphorescence of decay.

Corruption, I thought.

“The door’s open,” I said softly to the wire. “There’s some kind of light inside. Not much, but enough to see.” I took five deep breaths. “Going inside,” I said.

Feeling like the only man in the world, I climbed out of the car. I caught myself shutting Alice’s door very softly, and then pulled it all the way open and slammed it. Let the man know I’m here. The door made a nice, sane sound, and I started across the asphalt toward the other door, the insane door.

The door was solid metal, painted, no window, and it opened in. I pushed it slowly, but even so I pushed too fast to avoid breaking the fine black thread that had been strung across it, about four inches above the floor. I saw it snap as I yanked the door back toward me, and then all the lights inside went out.

No, not all of them.

I banged the door all the way open and went in. One kerosene lantern, mounted high on a black pole, glowed in the center of the space, more or less directly in front of me. The interior was a single room, dark as fate in the corners and only very dimly lighted in the vicinity of the lantern. Rows of empty shelves stretched away from me in parallel. They were supermarket shelves, too high to see over. That’s a feature of supermarket design: Don’t let the customer see beyond the brand names that are nearest. Each aisle should be a new vista. Each of these aisles was certainly going to be a new vista, and I had a queasy feeling I was meant to explore every one of them.

Like readers of European languages everywhere, I headed left. We’re used to starting at the left. Then I realized what I was doing, stopped, and went to the right instead. Walking on the balls of my feet, I stepped into the aisle that was farthest right.

The upper edge of the shelf to my immediate left cut off the pale glow of the lantern. This aisle was almost entirely dark. Each one to my left would be slightly brighter as I worked my way toward the lantern in the center, and then they would get darker as I zigzagged toward the left side of the store, but this was the only one that mattered now, and it was as dark as the inside of my skull.

“Hello,” I said. My voice cracked.

Someone tittered.

From where? The titter bounced around the room. I couldn’t fix its direction. It probably came from the left, but it might have come from directly in front of me.

“Just a couple of guys,” I said in what I hoped was a friendly tone. No response. I had to go down the aisle, but I couldn’t bear the thought that I might walk right past him and not know it, and then he’d be behind me. The one thing I knew was that the titter hadn’t come from behind me. Nothing was behind me but the south wall of the building. I stretched my arms until I could touch the shelves on either side. My fingers encountered grease and dust and cobweb. It took everything I had to keep them out there, but one step at a time I walked the length of the aisle, slowly, arms outstretched, a human scoop hoping it wouldn’t scoop up anything that might decide to kill it.

When I got to the end of the aisle, a stroll that seemed to take half an hour, I pulled my arms in and laughed from sheer relief. I couldn’t help it. Somebody moved, nearer to the center of the store. Somebody squeaked.

Do all the aisles anyway, I told myself. Every damn one of them. As I spread my arms and started up the second aisle, my ankle snagged something, and it broke. Another thread. I had a sudden image of myself in a web. I loathe spiders above almost anything else.

I was a third of the way up the aisle when the pillar of fire bloomed in front of me. It towered six, then eight, feet tall, too bright to look at, and I scuttled backward as fast as I could until I slammed against the wall at the end of the aisle, the end farthest away from the door I’d come in through. As the fire fell, I saw, or thought I saw, someone standing well behind it. He was tall and wrapped in black. The fire died, and I heard the squeaking sound again.

Then I was aware of a wild flapping sound that seemed to come from all over, and in my peripheral vision, which was all that I had left after the brilliance of the pillar of fire, black pieces of paper tore themselves to shreds above me and scattered through the darkness in all directions. Something knocked against the side of my head, and I screamed higher than the girl in a horror movie, and pressed back against the wall as the flapping died away. Something cooed.

The place was full of birds.

It was a bunch of birds and a firework, that’s all. One of those stupid cones that look so nice on the Fourth of July.

“Very pretty,” I said, wishing I hadn’t screamed, wishing I could keep the quaver out of my voice. “Have we got any more of those?” My direct vision was completely gone, the imprinted image of the fire pillar working my retina overtime, a green and red ghost vision that totally blocked out the tiny amount of real light in the room. I put my arms out again and swept the second aisle in a blind run, moving by touch until I was at the other end and I knew it was empty. I turned with my back to the south wall and panted, waiting for my eyesight to return and bring my courage with it.

Had he been standing at this end when the firework went off? My memory said yes, but I couldn’t be completely sure. “Okay,” I said out loud, partly for his ears and partly for the wire. “Okay, then.” Something squeaked, definitely to my left this time.

My feet didn’t want to take the three sideways steps to the left, but I still had control of my feet. I sought reassurance in the fact. “Ready or not,” I said, “I’m coming.”

I could see almost the entire length of the third aisle. The lantern’s light created an edge about three feet down the shelves to my right. It looked empty, but he might be crouched down against the left-hand shelving. I was certain he was to my left, but I knew now that I could hear him move, and I had decided to sweep every aisle. It might not have been much of a plan, but it was the only one I had, and I wasn’t going to abandon it. Hands out again. Test for a thread with the foot. Nothing there, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be one part of the way down.

There was, and this time the fire erupted behind me. It cast brilliant light all the way to the wall, and I pulled in my hands and ran for it while the glare lasted. The birds went crazy again, and I looked up and saw them diving and swooping for refuge among the open rafters, and then the glare died down and we were all back in the almost-dark.

“I liked that,” I said, turning to press my back against the wall. “Keep them behind me. Will you work on that?” I wondered what Hammond and Finch were making of this monologue. Probably asking Schultz to analyze it. The smell of the firework was sharp and pungent and familiar from the summers when I was a boy, and it tickled my nose. I might even have enjoyed it, except that the air was getting smoky, and that canceled out the increased visibility from the lantern. It was only one aisle over, but the air in the aisle in front of me was milky and hard to see through.

“Well, shoot,” I said. “Here we go again.” I touched the shelves and moved down the aisle, more slowly this time, putting out a tentative foot to test for threads before committing myself to a step. Nothing. The aisle was clear, and I got to the end, put my back against the wall again, and sidestepped to find myself staring down the next one, the aisle that had the lantern standing in its center. The air was too smoky to see the black pole on which it stood, but the lantern shone seven or eight feet up, in the center of a soft halo. The door through which I had entered was behind me, and it was closed.

I had left it ajar.

“Nobody there?” I called, before I noticed the thread. It was pinned to the shelf to my left and looped through a bent nail on the shelf to my right, and it disappeared down the aisle into the skim milk of the air. He’d taken a lot of time with this.

“Would you like me to break this one, too?” I asked. “Or can we just talk?” There was no answer, so I leaned down and yanked at the thread with my hands.

Music shattered the air, music so loud that it seemed to gather the smoke into balls and roll them at me. Handel. The Royal Fireworks Music. I covered my ears, knowing that now I couldn’t hear him squeak anyway, and took a step forward.

A cone of fire licked its way toward the roof at the far end of the aisle, and he was standing behind it, tall, wrapped in black, fuzzy, and indistinct though the smoke. Then the cone died.

“Wait,” I said, half-blind again, taking another step. The music boomed out again, and another flare erupted, closer to me this time, and he was there again, just behind it, moving in time to the music, and he was taller than I had imagined he could be, and stick-thin in his black coat. He had one hand out.

As the flame guttered and died, I backed up and tried the door behind me. It wasn’t locked. That was something.

The air was full of smoke now, the lantern only a firefly floating in front of me, and I had just let go of the door when the next cone blossomed, and he was only eight or ten feet from me, impossibly thin, with scraggly straight blond hair that was wrong somehow, on crooked, and a broad grin with very few teeth behind it. He leaned forward, extending the hand toward me. It had something in it. The smile was as crooked as his hair, and the birds cut through the smoke like lunatic confetti in a murderer’s parade.

“Stop,” I said for some reason, and stepped forward.

The cone went off almost at my feet, and I leapt back, and he was right behind it, four feet away this time, baring red puffy gums in a meaningless smile and showing me ravaged skin and empty blue eyes that were paler than ice. He stepped around the cone, so close that I could hear the rubber coat squeaking over the music, and looked down at me and pressed whatever it was into my hand.

A stalk of fennel.

He leaned down until his mouth was against my ear, and I was scrabbling for the gun in my pocket.

“Ten dollars,” he said. He smelled like a dead cow at the side of the road.

The cone died down, and the store and my mind went black simultaneously. “What? ” I said.

But he was past me then, shaking his head and heading for the door, and I heard him squeaking through the smoke and I turned to watch and then threw up a hand to protect my eyes as he pulled the door open into an impossible blaze of light and squeaked through it and birds exploded through the doorway and into the light, and over the music someone shouted, “Stop or I’ll shoot,” but he didn’t stop, and two loud booms shook the smoke like water in a jar, and he went down.

And I ran through the door into the glare from the headlights of six LAPD black-and-whites and saw him on the broken asphalt, twisted like a scout’s knot gone wrong in the center of what seemed to be a pool of black ice, and I looked around and, with an effort that began at my toes, I did my level best to break Al Hammond’s jaw.