Incinerator

18

This is what it said: 127.

The letters were black and even, set in type. They occupied maybe a square inch of paper that must once have been the upper right-hand corner of a left-facing page. There was nothing else.

The cheery canary-yellow envelope was tiny, the kind little kids get birthday cards in. It had arrived in the regular mail, and my name and address were in blue ballpoint in a normal, everyday handwriting, a small and precise handwriting but nothing as inhumanly rigid as the square, tightrope-straight gold calligraphy of the first notes.

I might have dismissed it, except for the return address on the envelope’s back flap. It said: From the forge of Hephaestus.

“One twenty-seven,” Schultz said over the phone. He lit up.

“Page one twenty-seven,” I corrected him.

“Yeah,” Schultz said. “Put it in the mailbox. We’ll call the Topanga P.O. And tell them we’ll be by to pick it up after they collect it. We’ll analyze it six ways from Sunday.” Then he started to cough.

“You really ought to quit,” I said. “Your prognosis is terrible.”

“Look who’s talking,” he said.

There’s not a lot you can do to get ready for someone who’s promised to burn you to death, but in the two days between my telephone conversation with Wilton Hoxley and the arrival of the three-number note, I’d done everything I could think of, mainly to keep moving. Sometimes even a futile gesture can be reassuring.

I’d started on Friday morning, the morning after the call.

“Six eight-gallon plastic buckets,” said the checker at the Fernwood Market, ringing them up. “Twenty-four- can that be right, twenty-four? — cotton towels, two, um, sixteen-foot garden hoses, four of whatever these are called, at two-twenty-nine apiece.” I didn’t know what they were called either, but they were short lengths of metal tubing with spiral threads at both ends. She dropped them into the bag. “Two nozzles?”

“I’ve got two hoses,” I explained.

“Piano wire?” she said, holding up a spool.

“It’s a jazz piano. Always wants to get wired.”

“And seven sets of wind chimes,” she said, putting them onto the counter with an unmelodious clatter. “All those bells,” she said. “Let’s hope you’re a sound sleeper.”

“Let’s hope I’m not,” I said.

I coasted Alice into the Valley, where I bought an extralarge sweat suit. Last stop was a Thrifty Drug Store, all overbright white fluorescent lights and underpaid brown help. The help sold me three of those thin plastic raincoats that meteorological paranoids fold up and carry in their pockets. All the way home I hummed complacently.

But halfway up the driveway, toting my haul in two huge cardboard paper-towel cartons with Bravo Corrigan trotting along at my heels and offering moral support, I got mad. If I hadn’t had to behave as though I were living under a mad scientist’s microscope, I could have carried the things up a few at a time, like a normal suburban American, over the space of an hour or so; instead, I’d needed cartons so he couldn’t see my surprises, pathetic as they were. I dumped the junk where I stood and clambered up to the phone to call Schultz’s number of the moment.

“Where’s he living, damn it?” I demanded.

“Nowhere.” Schultz sounded hoarse, but there was no way to tell whether it was from nerves or nicotine. “He’s underground.”

“You’re checking hotels?”

“And motels, and rooming houses. Literally every cop in this city has his picture. And it’s just jerking off, Simeon, and you know it. It could take weeks.”

“Has he bought a new Mazda?”

“Nein. We’re plugged into the DMV. All Mazda sales are being filtered out and fed back to us. There’s a lag of a couple of days from the sheer volume of the data, but so far-say, up to forty-eight hours ago-nothing.”

I thought. “Maybe an RV. Something mobile. Does Mazda make an RV?”

“RVs,” Schultz sighed. “Okay, we’ll get the RV transfers, too. I don’t think Mazda makes an RV, but he may not need a Mazda any more. That may have nothing to do with his new mission. He may be a new god by now.”

“Something mobile,” I said. It sounded right. “Something he could sleep in. It would solve all his problems. He could move around, plan whatever the hell the new mission is, not have to check in anywhere at night.”

The line was silent for a moment. “An RV would be pretty big,” Schultz said.

“So?”

“He saw the kid checking your mailbox. After he torched the Mazda.”

“Whooee,” I said.

“Can’t be that many spots where you can park an RV,” Schultz said. “Can there?”

“Check the RVs, okay?”

“Sure. Same forty-eight-hour lag, though.”

“Norbert,” I said. “You’re a brick.”

Before exploring Schultz’s idea, I went out and lugged the cartons the rest of the way into the house. Bravo Corrigan had gone to sleep in the shade. The sun’s heat sat on my shoulders like a fat, feverish kid. Thumb-sized bumblebees droned drunkenly through still air. A big one had decided to give up and rub its legs around in the dust. I stepped over it enviously, staggering along beneath the weight of the boxes.

The junk got dumped, like junk, in the center of the living room. I went into the bedroom to get my hawk-watching binoculars, a nice pair of lightweight Nikons that Eleanor had given me for my thirty-fifth birthday as a subtle way of contradicting my conviction that I was growing farsighted in my old age.

I closed the curtains to let the house cool, or at least stop heating up, for a few minutes. Then I moved methodically around the house, opening each curtain only a couple of inches and surveying the hills opposite.

The house perches very precariously on a ragged, triangular point of land that is almost the highest in the canyon. Rising behind it is a sheer cliff of decomposed granite that stretches twenty-five or twenty-six feet to the peak of the mountain. There is no way up to the peak except to leave the road and claw your way up through the rattlesnakes and chaparral, an unpleasant fifteen-minute hike highlighted by scratched arms and legs, branches in the eye, and worse. I’d done it, out of pigheaded curiosity, when I first rented the place. In front of the house and on both sides is nothing but air.

Half a mile through the air to the north is a tough-looking gang of scrub-covered granitic mounds, not quite mountains, that shoulder their way roughly northwest, toward the Pacific. They have not yet been developed, which makes them an endangered species. A raw interlocking system of dusty red firebreaks runs up and down them. To the south, three quarters of a mile away, is a long, high landslide-prone ridge, sharper than fur bristling on a mad dog’s spine, which some optimistic realtor had named Happiness Hills Homes. The mountains in front and west of the house are almost five miles away, and beyond them the ocean wrinkles and smooths itself in the sun.

Seen through the binoculars, between four inches of open curtain, the firebreaks in the granite mounds to the north looked suicidally precipitous. Up the gentlest-sloping of them, though, ran an unsurfaced dirt road for heavy equipment that would easily accommodate traffic in two directions: a possible. The mountains in front of the house were just too damn far away for him to have seen anything, unless he had the Hubble Space Telescope and he’d managed to fix the mirrors.

Happiness Hills Homes looked pretty good. There was plenty of access, and five building lots had been gouged into the face of the rock. Some of them had even withstood the record rains of February and March. On three of them the unfinished Homes of Happiness Hills baked in the sun, all open beams and broken rectangles of sheetrock. The developer had been working on spec, and not a nail had been driven into the houses since two of the pads spilled down the hillside on a fifth consecutive day of rain. Another profitable tax write-off, another hillside ruined.

I hadn’t bothered to look for Hoxley’s spy-hole for two reasons. First, he was supposed to be looking at me so he could see there weren’t any cops hanging around on the edges of things, and second, he could have been practically anywhere while he was driving the little Mazda. But now, if he was literally on the move, roaming the streets in a big, fat RV, he had a new set of requirements. And anyway, I thought, why not let him see me looking for him?

The problem, of course, was that I might find him.

Still, it felt good to be going on the offensive. I jumped lightly over the cartons in the living room, grabbed an apple from the refrigerator, and hiked down the driveway to Alice.

The southbound motorist on Old Topanga Canyon Boulevard, if he or she was stricken with an inexplicable compulsion to visit Happiness Hill Homes, would yield to the compulsion by turning left over an ugly raw concrete bridge that had been poured across Topanga Creek. He or she would then proceed almost vertically upward via a wide road, unpaved but liberally and repeatedly sprayed with oil. He or she would strike a substantial number of the large rocks that litter the road’s surface, and he or she would watch his or her temperature gauge rise airily toward the red sector. By the time he or she reached the circle at the top, he or she would probably be swearing liberally. I stopped swearing when I got out of Alice, who was steaming like the teakettle in a British farce, and saw tire tracks in the dust around the periphery of the oiled circle.

A wind tugged at my shirt and threw dust in my face as it blew over the ridge, drawn out of the baking San Fernando Valley by the low atmospheric pressure over the ocean. A fire wind, a steady flow of dry air that can push flames in front of it for days. It dried the sweat on my forehead as I knelt and looked at the tracks. They were very wide, wider than any I’d ever seen on an RV. They could even have been from the wheel of a tractor. Maybe they were going to begin building again. Maybe I was wrong about Happiness Hills Homes.

The pads radiated off the circle like the petals of a daisy. Each of them was reached by a short path, probably an embryonic driveway, that cut through the waist-high brush. Lizards scuttled away from me as I took the path leading to the highest pad.

Pad number one was a fragment. Most of it had rumbled down into the canyon during the rainstorm, leaving a gaping red scar that stretched for a hundred feet or so below it. Granite boulders had rolled down onto what remained, probably during the same storm, creating a moonscape of jumble and clutter. I climbed out onto it nevertheless and found cigarette butts, tinsel from a fresh pack, and two used condoms.

Pad number two held one of the partially built houses, just a skeleton of timber with a few empty windows framed in place and some finished stonework around what was ultimately to have been the fireplace. A small rattler sunning on the warm stone of the hearth politely announced itself in plenty of time for me to stop and back away. Other than that, there was nothing at all of interest, unless you counted the splendid view of my house and mailbox, below and almost a mile away.

The rattler was the hero of the day. It was small, which meant that its brothers and sisters were likely to be frolicking in the neighborhood, the healthy rural children of Happiness Hills Homes. The small ones can be as venomous as the whoppers. Bearing that in mind, I negotiated the path to pad three much more slowly than I had to the other two, walking heavily and deliberately with my eyes on the ground. If I hadn’t been looking at the ground, I wouldn’t have seen the fishing line.

It ran, stretched taut, between the upright timbers of the frame, passing through screw-in eyelets about four inches above the ground. The line was transparent, but the sun was almost directly overhead, and a gleam scooted along it as I approached. The gleam was tiny, but, thanks to the rattler, it was enough.

He’d been thorough, just as he’d been at the Doopermart. The fishing line traversed the entire perimeter of the house, four inches above the concrete pad. After I’d stood there for about ten minutes, just looking, I stepped over the tripline and onto the pad. Moving very slowly, I traversed the pad. It was as clean as if it had been swept. I was pretty sure that it had been swept.

This house was Plan B. Unlike the one on lot two, a stairway ran down from the pad to reach a lower level. A tripwire, stretched across the stairway four inches above the fourth step down, was virtually invisible. A foot coming down on it would have done the job, whatever the job was. It took me quite a long time, standing absolutely still and cupping my hands around my eyes against the sun’s glare, to determine that it was the only one. I stepped over it, going down, as though it were a foot thick.

When I reached the lower level, I stopped dead and took a long look around. I smelled oranges. What the architect evidently had in mind was a single, awkwardly long room with a glass wall looking out over the canyon, opening onto an outer deck from which one could enjoy the view. My house was in the center of the view.

There were no tripwires stretched over the skeleton of the deck. Dry weeds, thick and coated with dust, pressed up against the sides of the house. I took a loose two-by-four, lay down on my stomach on the deck, parted the weeds, and looked at dirt. Not until I’d checked all three open sides of the deck did I climb down into the brush. The first thing I did when I got there was stamp my feet eight or ten times to let the snakes know I was around. That finished, I jumped up and down twice and waited. Nobody rattled at me.

Getting no closer to the edge of the house than a foot or two, I worked my way around to the west-facing side and started up the hill, moving sideways. I’d gone six feet when I spotted a line of filament running down from the tripwire surrounding the pad, and used the two-by-four to part the brush in front of it. The line ran into a little square silver device, bolted to the wooden frame of the house. Emerging from the center of the little silver device was a long fuse. The fuse traveled three or four inches before it entered the business end of yet another Fourth of July fire cone. The fire cone was pointed out, away from the house. Into the brush.

Something moved behind me.

I froze, trying to will myself into silent invisibility. Whoever it was waited, too.

All I could think of was to get under the house, get between the open timbers that led down into the foundation, get away from the brush. The brush would explode. I didn’t want to burn, but I certainly didn’t want to explode.

I sank slowly to a squatting position. The person behind me moved closer, accompanied by the sound of breaking brush. I had so much sweat in my eyes that the foundation timbers blurred and wavered.

Then he came fast, and I leaned forward and pushed off with all my strength, a human frog trying to get under the lily pad before the hawk hits. I landed on one shoulder and tumbled away, rolling uphill, toward the juncture of the concrete pad and the hillside.

Rolling, in other words, into a corner.

Transformed in seconds from a frog to a crab, I scuttled backward into my corner and watched the brush. I heard something rasping and realized it was my breath.

Then I saw his feet.

They were brown. They were covered with fur. He lowered his head, gazed lovingly at me, and drooled.

“Bravo,” I said thickly. “God damn you, Bravo.” He started to back away. “Good dog,” I said very quickly. “Good Bravo. Stay, Bravo. Stay.” I was working my way toward him on my hands and knees. “Stay, boy. If you don’t stay, you’ll be Barbecue Corrigan. You wouldn’t like that, would you?” I emerged from my lair and twisted my fingers through the kerchief tied around his neck. He made a sound low in his throat, not really a growl, more like a canine “What’s up?” but he didn’t resist. United by a bond of love and cheap cotton, man and dog completed their surveillance.

I found three cones on that side of the house alone. When I got to the top, I brushed myself off, put Bravo into Alice and rolled up the windows for insurance, stepped over the tripwires again, and went downstairs. Anyone hitting one of those tripwires would have started a conflagration that could have burned half of Topanga Canyon. Wilton Hoxley was going in for mass immolation.

The smell of oranges came from one of the corners of the lower room overlooking the canyon. In it I found a tidy litter of orange peels, melon rinds, peach pits, and seeds. The Incinerator, apparently, lived on fruit. When I finally turned to climb the stairs, something gleamed at me from the vertical portion of the fourth step from the top, the one with the fishing line over it. On a small square of brown paper, in gold ink, I read the words: Hi!

How do you like it!

“I’m going to tell Finch to put a man up there,” Schultz said.

“The hell you are. Why? I cut the lines and yanked the fireworks. He’s not coming back. He booby-trapped it and went away.” The phone was slick and wet in my hand.

“He reads the papers,” Schultz said. “That thing doesn’t go off, he’s going to go up and check. He won’t be able to keep himself from checking. Maybe you found it, maybe you disarmed it. There’s nothing in the papers, he’s going to be beside himself.”

“Oh, for the love of God, Norbert. For this kind of thinking, they pay you eighty dollars an hour? He’s not coming back. If it doesn’t go off, then either it’s intact or it’s been discovered. If he thinks it’s intact, he’ll wait until someone trips over it and it makes the front page. If he thinks it’s been discovered, he’ll figure every cop in California is sitting in the sagebrush wearing asbestos and waiting for him.”

“You’re thinking sane” Schultz protested.

“I’m thinking, period.”

“You can’t think sane with this guy. Trust me on this.”

“I’ve been trusting you. Have we caught him so far?”

“What’s the note say? ‘How do you like it?’ Suppose you’re keeping us from preventing his new mission?”

“This isn’t his new mission. This is a prank.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because he isn’t around for the fun.”

Schultz lit up and breathed smoke. “A lot of people could get killed if you’re wrong,” he said. “I can’t keep this from Finch.”

“Then I stop talking to you.”

“Wait, wait. How you going to feel if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not wrong.”

“If you can say that right now, you’re dumber than I thought you were. Let’s say there’s one chance in five thousand that you’re wrong. Let’s say that’s the chance that comes up and he rerigs it and some kid sets it off and fifty people die in their houses. Remember how I felt when he burned the first woman?”

I used the time I needed for reflection to transfer the receiver to my other ear.

“You could be right about his mission,” Schultz conceded. “That sounds good to me. He’s going to want to be there. But if you’re wrong about this, this prank or whatever it is, you’re going to carry it with you until the day you die. There are little kids living up there.”

Five thousand to one didn’t sound good enough. “Only two cops,” I said. “And they can’t be uniforms.”

“Fine,” Schultz said. “I’ll tell Finch.”

“They have to go in on foot, over the fire roads. They can get dropped off about two miles away, at the top of Old Topanga Canyon, and pick up the fire road directly across the road from Deer Creek Ranch. You can get a map from the fire department. They should dress like hikers. I don’t care if they’re packing atomic cannons, they keep them in their backpacks until they’re in position and they know no one is peeking. And they take every foot of the way like they’re in enemy territory.”

“Green Beret time.”

“Eight- to ten-hour shifts,” I said. “No endless line of oversized Boy Scouts trekking heartily back and forth to Happiness Hills Homes.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Schultz said impatiently.

Since I had a lot to do, everybody called. I was threading the pipe gizmos into the faucets in the kitchen and bathroom when the phone rang the first time. It was my friend Annie Wilmington, the mother of my goddaughter, inviting me to an eighth birthday party for her son, Luke, on Sunday. I declined. I was screwing the garden hoses onto the pipe gizmos in the faucets when a lady from the Los Angeles Times called to suggest that what was missing from my life was a six-month trial subscription. I told her I wasn’t sure I had six months to live. I was using the hoses to fill five of the six buckets with water when Stillman called to ask how the case was coming along. I told him it was coming along like a house afire and hung up on him. I was putting eighteen of the twenty-four towels into the buckets full of water when Annabelle Winston called.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve lost a little weight, but I’ve acquired a guard dog.”

“I haven’t wanted to bother you. I just wondered if you have anything to tell me. I want to go to Chicago for the weekend, but not if you think anything is likely to happen.”

“I think that exactly anything is likely to happen.”

“Should I stay?”

“Look, Miss Winston, I appreciate how patient you’ve-”

“I saw how stressed you were last time,” she said, pouring it on just a bit. “I wouldn’t add to the strain for the world, it’s just that I’m not sure whether to leave or not. When you say you think anything might happen-”

“I mean that he might burn me, he might burn you, or he might burn half of southern California. I think he’s on the move and that he’s got something very big in mind. And I think it’s going to happen soon.”

“I’ll stay,” she said.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to finish filling my moat.”

I put each of the buckets, full of water and towels, dead center in a room. I fastened the garden nozzles onto the hoses and hauled them through the house to make sure there was no spot I couldn’t hit. I filled the sixth bucket with water, dropped the remaining six towels into it, and toted it down to Alice. Bravo roused himself loyally and trotted down after me. When I got back to the top of the hill, I gave him a bowl of water and a full box of low-salt Triscuits, over which I poured bacon grease from some forgotten breakfast. He knocked it back as though it had been Chateaubriand.

Having purchased his territorial loyalty for one more night, I sat at the plywood breakfast counter and used a pair of needlenose pliers to work the bells out of the wind chimes. I only pinched myself twice. The pliers doubled as wire cutters, so I took them outside as I strung the piano wire back and forth across the driveway and through the brush on the hillsides surrounding the house. Each wire or pair of wires ultimately passed through one of the many holes in the screen over my bedroom window, where I passed it under a bent nail driven into the wall and then tied it off through one of the metal rings that had held the bells in place in the wind chimes. The entire bouquet of bells dangled about twelve inches above where my nose would be when I was asleep. I was outside, tugging wires and listening to bells, when the phone rang again.

“Yeah?”

“Hello, Simeon,” Eleanor said.

“Oh, Lord,” I said, feeling as though I’d broken into a blush. “Let me get a beer.”

I grabbed a bottle of Singha from the refrigerator and plopped down on the floor. “So hi,” I said.

“How are you?”

“Everybody’s asking. I’m not well done yet, and that’s something.”

“Have you got any protection?”

“Bravo Corrigan’s here. I’ve put in an alarm system.” I could hear a television in the background. “And you?”

“Getting tired of hotels.”

“Call room service.”

“I do,” she said. “Continuously.”

“How’s good old Burt?”

“In New York.”

“He’s a New York type of guy. He should really move to New York. I bet he’d be happy as hell in New York.”

“Well,” Eleanor said. It was beginning to get dark.

I didn’t want her to hang up. “Have you seen Hammond?”

“He’s with me four hours a day. He’s in terrible shape, Simeon. I think he’s drunk all night long. He’s got so much fluid under his eyes I’m surprised he can blink.”

“Tough,” I said. “He’s a big boy. Time for him to stop feeling sorry for himself.”

“She’s going to take everything. She’s got proof that he committed adultery.”

“ Al? ” I asked in mock disbelief.

“Oh, stop it. He’s your friend.”

“I am now the One Musketeer,” I said.

“Well,” she said again. “He misses you.”

I drank again. “He does?”

“I miss you, too.”

“Eleanor,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too,” she said after a moment. “How did things get so complicated?”

“Maybe I’m not the best guy in the world. But I could get better.” I felt like I was talking Tourist’s English.

The television on her end of the line went bang-bang. “It would be good for you if you did,” she said. “You can’t run away from love forever.”

“It’s how I keep in shape,” I said. “Stupid. Sorry, that was stupid.”

“Well, it was certainly Simeon. Do you want me to come over?”

“No,” I said quickly. “We’re in Wilton’s time zone here.”

“Do you want to come here, then?”

There was nothing in the world I wanted more. “I’m afraid to leave.”

“I’d think you’d be afraid to stay.”

“That, too.”

“And you think you can change,” she said. “Well. When it’s over, then. Promise?”

“I promise.” I searched my brain for words that would prove I meant it.

“Please take care of yourself. For me, if not for you.”

“I will.” I drank half the bottle in a series of long, heart-clutchingly cold swallows.

“See you, then.”

“See you.” She hung up, and I finished the bottle and thought about the conversation we hadn’t had.

When in doubt, Dreiser. Since I’d totaled An American Tragedy, I took a shovel to The Titan for an hour or two, then gave up once again and reread the first part of Trollope’s richly venal The Way We Live Now. At about eleven I turned off the light and got into bed. Two minutes later, the phone rang. I pushed Bravo Corrigan off my feet, where he was already twitching his feet, chasing some dream cat, and went to answer it.

“Hello?” I said, hoping it was Eleanor again.

Silence.

“Oh, fuck you, Wilton,” I said, slamming the phone down. I went back to bed. Ten minutes later, Bravo raised his head and growled. I picked up the flashlight I’d put on the table by the bed and pointed it out the bedroom window. I lay down again.

All the bells went off.