Incinerator

24

The heat had broken. Cooler air from the sea flowed into the canyon, bringing morning fog with it. The fog would spread its marine damp over the fuel, turning it sodden and useless for the gods of fire. Zoroaster would be taking his seasonal holiday, probably in Miami with everybody else.

The house was both damper and emptier than I would have liked it to be. I had bandages on both hands, and a jagged cut on my forehead, courtesy of the floor of the catering truck, that extended perversely several inches into my hairline. They’d had to shave a shape like a very large comma into my scalp, just above my left eye. In all, I looked like someone who arched his eyebrow so often that space had been carved to make room for it.

On the stereo, Rodney Crowell was stretching country music into new shapes while remaining within the same immemorial scraggly whiskered, whiskey-soaked, heartbroken mode.

“You’re just like a wildfire,” he sang, sounding like someone whose heart was tattooed on his sleeve; “Spreading all over town.

“As much as you burn me, baby…”

I turned over on the couch, a fat book in my hands. “I should be ashes by now.”

Eleanor was in chilly New York with Burt, “exploring his space,” as she’d said semiapologetically from an airport pay phone. When I’d suggested that his space was the nicest present he could give her, she’d hung up. She’d snorted unpleasantly first, though, and later called from New York to apologize for the snort. Small blessings are sometimes the only ones at hand.

Hoxley was dead. Burning rubber, it turned out, was the hardest fire of all to put out. Ashes by now, although he still stalked through my dreams. In my dreams, his eyes were on fire.

Eddie was moldering in the ground, or, alternatively, laying bets on the fastest seraphim in the sky. I had no idea which, and I didn’t particularly care. I’d liked Eddie, but he was as dead as Wilton. Some things you can’t fight. Schultz, almost preternaturally disconsolate, had resigned from the cops to go back into private practice.

My bank account was nearly full enough to compensate for my empty house. Annabelle Winston had been free with the zeroes. Zeroes, I soon discovered, are cold comfort, especially when you can’t think of anything you want to buy.

I could think of lots of things I wanted. Problem was, none of them happened to be for sale. “Ashes by now.”

On the other hand, I was finally enjoying Dreiser. Billy Pinnace had whistled through Sister Carrie, stinging my vanity, and I’d taken another whack. Poor Carrie was making all the wrong choices, and I was sympathizing with her heartily, my sympathy perhaps oiled slightly by an indistinct number of Singha beers, when the phone rang.

The room was getting dark enough to make me turn on a light, so I had to get up anyway. I dropped the book to the floor, and Bravo Corrigan, still hanging around in the hope of a free lunch, thumped his tail. To him, the phone held out a vague promise of future fun.

First, I snapped on the light. Then I picked up the phone and said, “Yeah?”

“Ho,” somebody said. Rodney Crowell’s bassist whopped his strings.

I looked at Sister Carrie. Many wrong choices, safe on the page, beckoned to me.

“Ho, yourself,” I said.

There was a silence, enlivened by the random electronic cackle.

“I’ve got this apartment,” the voice said. “It’s an okay apartment.” There was another pause. “Um,” the voice said.

I waited. Sister Carrie gave me a despairing wave.

“Do you know how to hook up a stereo?” the voice said.

“Yeah,” I said to Al Hammond, “I think I can hook up a stereo.”

I tripped over Sister Carrie on the way out.