California Fire and Life (11 page)

Shit.

Like you’re any different.

You’re the same guy without the money.

It’s not Nicky Vale.

It’s
me
, Jack thinks.

My pathetic fucking excuse for a life, which mostly consists of sifting
around in the ashes of other people’s lives, trying to put things back together again. Like that can happen, like that can ever happen.

Putting ashes together again.

“Christ, listen to yourself,” he says.

Fucking pathetic, self-pitying, burned-out.

Cold ashes.

Jack, the ace fire guy, a burnout case.

Now,
that’s
funny.

The cell phone rings.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” the voice says.

But …

The voice takes him back a long way.

Back to the days when he graduates from fire school and goes back to the Sheriff’s Department and they put him in the Fire Inspector’s Unit.

Jack is a comer, a real potential star.

He works his ass off, takes every seminar offered, goes to fires that aren’t even his. The joke is that every firefighter in south Orange County is afraid to barbecue a burger because they’re afraid Jack will show up.

Jack, he figures he has life just about dicked.

He has a trailer across the PCH from Capo Beach, so he’s ten minutes from Trestles, ten minutes from Dana Strand, and twenty from Three Arch Bay, and he can always just go across the highway to surf Capo if he’s pressed for time. He’s got a primo ’66 Mustang that needed only a little Bondo, and he gets a yellow paint job on that hummer, wires the sound system himself and puts on a rack and he is rolling.

Rolls out to a firebombing scene one day and everything else he could want in life is standing out in front of the Jewish Community Center waiting for him.

Letitia del Rio.

It’s
hard
to look good in an Orange County Sheriff’s Department deputy’s uniform, but Letty gets it done. Black hair an inch longer than
regulation, golden brown skin, black eyes in a face that is stunningly beautiful, and a body that is pure sex.

“This shouldn’t be a tough one for you,” Letty says to Jack as he walks up. She juts her chin at a teenage skinhead being loaded into an ambulance. “Adolf Jr. over there threw a Molotov cocktail and set himself on fire.”

“They think it’s the liquid,” Jack says, “not the fumes.”

“That’s because they sleep through their classes,” she says.

Jack shakes his head. “It’s because they’re morons.”

“Well, that too.”

Two minutes later he hears himself asking her out.

“What did you say?” she asks.

“I guess I asked you to dinner,” Jack says.

“You guess?” she asks. “I’m not going out on a
guess
.”

“Would you go out to dinner with me?”

“Yes.”

Jack blows out the savings account on a meal at the Ritz-Carlton.

“You’re trying to impress me, huh?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

“That’s good,” Letty says. “I’m glad you’re trying to impress me.”

Next date, she insists on Mickey D’s and a movie.

Date after that she cooks him a Mexican dinner that is only the best meal he’s ever had. He tells her so.

“It’s genetic,” Letty says.

“Did your parents come from Mexico?”

She laughs. “My family was living in San Juan Capistrano when it was still part of
Spain
. Do you speak Spanish, white boy?”

“A little.”

“Well, I’ll teach you some more.”

She does.

She takes him into her bedroom and Jack thinks he learns not only a little Spanish but the entire meaning of life when she steps out of her jeans and unbuttons her white blouse. She’s wearing a black bra and black panties and her smile says that she knows it’s sexy and she looks down at the bulge in his pants and says, “I make you
hard
, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” she says. Then smiles and says, “What I’ve got for
you
, baby …”

She’s not kidding.

You can take all those classroom definitions of fire, Jack thinks, but you don’t know about heat until you have Letty del Rio swirling on you. He reaches up to touch her breasts but she grabs his hands and pushes them down on the bed and holds them down while she keeps moving on him. She’s focusing his attention to just where she wants it; it’s like,
Once you’ve been in
here,
you’re never going to want to be anywhere else. You are
home,
baby
. And when he’s about to come, she reaches underneath him and lightly
strums
—later she’ll call this her “Mexican guitar”—and while he’s coming she’s talking dirty in Spanish.

She’s not only gorgeous and smart, she’s tough and hardworking and ambitious and she
gets
it. Like, they’re necking on his couch in the trailer when the scanner squawks about a fire on a houseboat, and after a minute Letty sighs
Go ahead
because she knows Jack has never done a boat fire before. Letty’s so cool she’s even there when he gets back and she lets him tell her all about it.

Some of their dates, they go to the shooting range together where Letty invariably beats him and then busts his balls about it all through dinner, telling him that because he lost and she won he has to do anything she says when they get home.

“
Any
thing,” she says, touching his dick with her toe. Then she starts murmuring
en español
what she wants him to do to her, and when he asks her what it all means she says, “You just start doing. I’ll let you know when you get it.”

She’s so cool she goes down to Mexico with him and sleeps in the back of the truck he borrows from his dad, and when they get back she says,
Sweetie, that was wonderful. Next time, a hotel
.

Pretty soon they’re spending all of their off time together. They go to the beach, to movies, they go out to clubs and dance. They make love and talk about cases. They talk about marriage and kids.

“I want two kids,” she says.

“Just two?”

“What? I’m Mexican, I’m supposed to want ten?” she says. “I’m one of those
modern
Mexican women. I read
Cosmo
, I read
Ms.
, I give head. Two kids, you can help me make them.”

“No, I’m one of those old-fashioned Anglo men,” Jack says. “You have to marry me first.”

“Maybe,” she says. “But if you want to propose to me, I want the dinner, the flowers …”

Jack starts saving for a ring.

So he has a place, a car, a woman.

And a job he loves.

Wakes up and goes to sleep to the sound of the ocean, sometimes sweetened by the sound of Letty’s breathing.

Then Kazzy Azmekian’s carpet warehouse burns down.

It’s a big freaking fire, so they put two guys on it.

Jack and a more experienced guy.

Brian Bentley.

The Atlas Warehouse fire is an arson.

Jack’s in there doing his inspection and what he sees are a bunch of cleaning rags left by a baseboard heater, but he’s also smelling enough gas fumes to get you through New Jersey on Empty.

The night watchman, some poor old semiretired guy from a second-rate rent-a-cop company, doesn’t get out. Probably asleep in there or something, and of course the smoke detectors have been disabled, so the guy dies from smoke inhalation.

So you got an arson and a murder, maybe second-degree but still a murder, and so Jack wants the arsonist
bad
.

Jack and Bentley are in the burned-out building doing their inspection when an old Mexican gentleman walks up to them and says that he heard that a man had died, and he wants to do the right thing.

Jack’s bowled over.

Like, here they are standing in the black hole of this used-to-be-a-building and this man walks up like a ghost. White suit, white shirt and carefully knotted tie—Jack figures the man must have dressed up to come talk to the police because he thinks it’s an important thing to do. The man just walks up and introduces himself.

“I’m Porfirio Guzman,” he says. “I saw what happened.”

Mr. Guzman lives in the apartment building across the street, hears a noise about three in the morning, looks out his window and sees a man come out of the warehouse, throw gasoline cans into his trunk and drive off.

“Can you describe the man?” Jack asks him.

Guzman got a good look at him. And the car. And the license plate.

“I see him toss the cans into his trunk,” he says. “A few moments later I see the flames.”

Jack learns that Mr. Guzman is sixty-six years old. Takes tickets at a local movie theater, pays his rent. Quiet voice, distinguished-looking, a real gentleman.

“Are you willing to testify to this?” Jack asks.

Guzman looks at him like he’s crazy.

“Sí,”
he says. “Of course.”

He’ll make a hell of a witness.

Except the guy he fingers is Teddy Kuhl.

Jack and Bentley bring Mr. Guzman in to look at pictures and he picks out Teddy Kuhl. Teddy’s the leader of a crew of white biker trash that does odd jobs for the so-called businessmen who own shit like the Atlas Warehouse. Teddy and his crew do the odd collections, extortions, vandalism, protection, arson and murder.

The second Jack sees Mr. Guzman point at Teddy’s picture and nod his head, Jack
knows
that Kazzy Azmekian had his own place burned down. He also knows he has a problem, because if Guzman makes a statement or takes the stand he’s going to get killed.

A dead-solid lock.

“We can’t let him testify,” Jack says to Bentley.

“He don’t, we have no case.”

They have an arson but no arsonist.

“He does testify,” Jack says, “he’s dead.”

Bentley shrugs.

Jack’s brooding on this all the time they’re going out to pick up Teddy. This is not a difficult thing to do. If Teddy’s not out actually committing some hideous form of nastiness, he’s on the third stool from the door at Cook’s Corner in Modjeska Canyon, either planning some hideous form of nastiness he’s about to commit or celebrating some hideous form of nastiness he just did. Anyway, Jack’s working on the situation as they go over there, jerk Teddy off his stool, cuff him and take him back to the station. By the time they have Teddy in the interview room Jack knows what he needs to do.

Get a confession.

Jack grabs a cup of coffee and then goes into the room to work him.

Teddy’s a real asshole. He even
looks
like a real asshole. Long blond hair thinning in front. A purple sleeveless T-shirt to show off his arm
muscles. Couple of tattoos, one of which appears to be an anatomically correct teddy bear in a state of arousal. He’s even got jailhouse tattoos on his fingers, which when interlocked together spell out L-E-T-S-L-O-V-E.

Jack turns on the tape recorder and asks, “Is it Kuhl like in ‘cool’ or like in ‘mule’?”

“Teddy Cool.”

Jack says, “A warehouse burned down last night, Teddy Cool.”

Teddy shrugs. Says, “That’s a real
bish
, man.”

Jack asks, “What did you say?”

“That’s a real
bish
.”

“Bish?” Bentley asks. “You mean
bitch
? You got a speech impediment there, Teddy?”

“Yeah,” Teddy says. “Maybe I do, you fat son of a bish.”

Jack asks, “Where were
you
last night?”

“What time?”

“About 3 a.m.”

“Fucking your mother.”

“You were at the Atlas Warehouse.”

Jack watches Teddy thinking. Mulling over that if they have him at the scene, it’s either a snitch or a witness. If it’s a snitch, he’s one of the crew. If it’s a witness …

“Your mom’s a drag in the sack, man,” Teddy says. “Gives lousy head. But I guess you’d know that.”

“You were at the warehouse.”

“Your sister, on the other hand …”

“You left a gas can behind,” Jack says. “Got your prints on it.”

He’d told this lie once to a young amateur who had blurted out, “Bullshit, I was wearing gloves!”

Teddy doesn’t go for it, though.

“Wasn’t me,” he says.

“Don’t be a dumb shit,” Jack says. “We got you. Why take a hit for Kazzy Azmekian? He wouldn’t take one for you. Give us Azmekian, we’ll get you some credit with the DA.”

Bentley chimes in, “Theodore, you have priors. Unless you do something to help yourself, you could be looking at double-digit time here. You could be dating Rosie for ten, twelve years.”

“Or you could write us a statement,” Jack says. “Like, now.”

Teddy lifts his middle finger, sticks it in his mouth and sucks it, then points it at Jack.

Out in the hallway, Jack says to Bentley, “We gotta get a statement. We can’t let Guzman testify.”

“Man knew what he was getting into,” Bentley says.

“Teddy’ll have him banged out.”

“I’m not losing an arson-murder,” Bentley says.

Jack shakes his head. “Either we get Teddy’s statement or we just say fuck it.”

Bentley looks at the floor for a long time. Finally says, “You do what you think you have to do.”

The selective use of the second person doesn’t elude Jack.

He asks, “We’re together on this?”

They look at each other while Bentley thinks it over. Then he says, “Yeah.”

They go into the room. Bentley leans against the wall in the corner as Jack sits down across the table from Teddy. Jack turns on the tape recorder, says, “You don’t know how to write, you can give it to us on tape.”

Teddy leans over the desk, gets into Jack’s face.

“You don’t got no fuckin’ gas can, you don’t got no fuckin’ prints,” he says. “What you got is a fuckin’ witness, and by the time this thing gets to trial … well, don’t you just hate it when bad things happen to good people? Ain’t it a real
bish
?”

Jack turns off the tape recorder. Takes off his jacket and lays it on the back of the chair.

Jack’s a big guy. Six-four and muscled. He comes around behind Teddy, says, “Teddy
Coooool
.” Then cups his palms and slams them against Teddy’s ears.

Teddy screams and slumps down in the chair, holding his hands over his ears and shaking his head. Jack picks him up and tosses him against the wall. Catches him on the rebound and bounces him off the other wall. Does this three or four times before he lets Teddy fall to the floor.