The Bone Fire: A Mystery (20 page)

Gil jogged another fifteen minutes before turning around and going back the direction he came, down the cold streets. When he saw his porch light shining brightly in the distance, he picked up the pace in anticipation of getting a shower, a beer, some ESPN, and a warm bed.

Lucy was still at work when her EMS pager went off. At the same time, she could hear the scanner above her desk sending out tones for the same page. It was a 4-Delta call, which meant an assault with serious injury. Copydesk had just finished up their work on the skull story, so Lucy said her good nights quickly as she raced out the door. She called herself into service using the radio in her car and pulled out of the lot. She raced down the dark, mostly deserted streets while pulling off her work shirt and pulling on her navy blue EMS top. She always wore black pants to work in case she went out on a call. She kicked off her work shoes and pulled on her combat boots while driving, switching her feet between putting on a boot and the accelerator.

She was just tucking her shirt into her pants as she pulled up to the fire station and jumped into the ambulance with Gerald. She got on the radio, telling Dispatch they were en route, then took out the street map to help navigate. Behind them, the engine pulled out with three firefighters on board.

She and Gerald didn’t talk while they hummed down the streets sirenless. There was no need to wake up the neighbors with shrieking noise when the roads were empty.

They arrived at the house—a sprawling ranch with an electronic front gate—but were stopped by a sheriff’s deputy blocking their access.

Gerald opened the driver’s window and leaned out, calling, “Hey, Jeanette. What’s up?”

“Hi, Gerald,” she said, smiling. “It’s good to see you. So, we’ve got SWAT on the way.” Which meant the scene wasn’t secure and they couldn’t go in.

Gerald backed the ambulance up and parked across the street, where they waited with the fire engine. The SWAT van arrived and pulled through the gate. Lucy could see nothing more than a dark street, the driveway, trees, and the sheriff’s car blocking their path. People might think SWAT situations were all action, and they were. Just not for EMS. For them, SWAT meant waiting. And waiting. Lucy considered asking Gerald what she should do about Lopez’s suggestion that she act as a reporter while on emergency scenes, but she knew what he would say. That it would be wrong. He would be disappointed that she even considered it.

Just then the cop blocking the driveway motioned them to drive the rig forward. Gerald said, “That was short,” as they pulled up to the home. They got out and grabbed their gear bag, then walked through the mostly dark house, stuffed with heavy replicas of Spanish Colonial antiques. A woman sat on a deep brown couch, a light shining on her face while the shadows on the outskirts of the room crowded around. She was in her forties and dressed in khaki pants and a torn blue blouse. She had a welt on her cheek and a split lip that was already clotted. Gerald knelt down beside her while Lucy took notes. The woman talked about a fight with her husband, who had taken off before SWAT had even arrived. Apparently he had held his wife hostage at gunpoint for a few hours before running off into the night.

Domestic assaults made Lucy feel oddly detached, as if all she could do was observe the situation. She knew that if she let herself get more involved, she would beat up the husband, move the wife out, and then burn the house down for good measure. Her anger and aggression got worse when she was the one treating the patient.
Luckily, Gerald preferred to be the one doing the active care of female assault patients. He never said as much, but Lucy suspected it was because he wanted the woman to be cared for by a man who was gentle and kind. Maybe it was his way of standing up for the gentlemen of his gender.

Gerald said his usual spiel to the wife: Did she have anywhere else to stay? Was there a friend they could call? Did she need anything else? Her responses were the usual as well: No, no, and no. Gerald had the woman fill out a refusal-of-treatment form, and then they left.

Mai Bhago Kaur concentrated on emptying her monkey glands as she got ready for bed. She had cut her finger slightly as she chopped twenty-four cups of vegetables for dinner earlier, and now the cut hurt as she gripped her toothbrush. She wondered if she’d cut herself because she was still recovering from the trance state that she had spent hours in that afternoon. She had come out of it feeling foggier then usual. Perhaps she had inadvertently gone on a psychic path she hadn’t meant to.

Or maybe she cut herself in her distraction over the new recipe she’d used for the vegetable curry and chapatis flatbread. It had been much harder than she’d thought it would be. Well, she would try it again tomorrow. She wanted to be able to make it perfectly for their welcoming feast day, which was only twenty-two days away, when Guru Sanjam Dev would finally be home again.

She wondered if this time he would tell them about the catastrophe that he had foreseen. She knew she would never ask him about it. God revealed these things only in due time. Nevertheless, since he had first told them about it during his last visit almost a year ago, they had spent hours each day reading the newspaper, looking at Web sites, and wondering if the next hurricane or global warming or Middle East war would bring the end to pass, and they concentrated on time training in the secret ways, both ancient and new. Only their prayers had kept them safe this long, and that was because their combined female energy was so powerful, it could save the world—but not indefinitely.

She finished brushing her teeth and went to her bed. She turned
on her CD player and heard his voice. She relaxed even more. She turned off the light and fell asleep to him telling her that in God’s love, they all were one soul.

Lucy was in the all-night grocery store, pretending to consider her shredded cheese choices, while in actuality she was watching a shopping cart that had food in it but no one nearby. It was about a quarter full. She could see a carton of chocolate mint ice cream that was surely melting. Any moment now, it would break through its cardboard container and—drop by drop—throw itself to the ground, making a mess. Then no one would ever want it.

She looked up and down the aisle one final time, certain the owner would come back. Who would leave a half-full shopping cart just sitting in a store? No, there was no one else around this time of night. She grabbed the cart and pushed it quickly down the row. She scanned the aisles looking for the frozen-desserts section. You would think that since she shopped here almost every night she would know where it was, but her trips here rarely involved food.

She came here for beer and the self-scanning checkout lanes. The anonymity of the place meant that she didn’t have to have human contact and the judgment that would bring. She didn’t have to pass under the all-seeing eyes of the cashier who would—after a week or so of seeing her every day—say a friendly “How are you tonight?” Which Lucy knew really meant, “Didn’t I see you last night buying another twelve-pack?”

In the past, Lucy had a set schedule of convenience and liquor stores she would frequent after work. She would visit each of them randomly, but never on successive days. One night she hit a store that she hadn’t been to in a week, yet as she walked in the cashier said, “You’re in luck, we just have one twelve-pack left.” Lucy was mortified.

She didn’t face this trouble at the all-night grocery store, where everyone was weirder than she was. She was a misfit among misfits, none of whom got judged poorly by the self-scanning checkout computer.

She kept pushing the cart down the aisle and replacing items:
Kleenex, laundry detergent, fresh tomatoes. She thought fleetingly that stores should hire people with OCD to do nothing more than wander around. Their natural inclinations would force them to clean and straighten everything.

By the time she was done, her beer craving was at full tilt. She couldn’t drink too much tonight, though, because she had agreed to meet Andrea at Starbucks at 10:00
A.M.
They would formulate a plan and then go over to the apartment complex. At most, she would have two beers.

Lucy twisted the top off beer number five as she cleaned her kitchen sink, using a scrub brush to get under its rim to the ancient caulk underneath.

Lucy loved the little house she rented on Alto Street, with its mosaic of Our Lady of Guadalupe by the front door and the old-timey feel of the neighborhood. Her tiny casita was old itself, with a clawfoot tub and a kiva fireplace. One of the few things she hated about her house was the lack of a washing machine. Whenever she wanted to do her laundry, she had to go to a Laundromat about a mile away. It was an inconvenient process for someone who didn’t tolerate inconvenience well.

At the moment, she had no clean underwear left and had worn the same socks the last three days. Her thought was to wash a few of her dainty things in the kitchen sink—but that would require that it be clean. She wiped the surface a few more times before she went to her room to figure out what she would wash.

She picked a few single socks that didn’t match off the floor, and then some underwear. She also was half looking for Nathan’s keys; his car was still in her driveway. She had come home from the grocery store expecting it to be long gone. Of course, she had expected Nathan to be long gone by that morning, and look how that had turned out. So he must have just pocketed the extra fifteen dollars she gave him for a cab back to her place. Classy.

After a few minutes of searching, and once again not finding his keys, she took her unmentionables out to the kitchen and threw them in the sink. She really didn’t want to wash them. She grabbed her
beer off the counter and took a swig. She looked at her dishwasher, considering.

As far as she knew, the dishwasher followed the same basic cleaning laws as a washing machine. She would just have to replace the dishwasher soap with laundry detergent and she’d be in business. She put her socks in the dishwasher’s bowl rack and draped her underwear over the silverware tray. After a few squirts of laundry detergent, she turned it on and then took her beer into the living room.

She sat down in front of the TV and watched some old
Simpsons
episodes, but her mind was elsewhere.

She thought back to the budget meeting and how she was shut down. Why was it so hard for them to understand that what they were doing was wrong? She realized she was anxious, feeling the humiliation that she hadn’t allowed herself to acknowledge during the meeting. She took another sip of beer to calm her nerves. Her co-workers had not only ignored her, they had mocked her for being some kind of police groupie because Gil simply stopped by to say hi. She cursed them all a few more times in her head. Maybe if she had explained to them about her friendship with Gil. Although “friendship” was too strong a word for it. Gil was more of her confessor. He knew why she punished herself. She took another sip of beer. If she had told him about her note in Zozobra, he would have understood that what she needed to be released from was her guilt. Guilt for causing someone else’s death.

Lucy picked up her cell phone and went through her contacts list to find a number, one she hadn’t looked up in six months. She dialed, listening to it ring four times before he picked up and said, “This is Detective Gil Montoya. Can I help you?” He sounded tired. Lucy looked at the clock. It said 1:45
A.M.
Really? How did that happen?

“Listen,” she said, not even identifying herself. “My boss is an asshole.”

“Okay,” Gil said hesitantly.

“I just wanted you to know that,” she said. He needed to understand that she was not a party to her boss’s misinterpretation of journalism ethics. She continued, “Okay, then, the thing is, those tapes you wanted, they aren’t here. I mean, not here here, but at work here,
and my boss thinks he’s not being an asshole about this but he is, he just is.” She stopped for a breath, realizing too late that she might sound drunk; on the other hand, she could usually handle her liquor, so he probably had no clue. “Then they all gang up on me. Anyway, the only thing for me to do is to just tell you that there are no tapes so you don’t waste your time looking for them, you know.”

“Are you saying there are no tapes from the security cameras in the newspaper lobby?”

“Correct.”

“Thank you,” he said. “That really helps us not waste our time.”

“Cool. So what are you up to right now?”

“Sleeping.”

“All right then,” she said, before adding a quick good-bye and hanging up. She was suddenly intensely embarrassed that she had called him so late at night. She took another drink of beer, but it did nothing to help her anxiousness. She felt her hands go cold and numb. She took a few deep breaths to try to calm down, but that only made her dizzy—and more nervous. If she wasn’t careful, she might end up in a full-blown panic attack. She knew that the only way to stop the feeling was to overtake it with another strong emotional response, possibly one that included a physical element.

She knew only one way to make that happen. She clicked her phone back open and dialed the next number by heart.

Gil hung up his cell phone and quietly put it on the nightstand, trying not to wake Susan. He turned off the bedside light but didn’t close his eyes. He listened to his house settling down for the night, the floorboards sighing and creaking to bed.

Lucy had been drunk. She’d been talking fast and nonstop. Her words had been slightly unformed and indistinct, one almost banging into the next. He was glad she had called him about the tapes, but the conversation left him unsettled for reasons he couldn’t quite pin down. It took him another forty-five minutes to finally fall asleep.