Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Don Winslow
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Copyright
Many people – most of whom it would be imprudent to thank by name – helped me in the research of this book, and I thank them all. Among those I can name, my undying gratitude to the ever patient Dr. Edward Ledford, president of the Zoex Corporation in Lincoln, Nebraska, for his guidance and counsel in regard to gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers and countless other issues involving the testing of debris samples. My thanks as usual to David Schniepp for sharing his knowledge of arcane surfing matters and south coast lore and legend. My gratitude to my wife, Jean Winslow, for her patient and expert drafting of the floor plans of the Vale house and for countless kindnesses.
ISLE OF JOY
THE DEATH AND LIFE OF BOBBY Z
THE POWER OF THE DOG
THE WINTER OF FRANKIE MACHINE
THE DAWN PATROL
THE GENTLEMEN’S HOUR
SAVAGES
WOMAN’S LYING IN bed and the bed’s on fire.
She doesn’t wake up.
Flame licks at her thighs like a lover and she doesn’t wake up.
Just down the hill the Pacific pounds on the rocks.
California fire and life.
GEORGE SCOLLINS DOESN’T wake up, either.
Reason for this is that he’s lying at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck.
It’s easy to see how this might have happened—Scollins’s little Laguna Canyon house is a freaking mess. Tools, wood, furniture lying all over the place, you can hardly walk across the floor without tripping on something.
In addition to the tools, wood and furniture, you have paint cans, containers of stain, plastic bottles full of turpentine, cleaning rags . . .
This is also the reason the house is a bonfire.
Not surprising, really.
Not surprising at all.
California fire and life.
TWO VIETNAMESE KIDS sit in the front of a delivery truck.
The driver, Tommy Do, pulls it off into a parking lot.
“Middle of freaking nowhere,” says Tommy’s buddy, Vince Tranh.
Tommy doesn’t give a shit, he’s happy to be getting rid of the load, a truck full of hot stuff.
Tommy pulls over by a Caddy.
“They love their Caddies,” Tranh says to him in Vietnamese.
“Let ’em,” Tommy says. Tommy’s saving for a Miata. A Miata is cool. Tommy can see himself cruising in a black Miata, wraparound shades on his face, a babe with long black hair beside him.
Yeah, he can see that.
Two guys get out of the Caddy.
One of them’s tall. Looks like one of those Afghan hounds, Tommy thinks, except the guy’s wearing a dark blue suit that has got to be hot standing out there in the desert. The other guy is shorter, but broad. Guy wears a black Hawaiian print shirt with big flowers all over it, and Tommy thinks he looks like a jerk. Tommy has him tabbed as the leg breaker, and Tommy is going to be glad to get his money, unload and get the fuck back to Garden Grove.
As a general rule, Tommy doesn’t like doing business with non-Vietnamese, especially these people.
Except the money this time is too good.
Two grand for a delivery job.
The big guy in the flowered shirt opens a gate and Tommy drives through it. Guy closes the gate behind them.
Tommy and Tranh hop out of the truck.
Blue Suit says, “Unload the truck.”
Tommy shakes his head.
“Money first,” he says.
Blue Suit says, “Sure.”
“Business is business,” Tommy says, like he’s apologizing for the money-first request. He’s trying to be polite.
“Business is business,” Blue Suit agrees.
Tommy watches Blue Suit reach into the jacket pocket for his wallet, except Blue Suit takes out a silenced 9mm and puts three bullets in a tight pattern into Tommy’s face.
Tranh stands there with this oh-fucking-no look on his face but he doesn’t run or anything. Just stands there like frozen, which makes it easy for Blue Suit to put the next three into him.
The guy in the flowered shirt hefts first Tommy, then Tranh, and tosses their bodies into the Dumpster. Pours gasoline all over them then tosses a match in.
“Vietnamese are Buddhists?” he asks Blue Suit.
“I think so.”
They’re speaking in Russian.
“Don’t they cremate their dead?”
Blue Suit shrugs.
An hour later they have the truck unloaded and the contents stored in the cinder block building. Twelve minutes after that, Flower Shirt drives the truck out into the desert and makes it go boom.
California fire and life.
JACK WADE SITS on an old Hobie longboard.
Riding swells that refuse to become waves, he’s watching a wisp of black smoke rise over the other side of the big rock at Dana Head. Smoke’s reaching up into the pale August sky like a Buddhist prayer.
Jack’s so into the smoke that he doesn’t feel the wave come up behind him like a fat Dick Dale guitar riff. It’s a big humping reef break that slams him to the bottom then rolls him. Keeps rolling him and won’t let him up—it’s like, That’s what you get when you don’t pay attention, Jack You get to eat sand and breathe water—and Jack’s about out of breath when the wave finally spits him out onto the shore.
He’s on all fours, sucking for air, when he hears his beeper go off up on the beach where he left his towel. He scampers up the sand, grabs the beeper and checks the number, although he’s already pretty sure who it’s going to be.
California Fire and Life.
THE WOMAN’S DEAD.
Jack knows this even before he gets to the house because when he calls in it’s Goddamn Billy. Six-thirty in the morning and Goddamn Billy’s already in the office.
Goddamn Billy tells him there’s a fire and a fatality.
Jack hustles up the hundred and twenty steps from Dana Strand Beach to the parking lot, takes a quick shower at the bathhouse then changes into the work clothes he keeps in the backseat of his ’66 Mustang. His work clothes consist of a Lands’ End white button-down oxford, Lands’ End khaki trousers, Lands’ End moccasins and an Eddie Bauer tie that Jack keeps preknotted so he can just slip it on like a noose.
Jack hasn’t been inside a clothing store in about twelve years.
He owns three ties, five Lands’ End white button-down shirts, two pairs of Lands’ End khaki trousers, two Lands’ End guaranteed-not-to-wrinkle-even-if-you-run-it-through-your-car-engine blue blazers (a rotation deal: one in the dry cleaners, one on his back) and the one pair of Lands’ End moccasins.
Sunday night he does laundry.
Washes the five shirts and two pairs of trousers and hangs them out to unwrinkle. Preknots the three ties and he’s ready for the workweek, which means that he’s in the water a little before dawn, surfs until 6:30, showers at the beach, changes into his work clothes, loops the tie around his neck, gets into his car, pops in an old Challengers tape and races to the offices of California Fire and Life.
He’s been doing this for coming up to twelve years.
Not this morning, though.
This morning, propelled by Billy’s call, he races to the loss site—37 Bluffside Drive, just down the road above Dana Strand Beach.
It takes him maybe ten minutes. He’s pulling around on the circular driveway—his wheels on the gravel sound like the undertow in the trench at high tide—and hasn’t even fully stopped before Brian Bentley walks over and taps on the passenger-side window.
Brian “Accidentally” Bentley is the Sheriff’s Department fire investigator. Which is another reason Jack knows there’s been a fatal fire, because the Sheriff’s Department is there. Otherwise it would be an inspector from the Fire Department, and Jack wouldn’t be looking at Bentley’s fat face.
Or his wavy red hair turning freaking orange with age.
Jack leans over and winds down the window.
Bentley sticks his red face in and says, “You got here quick, Jack. What, you carrying the fire and the life?”
“Yup.”
“Good,” Bentley says. “The double whammy.”
Jack and Bentley hate each other.
That old thing about if, say, Jack was on fire, Bentley wouldn’t piss on him to put it out? If Jack was on fire, Bentley would drink gasoline so he could piss on Jack.
“Croaker in the bedroom,” Bentley says. “They had to scrape her off the springs.”
“The wife?” asks Jack.
“We don’t have a positive yet,” Bentley says. “But it’s an adult female.”
“Pamela Vale, age thirty-four,” Jack says. Goddamn Billy gave him the specs over the phone.
“Name rings a bell,” Bentley says.
“Save the Strands,” Jack says.
“What the what?”
“Save the Strands,” Jack says. “She’s been in the papers. She and her husband are big fund-raisers for Save the Strands.”
A community group fighting the Great Sunsets Ltd. corporation to prevent them from putting a condo complex on Dana Strands, the last undeveloped stretch of the south coast.
Dana Strands, Jack’s beloved Dana Strands, a swatch of grass and trees that sits high on a bluff above Dana Strand Beach. Years ago, it was a trailer park, and then that failed, and then nature reclaimed it and grew over and around it, and is still holding on to it against all the forces of progress.
Just holding on, Jack thinks.
“Whatever,” Bentley says.
Jack says, “There’s a husband and two kids.”
“We’re looking for them.”
“Shit.”
“They ain’t in the house,” Bentley says. “I mean we’re looking for notification purposes. How’d you get here so soon?”
“Billy picked it off the scanner, ran the address, had it waiting for me when I got in.”
“You insurance bastards,” Bentley says. “You just can’t wait to get in there and start chiseling, can you?”
Jack hears a little dog barking from somewhere behind the house.
It bothers him.
“You name a cause?” Jack asks.
Bentley shakes his head and laughs this laugh he has, which sounds more like steam coming out of a radiator. He says, “Just get out your checkbook, Jack.”
“You mind if I go in and have a look?” Jack asks.
“Yeah, I do mind,” Bentley says. “Except I can’t stop you, right?”
“Right.”
It’s in the insurance contract. If you have a loss and you make a claim, the insurance company gets to inspect the loss.
“So knock yourself out,” Bentley says. He leans way in, trying to get into Jack’s face. “Only—Jack? Don’t bust chops here. I pull the pin in two weeks. I plan to spend my retirement annoying bass on Lake Havasu, not giving depositions. What you got here is you got a woman drinking vodka and smoking, and she passes out, spills the booze, drops the cigarette and barbecues herself, and that’s what you got here.”
“You’re retiring, Bentley?” Jack asks.
“Thirty years.”
“It’s about time you made it official.”
One reason—out of a veritable smorgasbord of reasons—that Jack hates Accidentally Bentley is that Bentley’s a lazy son of a bitch who doesn’t like to do his job. Bentley could find an accidental cause for virtually any fire. If Bentley had been at Dresden he’d have looked around the ashes and found a faulty electric-blanket control. Cuts down on paperwork and court appearances.
As a fire investigator, Bentley makes a great fisherman.
“Hey, Jack,” Bentley says. He’s smiling but he’s definitely pissed. “At least I didn’t get thrown out.”
Like me, Jack thinks. He says, “That’s probably because they don’t realize you’re even there.”
“Fuck you,” Bentley says.
“Hop in the back.”
The smile disappears from Bentley’s face. He’s like serious now.
“Accidental fire, accidental death,” Bentley says. “Don’t dick around in there.”
Jack waits until Bentley leaves before he gets out of the car.
To go dick around in there.
BEFORE THE SCENE gets cold.
Literally.
The colder the scene, the less chance there is of finding out what happened.
In jargon, the “C&O”—the cause and origin—of the fire.
The C&O is important for an insurance company because there are accidents and there are accidents. If the insured negligently caused the accident then the insurance company is on the hook for the whole bill. But if it’s a faulty electric blanket, or a bad switch, or if some appliance malfunctions and sets off a spark, then the company has a shot at something called subrogation, which basically means that the insurance company pays the policyholder and then sues the manufacturer of the faulty item.
So Jack has to dick around in there, but he thinks of it as dicking around with a purpose.
He pops open the trunk of his car.
What he’s got in there is a folding ladder, a couple of different flashlights, a shovel, a heavy-duty Stanley tape measure, two 35-mm Minoltas, a Sony Hi8 camcorder, a small clip-on Dictaphone, a notebook, three floodlights, three folding metal stands for the lights and a fire kit.
The fire kit consists of yellow rubber gloves, a yellow hardhat and a pair of white paper overalls that slip over your feet like kids’ pajamas.
The trunk is like full.
Jack keeps all this stuff in his trunk because Jack is basically a Dalmatian—when a fire happens he’s there.
Jack slips into the overalls and feels like some sort of geek from a cheap sci-fi movie, but it’s worth it. The first fire you inspect you don’t do it, and the soot ruins your clothes or at least totally messes up your laundry schedule.
So he puts on the overalls.
Likewise the hardhat, which he doesn’t really need, but Goddamn Billy will fine you a hundred bucks if he comes to a loss site and catches you without the hat. (“I don’t want any goddamn workmen’s comp claims,” he says.) Jack clips the Dictaphone inside his shirt—if you clip it outside and get it full of soot, you buy a new Dictaphone—slings the cameras over his shoulder and heads for the house.
Which in insurance parlance is called “the risk.”
Actually, that’s before something happens.
After something happens it’s called “the loss.”
When a risk becomes a loss—when what could happen does happen—is where Jack comes in.
This is what he does for California Fire and Life Mutual Insurance Company—he adjusts claims. He’s been adjusting claims for twelve years now, and as gigs go Jack figures it’s a decent one. He works mostly alone; no one gives him a lot of shit as long as he gets the job done, and he always gets the job done. Ergo, it’s a relatively shit-free environment.
Some of his fellow adjusters seem to think that they take a lot of shit from the policyholders but Jack doesn’t get it. “It’s a simple job,” he’ll tell them when he’s heard enough whining. “The insurance policy is a contract. It spells out exactly what you pay for and what you don’t. What you owe, you pay. What you don’t, you don’t.”
So there’s no reason to take any shit or dish any out.
You don’t get personal, you don’t get emotional. Whatever you do, you don’t get involved. You do the job and the rest of the time you surf.
This is Jack’s philosophy and it works for him. Works for Goddamn Billy, too, because whenever he gets a big fire, he assigns it to Jack. Which only makes sense because that’s what Jack did for the Sheriff’s Department before they kicked him out—he investigated fires.
So Jack knows that the first thing you do when you investigate a house fire is you walk around the house.
SOP—standard operating procedure—in a fire inspection: you work from the outside in. What you observe on the outside can tell you a lot about what happened on the inside.
He lets himself in through the wrought-iron gate, being careful to shut it behind him because there’s that barking dog.
Two little kids lose their mother, Jack thinks, least I can do is not lose their dog for them.
The gate opens into an interior courtyard surrounded by an adobe wall. A winding, crushed gravel path snakes around a Zen garden on the right and a little koi pond on the left.
Or former koi pond, Jack thinks.
The pond is sodden with ashes.
Dead koi—once gold and orange, now black with soot—float on the top.
“Note,” Jack says into the Dictaphone. “Inquire about value of koi.”
He walks through the garden to the house itself.
Takes one look and thinks, Oh shit.
HE’S SEEN THE house maybe a million times from the water but he hadn’t recognized the address.
Built back in the ’30s, it’s one of the older homes on the bluff above Dana Point—a heavy-timbered wood frame job with cedar shake walls and a shake roof.
A damn shame, Jack thinks, because this house is one of the survivors of the old days when most of the Dana headlands was just open grass hillside. A product of the days when they really built houses.
This house, Jack thinks, has survived hurricanes and monsoons and the Santa Ana winds that sweep these hills with firestorms. Even more remarkably, it’s survived real estate developers, hotel planners and tax boards. This sweet old lady of a house has presided over the ocean through all that, and all it takes is one woman with a bottle of vodka and a cigarette to do her in.
Which is a shame, Jack thinks, because he’s sat on his board looking at this house from the ocean all his damn life and always thought that it was one of the coolest houses ever built.
For one thing, it’s made of wood, not stucco or some phony adobe composite. And they didn’t use green lumber to frame it up either. In the days when they built houses, they used kiln-dried lumber. And they used real log shakes on the exterior and were content to let the ocean weather it to a color somewhere between brown and gray so that the house became a part of the seascape, like driftwood that had been washed up on the shore. And a lot of driftwood, too, because it’s a big old place for a single-story building. A big central structure flanked by two large wings set at about a thirty-degree angle toward the ocean.
Standing there looking at it, Jack can see that the central and left sections of the house are still intact. Smoke damaged, water damaged, but otherwise they look structurally sound.
The wing to the right—the west wing—is a different story.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the fire started in the west wing. Generally speaking, the part of a house that suffers the most damage is where the fire started. You know this because that’s where the fire burned the longest.
Jack steps back and photographs the house first with one camera and then the other. He has one loaded with color film and the other with black-and-white. Color is better for showing the damage, but some judges will only allow black-and-white shots into evidence, their theory being that color shots—especially in a fatal fire—are “prejudicially dramatic.”
Might inflame the jury, Jack thinks.
Jack thinks that most judges are dicks.
A lot of adjusters just take Polaroids. Jack uses 35 mm because the images enlarge so much better, which is important if you need them as exhibits in court.
So some bottom-feeding plaintiff’s attorney doesn’t take your shitty Polaroids and stick them up your ass.
“Polaroids are hemorrhoids.” Another of Goddamn Billy’s pithy sayings.
So just on the odd chance the file might end up in court, Jack’s covering all his bases. Which is why he keeps two 35s handy in the car, because it would be a waste of time to have to reload and then go take each shot again.
He grabs shots of the whole house with each camera and then jots down a note describing each shot and giving the time and date that he took the picture. He notes that he used Minolta cameras, notes the serial numbers of both cameras, the type of film and its ASA. He speaks the same information into the tape recorder, along with any observations he may want to have for his file.
Jack takes these notes because he knows that you think you’re going to remember what you took and why, but you won’t. You got maybe a hundred losses you’re working at any given point and you get them mixed up.
Or as Billy Hayes poetically puts it, “It’s writ, or it’s shit.”
Billy’s from Arizona.
So Jack says, “Frame One, shot of house taken from south angle. August 28, 1997. West wing of house shows severe damage. Exterior walls standing but will probably have to be torn down and rebuilt. Windows blasted out. Hole in roof.”
The easiest way to the other side of the house is through the central section, so Jack lets himself in the front door.
Jack opens it and he’s looking straight out at the ocean like he’s going to fall into it, because there are big glass sliders with a view that stretches from Newport Beach to the right down to the Mexican islands to the left. Catalina Island straight ahead of you, Dana Strands just down to your left, and below that Dana Strand Beach.
And miles and miles of blue ocean and sky.
You’re talking two million bucks just for the view.
The big glass door opens onto a deck about the size of Rhode Island. Below the deck is a sloping lawn, a rectangle of green in all this blue, and in the green there’s another rectangle of blue, which is the swimming pool.
A brick wall borders the lawn. Trees and shrubs line the side walls, and the trees and shrubs are edged by a border of flowers. Down to the left there’s a pad with a clay tennis court.
The view is totally killer but the house—even this main section that didn’t burn—is a fucked-up mess. Drenched with water and the all-pervading acrid stench of smoke.
Jack takes some shots, notes the smoke and water damage on his tape and then goes out into the yard. Takes some shots from this angle and doesn’t see anything to change his mind that the fire started in the west wing, which must be the bedroom. He walks to the outside of the west wing, over to one of the windows, and carefully removes a shard of glass from the window frame.
First thing he notices is that it’s greasy.
There’s a thick, oily soot on the glass.
Jack makes this observation into the tape but what he doesn’t speak into the record is what he’s thinking. What he’s thinking is that a residue on the inside of the glass can mean the presence of some kind of hydrocarbon fuel inside the house. Also, the glass is cracked into small, irregular patterns, which means it was fairly near the origin of the fire and that the fire built up fast and hot. He doesn’t say any of this, either; all he says into the tape is strictly the physical details: “Glass shows greasy, sooty residue and small-pattern crazing. Radial fracture of glass indicates that it was broken by force of fire from inside the house.”
That’s all he says because that can’t be argued with—the evidence is the evidence. Jack won’t put his analysis or speculation on tape because if a lawsuit happens and it goes to trial, the tape will be subpoenaed, and if his voice is on there speculating on potential hydrocarbon fuel in the house, the plaintiff’s lawyer will make it sound like he was prejudiced, that he was looking for evidence of arson and therefore skipped over evidence of an accidental fire.
He can just hear the lawyer: “You were focused on the possibility of arson from Moment One, weren’t you, Mr. Wade?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, you say right here on your taped notes that you thought . . .”
So it’s better to leave your thoughts out of it.
It’s sloppy work to start thinking ahead of yourself, and anyway, there could be other explanations for the oily soot. If the wood inside the room didn’t burn completely, it might leave that kind of residue, or there could be any number of petroleum-based products in the house quite innocently.
Still, there’s that barking dog, which is really going at it now. And the bark is not an angry bark, either, not like a dog defending its turf. It’s a scared bark, more like a whine, and Jack figures the dog must be terrified. And thirsty. And hungry.
Shit, Jack thinks.
He photographs the piece of glass, labels it and puts it into a plastic evidence bag he keeps in a pocket of the overalls. Then, instead of going into the house—which is what he really wants to do—he goes to look for the dog.
THE DOG PROBABLY got out when the firemen broke in, and it’s probably traumatized. The Vale kids will be worried about the dog, and anyway, maybe it’ll help them feel a little better to get their dog back.
Jack kind of likes dogs.
It’s people he’s not so crazy about.
Nineteen years (seven with the Sheriff’s, twelve with the insurance company) of cleaning up after people’s accidents have taught him that people will do about anything. They’ll lie, steal, cheat, kill and litter. Dogs, however, have a certain sense of ethics.
He finds the Vales’ dog hiding under the lower limbs of a jacaranda tree. It’s one of those little fru-fru dogs, a house dog, all big eyes and bark.
“Hey, pup,” Jack says softly. “It’s all right.”
It isn’t, but people will lie.
The dog doesn’t care. The dog is just happy to see a human being and hear a friendly voice. It comes out from under the tree and sniffs Jack’s hand for some kind of clue as to his identity and/or intentions.
“What’s your name?” Jack ask.
Like the dog’s going to answer, right? Jack thinks.
“Leo,” a voice says, and Jack about jumps out of his geeky paper overalls.
He looks up to see an older gentleman standing across the fence. A parrot sits on his shoulder.
“Leo,” the parrot repeats.
Leo starts wagging his tail.
Which is what Yorkies do for a living.
“C’mere, Leo,” Jack says. “That’s a good dog.”
He picks Leo up and tucks him under one arm, scratching the top of his head, and walks over to the fence.
He can feel Leo trembling.
There’s that thing about people resembling their pets, or vice versa? Jack always thought that applied to just dogs, but the parrot and the older gentleman kind of look like each other. They both have beaks: the parrot’s being pretty self-explanatory and the older gentleman’s nose being shaped just like the parrot’s beak. The man and the bird are like some interspecies kind of Siamese twins, except that the parrot is green with patches of bright red and yellow, and the older gentleman is mostly white.
He has white hair and wears a white shirt and white slacks. Jack can’t see his shoes through the hedge, but he’s betting that they’re white, too.
“I’m Howard Meissner,” the old guy says. “You must be the man from Mars.”
“Close,” Jack says. He offers his left hand because he has Leo tucked under his right. “Jack Wade, California Fire and Life.”
“This is Eliot.”
Meaning the parrot.
Which says, “Eliot, Eliot.”
“Pretty bird,” Jack says.
“Pretty bird, pretty bird.”
Jack guesses the parrot’s heard the “pretty bird” bit before.
“A shame about Pamela,” Meissner says. “I saw the stretcher go out.”
“Yeah.”
Meissner’s eyes get watery.
He reaches over the fence to pet Leo and says, “It’s all right, Leo. You did your best.”
Jack gives him a funny look and Meissner explains, “Leo’s barking woke me up. I looked out the window and saw the flames and dialed 911.”
“What time was that?”
“Four forty-four.”
“That’s pretty exact, Mr. Meissner.”
“Digital clock,” Meissner says. “You remember things like that. I called right away. But too late.”
“You did what you could.”
“I’m thinking Pamela is out of the house because Leo is.”
“Leo, Leo.”
“Leo was outside?” Jack asks.
“Yes.”
“When you heard him barking?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure about that, Mr. Meissner?”
“Pretty bird, pretty bird.”
Meissner nods. “I saw Leo standing out there. Barking at the house. I thought Pamela . . .”
“Did Leo usually sleep outside?” Jack asks.
“No, no,” Meissner says, like dismissively.
Jack knows it’s a stupid question. No one’s going to leave a little dog like this outside at night. He’s always seeing signs for lost Yorkies and cats, and with all the coyotes around here you know it’s like “B Company ain’t comin’ back.”
“Coyotes,” Jack says.
“Of course.”
Jack asks, “Mr. Meissner, did you see the flames?”
Meissner nods.
“What color were they?” Jack asks.
“Red.”
“Brick red, light red, bright red, cherry red?”
Meissner thinks about this for a second, then says, “Blood red. Blood red would describe it.”
“How about the smoke?”
No question about it, no hesitation.
“Black.”
“Mr. Meissner,” Jack asks, “do you know where the rest of the family was?”
“It was Nicky’s night with the kids,” he says. “A blessing.”
“They’re divorced?”
“Separated,” he says. “Nicky’s been staying with his mother.”
“Where does she—”
“Monarch Bay,” he says. “I told this to the police when they were here, so that they could notify.”
Except, Jack thinks, Bentley tells me they’re still looking.
“I feel for the kids,” says Meissner. He sighs one of those sighs that come only from advanced age. The man has seen too much.
“In and out. In and out,” Meissner says. “Chess pieces.”
“I know what you mean,” Jack says. “Well, thanks, Mr. Meissner.”
“Howard.”
“Howard,” Jack says. Then he asks, “Do you know why they were separated? What the issues were?”
“It was Pamela,” he says sadly. “She drank.”
So there it is, Jack thinks as he watches Meissner walk away. Pamela Vale has a night without the responsibility of the kids so she gets hammered. At some point she lets Leo out to go pee, forgets he’s out there and ends up in bed with a bottle and some cigs.
So Pamela Vale is drinking and smoking in bed. The vodka bottle tips over and most of the contents spills onto the floor. Pamela Vale either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. Then, with a burning cigarette still in her hand, she passes out. The sleeping hand drops the cigarette onto the vodka. The alcohol ignites into a hot flame, which catches the sheets, and the blankets, and the room fills with smoke.
Normally it would take ten to fifteen minutes for the cigarette to ignite the sheets. Ten to fifteen minutes in which Pamela Vale might have smelled smoke, felt the heat, woke up and stamped her foot on the cigarette and that would have been that. But the vodka would ignite instantly, at a much greater heat than a smoldering cigarette—enough to ignite the sheets—and because she’s passed out she never has a chance.
It’s the smoke, not the flames, that kills Pamela Vale.
Jack can picture her lying in bed, passed out drunk, her respiratory system working even though her mind has shut down, and that respiratory system just sucks in that smoke, and fills her lungs with it, until it’s too late.
She suffocates on smoke while she’s asleep.
Like a drunk choking on his own vomit.
So there’s that small blessing for Pamela Vale. She literally never knew what hit her.
They had to scrape her off the springs, but she was dead before the intense heat merged her flesh into the metal. She never woke up, that’s all. The fire broke out, her system inhaled a lethal dose of smoke, and then the fire—fueled by all her belongings and her home—became fast and hot and strong enough to melt the bed around her.
An accidental fire, an accidental death.
It’s one of those cruel but kind ironies of a fatal house fire. Cruel in the sense that it chokes you with your own life. Takes those crucial physical things—your furniture, your sheets, your blankets, the paint on your walls, your clothes, your books, your papers, your photographs, all the intimate accumulations of a life, a marriage, a physical existence—and forces them down your throat and chokes you on them.
Most people who die in fires die from smoke inhalation. It’s like lethal injection—no, more like the gas chamber, because it’s really a gas, carbon monoxide, the old CO, that kills you—but in any case you’d prefer it to the electric chair.
The technical phrase in the fire biz is “CO asphyxiation.”
It sounds cruel, but the kind part is that you’d sure as hell prefer it to burning at the stake.
So there it is, Jack thinks.
An accidental fire and an accidental death.
It all fits.
Except you have the sooty glass.
And flames from burning wood aren’t blood red—they’re yellow or orange.
And the smoke should be gray or brown—not black.
But then again, Jack thinks, these are the observations of an old man in bad light.
He carries Leo back to the car. Opens up the trunk and digs around until he finds an old Frisbee he left in there. Gets a bottle of water from out of the front seat and pours some into the Frisbee. Sets Leo down and the little dog goes right for the water.
Jack finds an old Killer Dana sweatshirt in the trunk and lays it on the passenger seat. Rolls the windows halfway down, figuring that it’s early enough in the morning that the car won’t get too hot, and then sits Leo down on the sweatshirt.
“Stay,” Jack says, feeling kind of stupid. “Uhh, lie down.”
Dog looks at Jack like he’s relieved to be getting some kind of order and settles down into the sweatshirt.
“And don’t, you know, do anything, okay?” Jack asks. Classic ’66 Mustang, and Jack’s spent hours refurbishing the interior.
Leo’s tail whacks against the seat.
“What happened in there, Leo?” Jack says to the dog. “You know, don’t you? So why don’t you tell me?”
Leo looks up at him and wags his tail some more.
But doesn’t say a word.
“That’s okay,” Jack says.
Jack deals with a lot of snitches. Seven years in the Sheriff’s Department and twelve in insurance claims and you deal with a lot of snitches. One of the ironies of the game: you rely on snitches and at the same time you despise them.
Another plus for the dog column.
Dogs are stand-up guys.
They never snitch.
So Leo says nothing except for the fact that he’s alive. Which sets off this sick little alarm in Jack’s brain.
What Jack knows is that people will never burn the pooch.
They’ll burn their houses, their clothing, their business, their papers—they’ll even burn each other—but they’ll never torch Fido. Every house fire Jack’s ever worked that turned out to be arson, the dog was somewhere else.
But then again, Jack thinks, so were the people.
And Pamela Vale was good people.
Raising all that money to save the Strands.
So let it go.
He peels off the overalls and the rest of it.
The house inspection will have to wait for a little while.
You got two kids going through a divorce, then their mother dies and their house burns down. Better get them their dog.
Small consolation for a shitty deal.
GODDAMN BILLY HAYES strikes a match, cups his hands against the breeze and lights his cigarette.
He’s sitting on a metal folding chair in the cactus garden outside his office at California Fire and Life, claim files in his lap, reading glasses on his nose and a Camel in his lips.
The cactus garden was Billy’s idea. Since the People’s Republic of California banned smoking in the workplace, Billy has been the company chairperson of COSA, the California Outdoor Smokers Association. He figured since he spent most of his time out in the courtyard anyway, it might as well be someplace he liked, so he had it rebuilt as a cactus garden.
If you need to talk to Billy and he isn’t in his office, he’s outside sitting on his folding chair, working on his files and sucking on a stick. One time Jack came in on a Sunday night and moved Billy’s desk out there. Billy thought that was just about as amusing as filtered cigarettes.
Billy came from Tucson twenty years ago to head up Cal Fire and Life’s Fire Claims Division. He didn’t want to come, but the company said it was “up or out,” and up meant coming out to California. So here he is, sitting out among the ocotillo and barrel cactus and the sand and the rocks amidst the aroma of sage, tobacco and carbon monoxide coming off the traffic streaming by on the 405.
Goddamn Billy Hayes is a small man—five-six—and so thin he looks like one of those dolls where there’s just wire under the little clothes. Got a sun-shriveled tan face, a silver crew cut and eyes as blue as Arctic ice. He wears good blue suits over cowboy boots. Used to keep a .44 Colt holstered on his belt—back when he had a few arson losses on some mob-owned buildings in Phoenix, and the Trescia family intimated that if he didn’t pay up maybe he’d have an “accident.”
Here’s how Billy handles that.
Goddamn Billy walks into young Joe Trescia’s real estate office with the .44 in his hand, pulls the hammer back, sticks the barrel up under young Joe’s nose and says, “I’m about to have me one hell of a goddamn accident here.”
Five wise guys standing there—scared too shitless to reach for their own hardware because it’s clear this little nut ball would splatter Joe Jr.’s brains all over the wall. Which would make Joe Sr. very unhappy, so they just stand there sweating and saying silent prayers to St. Anthony.
Young Joe looks up the blue steel barrel at those blue steel eyes and says, “I’ve decided to look elsewhere for our insurance needs.”
But that was the old days, and they don’t let you do that kind of thing anymore, especially not in California, where it would be deemed inappropriate. (“I mean, goddamn it,” Billy said, relaying the story to Jack one night over Jack Daniel’s with beer chasers, “in a state where they won’t let you smoke, you know they ain’t gonna let you splatter some greaseball’s brains all over the wall.”) So the pistol now sits on the top shelf of Billy’s bedroom closet.
What we got now instead of guns, Billy thinks, is we got lawyers.
Not as fast, but every bit as lethal and a hell of a lot more expensive.
Only thing more expensive than having lawyers is not having lawyers, because what insurance companies do these days—in addition to selling insurance and paying claims—is they get sued.
We get sued, Billy thinks, for not paying enough, paying too slow, paying too fast, but especially for not paying at all.
Which is what you got to do when you got an arson, or a phony theft, or a car accident that didn’t really happen, or even a dead insured who isn’t really dead but who’s slurping piña coladas in Botswana or some such goddamn place.
You gotta deny those claims. Say, Sorry, Charlie, no money; and then of course they sue you for “bad faith.”
Insurance companies are scared shitless of bad faith lawsuits.
You end up spending more on lawyers and court costs than you would have just to pay the goddamn claim, but goddamn it, you just can’t go around paying money you don’t owe.
Another Goddamn Billy dictum: “We don’t pay people to burn their own houses down.”
Unless, of course a judge and/or jury disagrees with you.
Finds that you “unreasonably” denied the claim or paid less than you should. Then you’re in bad faith and you’re also neck deep in a downwardly swirling shitter, because they hit you with not only the “contractual damages,” but also “compensatory damages,” and—if they really hate you—punitive damages.
Then you do pay your insureds to burn their own house down, and you also pay them compensatories for the pain and anguish you caused them, and you pay a few million in punitive damages if the scum-sucking, bottom-feeding goddamn plaintiff’s attorney has managed to whip the jury into a froth about how mean and nasty you were to the poor insureds who burned their own goddamn house down in the first place.
So it’s entirely possible—possible, shit, it’s happened—to deny a $10,000 theft claim and get popped for a cool mil in a bad faith judgment.
You get the right lawyer, the right judge and the right jury, the very best thing that can happen to you in your whole life is that your insurance company denies your claim.
Which is why Billy sends Jack Wade out on the Vale loss, because Jack is the best adjuster he’s got.
Goddamn Billy’s thinking these thoughts while he’s looking through the Vales’ homeowner’s policy and what he sees is that this loss is a beaut: a million-five on the house itself; $750,000 on personal property, propped up with another $500,000 in special endorsements.
Not to mention a dead wife.
With a $250,000 life policy on her.
All of which is why he handed this one to Jack Wade.
He knows Jack, so he knows that whatever else happens, Jack is going to do the job.
HERE’S THE STORY on Jack Wade.
Jack grows up in Dana Point, which in those days is a small beach town with a couple of motels, a few diners and surf to die for. In fact, so many surfers actually die for the surf that the beach gets the nickname Killer Dana.
Jack’s old man is a contractor so Jack grows up working. Jack’s mom is a contractor’s wife so she gets it: as soon as her little boy is big enough to hold a hammer he’s on jobs with his dad after school, weekends and summers. Jack’s seven years old and he’s holding the hammer for his dad until his dad reaches back and then smack, that hammer’s in Dad’s palm because little Jack is on the job. He gets bigger he gets to do bigger stuff. Jack’s thirteen, he’s in there tacking framing, hanging Sheetrock, toeing in footings. He’s sixteen he’s on roofs nailing down the shingles.
Jack works.
When he isn’t working he does what every other kid in Dana Point does—he surfs.
Learns this from his old man, too, because John Sr. was one of the early guys out there on a longboard. John Sr. was out there riding a Dale Velzy ten-foot wooden longboard in the days when surfers were considered bums, but John Sr. doesn’t give a shit because he knows he works for a living and bums don’t.
This is what John Sr. tells Jack like maybe only a million times on the beach or on the job. What he tells him is, “There’s work and there’s play. Play is better, but you work to earn the play. I don’t care what you do in this world, but you do something. You earn your own living.”
“Yeah, Dad.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” John Sr. says. “But I’m telling you: you do the job, you do it right, you earn your paycheck. Then the rest of your time is yours, you don’t owe anybody shit, you don’t owe any explanations, you have paid your way.”
So Jack’s father teaches him to work and to surf. Turns him on to all the good stuff: In-N-Out Burgers, Dick Dale & His Del-Tones, tacos carne asada at El Maguey, longboards, the beach break at Lower Trestles, the old trailer park at Dana Strands.
Young Jack thinks it might be the most beautiful place in the world, this long ridge overlooking Dana Strand Beach. The trailer park has been closed for years; all there is now is a few decrepit old buildings and some trailer pads, but when he’s up there among the eucalyptus and the palms which overlook the gorgeous stretch of beach that curves into the big rock at Dana Head, well, it’s the most beautiful place in the world.
Young Jack spends hours there—hell, days there—on the last undeveloped hillside on the south coast. He’ll surf for a while, then hike up the ravine that leads up the bluff and slip under the old fence and wander around. Go sit in the old rec hall building where they used to have Ping-Pong tables and a jukebox and a kitchen that put out burgers and dogs and chili for the trailer park patrons. Sometimes he sits there and watches the lightning storms that crash over Dana Head, or sometimes he sits up there during the whale migration and spots the big grays moving north up the coast. Or sometimes he justs sits there and stares at the ocean and does nothing.
His dad doesn’t let him do a lot of nothing. John Sr. keeps him pretty busy, especially as young Jack gets older and can handle more work.
But sometimes when they’ve finished a big job they take the truck down to Baja and find some little Mexican fishing village. Sleep in the back of the truck, surf the miles of empty beach, take siestas under palm trees in the ferocious midday heat. In the late afternoon they order fish for dinner and the locals go out and catch it and have it ready by the time the sun goes down. Jack and his dad sit at an outdoor table and eat the fresh fish, with warm tortillas right off the grill, and drink ice-cold Mexican beer and talk about the waves they caught or the waves that caught them or just about stuff. Then maybe one of the villagers gets out his guitar, and if Jack and his dad have had enough beers they join in singing the canciones. Or maybe they just lie in the back of the truck listening to a Dodgers game through the crackle of the radio, or just talk to the background of a mariachi station, or maybe just fall asleep staring at the stars.
Do a few days of this and then drive back to el norte to go back to work.
Jack graduates from high school, does a couple of semesters at San Diego State, figures that ain’t it and takes the test for the Sheriff’s Department. Tells his dad he wants to try something different from Sheetrock and 2 by 6s for a while.
“I can’t blame you,” says his dad.
Jack aces the written exam, and he’s bulked up from the construction work and the surfing, so he gets on with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. Does the usual gigs for a few years—serves papers, picks up fugitive warrants, does car patrols—but Jack is a smart kid and wants to move up and there’s no spot in Major Crimes so he applies for fire school.
Figuring that if you know construction you got a jump on destruction.
He’s right about this.
He rips fire school.
“PROMETHEUS,” THE LITTLE man in the tweed suit says.
Jack’s like, Pro-who? And what the hell does it have to do with fire?
The lecturer acknowledges the blank stares of the class.
“Read your Aeschylus,” he says, adding to the general puzzlement. “When Prometheus gave fire to mankind, the other gods chained him to a boulder and sent eagles to pick at his liver for all eternity. If you consider what man has done with fire, Prometheus got off easy.”
Jack had expected fire school to be taught by a fireman—instead he has this tweed-jacket professor named Fuller from the chemistry department of Chapman mumbling about gods and eternity and telling the students in a thick Irish accent that if they don’t understand the chemistry of fire, they can never understand the behavior of fire.
First thing Jack learns in fire school is, What is fire?
Nothing like starting with the basics.
So . . .
“Fire is the active stage of combustion,” the professor tells Jack’s class. “Combustion is the oxidation of fuel that creates flame, heat and light.”
“So combustion is flame, heat and light?” Jack says.
The professor agrees, then asks, “But what is flame?”
The class’s reaction is basically, Duhh.
It’s easy to describe flame—it’s red, yellow, orange, occasionally blue—but defining it is something else. Fuller lets the class sit with this for a minute, then he asks a very unprofessorlike question: “Are you telling me that no silly bastard in this room has ever lighted a fart?”
Ahhh, says the class.
Ahhh, thinks Jack. Flame is burning gas.
“Burning gases,” Fuller says. “So combustion is the oxidation of fuel that creates burning gases, heat and light. Which begs what question?”
“What is oxidation?” Jack asks.