Faces in the Fire (24 page)

Wait. Her cell phone. She pulled it out of her purse, dialed 911, told the operator a fire had started at the Villa Apartments. At least she could give rescue workers a head start.

She turned off her phone and slipped it back into her purse. If she could figure out a way to avoid the fire altogether, stop Dane before he started . . .

Maybe she could try getting the attention of someone in a ground-floor apartment, see if they'd give her access to the inner courtyard and the stairs. She glanced down the row of windows; a few apartments down, she saw lights behind pulled drapes in one of the windows.

Grace turned and ran for the apartment; seconds later, she heard the front door open behind her. She turned, ready to sprint back to the door before it closed.

Instead, she was looking at the face of Dane. Even worse, he was looking at her.

He furrowed his brow for a few seconds, then tried a smile. “Grace? Is that you?”

She took an involuntary step back as he moved toward her. “Yeah,” she said, trying to look nonchalant, trying to put on that funny-to-randomly-see-you-here look. “Just, uh . . . dropping by to see a friend here.” She pointed at the poured concrete building behind him.

“Oh, I don't think that's a good idea,” he said, and his eyes seemed to twinkle in the low light. Behind him, a dull
whump
rattled the front doors.

He made a comical face, rolled his eyes to look at the door behind him. “Ooh, that didn't sound good,” he said.

She could barely see his face, but that grin—that manic, unbearable grin—shined at her in the low light.

“I know who you are,” she said. “What you are.”

Behind him, smoke had begun working its way up the stairs from the basement and was filling the area behind the glass doors. Grace stared at the smoke uneasily. The parking lot lights and the call box had been broken; would the alarm system inside the building make it three for three? She guessed it would, if the building had any kind of alarms at all.

“Oh, you don't know me at all,” he said. “Dane's not even my real name.”

“I've called the police,” she said. “They're on the way.” Not quite true. She'd called the fire department, but the police would surely accompany them.

He shrugged. “Time to move on,” he said, moving away from the door and trying to disappear into the night. A phoenix in search of its ashes. He stopped, turned her way again. “I've been in Seattle too long anyway.”

She scrambled, finding the gun in her purse. “Stop!” she screamed, pointing the gun at him and dropping her purse without meaning to. She thought about picking up the purse but opted instead to put both hands on the gun grip.

Dane smiled at her. “Please,” he said. “You expect me to believe that's loaded? To believe you've ever even fired it?”

Smoke was billowing out of the apartment complex now, and she needed to make a choice: keep Dane at bay or try to help people inside the apartment.

Or . . . maybe both.

She dropped the aim of her gun, pulled the trigger, fired a round into his upper thigh. He dropped instantly, howling in pain.

Keeping the gun trained on him, she walked over to where he lay on the grass, blood seeping from a black hole in his leg. She leaned close to his ear and spoke through gritted teeth. “You don't know me at all,” she said. “Grace isn't even my real name.”

She pulled the front key to the apartment from his hand, ran to the apartment complex, and retrieved her purse from the dewy, sparse grass. Then she unlocked the twin glass doors on the front of the building and did her best to prop them open.

Inside, she heard smoke detectors beeping in a couple of apartments, but no fire alarm.

He disabled the alarm and the sprinklers
, a voice inside said. And suddenly, she knew that was correct.

Okay, she should start with the top floor, because it would be most difficult for them to get out. She ran up the four flights of stairs and began going down the row, ringing doorbells and pounding on the doors as she did. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps as she went, and she felt tears squeezing from her eyes. Not just from the smoke.

People began coming to their doors, but by the time they did, she was already at the next door. Her lungs felt like they were torn, and she wasn't sure what she'd say, anyway. The gathering smoke did all the talking necessary.

Two other people joined her, pounding on doors and ringing the doorbells of apartments where no one had answered yet.

She went to the third floor and repeated the process, recruiting more help, then on to the second and first.

She paused briefly to see if Dane was still on the grass outside. He was sitting there, his belt now wrapped around his leg, but his face had a look of utter and complete wonder as he stared at the smoke boiling from the building.

Maybe he was a phoenix, but she'd chased worse. She'd chased dragons.

Flames began to eat their way out of the basement, working their way into apartments on the first floor. Most of the doors to those apartments were hanging open now, the occupants moving safely away from the building. But two doors remained shut.

She couldn't see what was happening on the other floors, but she had to trust that the people who had joined her were making sure everybody got out.

She went to the nearest closed door on the ground floor once again, rang the doorbell several times, pounded on the flimsy door.

She heard something inside that made her whole body go cold, even though the heat of flames continued to spread around her.

A child crying.

“Hey!” she screamed at a man running away from the building in a T-shirt and boxers.

He stopped and looked back at her.

“Give me a hand!” she said. “I hear a kid inside.”

He looked like he was debating for a moment, then he ran over to where she stood. Up close, she could see the sweat on his face.

“Help me get this door open,” she said. She rang the bell and pounded on the door several more times, rattling it in its frame.

The man looked around. “How about a garbage can?” he asked. “We could use it to bang down the door.”

She nodded, tried to put her shoulder into the door. Inside, the child continued to sob, and Grace felt her own tears beginning to stream down her cheeks.

The man in boxers returned, dragging a large steel barrel behind him. She ran to him, helped him lift it.

“Okay,” she said, “let's bust the door down. One, two, three, go!”

Together they rushed the door, using the can as a crude battering ram. The door gave a huge shudder, and a crack appeared near the bottom hinge, but still the door held.

The smoke thickened, and the man in boxers coughed a few times. “Again!” he said between coughs, and Grace lifted and counted again.

“One, two, three, go!”

They hit the door a second time, and it jumped away from its hinges, hanging lazily open a few feet.

Grace pushed at the door and rushed in first. Now every drop of blood in her system felt like dead blood, because the child's crying had stopped. She wished she had a flashlight.

Should she crawl? Isn't that what they said to do in fires? Yeah, but the fire was in the basement, so what good would it do?

Shaking her head, she decided to drop to her hands and knees, realizing instantly that it was the right choice. Smoke, little more than heated air, would rise, collect in the top part of any floor.

After a few seconds of crawling, she made her way to the child, crouched and unconscious in a corner. She grasped for the small body, scooped it into her arms, stood and turned to head back out the door. No way she could crawl now.

She kept her eyes on the door, which looked like a gaping wound into the darkness outside. On the way, she tripped on something and almost went down. Another person, she realized. Also unconscious.

“Hey!” she screamed, hoping the guy in boxers was still outside. “There's a woman in here!”

“Got her,” came the short reply. He was obviously inside the apartment too. That was good; it meant he had run into the fire with her. And then Grace was back out the front door again, cradling the child against her, sobbing as she looked for signs of life.

(It was a girl, she could see now, a beautiful five-year-old girl like her Tiffany had once been, like—)

She squeezed her eyes shut once more, squeezed thoughts of Tiffany from her mind, opened her eyes slowly again.

She whispered to the child, incomplete, incoherent words, willing the young girl to open her eyes,
just open her eyes
.

“I'm sorry, Tiffany,” she said, seeing that the child was Tiffany—the same ruddy cheeks, the same wild hair that wouldn't stay out of her face (that was impossible, of course, that was impossible)—and then: “I know you don't have the dead blood.”

Suddenly, miraculously, Tiffany opened her eyes. And smiled at her.

(Not Tiffany)

A tap on her shoulder. It was the guy in boxers. At his feet lay an unconscious woman.

“I think she's stoned out of her mind,” he said.

Grace glanced down at the woman and saw the needle marks on the woman's arms.

She closed her eyes, turned, gently rocked the child to soothe her. And as the tears continued to stream from her eyes, the cleansing tears that were helping her see clearly for the first time in years, she sank to her knees because she knew she could no longer stand.

And as police cars and fire trucks poured into the parking lot in front of her, the dragon did some chasing in the apartment behind her.

56.

Later, after getting control of her sobs, after telling a police officer she'd seen the wild-eyed man on the lawn come crashing out of the apartment just before the fire erupted (though she said nothing about the gunshot wound, her mind was still clear enough to steer away from that entanglement), she returned to the tattoo shop. It was late. Or early, depending on your definition—that hazy dead zone between the quiet, still darkness of late night and the awakening of first light in the eastern sky.

Her clothes still smelled like smoke. Her tears still traced clean tracks down her ash-covered face. Her stomach still felt sick and empty.

The police wanted her to come to the station and make a statement at eight o'clock that morning, just a few hours away, knowing she knew more than she'd let on, but evidently trusting her enough to let her leave. She would do that. She would tell them all she had seen. Even the part about the gun.

Well, maybe not all of it. She'd already concocted a story about how she became suspicious of Dane because of his tattoos—all of them fire related. How he talked about fires and burning throughout his last tattoo session. (This was an outright lie; neither she nor Dane had any memory of their last tattoo session, she knew.) How she had followed him and had her suspicions confirmed when he lit the fire in the basement of the apartment complex.

They might slap her wrists, give her the old lecture about not taking the law into her own hands, that kind of thing. But they would let her walk out of there after a few hours.

And she would keep walking.
She
would be the phoenix.

She unlocked the gate at the front of GraceSpace, rolled it away, unlocked the front door, turned on the lights inside. First she wrote a note to Vaughn and Zoey, letting them know their apprenticeships were over and telling them the shop was all theirs. She was making other plans, moving other directions.

She took all the cash from her Dark Room's safe and transferred it to her purse. Then, she took the .38-caliber revolver from her purse, put it in the safe, and locked it again. Finally, she retrieved the last bottle of Black Tar, slipped it into her purse. Yes, it was the last bottle. But she had the stock number; she could order more.

She could order so much more.

Out in the front lobby area, she passed the mirror Dane had used to admire his new phoenix tattoo fifteen long hours ago. Her reflection stared back with red, unmoving eyes.

After a few seconds of staring, she unbuttoned her shirt and looked at her chest. The tattoo of the door was there still, but now it was different. The door was open.

Unlocked.

And in the thin sliver of space behind the open door on her chest, she saw hidden letters, now glowing.
F-A-M-I
L-Y.
She touched the letters, saw an image of her children, Tiffany and Joey, laughing as she chased them across a manicured lawn, dappled sun shining through the thick canopy of leaves above. This tattoo moved, hypnotically cinematic, a movie in front of her eyes. The children were older now, yes. But still children. Still
her
children.

After her statement to the police, she would return to Montana. To Red Lodge. Once, dead blood had flowed through her arteries, but now every drop was alive.

She smiled at her reflection.

In that moment, she stopped chasing the dragon.

And it stopped chasing her.

Final Stanza

Minus Midas

4.

They wanted him to kill a woman here in the District.

Not that he had to, of course. Killing was completely voluntary; he could quit at any time.

All he had to do was die himself.

And that would mean one other person close to him would die as well.

And so, because he had to keep living, he had to keep killing.

He smiled as he cradled the mug of coffee in his hands, and blew on it a bit before sipping. It was a habit he'd developed, this blowing on coffee before every sip, imprinted into his brain because he'd worn gloves so long. Sometimes leather, sometimes latex, sometimes leather over latex. Hold a mug of coffee in your hands while you're wearing gloves, you don't know how hot the drink is. If you're not paying attention, you burn your lips, maybe blister your tongue. So it became a habit to blow on any drink before he sipped it, and the regularity of the act comforted him.

There really was no alternative. He couldn't take off the gloves while he was out in public. Ever.