Fire Season (24 page)

Loverboy had parked the Lincoln in the official lot behind Town Hall, in the space reserved for the chief of police. He and Rudy slipped in through the same side door that Filson had used, to which Rudy happened to have a key; it opened directly onto a dank stairwell that hardly anyone used. Until the renovations had begun, the stairwell's exterior wall had been inhabited by a large colony of bats, and the smell of hamster cage was still powerful months after the flying rodents had been driven out.

On the second floor, Rudy checked his watch: 10:07. They'd have maybe three or four minutes to get into the assessor's office, open the safe, grab the bag, and get the hell out. Plenty of time. No one was around; all the lights were out.

“You know the great part about this?” Rudy said, using another key to open the door to the assessor's office.

“Aside from what it's going to do for my portfolio?” Loverboy said.

“The great part is that once they get over being surprised, they'll all be relieved it's gone. I'm doing them a favor, really. I just love helping people out like that.”

“You're a humanitarian. A liberator of the human spirit.”

“Exactly,” Rudy said, slipping into the dark office, finding the safe's square bulk in the corner. “Now let's liberate some smack and get the fuck out of here.”

*   *   *

The current Highland Light was built in 1857. It consisted of a modest light keeper's cottage—now a museum and gift shop—attached to a sixty-six-foot tower, which was in turn outfitted with a two-way beacon that emitted a very bright pulse of white light every five seconds. In 1996 the lighthouse had been moved a hundred and fifty yards to the southwest, away from the edge of a cliff that had been considered remarkable for its tendency to erode since Thoreau made note of it in his nineteenth-century tourist memoir,
Cape Cod.
Had the light not been moved, it would have eventually tumbled into the surging Atlantic, a hundred feet below. From its new, safer location, the Highland Light kept watch over a long, treacherous stretch of the Atlantic coast, aquatic graveyard to dozens of ships, still notorious for its shifting sandbars and unpredictable currents.

At night the lighthouse stood in black silhouette against the horizon—like a big middle finger, Coffin thought, raised to the dark and rumpled sea as it ground away at the cliff base. The clouds were beginning to break up, passing slowly overhead like rush-hour traffic on a celestial freeway. Coffin parked the Fiesta in the gravel lot just on the cliff side of the lighthouse, nose pointed east, toward the ocean. There was a slight downward incline, so he gave the emergency brake an extra-firm yank after double-clutching the gearshift into reverse.

“Okay,” Coffin said, climbing out. “Where are they?”

“What time is it?” Tony said, rummaging in the Fiesta's glove box. “The hospital took my watch.”

“Five 'til ten. What are you looking for?”

“Cigarettes. I'm out.”

“Good luck. I'm still not smoking.”

“I've been smoking like a freaking chimney,” Tony said, ducking down to check under the seats.

“When was the last time you ate?”

“I don't know. Yesterday? I haven't been very hungry. Plus, I'm pretty sure the hospital tried to drug my food.”

“Of course you are.”

“Eureka!” Tony said, emerging from the Fiesta's grungy interior. “Look what I found.” He held up a single, badly bent cigarette. “It was stuck behind the gas pedal. I always say, if you keep trying, good things happen. Got a light?”

“Nope.” Coffin patted his pockets. “Sorry. I don't carry a lighter anymore.”

Tony stuck his upper body back into the Fiesta, pushed the lighter into its socket. “Man—I'm fuckin' dying here. This thing work?”

“I don't think so,” Coffin said.

“What time is it now?”

“Straight up ten, give or take. Which is when Arnold's closes, by the way.”

“Here we go,” Tony said, holding up the glowing lighter. “My lucky day.” He puffed the rumpled cigarette to life.

“I'm giving this maybe one more minute, then I'm taking you home. I've had a hell of a long day.”

“They'll be here, Frankie,” Tony said, puffing happily. “They always show up. Very reliable.”

Coffin shook his head. With any luck, Jamie would be asleep when he got home. He shoved his hands into his pockets, walked down the sloping gravel path that led from the lighthouse to a small, circular observation area near the cliff—the golf course's elevated eighth green to his right, the ninth tee and fairway to his left, five or six good-sized boulders straight ahead, arranged in a neat line maybe three feet apart, to prevent potential suicides from driving over the edge.

Coffin stood for a moment gazing out at the dark water, the slow whitecaps rolling in to the beach below, endlessly, one after another. He wanted a cigarette. He wanted to go home, crawl into bed, and go to sleep.

A minute passed. Coffin turned, started to walk back. Tony was leaning on the Fiesta's trunk, smoking. Coffin could guess what it would be like now, for Tony and his family—month upon month of hope and disappointment, slow improvement and crushing setback. He'd be on his meds, then off them, then back on again.
Tough on everybody,
Coffin thought.
Tough all around.

“Come on, Tony,” Coffin said, walking up the gravel path, the ocean at his back. “Time to go home.” He had to raise his voice to be heard above the dull roar of the surf, and something else—in the background at first—a rushing, thwonking sound, coming from behind him, growing louder. There was a sudden wind, leaves and sand blowing, then white and orange lights flashing overhead.

“Holy shit,” Tony shouted, pointing at the sky. “They're here!”

For a moment Coffin could see only flashing lights amid the swirl of sand and debris. There was a great, hectic roaring overhead, then a single blinding spotlight sizzled out of the night sky. It probed the Fiesta for a moment or two, then found Tony, who stood with his arms raised, exulted, like a TV preacher about to speak in tongues. He shouted something. I'm here, maybe. Take me!

Coffin visored his eyes with one hand, still nearly blinded by sand and light, hair on the back of his neck prickling.
Jesus Christ,
he thought.
Seriously?
But then, as his eyes adjusted to the glare, he could make out the dim silhouette of a helicopter, hovering overhead like a huge metallic dragonfly. He squinted—
Coast Guard
—white with red markings, one of the big MH-60 Jayhawks the Coasties used for search and rescue.

A woman's voice boomed out of the chopper—probably the co-pilot, Coffin guessed, speaking over the PA system—“
Get back in your vehicle. The park is closed. Repeat: the park is closed. Get back in your vehicle and leave at once
.”

Coffin held up his shield, tried to wave the chopper off, but the Coasties kept the searchlight on Tony, who was waving his arms and yelling something Coffin couldn't quite make out. It sounded like, “It's me, it's me!”

“This is your last warning,” the voice from the chopper said. “The park is closed. We will contact law enforcement in two minutes.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Coffin said. “Tony! Get in the car!”

The spotlight went dark, and Tony stood blinking next to the Fiesta. The helicopter gained altitude, then swiveled and headed out to sea.

“Wait!” Tony yelled, waving his arms wildly, the red coal of his cigarette weaving bright, frantic trails. “Come back!”

“Tony, it's a fucking
helicopter!
” Coffin yelled, as the chopper took a hard right and roared along the coastline heading south, toward Chatham, taking its noise and rotor-wash with it.

“Oh, shit,” Tony said, arms limp at his sides. “It's a fuckin' helicopter.” He sat down heavily on the Fiesta's blunt rear-end, which produced a sharp crumpling sound. And then the Fiesta started to roll.

“Tony—” Coffin said.

“Whoa, fuck!” Tony said, losing his balance as the little car rolled away from him, tires crunching slowly across the gravel lot, nose pointed straight for the footpath. Tony staggered a few steps after the wayward Fiesta, stepped in a pothole, and fell hard on his side.

Coffin stood for a moment, the Fiesta's blunt snout slowly bearing down on him. The little car had picked up a bit of speed on the footpath's downhill slope: It was rolling at six or seven miles an hour, Coffin guessed—too fast to simply jump into its path and stop its momentum. He could open the driver's side door, jump in, and pull the handbrake (but hadn't he pulled the handbrake when he parked it?)—easy in the movies, maybe, easy for James Bond.

He took three quick steps to his right, out of the Fiesta's path, and started to jog, matching the little car's pace as it rolled toward the barricade of boulders at the path's end. He reached for the door handle, caught it, pressed the latch button.

“Come on, you rotten little piece of shit,” he hissed. “Open!” The door was locked or stuck—he couldn't budge it. He tried digging his boot heels in, leaning his weight up the hill, hanging onto the handle with both hands, but the Fiesta dragged him down the path, closer now to the boulders than he cared to be. He let go, jumped clear, landing without much grace on all fours, scraping his palms on the gravel.
At least,
he thought,
it won't go over the edge—the boulders will stop it.

The Fiesta was rolling faster, jouncing down the footpath, heading straight for the boulder at the far left of the row. Coffin felt a little surge of excitement—a part of him had been wanting to do this to the Fiesta for a long time—but he knew, too, that all sorts of questions would be raised if the Fiesta met its end out at the Highland Light on a damp October night when, as the Coasties had reminded them, the park was closed. So he clenched his teeth and half-closed his eyes as the Fiesta struck the leftmost boulder headlight-high—crunch of metal, tinkle of broken glass—crumpling the right fender and popping the hood latch, the impact bouncing the little car sideways, spinning it ninety degrees so that it rolled backward slowly down the slight embankment toward the golf course, following the contour of the fairway, picking up speed again in the cropped grass.

“Oh, shit,” Coffin said, as the Fiesta rolled backward over the slightly elevated ninth tee and then disappeared down the bank toward the cliff's edge. He ran. He could hear the Fiesta's tires and undercarriage ripping through the grass and weeds a few feet from the cliff. He got there just in time to watch it tumble backward over the edge, bumping still on its wheels at first down the soft limestone face before gravity took it once and for all, flipping it end over end before it finally struck with a loud, grinding
whomp
on the beach below. Coffin waited a moment, half hoping the Fiesta would burst into flames the way cars always did in the movies when they went dramatically over a cliff, but nothing happened. There was the smell of gas, to be sure, but the engine was cold—no heat or spark to ignite it. Coffin took a deep breath as Tony appeared at his side.

“Well,” Tony said. “Scratch one Fiesta.” He took a last hit from his cigarette, and before Coffin could say anything, flipped the glowing butt over the cliff.

 

Chapter 18

For a long moment, nothing happened. Coffin drew a deep breath, let it out. He could just make out the dark, crumpled corpse of the Fiesta, lying on its roof at the bottom of the cliff. The tide was up, waves sloshing maybe twenty feet down the beach, just below the dark line of dead seaweed that had been regurgitated by the last big storm. Then a small, bright bloom of flame appeared, below the Fiesta's trunk. It spread quickly, backlighting the ruined Fiesta—Coffin could see the shattered windshield hanging from its frame, its thousand broken facets sparked by fire.

“Uh-oh,” Tony said.

“No shit, uh-oh,” Coffin said.

“You're gonna have some splainin' to do, boss.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

The Fiesta was burning merrily, flames sprouting from the undercarriage—all of the hundred little leaks of flammable fluids catching at once.

“We'd better go, Frankie,” Tony said.

“Suit yourself,” Coffin said. “I'm waiting for the gas tank to—”

Coffin paused for a moment as the Fiesta's gas tank produced a hard
whomp
and then erupted in flame. The blast wave traveled up the cliff face and pushed him in the chest like a big, hot hand.

“—go.”

“Whoa,” Tony said. “That was frickin' awesome.”

“All right, let's get the fuck out of here.” Coffin turned and, walking back toward the footpath, fished in his jacket pocket for his cell phone. To his mild surprise, it was still halfway charged, and two signal bars appeared in the upper-left corner.

“Who you calling?” Tony said, breathing heavily as he followed Coffin up the slight incline.

“Lola. Even though I hate to bother her with something this stupid.”

“I hear she's got a girlfriend now,” Tony said, snickering.

“Great girl,” Coffin said. “She's a pilot with Cape Air. Apparently she's seen these UFOs of yours. She thinks they're experimental military aircraft.”

Tony snorted. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Some people will believe anything.”

Coffin touched the speed dial for Lola's cell phone. There was a rush of static, then a loud busy signal. He hung up.

“Great,” he said.

“Why don't you call my pops,” Tony said. “He'll come get us.”

Coffin stopped walking. “You know his phone number?” he said. “Holy shit.”

Tony shrugged. “Sure. I mean, I think so. He changes phones a lot.”

Coffin handed Tony the phone. “Call him,” he said, “but keep walking. I don't want to be around when that chopper comes back.”