Valley of Ashes (28 page)

And I would have sounded like a lunatic, probably.

I certainly felt like one.

A worried, worried lunatic.

I mean, what could I have said, “I had this weird dream, Officer, and I was just wondering if…?”

Even in Boulder, I doubted that line of reasoning could gain any traction.

Maybe
especially
in Boulder. Poor cops probably had volunteer psychics coming out their ears.

But I still couldn’t stop feeling like something was really, really wrong. I tried to think the day through… I’d first called Cary around what, nine thirty that morning?

And I’d left a ton of messages.

I glanced at the clock in the kitchen: almost five, now.

Still light out, but that was a hell of a long bike ride, even for Cary.

And he was anally religious about checking his answering machine the minute he got home. I’d heard Dean teasing him about it.

Should I go by his apartment again, see if the truck is still there?

That would take an hour, though. At least.

I called his home number again. Waited until I heard the same old recording of him saying, “Hi, this is Cary…, ” before hanging up.

Winnie-the-Pooh had finished his musical number out in the living room.

I tried Mimi one more time. No luck.

I stepped out of the office and looked out the front windows, onto Mapleton.

The Galant was sitting across the street. Right where Dean had parked it, the day before he took off for Japan.

Wouldn’t take an hour if I
drove
out to Cary’s place.

And the keys were hanging on their little hook, just inside the front door.

I looked at the girls in their playpen and tried to talk some sense into myself.

Was this just dream-inspired paranoia, or was there a possibility Cary might actually be in trouble?

Maybe the New Age wiffleheads are getting to you, Madeline. Maybe you’re soaking up idiocy by osmosis.

Yeah, in which case I would’ve driven for ten minutes—out to Cary’s and back—for no real reason. Big fucking deal.

I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t know
how
to drive… it was just a matter of paperwork.

And at the moment I didn’t really care that I’d let my license lapse, back in New York.

I got the girls strapped into their car seats as quickly as I could, then climbed up behind the steering wheel myself.

Once I’d gotten the key into the ignition, I took a deep breath.

You used to own a Porsche, for fuck’s sake. Step on the clutch and crank the thing up already.

So I was a little lead-footed on the gas pedal, so what. The engine roared to life like a pissed-off water buffalo.

“Here we go, girls,” I said, slamming the gearshift into first and peeling out onto Mapleton.

Okay, so I left some rubber on the asphalt. German clutches were better engineered than Japanese ones.

“Wheee!” squealed India, from the backseat.

Hey, it was all coming back to me. Just like riding a bike—only with a far more satisfyingly selfish carbon footprint.

Way different from my Porsche, of course. Center of gravity was a lot higher, as I found out the first time I took a corner on two wheels.

“Sorry about that,” I said to my children.

Five minutes later, I was pulling up in front of Cary’s building.

His truck was still parked out front, his bike was still gone, and he still didn’t answer when I banged on the door.

This time, I’d remembered to bring a pen.

I wrote him a note and affixed it to his door frame, having also brought a thumbtack.

Dude
, it read,
where the fuck are you? Been calling all day. You have me worried. Call me if you get this before I find you.

Then I signed it.

And got back in the car. And didn’t really consider going home to my house once I’d started the engine again.

I was already being totally illegal, right? So I figured I might as well drive out to the warehouse.

Just cruise past the place. Keep the doors locked the whole time.

Wouldn’t get out of the thing, even if I saw something that worried me.

A
ll I knew was that the warehouse was out past the industrial park where Ionix had its offices. In the blank stuff, the scrubby plains between Boulder and Longmont.

I ground the gears of the Mitsubishi and kept driving east. Not too fast, with the girls sitting behind me, but as fast as I maternally dared.

The trees started to thin out. I squeaked through a stoplight as it was just going yellow.

We were just past King Soopers when I saw the pillar of smoke.

I pulled the car up to the curb outside the entrance to the storage buildings.

Ionix wasn’t the only business to keep shit out here, but their logo was on the only building that was belching smoke and sparks out of its roof. Right up front.

There were four fire trucks and an ambulance beside it, parked all skewed like they’d shown up in a hurry. Which they had, of course.

A clump of guys was standing behind one of the trucks. Their faces and turnout coats were sooty and streaked. Nomex hoods under their helmets, respirators hanging loose around their necks.

First shift, tired out.

The building looked nothing like the one in my dream. It was all metal.

How the hell was it on fire, then?

I rolled down my window.

The wind shifted and I got a harsh full-face blast of sodden ash and that nasty sour fire-retardant smell, just like the place on Mapleton. I could hear the crackle of emergency radios.

Their voices were drowned out by a horrible creaking sound, right before this loud, sustained crash… the sound of beams colliding, maybe, or some big pile of weighty shit grinding and moaning as it collapsed in on itself.

Not the structure I was looking at, something inside it.

A second cloud of soot and sparks pillared up from behind the building’s roofline.

The guys who’d been taking a break moved back toward the building.

Slow motion.

I rolled the window up, then opened my car door and got out. Closed it behind me so the girls wouldn’t have to breathe any smoke.

Leave. Leave now. You shouldn’t be here.

But I was frozen in place. Might as well have been duct-taped to the side of the Galant, for all the ability I had to actually act on that admonition to myself.

There was one guy up in the air on a ladder, lifted high above the truck it was attached to and shooting a jet of hose-water down into the roof below.

Someone had battered a loading-bay door open.

Another helmeted guy came out of it, looking for all the world like some World War I trench soldier, what with the respirator covering most of his face. Another guy had an arm over his shoulder. Limping.

A firefighter.

Don’t be in there, Cary. Please God.

And then I was walking forward. Across the street.

A burly older guy in a white shirt and dark pants stepped forward to block me when I got near the trucks—both hands raised, his palms forward. “You can’t be here, ma’am.”

He was wearing a tie, too. Dark blue, same as his pants.

“Is Mimi Neff here?” I asked.

I didn’t know what else to say. Already, the smoke was hurting my throat.

“Ma’am,” he said, “you’re going to have to leave.”

Then I noticed a gold-bar name-tag thing, pinned to the left of the tie.

Chief Benjamin Davidian.

McNally’s pal Benny?

“I’m a reporter,” I said. “With the
Boulder New Times
.”

He stepped toward me, hands still up. “We’ve got a situation here, ma’am.”

“I’m working with Jon McNally. Covering the arsons.”

“Ma’am, be that as it may, I’m going to have to ask you to vacate the premises.”

“You the guy McNally used to smoke-jump with? He told me to get my ass over here, make sure I talked to you first.”

His hands dropped a little from the full-stop position.

“Benny, right?” I stuck out my hand. “I’m Madeline Dare. I shadowed Mimi for an article last week, that house up on Mapleton.”

He was listening. Taking me more seriously than I’d expected.

You sound more serious than you expected.

There was another cracking sound behind him, like a big tree snapping at the base, ready to fall. Benny turned to look, decided it was all right, then turned back toward me—suddenly all official around the mouth again.

“Ma’am…”

I was about to start babbling about lab results and accelerants and beers with Mimi, trying to sound all technical and impressive, when there was a long ripping sound and two far louder cracks.

Some guy behind us yelled, “Jesus Christ, Kevin… jump!” His voice loud and really scared.

Then half the long building caved in on itself, with dust and smoke and debris flying everywhere.

Benny threw his arms around me, tumbling us both to the pavement.

He’d knocked the wind out of me, but I realized he was curled over me, using his body to shield mine.

The crashing stopped, but the air was still thick and tough to see into.

Benny raised his head. “You okay?”

I coughed. “Yeah.
Yes
. Thank you.”

He jumped up off me and gave me a quick once-over, like to make sure I didn’t have a spike through my head or any other injuries masked by shock, then pulled me to my feet.

“Go home,” he said.

“I have to talk to Mimi. Is she here?”

“On her way,” he said.

“I have to wait.”

I’d seen something, before the building caved. Something I was refusing to look at again. Over by the edge of the grass.

I had to tell Mimi about it. Only her. Not this guy.

I felt snot leaking out of my nose and wiped the back of my hand across it.

It came away black. I tried to breathe through my nose but my nose was having none of it.

“I have to talk to Mimi,” I said again.

“Get back in your car. Drive to the end of this block,” he said. “Where you came in from. Can you do that?”

“Yeah.”

He looked at me funny. “You sure?”

I nodded. It made my head hurt.

“Quickly,” he said. “And I want you to stay there.”

I did what he’d told me, glancing back over my shoulder once to see him running full-tilt right back in toward the worst of it.

Now that he wasn’t looking, I blew my nose into my fingers and flicked the snot on the grass.

Then I inhaled.

Yeah. The air reeked of gasoline.

The shakes set in the minute I’d reached the car. And then I started hacking up a bunch of nasty brown-black stuff I’d apparently inhaled.

Get the girls out of here.

The air started to clear just a bit. I could see Benny yelling into a radio now, standing at the driver’s window of a red-and-white-painted Bronco with a seal on its door.

Mimi can wait. Get the hell out of here.

That’s what half my brain thought, anyway.

The other half was apparently incapable of making me act on that suggestion.

I could hear more sirens starting up in the distance, louder and louder as they raced toward us all.

Another ambulance rushed in first.

Right behind it came Mimi’s pickup.

I saw her eyes flash white, widening when she realized it was me standing next to my car, but she didn’t stop.

She hit the truck’s brakes and pulled up behind Benny’s Bronco, jumping out of her truck’s cab.

The ambulance guys ran past them, hauling a flat oval stretcher between them, tipped sideways like a surfboard.

The guy in front had something else tucked under his other arm. Might have been a neckboard.

Whoever Kevin was, his buddies were pros, and they weren’t fucking around.

I’d wrapped my arms around my chest and was rocking, forward and back.

I realized I was talking to myself, muttering
not Cary, not Cary, not Cary
rapidly under my breath.

Over and over. A mantra.

But he was in there. I knew it for sure now.

And nobody was rushing to bring him out.

I got into the car and slammed the door behind me as quickly as I could, then started it up and drove well away from all the havoc.

“Mummie okay?” asked India, when I’d pulled over to the side of the road again.

“Yes, sweetie,” I said, as calmly as I could.

Okay, but totally fucking stupid.

I knew Mimi would come back out and find me.

And that was a good thing.

Because Cary’s bike had been lying on its side in front of the building. At the edge of the grass.

And this wasn’t the serial-arsonist guy’s MO. Whoever set this fire hadn’t started it with acetone.

I had to wait until I could make sure Mimi knew that. Then I could take my children home.

I was far enough away now. So I got out of the car and sat down on the curb. I wanted her to be able to find me.

For some reason, I was sure she would.

It felt like I’d been sitting there thirty seconds. Or maybe a month. Time was rubbery.