Timothy Hallinan: Incinerator

She sat down on the couch, and both she and the upholstery sighed. The bottle trembled in her hand. “Will you help me?”

“I thought we’d settled that,” I said. “I’m going to try.”

“Oh,” she said, and she leaned forward until her forehead touched her knees. “Oh.”

I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “Was his face burned?”

“No,” Baby Winston said, without straightening. “Only the lower two thirds of his body. But they were third-degree burns.” She was talking to her lap.

“Then why did it take you an hour to recognize him?”

She remained folded forward, tighter than a jackknife. “Let’s hope you never have to find out,” she said.

That evening I had a prearranged date with Hammond. The bar called the Red Dog glares out onto a block of Hollywood Boulevard that only the most foolhardy walk at night-the most foolhardy and cops. Not that the two categories are mutually exclusive.

The Red Dog has a corny sawdust floor and a sixties jukebox, recycling hits from the Summer of Love at numbing volume. The latest hits reach cops last, and it’s probably a good thing. Otherwise they’d be able to figure out what the rest of us are up to.

Hammond had a red kerchief tied crookedly around his head when I walked in. It wasn’t a good sign. His broad face, shadowed with a day’s worth of whiskers, gleamed with sweat and malice, and he had a drink in each of his ham-sized hands.

“God damn,” he said. He darted a glance at me and missed by about a yard. “I was afraid I’d have to drink both of these.”

“What a fate,” I said, taking the nearer of the two. It was sweating more heavily than Hammond. After all the beer I didn’t want it, but it seemed like good policy to slow Hammond down. “Nice hat, Al.”

“I’m a pirate,” he announced vehemently. “Al the Red.” He looked around for someone to contradict him.

“Shiver me timbers. Where’s your parrot?” The whiskey tasted like recycled perspiration: flat, malodorous, and for some reason slightly salty.

“Don’t need no fucking parrot. Parrots got lice.”

“That a fact?”

“Every parrot I ever knew. Al the Red is a bad guy, but he doesn’t have lice. Lice, they’ll eat your peg leg right out from under you.”

“I thought that was termites.”

“Termites eat houses,” Hammond said with leaden patience. “Lice eat peg legs. Termites I got. They ate my whole fucking house already.”

“Al,” I said as gently as possible. “You’ve still got your house.”

“Who said anything about houses?” Hammond asked belligerently. “Al the Red lives on a ship.” He tugged the kerchief to a more rakish angle. “What the fuck good is a house? Can you take it anywhere? Huh? Can you sail your house into a harbor and fire cannons at the civilians?” He drained his drink, leaned toward me, and tapped the back of my hand meaningfully. It felt like a hammer. His eyes narrowed. “Can a house do twenty knots?”

It was going to be a long night.

“Where’s your crew?” I asked, and instantly kicked myself under the table. It was the wrong thing to ask.

“Deserted,” Red Al said. “Every man jack of them. Every woman jack, too. Desertion. That’s the trouble with houses. They’re too easy to leave.” His eyes closed heavily, and he rested his big forehead on the rim of his glass. I glanced around for help and didn’t find any. Cops avoided my eyes. Our table reminded me of the drop of penicillin in the center of a petri dish: The area around it was a vacuum, vacated by the swarms who had withdrawn to the walls, cops and cop groupies carrying on earnest conversations over the din of the music- by now it was Sly amp; the Family Stone. I searched for the black cop who might have dropped that particular quarter and didn’t find him. He was hiding. Like everybody else.

Hammond lifted his head. The circular impression of the glass was printed on his forehead, like a target. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened his mouth, and bellowed, “PEPPI!”

Peppi, the barmaid, was as butch as Hammond but a lot smaller. I’d never been sure which of the two I’d rather fight. She materialized at a safe distance from the table and said, “Yeah?” She’d traded in her trademark black net stockings for a pair of silvery Spandex tights under six inches of black cloth. It hadn’t been a wise fashion decision. From the waist down, she looked like two fish trapped in a miniskirt.

“Al the Red is thirsty,” Hammond said in an eminently reasonable tone of voice. “So is his first mate.”

“Comin’ up.” Peppi wheeled to go, and Hammond leaned forward and grabbed a fistful of her short skirt. Peppi stopped shorter than a fishing weight at the end of a snarled line. “Hey,” she snarled.

“Peppi,” Hammond said. “Tell you what. Make a woman of you.”

“I’ve already taken that course,” Peppi said. “I changed majors.”

“Try a real man,” Hammond said. He gave her a lop sided leer.

“Find one,” Peppi said, tugging her skirt free with red-knuckled hands. “Just find one.”

Hammond directed his gaze toward her silver knees and winked appreciatively. He was even drunker than I’d thought. “Great gams,” he said inaccurately.

“You,” Peppi said, looking at me. “You. First mate.”

I looked up.

“Take care of him,” she said.

“Me?” Hammond said, pounding the table with a fist slightly smaller than West Virginia. “Take care of Al the Red? Nobody born can take care of Al the Red.”

“Yeah,” said Peppi, who had never liked me. “That’s why I picked him.”

Hammond gave up. “Grog,” he said. “Posthaste.” Peppi marched off, and he looked up at me balefully, “Am I making an asshole of myself?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, fuck it,” he said. “And fuck you, too, while I’m at it. I won’t remember in the morning. Funny what you remember and what you forget.”

I agreed that it was funny and then tried to do some business.

“Listen,” I shouted over Gary Lewis and the Playboys or someone like that, “what do you know about this guy who’s setting fire-”

“The paper plates,” Hammond said. “Did I tell you about the paper plates?”

I shelved my question and shook my head. The paper plates were a new wrinkle.

“I get home,” Hammond said, taking the glass from my hand and draining it in a single gulp, “and the door’s open.” He looked down at the two empty glasses in front of him. “Where’s the goddamn grog?”

“Coming.”

“That’s what’s wrong with grog. It takes too long. I don’t know how Francis Drake did it, waiting all day for his fucking grog. Do you think Francis Drake ever got home and found the door open?”

“No,” I said. “His boat would have sunk.”

Hammond licked a finger and made an imaginary mark in the air. “One for you,” he said. “Problem was, I was living in a house, not a boat. I mean, what’s it supposed to sink into, the lawn? Nothing ever sank into a lawn.”

“Newspapers do. Every morning.”

“So I get home,” he said, ignoring me, “maybe eleven o’clock, maybe later. I mean, I’d been out drinking, but nothing new. Did it every night. Same as you. Everybody does.”

So far, except for the paper plates, we were on familiar territory. Everybody didn’t, of course, but most cops did. They had to. Whiskey was the anesthetic that made it possible for them to get home and pretend for their children’s sake that the world was sane.

“And the door’s open.” Hammond belched. “There’s light pouring through the door. Hazel never left the lights on. She’s the original Scrooge McDuck. She thinks every time she turns off a light it’s a hundred in the bank. All for little Al’s college.”