Ричард Старк - Flashfire [= Parker]

And what happens to me? she wondered.

Mrs. Fritz’s ballroom quickly filled. All the men wore essentially what they’d worn at the Breakers last night, and all the women wore something strikingly different. Staff moved among them with canapés and champagne, and special lights gleamed on the display tables where the jewelry was arrayed. Maroon velvet ropes kept the guests from getting within reaching distance of the jewelry. Everybody was here now except the musicians, who would arrive later, and play for dancing after the auction was complete. To one side, Mrs. Fritz and the auctioneer, a professional man who’d worked any number of charity balls around here over the years, consulted together about timing.

“I think it’s time,” Melander said, and the three of them, encumbered in their full firefighter gear, tromped out of the house and around to the fire engine parked at the side. Carlson climbed up behind the wheel while Melander and Ross took up standing positions on the outside of the fire engine, just to increase the visual plausibility of the thing.

Carlson said, “Ready?” and the other two agreed they were ready. Carlson picked up the two small radio transmitters from the seat beside him and pressed down on the buttons.

In the ballroom, the incendiary rockets came thundering out of the amplifiers still in the corner. Some of the rockets flew straight up, to embed themselves in the ceiling and spray sparks and flame onto the people below. Some shot directly back into the wall, gouting flame and smoke, and the rest drilled down into the floor. None were aimed at the guests or the display tables of jewelry.

Shocking heat and noise and smoke abruptly filled the room. No one knew what had happened, where this sudden disaster had come from. A lot of people thought rockets were being fired from outside the house. Everybody milled around in sudden fear, trying to find a way out. The display tables and the auctioneer’s stand blocked the terrace doors, so the only way out was through the broad interior doorway into the rest of the house. People jammed together, making a bottleneck in the doorway, clawing to get through.

Outside, the police and the security guards stared in amazement at the sudden fire burning on the roof, listened unbelievingly to the screams from inside the house, gaped at each other in bewilderment, not knowing what they were supposed to do. Then, almost immediately it seemed, they felt the great relief of hearing that approaching siren.

The fire engine came rushing up from the south, red lights flashing, siren yowling. Police and guards cleared everybody out of the entranceway, and the fire engine went tearing around the curve, Melander and Ross clinging to the handholds, the fire engine rushing full tilt at the house, where the first of the fleeing guests were just now beginning to stagger out into the clear night air.

Carlson didn’t hit the brake until the very last second, the big fire engine spewing gravel as it shuddered to a stop. He switched off the motor and took the key with him, to cause a little extra trouble down the line, but left the siren on, screaming away, so communication among the other people present would be just that much more difficult.

Leslie helped Daniel into his shirt, and the two of them gathered up everything that had been brought into the condo. She said, “Are you sure, Daniel?”

“Time to go,” he said.

The three firemen ran heavy-footed through the house, pushing the panicked guests out of their way, finally helping the last of the guests and staff out of the ballroom. They slammed the double doors and slid a massive sideboard over the polished floor and up against the doors to block them.

Alice Prester Young staggered out of the house alone, into the glare and scream of the big fire engine, with more fire engines coming now from far away, racing south. She’d lost Jack somewhere, she’d been terrified, she had to struggle through the awful crowd completely on her own.

Where was Jack? Was he hurt, crushed by the people back there? Where was Jack?

She stared around at the people collapsing on the lawn, and all at once she saw Jack, and he was carrying somebody, in his arms, like a groom carrying a bride. He was reeling like a drunken man, but he was carrying a woman, and as he at last put her on her feet on the lawn Alice saw she was young Kim Met-calf, Howard Metcalf’s sexpot stewardess wife. And as she saw them, Jack saw her and stopped dead.

The stupid thing is, she hadn’t thought anything until Jack stopped like that, like... like a caught burglar. And Kim’s look of shock and guilt when she met Alice’s eyes across the reeling, weeping, stunned crowd, there was that, too.

Movement to her left. Alice turned her suddenly heavy head, and Howard Metcalf stood there, near her on the steps, gazing out and down at his wife. With great difficulty, Alice turned her heavy head again and looked at Jack, and now he seemed to have no expression on his face at all, like a bad drawing, or a minor figure in the background of a comic strip.

In all that racket, there was a great silence, enclosing the four of them.

In the ballroom, Melander and Carlson and Ross quickly shimmied out of their gloves, helmets, air tanks, fire boots, and turnout coats. Beneath, they each wore a black wet suit and a large zippered bag on a belt around the waist. The bags now held nothing but divers’ face masks and headlamps, which they removed so they could load the bags with all of Miriam Hope Clendon’s jewelry.

Leslie and Daniel drove northward in her Lexus, neither saying anything, he resting his head back, eyes closed. Conserving himself. Then he opened his eyes and looked out ahead and said, “Slow down.”

She did, but said, “Why?”

Instead of answering, he opened his window. She had the air-conditioning on, of course, and now the humid air billowed in, and with it a faint distant sound of sirens. She said, “Police?”

He laughed, a sound like a bark. “Fire engine,” he said. “I told you they were gaudy. They aren’t going in from the sea after all, they’re going in from the land, in a fire engine.”

“But there isn’t any fire,” she said.

“With them? There’s a fire. It’s along here now.”

He meant Mr. Roderick’s house, or whoever Mr. Roderick really was. As he closed his window, she said, “Do you want me to come in with you?”

“No. You go home. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“What if you don’t?”

“Then I don’t,” he said. “Stop here.”

She rolled to a stop near the Roderick house, and he paused, his hand on the door handle. “The question is, how do they get back out? Tuxes under the fire coats?”

She said, “To mingle with the guests, you mean? Could they do that?”

“They think they can do anything,” he said, and opened the door. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

At the Fritz house, more fire engines had arrived, blocked by the milling crowd and the still-screaming first fire engine that none of the later firefighters recognized. “Whose is this? Is this from West Palm? What the hell’s it doing here?”

In the ballroom, Melander and Carlson and Ross finished loading the jewelry into their waist bags. They put the air canisters back on, put on the divers’ face masks and the mouthpieces and the headlamps. From hooks inside their turnout coats they brought out pairs of black flippers.

Leslie found a place to park, locked the Lexus, and walked back down the road toward Mr. Roderick’s house.

Firemen hurried through the mansion and found the ballroom doors wedged shut. They had their axes and used them, splintering the doors.

Melander and Carlson and Ross heard the thuds of the axes. Melander shoved a display case out of the way and they went through the terrace doors and ran across the terrace, invisible in their black wet suits, holding their flippers in their hands. A little apart from one another, so they wouldn’t collide underwater, they dove into the sea.