Alan Russell - Burning Man

The right thing to do would have been to report to police headquarters. When the lights go out, the LAPD puts out a call for all the bodies it can muster. The brass would be worried about looting, or any appearance of lawlessness. It would want to send out as many squad cars as possible so as to give the appearance of a police presence. Tonight, though, they’d have to do that without me.

In the absence of streetlights, my neighborhood seemed to have mostly disappeared. I backed out of the driveway and began driving. My headlights, even on bright, didn’t make much headway against the darkness. The strong winds were stirring everything around, and the shifting reflections played out on my windshield, making me feel as if I was taking in a black-and-white movie at a drive-in.

I tuned in to KNX and was glad to hear the blackout hadn’t stopped it from broadcasting. A serious-sounding newscaster was talking about all the calamities affecting the Southland that had been caused by the Santa Ana winds.

“It’s a mess out there,” he said. “Power lines are down all over the county and fallen trees are causing numerous road closures. Firefighters are currently battling multiple brushfires that are raging in Whittier, Covina, and Brentwood. If you don’t have to be out on the road, you are advised to stay home.”

It was good advice, but I didn’t heed it.

The freeways were still open. Usually a parade of big rigs travels the Los Angeles arteries at night, but not this night. The trucks were sitting it out. In all my years of LA driving, I’d never seen the highways so deserted. That should have made driving easy, except for the wind. I was driving like a drunk, unable to navigate a straight line. The wind kept blowing my sedan from one lane to another. The gusting increased as I traveled inland. I found myself leaning forward in my seat while keeping a tight grip on the wheel.

There were patches of darkness and light that showed those areas with power and those without. Whenever I had cell service, I tried calling Gump and Martinez, but the calls didn’t go through, which probably meant the power was out where they lived. I could have gone through the LAPD switchboard to get a message to them, but it wasn’t a good night to ask for messenger service. Judging by what KNX was telling me, all city services were being stretched to the max.

I tried not to think about the last time I’d braved the elements during a bad Santa Ana, but Ellis Haines kept invading my thoughts. Like it or not, our Santa Ana dance with death had intertwined our paths forever. I wanted out of our chain gang, but Haines wasn’t making that easy. The bastard had predicted this Santa Ana; he’d reveled in it. Killer winds, he’d told me. I knew it wasn’t by chance that he’d called me earlier. He had known my three attackers were dead. Later, when I was in the right frame of mind, I’d play back his message. I wasn’t sure whether Haines had called me directly or made a tape and managed to get it smuggled out of prison. If he’d made a tape, that meant in his own way Haines had managed to escape his cell, and that on his orders his confederate or confederates had obtained my unlisted number. It was possible they had my address and were monitoring me. At his trial and afterward, I had seen Haines’s freak show followers. The master was creepy enough; his disciples were almost as scary.

It was more likely, though, that Haines had called me directly. Cell phones are contraband in prisons, but they can be had for a price even if you’re housed in San Quentin’s Adjustment Center. The FBI would be able to tell me if that was the case. Thinking about his call made me remember a line from an old AT amp;T ad campaign: “Reach out, reach out and touch someone.” That’s what Haines had done. He had reached out with his toxic touch. But now of all times I couldn’t let Haines get into my head. That was exactly what he wanted, of course, but I couldn’t waste any more psychic energy on a bogeyman.

Aloud, I said, “I thought I saw a puddy cat.”

Sirius’s ears popped up at the c-word.

“But I didn’t, I didn’t,” I added.

Sirius settled down. I tried calling Martinez and then Gump but still had no luck reaching them. I was drawing ever closer to Miller’s home. My cop training told me to not proceed; my cop instinct said to keep going. Since being burned, I had come to rely more and more on that instinct. Something was about to happen, I knew, and I felt this need to get to Miller’s place without any delays. My fire walk had apparently burned away my common sense.

The signs told me I was nearing the city of Temecula. The location of Temecula-roughly equidistant from LA, San Diego, and Orange County-had made it a popular bedroom community for all three when land and gas were cheap. There were still some references in the signage and billboards to the city’s not-too-distant ranching past, but nowadays the cowboys have forsaken the area. Not so the Indians, who according to several billboards were running a large casino in town.

I exited the interstate and turned west on Rancho California Road. De Luz was above Temecula. I drove slowly, not because I wanted to but because conditions demanded that. My window was down and my head was out. Visibility was bad. It appeared as if the area was having a partial blackout, but it was hard to tell because the houses were spread out, with most of them sitting on so-called gentleman ranches, groves with acreage of avocado and citrus. Some of the area was undeveloped, and I passed by stretches of chaparral, coastal sage brush, and one of California’s big imports-eucalyptus trees.

The ubiquitous eucs are an Australian import that date back to the nineteenth century. Gold rush settlers to California hadn’t liked the treeless nature of the land and had started planting seedlings of this “wonder tree” over 150 years ago. The Central Pacific Railroad had also gotten into the act, planting a million seedlings. Like so many other immigrants, eucalyptuses flourished in the Golden State.

I am not a fan of eucalyptus, a prejudice borne from my fire walk. Many of my facial burns had come from flaming eucs. There’s a reason the trees are nicknamed nuke-alyptus. Few trees have as much oil in them as eucalyptuses. They’re highly flammable, so much so that during fires they sometimes explode. In every big Southern California fire, news crews invariably film dramatic footage of stands of eucalyptus trees torching upward like giant flamethrowers.

The trees don’t do well in windstorms. Evidence of that could be seen in the leaves, bark, and branches that littered the road. As the wind pushed at a stand of eucalyptus, the susurration of dry branches sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard. Then a gust came up, and the sound changed to that of bones rattling.

The wind brought with it a scent I didn’t like, and I felt my chest tighten: there was smoke in the air. I looked around for any sign of fire, but it wasn’t showing itself, at least not yet. The area was probably a firefighter’s nightmare. Many of the estates were situated between the canyon hills. The wind was already whipping through those canyons. The wrong spark could mean a conflagration. According to my nose, that conflagration might already have started.

I could turn around and in twenty minutes be in Temecula. From there I could get a squad car or two, and maybe even a fire engine, to accompany me to Miller’s avocado grove.

There was no time, my little voice told me. I wanted to tell my little voice to shut up and that haste makes waste. I kept driving. It was my nose and not my little voice that told me I was driving toward a fire.

I turned onto a cul-de-sac. Miller’s spread was supposed to be at the end of the street. The darkness and the smoke grew worse as I drove forward; the reason for the darkness quickly became apparent. A power line was down. It was acting like a snake with its head cut off but unaware that it was dead. The line arced and moved, and I had to carefully inch my car by it.