Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

“Hey, Captain,” I said.

“This can’t possibly be the most interesting thing going on in Newark today,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be off trying to figure out who the city council is stealing from?”

“I was just driving into the office, saw the smoke, and wanted to see Newark’s bravest in action,” I said, trying to keep my tone nonchalant. “So what’s this one? Crack addicts get sloppy with their lighters again?”

“Nope, someone wanted themselves a bonfire,” he said. “You’ll have to get it officially from the chief’s office, but off the record, this sucker was set intentionally.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Whoever did it was quick and sloppy about it. You could still smell the gasoline when we arrived.”

“No kidding. When did you guys get here?”

“Call came in at seven thirty-six, I think. Chief will have that, too. We were here in four minutes-I don’t want to hear any more of that crap about slow response times. We were able to contain it pretty quickly. Only the upper two floors on that one end got it. But they got it good. There was definitely an accelerant involved.”

I looked down at my feet, sorting things out. The call in Nutley had come in at 7:29, right after the man in the white van tossed his little present through my living room window. At that time of the morning, it was at least fifteen minutes from my place in Nutley to 18th Street, even if you drove like it was Indy qualifying. There was just no way Van Man could have gotten here, doused the place with gasoline, and gotten a good fire roaring so quickly. Obviously, Van Man had friends. This was a coordinated attack.

“Everyone get out okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, looks that way. Except for this one woman on the fourth floor. She wasn’t breathing too well when she got carted out of here.”

“Her name Brenda Bass, by any chance?”

“You know her?”

“I interviewed her once,” I said, skipping the details.

“Yeah, that’s her,” the captain said. “Brave lady. We’re pretty sure the fire got started in the apartment below hers-the super said it was empty. She must have smelled it pretty quickly, because she threw her four kids in the bathroom, stuffed some wet towels under the door, and got the shower going. Then she started looking for the fire to put it out. We found her in the living room with an empty fire extinguisher. The smoke got her.”

“Why didn’t she just take her kids and run out of the building like all the others?”

The captain looked over his shoulder at the TV crews then back at the building, then at me.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said. “And you didn’t get it from me. But someone barricaded her in that apartment.”

“Barricaded?”

“You didn’t get this from me, right?” he said.

“Right. Of course. We didn’t talk.”

“Good,” he said, speaking quickly in a low voice. “Some of my guys told me there was a board over her door.”

“Oh, dear God.”

“Yeah. You know how a landlord who is kicking out tenants will put plywood over the doors of the empty apartments to stop vagrants from breaking in?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s what someone did to this place, except the apartment wasn’t empty. That lady and her kids were trapped in there. Someone wanted to burn them alive.”

The captain’s radio squawked something unintelligible, but it was enough to get him moving.

“Interview over,” he said, as he walked away. “Call the chief’s office.”

As I watched water drip down from Miss B’s building, I wondered if this was how bugs who lived near the highway felt. They knew there was danger all around but they told themselves if they just kept flying, everything would be fine. And then all of a sudden, splat, there comes the one fast-moving windshield they couldn’t avoid.

I was nearly lost in that thought when I suddenly became aware of someone approaching behind me. With a surge of adrenaline, I whirled around in a crouched position, ready to be staring at a six-foot-five, white-van-driving brute.

Instead, it was just Tommy.

“Relax, I come in peace,” he said, holding his hands up.

“You scared the crap out of me,” I said, putting my hand over my fast-beating heart.

“Tina told me what happened to your place. She’s right. You are a mess.”

“I’m just a little edgy is all.”

“A little? I’ve never seen a white man jump so high.”

I could still feel the pounding in my chest.

“You shouldn’t have turned off your cell phone,” he said. “Tina is really freaked out.”

“Excuse me if I’m not awash in pity for her.”

“Well, she sent me out here to fetch you. She wants you to come into the office immediately. She said to tell you Szanto and Brodie said the same thing.”

“Then I’m going to ask you to pretend you didn’t see me.”

“Carter, I don’t know. This is pretty serious. I mean, this guy is a wacko. And Szanto and Brodie. .” Tommy said, looking stricken. He was a twenty-two-year-old kid. He had yet to learn the finer art of ignoring the higher-ups.

“There is no way I can figure out who is doing this while cowering in the office,” I said. “At least if I’m cowering out here, I can keep my mind off it a little.”

Tommy said nothing, turning his attention toward the sodden, blackened building.

“What a mess,” he said. “Everyone get out okay?”

I related what my fire captain had told me about the plywood on Brenda Bass’s door.

“Oh, my God, that’s terrible,” Tommy said. “This is real, isn’t it? This guy is really going after you, her, everyone.”

“Yeah, and don’t forget your name was at the bottom of that story as a contributor,” I said. “You better watch yourself, too.”

He nodded silently, looking down at a broken spot in the sidewalk, nervously shifting his weight from side to side.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” I said. “There’s no need for you to panic. There are a lot of guys named Tommy Hernandez in the world. There’s no way these psychos are going to be able to find you.”

“I guess they would have done it already,” Tommy said. “I don’t know whether to find that comforting or terrifying.”

We hadn’t really been looking at each other, but suddenly he was staring me straight in the eye.

“Carter, please come into the office,” he pleaded. “Tina is right. You shouldn’t be running around the city right now.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, trying to convince myself more than him. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll call Tina myself. That way, you’ll be off the hook.”

“It’s not about being on or off the hook. It’s about you being dead or not.”

“Tommy, I just feel like my best chance to stay alive is to keep moving and get to the bottom of all this. And I need to have you on my side. Please help me.”

Tommy held my glance for another ten or fifteen seconds, which feels like an awful long time when you’re looking straight at another human being.

“Okay,” he said, finally.

“Thank you. I promise I’ll be careful.”

“You better be,” he said. He looked down at his shoes, then added: “I’m not supposed to tell you this part, but there’s been another explosion this morning.”

“Let me guess: Booker T.”

Tommy nodded.

“Initial reports are that Building Five is a big pile of rubble,” he said.

“When did it happen?”

“It’s tough to say because we think it wasn’t called in right away-there’s no one up there with a phone. Maybe an hour after your house blew its top.”

I shook my head, thinking about Queen Mary and Red, hoping they weren’t inside. And who knows how many other vagrants might be sleeping there? How high would the body count get?