Don Winslow - California Fire And Life

A surfboard workshop isn't a bad description, Letty thinks.

Jack has two old longboards on sawhorses and a couple more hung up on racks. The garage smells of surf wax and wood finish. There are posters from old surf movies on the walls.

"You never change, Jack," Letty says.

"This is the best one," Jack says. He rubs a hand along an old wooden longboard stretched across two sawhorses. It has three grains of wood, dark wood blended into light- beautifully jointed, seamless. A flawless piece of work. "Made by Dale Velzy back in 1957."

"It was your dad's."

"Yeah."

"I remember these things."

"I can see that."

"You're stuck in the past," she says.

"It was better then," Jack says.

"Okay."

They go up the sixteen concrete steps to his door.

Jack's condo is Plan C — "The Admiralty." To the right as you come in is a small but functional kitchen with a window that looks out at the cul-de-sac end of the condo complex, and on a clear day has a view of Saddleback Butte to the east. To the left is a dining alcove and then a living room with a fireplace. The bedroom is off the living room to the left.

A sliding glass door off the living room leads to a small balcony.

" Mira," Letty says. "You have some view."

She steps out onto his balcony.

"Yeah," Jack says, nodding to a strip mall that sits across Golden Lantern down to the right. "I can see Hughes Market, Burger King and the dry cleaners. In a west wind, I can smell the grease from Burger King. An east wind, I get garlic from the Italian place."

"Come on," Letty says, because the view from the balcony is spectacular. Disregard the strip mall, and the condos down the slope, and look straight ahead and you have miles of ocean horizon. You can see Catalina Island to the right and San Clemente Island straight ahead. Dana Point Harbor is behind a knoll just to the left and then it's open coast all the way down to Mexico.

"You must have some great sunsets," Letty says.

"It's pretty," Jack says. "In the winter the ocean rises up like this big blue bar of color. It's two miles away, but at least I can see it."

"Are you kidding? This is a million-dollar view."

The place cost him $260,000 — cheap by local standards.

Letty says, "I think I'm going to start crying again."

"Do you want someone with you or do you want to be alone?"

"Alone."

He's about to say Mi casa es su casa, but thinks better of it.

"The place is yours," Jack says.

"I don't mean to kick you out."

"I have things I can do downstairs," he says. "If you need me, stamp on the floor or something. I'll hear you."

"Okay."

He gets out quick because even saying okay her voice quivers and her eyes are full. So he goes down in the garage and works on the board. Takes a sheet of 000 sandpaper, folds it over a block of wood and runs it up and down the length of the board. Slowly, lightly, he gets into a rhythm, sanding the old balsa down to a high, smooth finish.

Upstairs he can hear her sobbing. Sobbing and yelling and throwing pillows and stuff and he half expects to get a call from the association telling him that his condo is a residence, not a funeral home or a shrink's office, and that open displays of grief are in violation of the CC amp;Rs.

It's an hour and a half before it gets quiet up there.

Jack waits another twenty minutes and then goes up.

She's asleep on his couch.

Her face is puffy and her eyes are slits, but they're closed anyway. Her black hair is splayed out on the pillow.

Watching her sleep is something wonderful and painful. Letty asleep is like an underground fire — placid and beautiful on the surface, but something always smoldering underneath, waiting to ignite. He remembers that from when they were together and he'd wake up earlier and look at her lying there and he'd ask himself what he ever did that someone that beautiful and that good could be with him.

And twelve years later, he thinks, I'm still in love with you.

So what? he thinks. I threw you away.

Like something tossed into the ocean, and now a wave washes up on my little stretch of the beach. Life giving you back something you don't deserve.

Don't get carried away, he thinks. Take a step away from yourself. She's not back because she loves you; she's back because she needs you.

Because there was a fire and her sister died.

He gets a spare blanket from the hall closet and puts it over her.

Her story doesn't change a thing. Pam had a history of alcoholism, a history of pills. Her blood tested positive for both.

Nothing Letty says can change that story.

The only thing that can really tell the story, Jack knows, is the fire.

Fire has a language.

It's small wonder, Jack thinks, that they refer to "tongues of flame," because fire will talk to you. It will talk to you while it's burning — color of flame, color of smoke, rate of spread, the sounds it makes while it burns different substances — and it will leave a written account of itself after it's burned out.

Fire is its own historian.

It's so damned proud of itself Jack thinks, that it just can't help telling you about what it did and how it did it.

Which is why first thing the next morning Jack is in the Vales' bedroom.

He stands there in that dark fatal room and he can hear the fire whispering to him. Challenging him, taunting him. Like, Read me, you're so smart. I've left it all here for you but you have to know the language. You have to speak my tongue.

It's okay with me, Jack thinks.

I speak fluent fire.

Start with the bed.

Because Bentley called it the point of origin and because that's just what it looks like.

They had to scrape her off the springs.

In fact, Jack can see the traces of dried blood on the metal. Can smell the unmistakable smell of a burned body.

And the bedsprings themselves — twisted, congealed. It takes a hot fire to do that, Jack knows. This kind of metal only starts to melt at 2,000 F

That's the fire telling you, I'm bad, baby. I'm a badass fire and I did her in the bed.

Then there's the hole in the roof. What's known in the trade as a BLEVE, a boiling liquid evaporation explosion. Also known as a chimney effect. The fire ignites at the point of origin, and the superheated gases rise and form a fireball. The fireball hits the ceiling and boom. Which certainly means that something hot and heavy happened around the bed. Fire saying, I'm so bad you can't even keep me in the room, Jack. I'm so big and bad I have to fly. Break out, baby. Show my stuff to the sky.

Jack looks down and sees where Bentley dug through the ashes on the floor by the left side of the bed, and he can see the vodka stain — the spalling — literally burned into the wood floor. He can see some shards of smoked, oily glass, including the neck of the bottle.

He can see where Bentley got his theory.

But the lazy bastard just stopped there. Saw an Insta-Answer and grabbed at it so he could start packing for the big fishing trip.

So Jack keeps looking.

Not only because he thinks Bentley is a cretin, not only because of Letty's story, but also because it's just laziness to repeat someone else's work. That's where mistakes — if indeed there is a mistake here — get perpetuated. One lazy bastard after another copying each other's work.

A circle jerk of error.

So start again.

Start from scratch with no preconceptions and listen to the fire.

The first thing that the fire is telling him is that it burned a whole lot of stuff in this room, because Jack's standing in char up to his ankles. He clips his Dictaphone inside his shirt and starts talking notes.

"Note ankle-deep char," Jack says. "Indicates the probability of heavy fuel load. Whether primarily live load or dead load I can't tell at this point."