Don Winslow - California Fire And Life

So the fire zooms up and consumes those things, and the carbonized material — char — falls down on the floor. A lot of times there's enough fall down to smother the fire on the floor. That's why you can go into a fire site and the ceiling is burned but the floor — where the fire started — isn't.

See, sometimes fire will go up and then across. The fire isn't even burning across the floor, it's up along the ceiling, where the fuel is. It burns the nice fuel up there and gets hotter and hungrier and then you have what's known as the convection effect. The fire up top generates so much heat that the heat — not the flame — ignites the material on the floor and then the floor goes up.

But it all has to start somewhere.

Which is at the base of a V, and the reason Jack's looking in the closet is because Jack is a cynical bastard.

A cynical bastard thinks that if someone is going to start a fire, the closet is a good place to do it because it's not immediately visible and the fall-down effect often obscures the evidence.

So Jack's down on his knees digging away the ash at the back wall of the closet and it doesn't take long before he finds what he's looking for — a tall narrow V marking on the wall. Important that it's narrow instead of wide. A wide V is the fire telling you that it spread normally, just the usual grazing on the usual feed. A narrow V is the fire telling you something else.

The fire saying, I was hot.

I was fast.

Something else with this V. The apex doesn't come to a point. It looks like a V with the point cut off, more like V.

Which is the fire hinting to Jack, Yo, dude, maybe I had a little help. A little boost. Maybe I had me a little something to get me, you know, started.

In an accidental fire, the V will be pointed. But if the fire had a little help — say, if someone poured an accelerant on the floor — then the apex of the V is going to be as wide as the pool of the accelerant. Because you don't so much have a point of origin as you have a pool of origin, all of which ignites at the same moment.

So now, Jack thinks, we have not just one point of origin, we have at least two.

Which is one too many.

If there's one thing Jack knows about an accidental fire, it's that it has one — count them, one — point of origin.

An accidental fire doesn't start accidentally in two places.

It's not possible.

Jack pushes aside the charred remains of what appears to have been some coats on the floor by the wall at the bottom of the V.

Could swear he hears the fire laughing.

Because there's a hole in the flooring. As wide as the base of the V.

Which makes Jack think that maybe Letty is right.

Maybe Pam was murdered.

Letty del Rio is standing in a chop shop in Garden Grove, hip deep in cut-up cars, and she's got five Vietnamese kids against the wall with plastic ties around their wrists and not one of the jokers will tell her anything about what she wants to know.

That is, what were Tranh and Do up to when they did their duet Houdini act.

And she doesn't really want to run these boys in for the cars, because it is a major pain in the ass for little results, but that's what she's going to do unless they start showing a marked improvement in their attitude.

Letty says to the interpreter, "Tell them they'll get five to eight on the cars."

She unwraps a stick of gum and pops the Juicy Fruit into her mouth as the interpreter translates her threat and gets a response.

"They say they'll get probation," he tells her.

"No," she says. "Tell them I'll personally fuck them with the judge. Tell them that."

He tells them that.

He gets their answer and says, "They say your sex life is your business."

"Cute boys," Letty says. "Very cute boys. Tell the cute boys they better not have sheets because I'll rattle their probation officer's cage until he violates them. Tell them I'll make sure they get into one of those tough-love juvenile boot camps where they do push-ups till they puke. No, don't tell them that. I know they speak English."

Shit, Letty thinks, these kids were born right here in Little Saigon, which is technically in California but in real-life terms is still in the Republic of (South) Vietnam. They all speak English until they get popped, then they dummy up and go for the interpreter bit because they know it's hard for a prosecuting attorney to work up any mojo when he has to wait for the translation.

It pisses Letty off.

"You speak English, don't you?" she says to the kid who looks the oldest. The kid who's been giving the other kids the shut-your-mouths looks. Checks his ID and the kid's name is Tony Ky. "I'm looking for Tranh and Do and I know they were involved with your little parts dealership here. So I'm going to bring the heat on you, and I'm not ever going to stop bringing the heat until you help me out. No, don't say a word to the interpreter — I don't need your smart mouth. You just think about what I'm telling you."

Like it's going to do any good, Letty thinks.

This is a closed world Little Saigon, and it ain't going to open up for her. So she's pissed off at these kids, and she's pissed off at her boss for sending a Latina into a closed Asian, male world.

Like they're going to talk to me, she thinks.

And she's also pissed off that she's going to have to go talk to Uncle Nguyen, who is the one person who could open up mouths for her, and Uncle Nguyen just gives her a headache. Uncle Nguyen used to be a cop back in Big Saigon, the old Saigon, so he has this annoying we're-all-cops camaraderie bullshit and he also isn't going to tell her a thing. Or tell anyone else to tell her a thing.

Shit, if Tranh and Do have been whacked, Uncle Nguyen would have had to okay them getting whacked so that's probably a dead end. But it's a street she has to walk down to make the boss happy.

But I'll get a headache, she thinks.

She tells the uniforms to take the kids in and then she starts searching the shop.

The thing you have to love about the Vietnamese, Letty thinks, is that they keep records. Here they have this beautiful scam going, stealing each other's cars and stripping them, selling the parts and collecting the insurance, and they just have to keep lists of whose cars they "stole" and how much they paid.

Thinking, like the old-time bookies, that they can flash the paper before the cops come through the door.

Sorry, you lose. Deputy del Rio is faster than your average cop.

Smarter, too.

And much faster and smarter than your average fucked-up kid who doesn't have the cojones to at least try to get himself into a junior college or something and chops cars instead.

Letty has no sympathy.

So Letty's poking around the shop, looking for the record books, and she collects every slip of paper in the joint. Logs them in as potential evidence and has them translated.

Tells the translator, "I want to see — right away — anything with the names Tranh or Do on it."

Which, Letty thinks, is kind of like standing down in Chula Vista and saying you want to see anything with the name Gonzalez on it. But what are you going to do?

Fire burns up.

Because that's where the oxygen is.

Fire burns up… unless…

… it has a reason to burn down.

Jack knows that there's a limited universe of possibilities as to what that reason could be. Anything poured on the floor to get a fire going — in the lingo, an accelerant — seeps down, as any liquid will. Down — into the flooring — and the fire follows. Follows down because now it has a reason, the accelerant, which is better fuel than oxygen. The fire eats up that nice tasty accelerant — gasoline, kerosene, styrene, benzene — and then burns up. Fast, hot, and mean.