Don Winslow - California Fire And Life

Jack says, "If you'd do your fucking job for once-"

"Get out of here!" Bentley yells. He's straightening out his shirt and patting his hair back into place.

"He's leaving," Letty says. She holds a hand up to the two deputies who are about to escort Jack from the building. She keeps her hand on his elbow as she walks him down the hall. They can both hear Bentley yelling, "You're an asshole, Jack!"

"He might have something there," Letty says.

"Probably."

"Probably," Letty chuckles. Then says, "Arson?"

"I won't be sure until the sample tests, but…" Jack says. Then he asks, "Could Pam have done that, Letty? Could she have been so down she'd take herself out and the house along with her?"

"Pam would never have killed herself."

"How-"

"The kids," Letty says. "She never would have left the kids."

"She was very drunk."

Letty shakes her head. "He killed her, Jack."

"Letty…"

"He killed her," she says. Then, "You'd better get out of here."

He gets into his car and drives off. When she gets back into the office Bentley asks her, "So how's the old boyfriend?"

"Shut up, you dumb lazy fuck," Letty says.

Dinesh Adjati looks like Bambi.

Not the older Bambi, Jack thinks — the one who kicks the rival buck's ass at the end of the movie — but the younger Bambi, Thumper's little buddy.

Dinesh has these big, brown Bambi eyes and long eyelashes and he's slender and has brown skin. However, he also has a Ph. D. in chemical engineering, so to the extent that he resembles Bambi, he's Doctor Bambi.

Dinesh works for an outfit called Disaster Inc.

Disaster Inc. is the company you call when something goes very wrong.

You want to know why a train wreck happened, a bridge collapsed, a bus plunged into a river or a fire happened, you call Disaster Inc. Any catastrophe, they'll tell you why it happened.

Disaster Inc. gives its clients a Disaster of the Month calendar every year but Jack's never known anyone sick enough to actually have it on his wall. The calendar features slick Technicolor glossies of that month's featured disaster along with a daily chronicle of past human tragedies like "Hindenburg Explodes," "Chicago School Fire," and a mock-up of "Vesuvius Erupts," which Goddamn Billy amended to read "Vesuvius Erupts and Disaster Inc. Not There to Bill for It."

Disaster Inc. has done some very serious billing in the '90s because the decade has been chock-full of disasters. In California alone you had the '93 fires — Malibu, Laguna, Sherman Oaks — and the good citizens of those towns wanted to know what caused the fires to spread so quickly and burn down so many homes.

Then the Mother of All Disasters hit — the Northridge earthquake. It took thirty seconds of January 17, 1994, to drain a third of Cal Fire and Life's reserves and make the owners of Disaster Inc. rich men.

Dinesh got one whomper of a bonus, because he's the fire guy at Disaster and he billed a lot of hours figuring out the cause of fires that broke out in the aftermath of the quake. A lot of people didn't have earthquake insurance but they did have fire insurance, so a lot of buildings went up in spontaneous combustion that day.

Jack himself knew a lot of insurance claims guys who had figured out how to get total earthquake coverage for a buck sixty-five: you set a gallon of gas on top of your furnace and when the shaking starts — Abracadabra, KABOOM — earthquake coverage.

But most people hadn't figured that out and so were running around pouring accelerants all over their rubble and that's why Dinesh Adjati is twenty-eight years old and has a Porsche, a house in Laguna, and a condo in Big Bear.

Jack loves Dinesh, though.

He loves Dinesh because Dr. Bambi works his ass off, gets it right, and makes a wonderful witness. He just turns those fawn eyes on the jury and explains the most complicated chemical analyses to them in plain-old American English and they eat him with a spoon.

Anyway, Jack drives straight from the Vale house to Disaster's lab in Newport Beach overlooking the greenway.

He gets a Most Favored Client pass right into Dinesh's lab, where Dr. Bambi is wearing a flameproof smock and a masked helmet and appears to be torturing a pickup truck with a blowtorch.

Dinesh turns it off, flips up the mask and shakes Jack's hand.

"A libel suit against a TV show," he explains. "I'm working for the plaintiff."

Jack tells him that he has a trunk full of samples in the car.

"Can you run the samples for me?" he asks. "Double pronto?"

"Somebody wanted something to burn?"

"Someone to burn."

Dinesh makes a face. "No shit?"

"No shit."

"Nasty."

"I need it quick, Dinesh."

"Today?"

"Cool," Jack says. "And I might need you to testify down the road."

"Well," Dinesh says, "I have good news and bad news."

"Tell."

"The good news is that I can get it to you today," Dinesh says. "I'll have to put a crew of techs on it and bill you accordingly, but you'll get it today and you'll get it right."

"What's the bad news?"

"The bad news," Dinesh says, "is that I'm not completely confident that I can testify."

Say what?

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not completely confident," Dinesh repeats, "that a gas chromatograph — or even a GC with a mass spectrometer — can accurately determine traces of accelerants."

Jack feels the floor sinking under him.

"We've always used the GC-mass spec," he says. "What's wrong with it?"

"We live in a plastic society," Dinesh says. "In more than just the symbolic sense. The modern home is just chock-full of plastic products, every one of which — when they burn — produces thousands of chemicals that can be confused with hydrocarbons, with accelerants. For example, your basic GC-mass spec reveals about two hundred chemicals in kerosene."

"So?"

"So I've been working with something that shows two thousand."

"Two thousand?" Jack asks.

"Yeah," Dinesh says. "Let's say that's a little more effective at sorting out the chemical sheep from the chemical goats."

Jack asks, "More expensive?"

Dinesh smiles. "The only thing more expensive than good science is bad science. Let me just say that I don't think I could get up in front of a jury anymore and swear under oath to the absolute accuracy of a GC, even with a mass-spec chaser."

"And with your new process, you could."

"It's not new," Dinesh says. "I've been testing it for months. Something called a GC x GC. Or two-dimensional gas chromatograph, if you prefer. Maybe now is the time to trot it out."

"Do it."

"It's going to cost."

"How much?"

"Run you about another ten grand."

Do it anyway, Jack thinks. You don't want to get hit for a few million on a bad faith suit and then say, Yeah, but I saved ten thou on the testing.

"Do it," Jack says.

"This is why I've always loved you, Jack."

"Do it the old way," Jack says. "Then do it the new way. Do it till you're satisfied. But do it."

Whatever it is.

Letty's at the regular Thursday-afternoon south coast meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, which because of its time and location is generally known by the sobriquet "Ladies Who (Drank) Lunch."

This is not the kind of meeting Letty's used to. She's used to night meetings in church basements, meetings with broken cookies and greasy coffee and stories about blowing the rent on beer and bourbon benders.

She's not used to a meeting in broad daylight in a "togetherness space" on a pier in a marina, but that's where the ladies go to share their experience, strength, and hope and that's where Pam went to do it with them, and that's why Letty's there.

Thinking, The ladies are gorgeous. I mean for a bunch of drunks these babes are put together. Whatever boozy fat they put on in their sinful days these girls worked off on the treadmills and exercise bikes and spinners. Skin glowing with health, eyes bright, hair shiny, full and sexy. If AA ever wanted to do an infomercial, they'd shoot it at the regular Thursday-afternoon south coast meeting.