My Scotch was half full.
“I’ll buy this round,” K said. “Talk is medicinal.” I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a smooth beige glove on his unbandaged hand. He pulled money from his wallet. “They can reach us through coins and currency, you know,” he murmured. “But cash is better than being tracked through credit transactions.”
We walked out into the early evening. The air was sweet and mild in Berkeley, the sun filtered through a high layer of haze. I clutched Rob’s envelope in both hands. Despite myself, I glanced at the people around us—a shuffling old man in filthy brown coat and unlaced boots, a glazed young woman with peach-colored hair and white skin, two moneyed types in gray suits as alike as freshly curried thoroughbreds.
“Wait,” I said, stopping at the corner. “My brother’s dead. What in hell did you do for him that was so great?”
K’s eyes shifted. I thought he was avoiding my question. He stared east, into the hills. My nose twitched. I smelled smoke.
“Where do you live, Dr. Cousins?” he asked.
I turned. A fire burned high and bright a few blocks below the Claremont. Flames rose seventy or eighty feet in the still air and cast a glow on the hotel’s white façade like an early sunset.
A lazy column of smoke swung west, white and greasy, like—I could not avoid the comparison—the plume over a deep-sea vent.
“Nearby,” I said. “Over there.”
“Let’s make sure,” K said. His face became ruddy with an unexpected enthusiasm, and for an instant his appearance, more than ever, was pure Errol Flynn. “It’s possible they’ve already tagged your neighbors.”
We ran, then walked, then ran again, up the gentle slope around the campus, passing through alternating stretches of fine homes and streets with weedy lawns and houses in need of painting, not yet made over for the rich.
I was sick at heart—though nothing much of importance was in my apartment (I was certain now the smoke had to be from my apartment). I worried about the landlady and her artist friends, and about the houses nearby.
The actual scene still came as a shock. Fire trucks had surrounded my short, narrow street, and thick gray hoses lay across the tar-patched old asphalt like snakes, fat with pressure. Firemen leaned into hoses and aimed nozzles. Arcs of white water danced back and forth over the flames.
I stood in sick horror. Three homes were ablaze, the half-timber with my garage apartment and one on each side. The smoke was mostly steam now, the houses collapsing shells. Banana trees within the old greenhouse had become charred sticks, and the iron frame had twisted in an agony of heat. Beyond junipers still burning like flambeaux, I could see the black skeleton of the garage’s upper floor. It fell in with a rush of heat and roundels of flame that drove back a line of firemen.
A news helicopter churned the air with cocky whup-whups. Its downdraft pushed some of the smoke toward the street in a wicked, enveloping gray spiral.
“Yours, I assume.” K gripped my shoulder.
“Mine,” I said.
“Pity. I was hoping you’d put me up tonight.” His tone was philosophical. “It’s a long, old war, Dr. Cousins. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe it was an accident,” I said, folding my arms in what I hoped looked like cool resignation. I sat on a concrete car barricade and let out my breath in a long sigh. Before K could argue, my landlady and her two short-haired friends found us.
“Thank God, Mr. Vincent, you’re here!” the old woman exclaimed. Tears cut wet trails down her soot-smeared pink cheeks. “We all made it out. I’m so relieved.” She touched her hair with a nervous, smoky hand. “Did you see anyone?” she asked. “Anyone suspicious? It happened so fast, the firemen say it must have been set. But why, oh, why here?”
She gazed up with dreaming blue eyes at the tall dogleg of white smoke.
“No accident,” K whispered in my ear. “Let’s go. You’re known, Mr. Vincent. She might have set the fire.”
I pulled away and stared at him in disbelief, then at my landlady. “I have to fill out an accident report—don’t I?”
“Do it from a pay phone,” K suggested with cavernous patience, as if explaining a simple game to an idiot.
I followed him like a robot through lines of gawping neighbors. The crowd thinned.
Just another day in Berkeley.
I felt light-headed from delayed shock.
A block and a half from the ash and smoke, I looked up at a rapid ticking, what I guessed was the spinning chain of a bicycle sneaking up behind us. K yanked me aside just as a big black-and-tan dog with a snoutful of busy teeth drew a long rip down the rear of my pants.
No bicycle—dog claws: two Dobermans on extensible leashes, held by a young, black-haired, black-clad Diana, her face a mottled peach pit of fury.
“Goddamn you!” she shrieked. “Goddamn you rotten son of a bitch! Chew him up, Reno, Queenie!”
The dogs choked against their collars. K ran off a good distance, but to give him credit, whistled and stomped to divide their attention. I ran backwards, hands up in a gesture of both supplication and defense, using my brother’s package as a shield.
The woman glared. Her lips were flecked with foam. I could not believe what I was seeing and hearing.
“You destroy our neighborhood, you stalk our children and drive your huge car over our lawn, you leer at us in the supermarkets, and you sneak into our bedrooms!” The words caught in her throat.
The Dobermans danced in a white-eyed ecstasy of rage. Their hind legs wheeled and pumped like pistons, tendons taut as stretched wire. Front paws churned the air and knocked Rob’s package to the ground. Nails swiped my palms, leaving blunt, bloody scrapes. The twin blurred arcs of their teeth snapped less than two feet from my throat. I could smell hot gamy whiffs of Alpo. They heaved and wheezed, hanging laterally from the white-nylon cords. The whites of their bugged eyes turned red as the veins in their necks were squeezed.
The Doberman on my right lunged and fanged the ball of my thumb. It lunged again and bit hard. I screamed even before the pain hit. The dogs’ mistress chirped and crowed at the blood and gave her beasts more slack. The leftmost dog locked its paws into the hollows of my shoulders, twisted its head sideways, butting and poking through my weaving hands, then thrust its jaws home. As I went down, I felt its bloody cool nose on my Adam’s apple, a wet flick of lips, the next ivory puncture, and another bright point of pain.
A hoarse, deep, “Call off the goddamn dogs, lady!” followed by
Two shots like thunderclaps
And
I fell over a planter, slid along a bent sapling, tripped on a rope staked to the dirt. Some part of my attention saw the two dogs haul right and drop as if slammed by two big hammers. Blood sprayed the asphalt.
