sure what had happened ... except that the black fella had the biggest gold tooth he had ever seen in his life.
7
The toothless old man who had sold Leandro the T-shirt stood on his porch and watched expressionlessly as Torgeson's cruiser blasted by. When it was gone he went inside and made a phone call to a number most people wouldn't have been able to reach; they would have heard the sirening sound which had infuriated Anne Anderson instead. But there was a gadget on the back of the storekeeper's phone, and soon he was talking to an increasingly harried Hazel McCready.
8
'So!' Claudell Weems said cheerfully after craning his neck to look at the speedometer, 'I see we are driving at just over ninety miles an hour! And since the consensus is that you're probably the shittiest motor-vehicle operator in the entire Maine state police-'
'What fucking consensus?' Torgeson asked.
'My fucking consensus,' Claudell Weems said. 'Anyway, that leads to a deduction. The deduction is that I will die very soon. I don't know if you believe in that bullshit about granting a doomed man's last request, but if you do, maybe you'd tell me what this is all about. If you can before we receive our engine-block implants, that is.'
Andy opened his mouth, then closed it again. 'No,' he said. 'I can't. It's too nuts. Just this much. You may start to feel sick. If you do, put some of that canned air to you right away.'
'Oh, Christ,' Weems said. 'The air's been poisoned in Haven?'
'I don't know. I think so.'
'Oh Christ,' Weems said again. 'Who spilled what beans?'
Andy only shook his head.
'That's why no one's fighting the fire.' The smoke boiled up from the horizon in a widening swath - mostly white so far, thank God.
'I don't know. I think so. Run one of the bands on the radio.'
Weems blinked as if he thought Torgeson might be crazy. 'Which band?'
'Any band.'
So Weems began to run the police band, at first getting nothing but the confused, beginning-to-be-frightened babble of cops and firemen who wanted to fight a fire and somehow couldn't get to where it was at. Then, further down, they heard a request for backup units at the scene of a liquor-store robbery. The address given was 117 Mystic Avenue, Medford.
Weems looked at Andy. 'Jeepers-creepers, Andy, I didn't know there was any Mystic Avenue in Medford - in fact, I didn't think there was any avenues at all in Medford. Couple of pulproads, maybe.'
'I think,' Andy said, and his voice seemed to be coming to his own ears from very far away, 'that particular squeal is coming from Medford, Massachusetts.'
9
Two hundred yards over the Haven town line, Lester Moran's motor died. It did not cough; it did not hitch; it did not backfire. It just died, quietly and without fanfare. He got out without bothering to switch off the key.
The steady crackle of the fire filled the whole world, it seemed. The air temperature had gone up at least twenty degrees. The wind was carrying the heavy smoke toward him but up, so the air was breathable. It still had a hot, acrid taste.
Here on the left and right were wide fields - Clarendon land on the right, Ruvall land on the left. It rose in a long, undulating slope toward the woods. In those woods, Lester could see steadily brightening winks of red and orange light; smoke poured up from them in a torrent which was steadily darkening. He could hear the thumping explosions of hollow trees imploding as the fire sucked the oxygen out of them like marrow from old bones. The wind was not straight into his face, but close enough; the fire was going to break out of the woods and into the field in minutes . . . seconds, maybe. Its rush down to where he stood, face red and running with sweat, might be lethally quick. He wanted to be back in his car before that happened - it would start, of course it would, old gal had never failed him yet - and piling up distance between himself and that red, oncoming beast.
Go, then! Go, for Chrissake! You've seen it, now GO!
Thing was, he really hadn't seen it. He'd felt its heat, seen it wink its eyes and fume smoke from its dragon's nostrils ... but he really hadn't seen the fire.
But then he did.
It came out of Luther Ruvall's west field in a pounce. The main fire-front bore on into Big Injun