Martin slams on the brakes.
Hector stands on his own brakes, cranks the wheel to the right, and just nicks Martin's right rear bumper.
Looks into his rearview and here comes Octavio.
Brakes squealing.
And BAM.
Octavio's so good, man.
Octavio is the only dude Hector ever wants to make his play with, man, because Octavio makes this sound like the big bang but only hits them at about ten miles per hour. Octavio leaves skid marks like an F-16 landing on a flight deck but the impact is like, minimal.
Like, I've been kissed harder.
The two cars look like shit, though. This is because Hector and Octavio smacked the bumpers up pretty good in the garage before putting them back on the cars. Matched the paint jobs and everything, but then again, they're pros.
Hector hollers into the back, "It's showtime!"
Hector slides out of the car, starts screaming in Spanish at Octavio, who's screaming back. Six dudes from Sinaloa in the back of the Aerostar moaning, Oh my neck, Oh my back, Oh my neck.
Doctor will diagnose soft tissue injuries and treat them for months. Refer them to physical therapy, man, and bill for ultrasound and massage and chiropractic sessions and all that shit that never happens except on paper.
Hector yells at Octavio, "You better be insured, man!"
"I'm insured!" Octavio yells back.
"Who's your insurance company?!"
Octavio whips out his insurance card.
Like American Express, only better, because you don't have to pay the bill.
"California Fire and Life!" Octavio yells.
Just like they've done it a couple of dozen times before.
Just another day at the office.
24
Mommy is all burned up.
Jack's so bummed he doesn't know whether to drive the car or suck on it.
The totally downer picture of Pamela Vale's death smacks him in the face: marriage fucked up, kids off at nightmare grandma's house, a lonely woman hits the vodka and the cigs and gets a longer oblivion than she was looking for.
Tough shit, he thinks. So what? She's not the only person who died today.
So, why do I care?
It's just the whole damn thing, he decides. It's drunk Pam Vale burning herself up in her bedroom, it's Bentley taking about ten minutes to call her death an accident, it's the grieving husband hustling to the phone to ask about his money, it's the All-Star Anal Retentive Mother from Hell charging her widowed son and motherless grandchildren bust-out retail for room and board.
And it's the kids, with their alkie mother and their shifting-cloud father and a grandmother who's about as warm as a steel ruler, and it's Daddy says Mommy is all burned up.
And there's this thing – this feeling, this suspicion, this paranoia, this sick thing – smoldering in the back of his cynical brain. The sooty glass, the dog outside, the blood-red flame, the black smoke…
Daddy says Mommy is all burned up.
Call Me Nicky, Jack thinks.
Call you a sick twist.
Telling your kids that.
Be honest, Jack tells himself. The main reason you don't like Nicky is because he's a real estate developer. One of those classic '80s schlock artists who made the big quick dollar throwing up shit all over the south coast. Shaving off the hillsides, pounding out building pads on bad soil, tossing up condos and apartment buildings with cheap materials and shoddy construction.
That's your fucking California, Call Me Nicky. You invent your own California and ruin mine. Reinvent yourself and invent me out.
And now he gets Nicky's involvement with Save the Strands. A fucking developer fighting development. Of course, the Vale house looks out over the Strands. It's just a NIMBY thing – Not in My Back Yard. I got my million-dollar view – don't fuck it up. I got my California.
Shit.
Like you're any different.
You're the same guy without the money.
It's not Nicky Vale.
It's me, Jack thinks.
My pathetic fucking excuse for a life, which mostly consists of sifting around in the ashes of other people's lives, trying to put things back together again. Like that can happen, like that can ever happen.
Putting ashes together again.
"Christ, listen to yourself," he says.
Fucking pathetic, self-pitying, burned-out.
Cold ashes.
Jack, the ace fire guy, a burnout case.
Now, that's funny.
The cell phone rings.
"I shouldn't be telling you this," the voice says.
But…
25
The voice takes him back a long way.
Back to the days when he graduates from fire school and goes back to the Sheriff's Department and they put him in the Fire Inspector's Unit.
Jack is a comer, a real potential star.
He works his ass off, takes every seminar offered, goes to fires that aren't even his. The joke is that every firefighter in south Orange County is afraid to barbecue a burger because they're afraid Jack will show up.
Jack, he figures he has life just about dicked.
He has a trailer across the PCH from Capo Beach, so he's ten minutes from Trestles, ten minutes from Dana Strand, and twenty from Three Arch Bay, and he can always just go across the highway to surf Capo if he's pressed for time. He's got a primo '66 Mustang that needed only a little Bondo, and he gets a yellow paint job on that hummer, wires the sound system himself and puts on a rack, and he is rolling.
Rolls out to a firebombing scene one day and everything else he could want in life is standing out in front of the Jewish Community Center waiting for him.
Letitia del Rio.
It's hard to look good in an Orange County Sheriff's Department deputy's uniform, but Letty gets it done. Black hair an inch longer than regulation, golden brown skin, black eyes in a face that is stunningly beautiful, and a body that is pure sex.
"This shouldn't be a tough one for you," Letty says to Jack as he walks up. She juts her chin at a teenage skinhead being loaded into an ambulance. "Adolf Jr. over there threw a Molotov cocktail and set himself on fire."
"They think it's the liquid," Jack says, "not the fumes."
"That's because they sleep through their classes," she says.
Jack shakes his head. "It's because they're morons."
"Well, that too."
Two minutes later he hears himself asking her out.
"What did you say?" she asks.
"I guess I asked you to dinner," Jack says.
"You guess?" she asks. "I'm not going out on a guess."
"Would you go out to dinner with me?"
"Yes."
Jack blows out the savings account on a meal at the Ritz-Carlton.
"You're trying to impress me, huh?" she asks.
"Yeah."
"That's good," Letty says. "I'm glad you're trying to impress me."
Next date, she insists on Mickey D's and a movie.
Date after that she cooks him a Mexican dinner that is only the best meal he's ever had. He tells her so.
"It's genetic," Letty says.
"Did your parents come from Mexico?"
She laughs. "My family was living in San Juan Capistrano when it was still part of Spain. Do you speak Spanish, white boy?"
"A little."
"Well, I'll teach you some more."
She does.
She takes him into her bedroom and Jack thinks he learns not only a little Spanish but the entire meaning of life when she steps out of her jeans and unbuttons her white blouse. She's wearing a black bra and black panties and her smile says that she knows it's sexy and she looks down at the bulge in his pants and says, "I make you hard, huh?"
"Yeah."
"Good," she says. Then smiles and says, "What I've got for you, baby…"
She's not kidding.
You can take all those classroom definitions of fire, Jack thinks, but you don't know about heat until you have Letty del Rio swirling on you. He reaches up to touch her breasts but she grabs his hands and pushes them down on the bed and holds them down while she keeps moving on him. She's focusing his attention to just where she wants it; it's like, Once you' ve been in here, you're never going to want to be anywhere else. You are home, baby. And when he's about to come, she reaches underneath him and lightly strums – later she'll call this her "Mexican guitar" – and while he's coming she's talking dirty in Spanish.