Except somehow it didn’t. The column, instead of wrenching completely free of the upstairs porch, as he might’ve expected, pulled away from the house a groaning inch at a time, allowing Raymer to wrap his arms around it and hang on for dear life. Then, amazingly, given that the post was no longer attached to the porch it was supposedly supporting, it stopped moving altogether. For the moment, though fifteen feet off the ground, he was stable. Unfortunately, the upstairs porch, at least to judge by the grinding sounds above, was not. Looking up, he saw the structure begin to sag. After which he saw nothing at all, because there was suddenly a blinding flash of light, incredibly close, that Raymer’s brain decoded as lightning, so he shut his eyes tight, bracing for the inevitable sizzle and thunderclap. This never came, but what did, again from above, was a rapid-fire crackling sound, the spindles of the upstairs railing snapping like twigs while the entire structure slumped even more dramatically. Having no desire to see all that come crashing down on him, Raymer kept his eyes sealed tightly shut and waited for the impact, but this didn’t come, either. It was as if the world’s effects had been abruptly hewn from their causes. When he finally did open his eyes, he discovered that his circumstance was far less perilous than he’d imagined. Yes, the column had completely detached from the upstairs porch, but it remained affixed, somehow, to the downstairs one, forming a radical V. By loosening his grip, he was able to slide right down it, then gently drop those last few harmless feet to the ground.
His mistake was remaining on the spot to marvel at the geometry of the column and the fact that the upstairs porch, despite its now-treacherous slope, somehow remained aloft. He heard the rattle of plastic wheels but didn’t put two and two together until the Weber kettle hit the splintered section of railing and capsized. As often happens in such situations, luck was on Raymer’s side until it wasn’t. The kettle’s dome, which might’ve killed him, landed with a dull thud behind him, then rolled down into the ravine. Even the rain of ashes and the last of the burning embers wouldn’t have been terribly problematic if he hadn’t been looking up.
But of course he was.
—
RAYMER HAD GONE only a couple blocks when he heard the familiar burp of a police siren. Turning, he made out one of North Bath’s three squad cars inching along behind him, close to the curb. Then the spotlight came on, finishing the job of blinding him that the falling ash had begun. He figured it had to be Miller at the wheel. Who else would be dumb enough to treat the boss like a common perp?
“That you, Chief?”
Sure enough, it was Miller’s voice. “Turn that fucking thing off,” Raymer told him, hands up to shield his burning eyes.
When blessed darkness returned, he went over to the vehicle, and the passenger window rolled down. “Why are you still on duty?” he asked Miller.
“Pulling a double,” he explained. The look on his face was astonishment bordering on, for some reason, fear. “What’s that you got all over you?”
Raymer ignored this. “Why are you here?”
“Like I said—”
“No, I mean here. On this street…this block. As opposed to anywhere else.”
“Responding to a call. Guy reported seeing a heavyset Caucasian man attempting to—”
“That was me.”
Miller nodded but was clearly troubled. “Actually, Chief? Right now you look more like…”
“Like what?”
“Like, well, a Negro-type individual.”
“You mean a black man?”
Miller sighed deeply. “Chief?” he said. “I’m not really understanding any of this. Am I supposed to?”
“Go on back to the station, okay? Forget this ever happened.”
When the window rolled back up, Raymer returned to the sidewalk and resumed walking, his eyes still smarting from the ash. At the end of the block he realized the cruiser was still creeping along the curb behind him. Again the window rolled down.
“Chief?”
“What, Miller?”
“Is this some kind of test? If the call that came into the station was about you, shouldn’t I be, like, questioning you?”
A fat drop of rain hit Raymer in the forehead, then another. There was an odd odor in the air. Strong. Nauseating. More thunder rumbled, very close now. “Instead of the station, how about driving me out to Hilldale,” he suggested. “I left my car there this morning. You can interrogate me on the way.”
“Sure, Chief,” Miller said, clearly excited by this opportunity.
Raymer had no sooner gotten in than the heavens opened with astonishing fury. “Wow,” Miller said, impressed by how the wind-driven torrents of rain rattled on the roof of the squad car and streamed down the windshield in wavy sheets. From outside the car there came a hissing sound, followed instantly by a clap of thunder so loud that Miller hit his head on the roof of the car when he levitated. “That was close,” he said. They both tried to peer out the back window, but with the rain you couldn’t see much. Raymer agreed, though. The lightning strike had to have been very close.
Miller took his hands off the metal steering wheel and made no move to put the vehicle in gear. When the rain finally let up enough to be heard, he said, like a man pretending that a thought had just occurred to him when in reality it’d been troubling him for a while, “Hey, doesn’t Charice, you know, Officer Bond, live around here somewhere?”
“If you say so,” said Raymer, who was about as good as Miller was at pretending not to know something.
Miller nodded, then went back to staring at the water streaming down the windshield.
“Look,” Raymer said, relenting a little. “Officer Bond invited me over for dinner, okay?”
Unless Raymer was mistaken, it certainly wasn’t okay with Miller. “Isn’t that—”
“Against the rules? Probably. That’s all, though. We just had dinner out on her back porch.”
Miller was sniffing. “What’s that smell?”
Raymer was wondering the same thing. The nauseating odor was stronger in the car than it had been in the street. Different from the Great Bath Stench, but right up there on the unpleasantness meter.
“Chief?”
“What?”
“Are you on fire?”
“Why would I be—”
“Look that way a sec.”
When Raymer turned his head, Miller yelped, grabbed a rolled-up magazine from the dash and commenced swatting the back of his head and neck with it, hard. Finally recognizing the smell as his own burning hair, Raymer let the other man have at him, though the blows rained down with such surprising ferocity that he had to wonder if his officer wasn’t driven by more than one motive.
“Am I out?” Raymer inquired, when the hitting finally stopped.
“I think so,” Miller told him. He cracked the door open enough for the dome light to come on, then used the end of the magazine to investigate Raymer’s hair where it was longish and thick and curled up in the back. “Something might’ve gone down the back of your shirt, though.”
Raymer leaned back against the seat and immediately felt a burning sensation between his shoulder blades, as if somebody’d just stubbed out a cigarette there.
The odor of burning hair was still thick in the car. “Didn’t you feel it?” Miller wanted to know.
“No, I didn’t. A man who knows he’s on fire will take steps.”
Miller nodded thoughtfully. “So what’d you have?”
“I’m sorry?”