Lacking an answer between them, the DCF agent and the child psychologist exchanged deflated stares. Their plan had clearly been foiled, but Moni knew they hadn’t concocted it by themselves. Sneed must have put them up to it. He wanted Mariella in foster care where they’d drug her up and crack her brain open like an egg splattered on the pavement. She couldn’t let anyone take the girl from her ever again because, next time, Sneed might swipe her for good.
“Go home and get some rest, you two,” Agent Roberts said. “But don’t let me hear about any more trouble. If you mess up again, and I mean a single time, you’re gonna say goodbye to that girl for real.”
As Moni led Mariella out of that dungeon of an office, she wondered how she could possibly keep Mariella out of trouble and out of the DCF’s eye. Every day something worse happened and it all centered around the lagoon. It wasn’t a matter of trying her best, Moni realized. She couldn’t make one misstep or she’d lose everything.
Chapter 22
Mario Jimenez had just kicked off his heavy boots inside the fire station’s garage when the alarm rang again. His boots were practically still smoking from the wildfire he had just quelled with his crew, but duty called again. That’s what happens when it doesn’t rain for five weeks.
Jimenez grabbed his boots, and despite the protests from his aching, itchy feet, slipped them back on. Looking in the mirror, he saw black soot all over his shaved head and under his chin. He only wiped off the dirt that covered the crucifixion tattoo on his neck. No sense cleaning what’s about to get filthy in a few minutes, he figured.
“This one better not be too big,” Jimenez told the fire engine driver. “I gotta sit down for a nice steak and beer some time, man.”
“It shouldn’t take too long. It’s the Melbourne Harbor Marina. Some idiot probably set his boat on fire,” the driver said. “And if you’re looking for somewhere to eat, I know a place where the steak is shitty but the tits are huge.”
“Yeah, I know a couple of those places,” Jimenez laughed. “I went in with my helmet on one time and got a free lap dance.”
Enlightened by that bit of wisdom, the driver pulled the fire engine out of the garage and whipped it around the corner with Jimenez and his crew clinging to its side. Cars darted out of their way as they barreled up U.S. 1 with the siren blaring. Jimenez stuck his head out into the wind, allowing it to blast the beads of sweat off his face. He saw the pillar of smoke rising from alongside the lagoon at the base of the Melbourne Causeway.
“That looks like more than a boat,” Jimenez shouted to his crew over the roaring wind.
When the fire engine pulled into the parking lot of the private harbor, the flames were engulfing an entire row of yachts along a concrete pier. The fire lapped up the mast of a sailboat until its network of ropes formed a web of fire. A speedboat at the base of the pier exploded and plowed into the side of a yacht. The hole it ripped in the larger vessel quickly flooded it with flaming water. Making a quick sweep of the harbor, Jimenez witnessed the fire dancing across the water on the back of a chemical spill. The flaming tentacles lashed across a pier on the opposite end of the harbor and the fire latched onto several more boats.
“It smells like burning gasoline,” Jimenez told his crew. “Blast it with foam!”
He spotted several places where the concrete pier had been cracked at its base so hard that it looked like a wrecking ball had pummeled it. Looking up toward the end of the pier, Jimenez saw the fuel pump. Whatever damaged the pier had caused a break in the fuel line underneath the concrete. He didn’t know anything short of a torpedo that could ignite so much devastation underwater.
The heat nearly melting his skin, Jimenez lowered his face guard, planted his feet with the hose in both hands and blasted foam onto the base of the burning pier. He stumbled backwards, but not from the recoil or the fire. He felt someone clutching his jacket and spinning him around.
“Get off me!” Jimenez shouted.
“You gotta run!” the man screamed as he tugged on his jacket.
The firefighter widened his stance so the scrawny old man in the polo shirt with the anchor insignia didn’t have a chance at pulling him an inch. The ends of the man’s gray hair had been singed. His face glowed beet red. That would sting like a motherfucker later. Jimenez couldn’t tell whether he had lost his eyelids or the man simply couldn’t blink.
“I’m getting you to the ambulance,” Jimenez said as he grabbed the man under the arm and hustled to the parking lot.
“Listen to me. I’m the harbormaster,” the man said as he hobbled along gasping for air amid the billowing smoke. “There were three teenagers on the pier when the fire started. Two of them fell into the water. The third… Oh God, he burned. He wanted to burn.”
“Are you saying this was arson?” Jimenez asked.
“Never mind that now. Get your men away from the base of the pier. The fuel tank is underground. I couldn’t seal it off before the fire blocked the controls.”
“The fuel tank… Oh shit!” Jimenez tossed the old man to the medics and sprinted to the edge of the parking lot where his men could see him. Waving his arms frantically, he shouted into his radio, “Abandon the dock. The fuel tank is unstable. Get the hell out of there!”
Three men turned and started running. The fourth kept blasting the foam. The crackle of the fire must have drowned out his radio. Jimenez yelled at the top of his lungs. He saw the fellow firefighter turn his head. His eyes went wide as he saw everybody running. That was Tommy, a second-year man with his wedding coming up in a month. The firefighter dropped the hose and took a few steps in his burdensome gear, but to Jimenez it looked like he moved in slow motion. Looking behind Tommy, Jimenez saw the concrete bend and crest like a growing wave creeping up at his friend’s back. A fiery plume erupted from the gash in the concrete. As the fissure stretched into a pit, a wall of flame slammed into Tommy’s back and launched him through the air. Jimenez saw Tommy land in the water amid the burning fuel. He lunged forward, but the storm of scalding air blasted Jimenez so hard he even felt it through his face guard. Jimenez turned and shielded his face as he backed off. He spotted Tommy’s arms flailing through the flaming sea of gasoline. Suddenly, he vanished. Something had dragged him under.
“Tommy!” Jimenez screamed into his radio in a futile final call. “I can’t believe that just happened. What was that thing?”
“There are all kinds of things in the water,” the harbormaster said as he trembled in a wet blanket. “They got the kid’s friends and then that idiot fired his gun into the water. I warned him about the fuel spill. He did it anyway. He didn’t even run from the fire. He stood there… stood there and burned. Oh God, he looked at me, just stared at me as his flesh melted away.”
Jimenez studied the old man. He wished he could brush his story off as a hallucination brought about by the intensity of the fire, but after seeing something drag Tommy underneath the flaming fuel spill, he didn’t question any tale.
What happened next shocked him even more. The spigot of fire shooting from the breeched fuel tank got sucked back down the hole-as if someone made it defy what a fire should do by sticking a giant straw into the fuel tank and draining the burning liquid into the harbor. The flames were whisked away from shore and then erupted over the water. It burned white hot. The boats on the far side of the harbor exploded, sacrificing their fuel and tinder to the orgy of destruction. It would burn until every last drop of fuel had been consumed.
“Guard the perimeter and don’t let it come ashore,” Jimenez told his crew even though he felt the fire didn’t want to come ashore. He got the feeling, not from his gut like he usually did but from somewhere even deeper, that the fire got what it wanted and it wouldn’t take any more-for now.