"What's happening, man?" he asked a bystander. "Somebody torched an old apartment. Chink family on the third floor was trying to start some kind tailor shop." He spat on the sidewalk. "Slopes got it coming, you ask me. Tryin' to mess with our rent control, sneak the place into bein' commercial property. They in it with the landlord, that's for sure."
A line of cops crowded the skins, pushing them back. Mark ran forward. Sprout screamed, "Daddy!", broke Kimberly's grip, and lunged after him. Kimberly followed, trying to grab her arm.
Am ambulance was parked this side of the blaze. Beside it cops were trying to keep back an Asian family. A man and woman were wrestling with the officers and firemen who hemmed them in, howling and windmilling painfully thin arms. A man in an asbestos suit was hanging on the end of a ladder; a truck was trying to bring him into position to get inside a window, but huge bellows of flames kept lashing out at him, driving him back despite his protective clothing.
Several other men in inferno suits stood in a puddle on the street with helmets off. "You gotta get in there," a florid-faced man with a chiefs badge on his helmet yelled. "There's still a little girl inside."
"It's suicide. Fucking roofs going."
Mark was fumbling in his Dead patch pocket. Kimberly caught up with Sprout a few feet away.
"Mark! What's happening?"
He shook his head, unheeding. Black and silver-no. Yellow: useless. Gray, worse than. In his haste he discarded them. His lives fell in glittering arcs to shatter on the asphalt.
"Mark, what what in God's name are you doing?" The last two. One blue-and, thank God, an orange. He stuck the blue vial back in his pocket. Then he tossed the orange one's contents down his throat.
Kimberly saw him stagger back. And then he changed. The familiar gawky outlines blurred, shifted, condensed. A different man stood there, with film-star looks, a Jewish nose, a devil's grin. And a red sweatsuit, worn over an orange T-shirt.
JJ Flash tipped a one-finger salute to Kimberly. "Later, toots. Take care of the kid."
He launched himself into the sky.
The man on the ladder said a couple of Had Marys and prepared to jump through the window. He was going to his death. But that was better than hearing the little girl in there crying every time he closed his eyes for the rest of his life.
He jumped. Something grabbed the back of his protective hood, bought him up short, and hung him on the end of the ladder.
"Just trying to save you from yourself, pal," said the man hovering next to him in midair. "Better leave this one to the professionals."
"Jumpin' Jack Flash!" the fireman gasped.
The ace put a finger beside his nose. "It's a gas-gasgas," he said, and darted into the heart of the fire.
JJ Flash was on fire.
But his flesh didn't blacken and crackle, his eyeballs didn't melt. His blow-dried hair wasn't even mussed. In the midst of hell, he was in heaven.
E J. O'Rourke heaven, in fact the fire felt like sitting in a Jacuzzi with a couple of lines up each nostril and a teenage girl by your side eeling out of her string bikini and getting ready to audition as a sword-swallower for Barnum amp; Bailey. This was fine.
Best of all, he could still hear the little girl crying. "Where are you, honey?" he yelled. She didn't seem to hear, just kept bawling, but that was enough. He went down a short hallway wallpapered in big batts of flame, gave a wall a jolt so hot the inferno around him seemed tepid. It went away in a puff of yellow incandescence.
She was sitting in about the only square yard of the whole fucking building that wasn't on fire, a little girl in pigtails and smoldering pj's with Yodas all over them. He walked up to her, knelt, and smiled.
The roof fell in.
Even the firemen gasped when they heard the thunderous series of cracks and saw a fresh spray of sparks shoot up through the column of smoke. Sprout screamed, "Daddy!" and threw herself forward.
A Puerto Rican cop in a riot helmet grabbed her arm. "Hold on, little lady," he said. "Your daddy'll be fine." The wet lines on his cheeks made a liar of him.
JJ Flash lay on his side with the little girl beneath him and an elephant on top. He moved, felt the raw ends of ribs grate against each other.
The girl was still alive, sheltered by his body. A miracle she hadn't seared her lungs. He looked up. There was still more building to fall on him, and while the flame couldn't harm him, a structural member could damn well snuff his lights. And there was only so long before the little girl breathed in the flames that were crowding around like teenyboppers at a Bon Jovi concert.
"As Archbishop Hooper said," he grunted, " `More fire' " Hugging the girl to him, he reared up. The flame rushed in with a joyous greedy roar. He thrust his arm down its throat.
It wasn't fire that almost nailed the poor son of a bitch working his futile hose from the end of the ladder. It was a jet of incandescent gas and vaporized cement and steel, bright as the sun and a couple degrees cooler. For a heartbeat the inferno died back to a few stray flickers.
A man flew out of the hole the jet had made. Flames wreathed his body and the little girl he hugged against him. They were absorbed into his body as he landed lightly next to the frantic family.
"Here you go, ma'am," JJ Flash said, handing the girl to her mother. "Better let the medics look her over before you hug her too tight."
He turned away before they could try hugging him, scanning the crowd for Sprout. All Mark's personae shared his overriding imperative love for her; they couldn't help it. Plus he just plain liked the kid.
"Madre de Dios," the Puerto Rican cop said, staring at Flash.
Kimberly Gooding reeled away. Her mind was spinning. Unraveling as it went.
And then she saw him. Standing at the end of the block, immaculate in his camel-hair coat. He caught her eye and nodded.
For the first time since she'd known him, St. John Latham was showing something like emotion. He was showing… triumph.
She knew, then, what she had been a party to. Kimberly put her hands to her cheeks and dug in, slowly and deliberately, until the nails drew blood from just beneath her eyes.
"Mr. Latham," Judge Conower asked gravely, "where is your client?"
"She has been released to the custody of a private mental-health clinic."
"And her condition?"
Latham paused just a sliver of a second. "She is in a fragile state, your honor."
"Indeed. Mr. Latham, Dr. Pretorius, kindly step forward."
The house was packed today, and Pretorius was expending lots of effort not to have hackneyed thoughts about bread and circuses. He glanced aside at Mark, who sat beside him wearing a lightweight buff blazer over the bandages wrapped around his upper body. JJ Flash or Mark A. Meadows, his ribs were cracked just the same. Mark only had eyes for his daughter, sitting at the table in the center between the opposing camps, directly facing the bench.
"This court is compelled to find that Ms. Gooding is clearly too unstable to be entrusted with custody of Sprout Meadows."
Pretorius caught his breath. Could it be-
"On the other hand," the judge said, turning to him, your client is in fact an ace-perhaps several aces, whose names have been linked to extremely risky and irresponsible behavior. Moreover, he seems still-and in spite of his sworn testimony-to be a user of dangerous drugs, if the preliminary tests conducted on the vials recovered from the street at the site of last night's fire are any indication. In fact, at the close of these proceedings, Dr. Meadows will be remanded to the custody of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
"With these facts in view I cannot in conscience award him custody of the girl either. Therefore I declare Sprout Meadows to be a ward of the state, and remand her to a juvenile home until arrangements can be made for a foster family."