Those windows blew out with a roar just as my foot touched down in front of the door.
A shower of glass rushed past me, hard pebbles that didn’t feel sharp even as they opened up my flesh. I dropped to my knees as the first wave of heat followed the glass. Flames surged out of the broken windows and up the front of the house. I covered my head with my hands and began to roll backward, away from the heat.
I made two complete rolls and half of a third before I fell off the porch and onto the lawn. As soon as I hit the grass, I began to clamber away from the house, moving on my hands and knees but trying to keep my face as low as possible, close to the cool earth and unexposed to the terrific heat behind me. Across the street more people were shouting; the crowd that had turned out to see what all the commotion to the east had been about was now drawn to the west by the new house in flames.
I went about twenty feet on the ground before finally rising and running across the street. The neighbors parted as I arrived, keeping their distance as if I had sprinted out of a quarantined plague camp. They watched me warily as I dropped onto my ass on the sidewalk and sat facing the fire, breathing heavily. My forearms were covered with long scratches from the glass, and blood was beginning to soak portions of my shirt.
“You all right, fella?” one woman asked, concern in her face. I just nodded.
“What were you doing over there?” said another voice, this one heavy with suspicion. “That house is vacant. What’s going on? There are fires going all over the neighborhood.”
I twisted my neck and looked behind me at the speaker, an overweight man with red hair and a face covered with freckles. I could see the other bystanders react to his words; expressions changed from surprise and concern to suspicion and anger.
“What were you doing over there?” someone else echoed. “That house has been empty for a year. How’d a fire start in it?”
I braced the heels of my hands against the sidewalk and pushed off it, getting back to my feet. As I did, my shirt slid up my back a bit, and the woman who’d asked me if I was all right screamed.
“He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!”
Chaos. Half of the bystanders ran immediately, not bothering to look for the gun or linger long enough to see if there was true cause for alarm. Two or three others simply joined the first woman in shouting, and the man with the red hair and freckles made a clumsy lunge at me, arms outstretched like a child running to hug his mother. I spun away easily and dipped under him, came up with my shoulder in his solar plexus, a football lineman’s move. All the breath left his lungs in one choked gasp and he staggered back as I stepped free.
“Somebody get a cop!” another man yelled, and then I heard a woman misinterpret this and shout that someone had just shot a cop. By the time the police did get there, they’d have a hell of a time extracting the truth of the situation from that group. But if one of those cops was Padgett, I had no desire to wait around. I began to run.
My truck was only a block or two away, still parked in the alley, but I was running away from the crowd, which took me in the opposite direction. I decided it would be best to stay on foot and try to move as fast as possible. Five houses were burning in the neighborhood now, and if the son of a bitch responsible stuck to the houses on my list, there were just two more to go. I wondered if Padgett would be turning up somewhere else along the list.
I ran back across the street and past the park, ducked in behind a house, and got the Neighborhood Alliance list from my pocket. My fingers left streaks of blood on the paper as I unfolded it.
I had a good idea of where to go next. The first fire had been the farthest east of any of the homes, and the two on Erin Avenue had also gone up in east-to-west fashion. Whoever was doing this was working for speed and efficiency, moving through the houses systematically, working his way west.
The closest house left on my list was to the southwest, on West Fortieth, between St. Mary’s Cemetery and Trent Park. If I ran hard down Fulton to Clark, I might be able to make it.
______
If the second house on Erin Avenue was the smallest I’d seen on the list, the house on West Fortieth was probably the largest. According to the recorder’s-office list Amy had faxed me, this was the last house Anita Sentalar had acquired. It was an old home, set back from the road a little deeper than the neighbors, composed of three stories of faded paint and broken windows. A front door looked out over a short porch, but after my last experience I decided to avoid the front steps and take a look around the back.
The house faced west, and the south side was bordered by a sagging chain-link fence. A narrow driveway led past the house on the north side, ending in a detached one-car garage.
I walked down the driveway, my legs trembling beneath me from the long, fast run I’d made. A streetlight was at the front of the house, but at the rear it was quite dark. I had a flashlight in the truck, but the truck was too far away to do me any good now. I approached the back of the house.
Everything about the property was still and quiet, and those qualities were accentuated by the commotion raging to the north and east. By comparison, this stretch of the neighborhood now seemed like a ghost town. I looked around the yard carefully and saw nothing. The back door looked solid, and there was no sign anyone had broken in. Maybe I’d been wrong in my assumption of where the next fire would be set, or maybe whoever was responsible for them had stopped at five. With the gathering police and fire attention, not to mention the crowds on the streets, it wasn’t an unreasonable idea.
I had nearly convinced myself of that when I stepped closer to the back door and saw a single pane of glass was missing from the window that made up the top half of the door. I slipped my arm through it and found the lock easily. I twisted it and then tried the knob. It didn’t turn, which meant the door had already been unlocked.
I took three steps back from the house and gazed up at the dark windows, looking and listening for any sign of movement, of someone inside. Nothing. I reached behind me and took the Glock out of its holster, then switched it from my right hand to my left and reached back inside to unlock the door.
Inside, the house smelled musty. I took a few tentative steps, shuffling my feet instead of lifting them and lowering them, because I couldn’t see what lay ahead. Using this technique, I moved forward, out of the small entryway and into what appeared to be a kitchen. Here I paused for a few seconds and allowed my eyes to adjust to the lack of light. When I could see well enough to make out large obstructions, I began to move forward again. At the doorway I stopped and slid my palm up and down the wall, searching for a light switch. I found it, but when I flicked it up, nothing happened. The electricity was out in the house, probably killed by a long-inactive account.
I moved through an empty living room and came to the steps, started up them. The first flight of steps ended on a narrow landing, and above it a hall led away to what I assumed were bedrooms. I was on the landing when I heard a shuffling noise, a slight rush of movement, then a gentle thud. I knelt and listened for another sound. Just when I was convinced there would be no more, I heard another thud, this one even softer than the first, followed by a jingling noise.
I was halfway up the steps, staying low and leading with my left hand, when something rushed at me. I shouted and brought the Glock up, my finger tense on the trigger, as a large cat bounded down the steps. It leaped over my shoulder and landed gracefully on the steps behind me, turned and meowed loudly. A metal tag on its collar glinted in the thin beam of light from the street, no doubt the source of the jingling I’d heard. The cat gave me one more yowl, then cut left and disappeared.