"Do to me? What the hell did you do to them?"
"Me? Nothing. Just the hand."
"Norm, you can tell me. If you can trust anybody in the world with this, it's me."
"I was supposed to meet them at five. I talked to the lawyer, Moore; he said they had something to show me."
"Yours truly, Exhibit A. So what the hell did you do?"
"I didn't do anything. I got to about a block away and saw that the place was burning to the ground. I saw the medics cut you loose from the chair, saw you could walk, and got away as fast as I could." He shook his head. "I'm sorry. I got you into this. I don't suppose there's any way to cover it up now."
"Wait. Before we talk about covering up. You didn't kill those shits?"
"I didn't kill anybody. I was ready to, but ... the fire. I saw you and figured it was a police thing."
"No ... whatever that thing was, the police don't have it. I'm getting debriefed tomorrow, and I'm not sure what to say. You didn't doit?"
"What was it? Some kind of firebomb?"
Qabil touched his face gingerly. "The three guys just blew up. I saw it happen. I haven't said anything to anybody, just that there was a fire. But I saw it all."
"They blew up?"
"A window broke, a window behind me. The Tampa scumbag, Solo, raised his gun—it was already in his left hand—and started to stand. Then he just burst into flames."
"Jesus. Like a flamethrower?" Norman had seen them in use, and he still had dreams about it.
"No—it was like he exploded from the inside out. Not his clothes, his flesh. Then the other two. One, two, three. Staggering around like something out of a movie. Then their clothes started to burn. Capra had a gun in a holster in the small of his back, and the rounds cooked off.
"He fell into the drapes, and they went up like tinder. Some of the furniture was smoldering. Then fire running out of their bodies like burning oil. I was able to half stand up, tied to the chair, and had to kick my way through the front door, fell down the steps, and knocked myself silly. Some civilian sprayed me with a fire extinguisher, maybe saved my life."
"What the hell could do that? Make people burst into flame like that?"
"I was hoping you could straighten that out. Some new military weapon or something."
"Come on, Qabil. I haven't held a military weapon in thirty years."
Qabil nodded and then had a coughing spasm that ended with a stifled retch. "The smell was disgusting. You know I'm forbidden pork. When human flesh—"
"I remember, Qabil." He shook his head hard. "It must have been a Mafia thing. Or a gang thing."
"Well, the gangs ... " He cleared his throat. "The gangs don't have any reason to love him. But they run more to baseball bats and knives. If they had burst-into-flames ray guns, we'd all be in real trouble.
"I thought about the Mafia. But why would a hit man kill three hoods and leave a live policeman as a witness?"
"Maybe he didn't know you were a—"
"I was still in uniform. But maybe, maybe that was the point. Maybe they want us to know they have this ungodly weapon. Willy Joe was not some godfather type they had to assassinate in a dramatic way. Just a bagman with delusions of grandeur."
They listened to the crickets for a minute. "What can make a body burn up?" Norman asked. "We're mostly water, aren't we?"
"Yeah. Crematoriums need a really hot fire to get things going. But we've both seen what napalm does."
"That's adding fuel. You said these guys just started to burn from the inside out."
"I saw that clearly. Their clothes weren't even on fire, not initially. Then everythingwas on fire."
"There've been cases of spontaneous human combustion."
Qabil laughed one "hum" and touched his cheek. "That always turns out to be nothing. Some old person or drunk, or drunk old person, falls asleep smoking. They die without noticing they've died. After they've smoldered awhile, fat starts to drip out. They burn like a candle then. Like an oil lamp."
"What about the water, then?"
"I guess it's like the water in a green stick of wood. If it's hot enough, the wood burns anyhow." He scratched his head. "But this was nothing like that. They didn't smolder or anything. They just ignited, like they were made out of gunpowder."
Norman sat straight up. "Oh, hell. It's obvious."
"Enlighten me."
"It's a policeweapon. They knew you were—"
"No, hold it. We don't have anything remotely like that."
"Not that youknow of. But let me finish. If the whole story came out, if any one of those three lived, there would be hell to pay. A homosexual policeman, a faggot's wife bribing a cop, the Mafia involved—hell, they'd use atomic weapons to keep that under wraps."
"But nobody knows. It's buried so deep—"
"Willy Joe found out."
Qabil shook his head hard. "If the department knew, I'd have been eased out a long time ago. Believe me; I've seen it happen. We use administrative procedures long before we resort to supernatural weapons."
"You once told me there was no such thing as 'supernatural.' If something happened, it was part of Allah's design, and therefore natural."
"Touché. And mystery is part of that design." He shook his head, smiling at the thought. "So think of this as a murder mystery. Weapon, motive, opportunity.
"The weapon, table that. Except to note that the person using it probably knew he was in no danger from his targets, once he pulled the trigger.
"The motive. Well, Capra probably has more people in this town willing to kill him than anyone else but the mayor. Right now you're the prime suspect, but I'm the only one who knows that, and if you say you didn't do it, that's enough for me. Who else? Did Rory know you were headed for a meeting with Capra?"
"No; I didn't want to involve her." Jesus! It was Pepe!"Besides, she was on camera all afternoon. Perfect alibi."
"And nobody else knew."
"No, of course not," he lied. Could Pepe's research have some kind of weapons application? Something developed from those gamma-ray bursters? Norman didn't know much about it. Maybe a burst of gamma rays could catch someone on fire.
"So what about opportunity? Usually linked to motive and weapon. If this is just a criminals-killing-criminals thing, the timing of it has to be explained."
"Because it's so propitious?"
He nodded. "And risky. In broad daylight, in a neighborhood full of criminal activity, someone sneaks around behind a house, breaks a window and kills three people inside, setting the house on fire, and walks away."
"There will have been witnesses."
"Most likely, but not models of good citizenship. And they probably don't want to get on the wrong side of whoever did this. Would you?"
"But wait. There's going to be a record of your having come to my house and catching this guy, Solo, Willy Joe's right-hand man. Then you wind up in a house with both of them dead."
"True. Except, as far as I know, there's nothing in police records linking the two. That would have been a real red flag. He was ID'ed as an out-of-towner." He breathed out, a loud puff. "We may get lucky. That fire was so intense it probably didn't leave anything useful, DNA or skeletal remains."
"Which might in itself be suspicious."
"It happens. They had all kinds of weapons in the war that made it impossible to identify remains. Usually intense heat and chemical action." He tapped his lower teeth with a thumbnail. "It's an angle. A possible angle."