CHAPTER 36
Ziggy no longer had the familiar feel of just being our car. It had transformed into something sinister when it became our getaway vehicle for the Giovanni robbery. It sickened me to put Ziggy into ignoble use once again, but it was “game on” and I had to play. For Winnie’s sake, I had to play.
I plugged the address Uretsky had provided into my GPS, and soon we were on our way to the site of a future arson incident in South Boston. I had divided the allotted time into three critical sequences : thirty minutes to reach our target (morning commuter traffic would still be a problem); ten minutes to get the gas canisters; twenty minutes to spread out the fuel and strike a match. I might have had a plan in place, but my thoughts were with Jenna and Winnie.
Ruby’s pale complexion and her body’s persistent trembling suggested that she was thinking the same.
“What are we doing?” Ruby said, her voice cracking from the strain. “What the hell are we doing?”
“We’re going to save your mother.”
Ruby held her head in her hands, her body convulsing. Her face flushed as she began to sob so hard, she could barely breathe. “What he did to that poor woman. How could he do that? How?”
“We can’t think about that right now,” I said. “We’ve got to think about your mom.”
“Every time I close my eyes, all I see is what he did to Jenna. That image—it’s never going to go away. Never.”
Somehow I managed to navigate my way through the barrage of traffic without getting into an accident. But Ruby was right. The image of Jenna would last us a lifetime. My eyes saw the road, but my heart saw only blackness, death, and Jenna’s bloody fingers. What I’d once thought to be our incorruptible morals turned out to have all the flexibility of a pipe cleaner—with disastrous or near disastrous consequences.
For Rhonda Jennings, who would never marry.
For Giovanni Renzulli, who almost choked to death before two million YouTube viewers.
For a redheaded prostitute named Jenna, whose mutilated body had yet to be found.
We had saved Dr. Adams’s life. How far would we be willing to go to save Winnie’s—or our own, for that matter? At what point would we be asked to do something we’d simply refuse to do? How far could we be bent before we broke?
I lost sight of myself, my morals, the moment I became Elliot Uretsky. What other crimes was I capable of committing? I wondered. I really didn’t know. That might have terrified me most of all. Uretsky didn’t know, either, but he was determined to find out.
“It’s my fault,” Ruby said, her sobs slowly abating. “I should have just gone through with it. I’m the reason that girl is dead.”
“Don’t do that to yourself,” I said.
Ruby flashed me an angry look. “Why? Because you don’t blame yourself for what happened to Brooks Hall?”
“That’s different,” I said.
“No, it’s not. It’s no different at all. You cut the rope. I couldn’t sleep with a stranger. We both made choices that cost innocent people their lives.”
“But I knew what was going to happen to Brooks. You didn’t know Jenna would be murdered.”
“It was a risk involving her with Uretsky in the first place. I knew that much,” Ruby said.
I didn’t say anything. How could I? She was right.
I parked a few blocks from the warehouse. I worried about surveillance cameras capturing video of two arsonists climbing into a red Ford Fusion to make their escape. We each wore Red Sox baseball hats, the ones I’d bought last year, during our annual anniversary date at Fenway Park. Ruby’s hat served a dual purpose, concealing her identity from the cameras while shielding her sensitive skin from the sun. I gave Ruby a pair of sunglasses to wear. Meanwhile, I donned a handkerchief to hide my face. I wanted to do this alone, but Ruby wouldn’t allow it.
We walked to the intersection of West Third and B Street. Sure enough, I saw the Dumpster behind the single-story redbrick building with a flat roof and a white garage door. The parking lot housing the Dumpster was empty. In fact, the only things in abundance in this desolate part of town were broken bottles and crumpled aluminum cans. I looked to my right and saw the warehouse we’d been instructed to torch, directly across the street from the Dumpster.
The three-story brick warehouse looked dark and empty, with many of the windows boarded up, covered in newsprint, or broken. I thought about how the flat tar roof would burn when the fire reached that floor. I imagined the smoke would be thick, black, and toxic, transforming a dumpy cityscape into the lead story on the six o’clock news. Would it be a three-alarm fire? Four?
And then I thought about a firefighter climbing up his steel ladder, hose slung across his shoulder, vanishing into a smoke-filled window and never coming out.
In my single-minded mission to save Winnie, it simply hadn’t occurred to me that a firefighter—or plural—could die while battling a blaze that I started. I pondered the conundrum while my stomach roiled. Walk away and Winnie dies. Set the fire and maybe somebody else—or plural—dies or gets burned to the point where death would be preferable.
What do we do?
Ruby saw my hesitation.
“What are you thinking about?”
I told her, and by her blank look, I saw that she understood the gravity of our situation.
“Do we let my mom die?” Her voice held no trace of sarcasm—same as me, she honestly considered just walking away.
How far would we bend?
I paced in a tight circle, cursing aloud to nobody but the pigeons enjoying a mid-morning snack of trash. I needed to start a fire. I had to burn a pile of wood pallets using three canisters of gasoline. I didn’t have time to go hunting for Uretsky’s hidden cameras. Either I did it the way he wanted it done, or I didn’t. But how could I start a fire that would be the least risky for the responding firefighters?
I caught sight of something that gave me an idea.
“No, we’re not going to let your mom die,” I said, pointing.
“How is a fire alarm box going to help us?” Ruby asked.
“Because we’re going pull the alarm before we start the fire,” I said.
I checked the time on my watch and set its stopwatch feature to zero. We had fifteen minutes to get that fire started.