“Ouch,” she said, but she wasn’t smarting from my snappy retort. She took her thumb off the trigger, and the flame died.
“Serves you right,” I said. “Okay, let’s get some data.” I walked toward one of the cars, and Miranda headed to the other. Fishing a book of paper matches from one pocket, I lit one—it took three tries to get enough friction from the tiny strip at the base of the book—then used that match to set off the rest. The matchbook erupted in a fusillade of flame, flaring bigger than I’d expected, and I reflexively flung it through the open window of the car. The gas-soaked upholstery ignited with a flash and a whoosh, and I wondered if I’d been too liberal with the accelerant. I also wondered, as I felt the heat searing my face, if I had any eyebrows left.
Through the rush and crackle of the growing fire, I caught the drone of an airplane overhead. A small plane, just off the runway from the nearby airport, banked in our direction. As it circled, the flash of its wingtip strobes illuminated the smoke from the burning cars in bursts, like flash grenades, minus the boom. I tried to wave them off, but if they could even see me, they ignored my frantic gestures.
Backing away from my vehicle, I glanced over at the other car, also engulfed in flames. Despite the intensity of the inferno, Miranda stood barely ten feet from the car, one arm shielding her face, a look of utter fascination in her eyes. I forced my way through the blast of heat and took her by the arm. “You’re too close,” I shouted over the hiss and roar of the fire.
“But look!” she shouted back, never moving her eyes, pointing into the vehicle at the figure slumped in the driver’s seat. I looked just in time to see the skin of the forehead peel slowly backward, almost like an old-fashioned bathing cap. As it continued to peel backward, I realized that what I was seeing was a scalping. A scalping done by fire, not by knife.
“Very interesting!” I yelled. “But you’re still too close. That’s what we’ve got the video cameras for. This is dangerous.”
As if to underscore my point, a thunderous boom shook the air. Miranda yelped, and I instinctively wrapped both arms around her and tucked my head. I saw a puff of smoke from one of the tires—the heat had increased the pressure and weakened the rubber to the bursting point. Miranda and I scurried to join Art in the shelter of the water truck. “I hope you took off the gas tanks,” Art shouted, “or filled them up with water!”
“Why?”
“In case there’s any gas left. You don’t want any vapors,” he said.
“Since they came from the junkyard—” I began, but I didn’t get to finish the sentence. Just then the gas tank of the car Miranda had been standing beside exploded, and pellets of hot glass rained down on us like some infernal version of hailstones. The car’s spare tire—launched from the trunk by the blast—arced toward the water truck, slammed into the hood, and smashed through the windshield. It’s going to be a long, hot summer, Bill Brockton, I said to myself, and you’ve got some serious ’splainin’ to do.
The circling airplane beat a hasty retreat into the safety of darkness, and a moment later I heard sirens.
CHAPTER 2
MY PHONE RANG FOR WHAT SEEMED THE EIGHTY-SEVENTH time of the morning, and I was hardening my heart to the plea of the ringer—resisting the reflex to answer—when I noticed that the caller was my secretary, Peggy.
It wasn’t as if Peggy could just roll back from her desk and lean her head through my doorway. My office—my working office, as opposed to my administrative, ceremonial office—was a couple hundred yards from hers, clear on the other side of the stadium. Years ago I had laid claim to the last office at the end of the long, curving hallway that ran beneath the grandstands. I was as far off the beaten track as it was possible to get, at least within the shabby quarters inhabited by the Anthropology Department. The isolation allowed me to get five times as much work done as I would if my desk were situated along the daily path of every undergraduate, grad student, and faculty member in the department. But the deal I’d made with Peggy, when I latched on to this distant sanctuary, was that any time she called, I’d answer. I could ignore the rest of the world, but not her.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Incoming,” was all she said.
I was just about to ask for clarification when I heard a sharp rap on my doorframe. “Gee, thanks for the warning,” I said. I hung up just as Amanda Whiting strode in, all pinstripes and power pumps.
“Do you have any idea how many local, state, and federal ordinances you violated last night with your little bonfire of the vanities?”
Amanda was UT’s general counsel, and she took both her job and herself quite seriously.
“From the way you phrase the question,” I said, “I suspect that ‘zero’ is not the answer you’re looking for.”
“It’s the answer I wish I had,” she said, “but it’s not the answer I’ve got.”