Fire Season Read online

  Coffin heard a siren—a fire engine, he knew, heading east from the station on Shank Painter Road. A few seconds later the intercom buzzed, and Coffin punched the button. “Yeah, Jeff,” he said.

  “Dumpster fire, Frank. Behind Rossi’s Package Store. I guess it’s goin’ pretty good—lots of cardboard.” It was Jeff Skillings, that day’s desk officer: his Cape Cod accent was even thicker than Coffin’s—“cardboard” came out something like “cahdbowed.”

  “Another one?” Coffin said. “That’s two in two weeks. Not good.”

  “Probably kids,” Skillings said. “Like the one at the high school.”

  “Probably. Anybody called Pete Wells?” Pete Wells was an investigator with the state fire marshal’s office in Stow, assigned to the Cape and Islands.

  “Think we need him?”

  Coffin thought for a second. “Let’s hold off,” he said. “You’re right. It’s probably just kids.” He punched the glowing intercom button again, breaking the connection. Then he stood up and put his coat on.

  Chapter 3

  Rossi’s Package Store was the first structure you came to if you entered Provincetown by Conwell Street off Route 6. It was a small, full-range liquor mart, selling everything from thirty-six-packs of Old Milwaukee Light to high-end single malt scotch, premium cognacs, and $250 magnums of Dom Pérignon. It was perfectly normal to see down-and-out fishermen standing next to Porsche-driving real estate lawyers at Rossi’s checkout counter; the former with maybe a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon, the latter with a fifth or two of Grey Goose, both on their way to very different kinds of parties, both with very distinct notions of what constituted a good time.

  By the time Coffin pulled into Rossi’s crushed oyster-shell parking lot, the Dumpster fire was already out. A loose half-circle of volunteer fire and rescue guys stood smoking and telling jokes near the front end of the idling pumper, a shiny new-to-them four-door Ferrara that had been bought used with money the volunteer firefighters had raised at raffles, bingo games, and pancake breakfasts. Wisps of foul-smelling smoke still rose from the Dumpster.

  Coffin shook hands with the fire chief, a short, barrel-chested man in his fifties named Walt Macy. “What’ve we got here, Walt?” Coffin said.

  Macy took off his PFD ball cap, scratched his bald head and put the cap back on. “Nasty little fire,” he said, crossing his arms over his big chest. “Must have used some kind of propellant—probably gasoline or lighter fluid. Pretty much the whole contents of the Dumpster were involved by the time we got here. Flames maybe ten feet high. Once we put the hose on her, she went out just fine, but it was pretty impressive when we first drove up.”

  Coffin wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell? Plastic?”

  “Yep, plastic juice jugs, the clerk says. Nasty shit in those things—that what d’ya call it—PBA or BPA or whatever.”

  “So why so much cardboard and plastic in the Dumpster—don’t these guys recycle?”

  “Clerk says they do, big-time. Evidently whoever set the fire pulled a lot of cardboard and other stuff that was waiting to go to the recycling center out of the bins there—” Macy pointed a thick index finger at a row of waist-high, chicken wire, and two-by-four bins with hinged lids that ranged along the side of the building. “Then they threw it in the Dumpster, poured in their gas or whatever, tossed in a match and up it went.”

  “Nice of them to put it all in the Dumpster, and not just torch the bins,” Coffin said.

  Macy nodded, pursing his lips. “Hadn’t thought of that. Yeah, I guess it was kind of nice of them. Relatively speaking.”

  “Who called it in?” Coffin said.

  “First call was the clerk. Then a few others from drivers passing by.” Macy tugged at the suspenders of his big, rubberized firemen’s pants. Bunkers, they called them. “Pretty bold, tossing all that stuff in the Dumpster, pouring in the gas and torching it before it’s even fully dark,” he said. “Could’ve been spotted pretty easy from the street.”

  “Maybe he was,” Coffin said. “We’ll get in touch with the folks who called it in, see if they saw anyone.”

  Macy nodded. “They’re on caller ID. I’ll phone the numbers over to your office.”

  “What’s the clerk’s name?” Coffin said.

  Macy pulled a notebook out of his pocket, flipped it open. “Szabo,” he said. “With a S-Z. From Hungary, he says.”

  Coffin shook Macy’s hand. “Good to see you, Walt. Wife and kids all right?”

  “Doin’ fine. How’s your ma?”

  “God,” Coffin said. “Don’t ask.”

  * * *

  There were no customers in the store, but the chemical smell of roasted plastic was strong. The clerk, Szabo, stood by the window, looking out at the parking lot. He was tall and slender, with pale eyes and dark hair. His fingers were long, his nose hawkish.

  “Pretty exciting out there, for a while,” Coffin said, pulling his shield out of his jacket pocket, flipping it open.

  “Yeah,” Szabo said. “Exciting. I guess you could say that. Scared the living shit out of me.” Coffin had a hard time telling one Eastern European accent from another. They all sounded like Boris and Natasha from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons to him.

  “Big fire?” Coffin said.

  “Fucking huge.” Szabo shook his head. “Flames five, six meters high. Burning cardboard flying around. I thought the shop was going to go up. Lucky those firemen come so fast.”

  Coffin looked out the window, too. The fire and rescue boys were climbing back into their shiny new truck. It had hot rod flames painted on the sides. “So, what happened—you looked out the window and there’s the fire?”

  Szabo frowned, shook his long head again. “Was customer,” he said. “Guy comes in, gets a couple forties out of the cooler. I’m reading my book.” He held up a weathered paperback: Flying Saucers by Carl Jung. “Guy’s walking up to the register, past window. He says, ‘Holy shit, fucking Dumpster’s on fire,’ so then I look.”

  “So you called it in right away?”

  “Right away. Picked up the phone and called 911.”

  “What happened to the guy—the customer?”

  “He pays up and pffft—takes off. Doesn’t even wait for change. His car was in the lot, so maybe he worries.”

  “What kind of car?”

  Szabo thought for a second, looking away. Then his pale blue eyes focused on Coffin’s face. “I don’t know,” he said. “Didn’t see. Guess I was watching fire.”

  “What did he look like, this customer?”

  “American. White guy.”

  “Tall? Short? Heavy?”

  “I don’t know—medium.”

  “How old?”

  “Late twenties.”

  “Did you card him?”

  Szabo shook his head. “He looks over twenty-one.”

  “Dressed how?”

  “Jeans, hoodie, ball cap. You know—like everybody.”

  “What color hoodie?”

  “Gray.”

  “What about the ball cap? Did it have a logo or anything?”

  Szabo thought for a few seconds, then shook his head. “I didn’t notice. It was dark. Black or navy blue.”

  “Facial hair, tattoos you could see?”

  “I don’t think so. No.”

  “Didn’t wait for change, so he paid with cash.”

  “Right.”

  “You didn’t see anybody outside, hanging around the Dumpster?”

  Szabo held up the book again. “No.”

  “See or hear anything unusual—anything we should know about?”

  Szabo frowned and shook his head again. “Sorry,” he said. “Not much help, right?”

  Coffin tapped the cover of Szabo’s book. “I didn’t know Jung wrote about UFOs,” he said. “He was the archetypes guy, right?”

  “Archetypes, collective unconscious, complexes—all Jung. He was one of the fathers of modern psychiatry.”

  “So why UFOs?”


  “Jung wrote the book during the big UFO craze in 1950s,” Szabo said. “Thousands of UFO sightings all over the world. Front page stories in newspapers, everything. People freaking the fuck out. Jung said there’s two possibilities.”

  Coffin raised an eyebrow. “Weather balloons? Swamp gas?”

  “First possibility is they’re real—there’s hundreds of flying saucers buzzing around and people are seeing exactly what they think they see. Second possibility is people want them to be real, and so anything they see in the sky that seems strange is alien spacecraft.”

  Coffin grinned. “So that second thing, then.”

  “Probably.” Szabo shrugged. “But interesting question is why? Why, all of a sudden after the end of World War II, thousands of people want flying saucers to come to Earth from outer space?”

  Coffin rubbed his chin. “Because God was dead. After World War II, with all the carnage, people couldn’t believe in a merciful God. So they believed in little green men instead.”

  “That’s what Jung thinks,” Szabo said. “Me, I don’t know. Ever seen the Herring Cove lights?”

  The Herring Cove lights were an occasional local phenomenon. On clear nights, maybe two or three times a year, strange clusters of white lights seemed to float above Herring Cove beach, moving slowly, apparently at random. “Sure,” Coffin said. “We get calls about them sometimes, so I finally drove out there to see for myself.”

  “And?”

  “We tell people it’s commercial air traffic, backed up from Logan. The lights are the planes’ headlights.”

  “That’s what you tell people. But what do you think?”

  Coffin shrugged. “Didn’t look like planes to me,” he said. He paused. “But that’s what I wanted it to be.”

  Chapter 4

  Coffin parked the big, unmarked Crown Victoria in front of his house and climbed out. The Crown Vic was another perk of the acting police chief’s job: in his usual role as Provincetown’s only police detective he mostly drove his own car, a cantankerous 1984 Ford Fiesta. Coffin hated the Fiesta: its floorboards were rusting out, its steering wandered, its clutch slipped, its wipers didn’t wipe, and its engine gagged and farted on even the slightest incline. He would have enjoyed shooting it, or setting it on fire, or driving it into the ocean—but between the taxes on the house, technically his mother’s, and the cost of her nursing home care, it was the best car he could afford.

  The house was a small, two-story Cape Cod–style, in Provincetown’s old working-class neighborhood, down the hill from the inland side of Bradford Street, at the edge of the town cemetery. In Coffin’s neighborhood the streets were narrow, the houses packed close together. His house had no water view; it looked out on the weathered cedar shingles of the houses next door, their tiny gardens and postage-stamp yards. If you leaned a bit as you looked out of his bedroom window, you could see Valley View Nursing Home, where his mother lived.

  The waterfront homes along Commercial Street still sold in the millions, although they no longer sold as quickly as they had five or six years ago, and prices were down by half, maybe, from their peak during the height of the Bush-era real estate madness. Coffin knew he’d never be able to afford his own private water view unless he won the lottery: and if he did win the lottery, he thought, he’d be gone—quit his job, move someplace warm. Jamie, his girlfriend, had been talking about Tuscany, maybe going to cooking school. He shook his head. He didn’t play the lottery—it was, as his uncle Rudy liked to say, a tax on stupid people—and Tuscany was a long way away from the damp fog of an October night in Provincetown.

  Meanwhile, if he wanted to look at the water he could walk down to the town beach and stand at the high tide line, small waves sloshing, gulls giving him the stink eye. Meanwhile, it had started to rain.

  * * *

  Coffin stepped on to his screened porch, pushed open the front door. The house was full of light and music—Queen Latifah singing “I Put a Spell on You,” slow and soulful. The savory smell of roasting chicken drifted from the kitchen. Jamie lay curled on her side on the uncomfortable Victorian sofa, shoes kicked off, eyes closed. She was five months pregnant and very pretty. She was also very pale.

  “Uh-oh,” Coffin said. “You okay?”

  “Thought I was gonna barf,” Jamie said.

  “What did it this time?”

  “Ginger. I was slicing ginger, and the smell made me feel like I was about to hurl. Or pass out. Or both. I love ginger—it’s so unfair.”

  “Last time it was shrimp.”

  “No, last time it was rhubarb. Time before that was shrimp. All things I love. What’s next—ice cream?”

  “That would be weird.” Coffin sat in one of his mother’s strict straight-backed chairs. It still felt like his mother’s house. The low ceilings and narrow doorways, the punitive antique furniture upholstered in wool and stuffed with horsehair, the unexpected taxidermy, including the big stuffed goat’s head that leered down from above the mantel, yellow-eyed, dust in its long beard—it all seemed like a metaphor for her Alzheimer’s, which was a disease of disorder and anachronism, of closed doors, blocked corridors. “Ice cream’s in the cravings column,” Coffin said. “It would be a first if something went from the cravings column to the aversions column. Unprecedented.”

  “Whatever,” Jamie said. She sat up. The color had returned to her face. “It’s my sense of smell. It’s turned up to eleven suddenly. You smell like cop car, for instance—like pine air freshener with piquant undertones of vinyl and adrenaline sweat.” She yawned. “Now I’m hungry again. Freaky.”

  Coffin went to the kitchen, poured a glass of water from the Brita pitcher on the counter, and brought it back for Jamie. “Great. Me, too.”

  “You’re a nice man,” she said, sipping the water. “I never see you anymore, but you’re a nice man.”

  Coffin made a face. “Paperwork. Budgets. Requisitions. Payroll. Blah. Being police chief sucks.”

  “Except for the office,” Jamie said. “And the car.”

  “And the paycheck. It’s gone up since last time I was chief.”

  “That’s my man,” Jamie said, patting her belly. “Bringing home the bacon for little fatso here. Mmm, bacon.”

  Back in the kitchen, Coffin opened the liquor cabinet and took down the bottle of Famous Grouse. “Time for a predinner beverage,” he said. He dropped a couple of ice cubes into a highball glass and poured a big double.

  “Wow,” Jamie said.

  Coffin sipped. “I’m drinking for two,” he said. “Actually not the most boring day ever, paperwork notwithstanding.”

  “No?”

  “Dumpster fire over at Rossi’s. Apparently it was exciting for a little while. The fire and rescue boys put it out before I got there, though.”

  “Another one? Was it a prank, like last week?”

  “Skillings thinks so. Whoever did it was pretty bold. Or maybe just dumb. Could have easily been spotted from the road, or inside the store.”

  “Bold and dumb—sounds like kids.”

  Coffin shrugged. “Probably.”

  Jamie opened the oven to check on the roasting chicken. From the back she looked the same as ever—a view Coffin had always enjoyed—but from the side she was definitely showing. “‘Notwithstanding’ isn’t a word, you know,” she said.

  “How can it not be a word if we both just used it?”

  Jamie poked the chicken with a long fork, then picked off a bit of white meat and ate it. “It just isn’t. Look it up—it won’t be there.”

  “If it’s not a word, what is it?”

  “A nonword.” Jamie grinned at Coffin. “Don’t argue with the pregnant lady.”

  “Should I kiss her instead?”

  “Yes, but I’m warning you—I have zero apparent sex drive. My need for you in that department is evidently over. Sorry!”

  Coffin kissed her anyway. She responded with brief enthusiasm, but it was true—the old zero-to-sixty acceleration wasn’t there.


  Jamie took a step back, picked another bit of breast meat and chewed it, eyes narrowed.

  Coffin sipped his drink. “So what’s for dinner besides chicken?”

  “You want something besides chicken, you’re on your own.”

  Coffin looked at the cutting board. Jamie had chopped a clove of garlic, and started to slice a small chunk of ginger. A bag of raw spinach sat on the counter, and a slick of olive oil was beginning to smoke in a wok on the stove. “Looks like you were doing something with spinach, garlic, and ginger.”

  “Sautéing. About to. Prenausea. Not so much anymore. I don’t even want to look at that damn ginger right now—I have my suspicions about the spinach, too.”

  “Okay,” Coffin said. “How about some rice? Should I make some rice?”

  “Feel free, but I’m not interested. I will, however, wrestle you for a chicken thigh.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Coffin said.

  Jamie kissed him on the cheek. “Hope springs eternal,” she said.

  * * *

  Later, Coffin lay asleep in the big four-poster his parents had slept in. Jamie lay beside him. The night was quiet—there was no sound except for a low wind outside, the slight patter of drizzle on the windowpanes.

  “Fire,” Jamie said.

  Coffin opened one eye, then closed it and went back to sleep.

  Jamie reached out with a slender arm and whacked him loosely in the chest. “Fire,” she said, eyes closed. “The house is on fire.”