Fire Season Page 8

  * * *

  “Well,” Coffin said later. “No Frank aversion this time.”

  “That’s the good news,” Jamie said.

  “There’s bad news?”

  Jamie yawned. She was lying on her side, covers pulled up to her chin, Coffin spooning behind her. “You know that nesting thing women are supposed to do when they’re pregnant?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think it’s kicking in.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “How are you with paint?”

  “Choosing or applying?”

  “I choose. You apply.”

  “It’s not my best thing, but I’ll get the hang of it.” Coffin yawned, tried not to doze off.

  “Frank?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I know this is your mom’s place and everything.”

  “But.”

  “But how would you feel about, you know, making some changes?”

  “Great.”

  “I mean, it’s kind of dark in here, all this mahogany and oak—and all these chairs are crazy uncomfortable. I’m thinking sell some of the antiques. Get some new furniture that human beings can actually sit on.”

  The stuffed owl on top of the wardrobe stared down at them, ear tufts awry, something like outrage in its yellow glass eyes.

  “Can we get rid of the taxidermy, too?” Coffin said.

  “Everything but the goat.”

  “Did you not tell me two weeks ago you got the feeling the goat was looking at your ass?”

  “You told me that your dead father was haunting that thing. I’m not selling your father’s ghost on eBay.”

  “Can I ask a practical question?”

  “How are we going to pay for all this great new stuff?”

  “Bingo,” Coffin said.

  “Did I ever tell you about my trust fund?”

  “You said it was small—no big deal.”

  “It was. Ten years ago.”

  “And now?”

  “Well, my grandfather wasn’t really a good investor. He just bought stock in companies that made cool stuff. And he thought Apple was kind of cool.”

  “Holy crap.”

  “So he bought a couple thousand shares of Apple for, like, twenty dollars a share.”

  “Can we get a car? I hate my car. Nothing fancy—just a nice Lexus, like Mancini’s, but bigger.”

  “Frank. The money’s for the baby.”

  “Babies need cars.”

  “I was thinking minivan.”

  “Oh my God,” Coffin said. “I’m going to be a guy who drives a minivan.”

  * * *

  It was late, almost 2:30 A.M., and Officer Pete Pinsky was lonely, cold, and bored. He sat in his squad car at the corner of Standish and Commercial streets, trying to keep warm. He’d thrown on a lightweight uniform jacket as he was leaving Town Hall—it had been warmer then—but the temperature had dropped in the last hour or so, and the wet fog had rolled in. Worse, the squad car’s heater wasn’t working again, and that wouldn’t have been so bad if it wasn’t for the no-smoking rule, which, Pinsky knew, actually meant “no smoking unless you roll the window down.” Late, dark, lonely, too cold for October, no traffic, nobody walking or riding a bike—just the fog blowing around like wet laundry on a clothesline. Pinsky took a drag from his cigarette and tried to keep his teeth from chattering. What he wanted to do was start the car and drive home to his fiancée, LaWonda, who would cook him up a shrimp étouffée, give him one of her patented massages, and then love him long and strong until he begged her to let him sleep.

  Love, he thought, was the biggest mystery of all. He’d grown up the one half-Jewish kid in his school in Pomeroy, Ohio—never even knew any black people, straight as an arrow, always had the hots for the cute, blond cheerleader types who never gave him the time of day. And now he was engaged to a drop-dead gorgeous, black, six foot four inch, preoperative transsexual who was hung like a mule and cooked like a Creole angel. Only love could do that to a man, Pinsky thought. Only love. His tenth high school reunion was coming up—he couldn’t wait to take LaWonda back to Meigs High School in Pomeroy and show her off.

  There was no sound except the slight crackle of static from his police radio, the slop of the harbor waves on the town beach—somewhere a faint clinking sound, rhythmic, the wind talking in one of its thousand voices. Then someone rapped on the passenger window, and Officer Pinsky nearly crapped his drawers.

  “Hey, cop,” a man said. It was Ticky, one of the local homeless men. He was a brain-rotted alcoholic, a gluehead, skinny, scruffy, and stinky. His face always looked to Pinsky like it had been stuck on to someone else’s head and didn’t fit right—it twitched and rippled uncontrollably, with no connection to whatever it was that Ticky might be saying or thinking.

  “Jesus, Ticky,” Pinsky said. “Try not to sneak up on a man like that.”

  Ticky laughed a high, warbling laugh. “Did I scare ya, cop? Ha?” He held up two fingers—the universal gesture. “Hey, you ain’t got a spare smoke by any chance?”

  “You’re starting to annoy me, Ticky,” Pinsky said. “Go pass out somewhere, why don’t you.”

  Ticky put his face close to the half-open window. “I’m just messin’ with ya, cop,” he said. “But listen—somebody left the door to the Fish Palace open a couple inches. Thought I’d better tell somebody, else I’d prob’ly get blamed for it.”

  “I’m moved,” Pinsky said, “by your dedication to public safety.”

  “Gotta take a piss,” Ticky said. He staggered off into the fog, heading for town beach.

  “Try not to freeze to death,” Pinsky called after him.

  He climbed out of the car, straightened his hat, took his baton from the rack inside the squad and slipped it into its holster. “’Cause I’m the guy has to frickin’ clean it up if you do,” he said to himself.

  * * *

  The Fish Palace’s glass front door was, indeed, open a couple of inches as Ticky had said. Pinsky ran a finger over the door frame; it was bent outward under the latch—somebody’d sprung it with a pry bar. Despite the ADT sticker in the front window, no alarm had sounded.

  It was very dark inside; a dim wash of ambient streetlight filtered in through the big rear windows, and Pinsky could just make out the silhouettes of a few chairs that had been turned upside down and placed on top of the tables. So’s they can vacuum, Pinsky thought. The shadows were very deep, and the long, windowless kitchen, which stretched to his left between the front door and the dining room, was pitch-black. The hair on the back of his neck prickled. He crouched down, listening. There was almost no sound—just the burbling of the water filters in the big lobster tank, a few feet ahead and to his left.

  Pinsky slid his big Maglite out of its loop. “Police!” he said, with as much authority as he could muster. “Anybody in here?” There was no reply, no sound except for the lobster tank’s faint gurgle, no movement anywhere in the dark restaurant. He clicked the Maglite on, panning its beam in a slow arc across the dining room. The Maglite flickered, dimmed, died.

  “Oh, shit,” Pinsky said. “Not now, for Christ’s sake.” It was one of those moments, he thought, where you feel like you’ve got an extra sense, like a shark: sharks could “see” electromagnetic fields, he knew, he’d seen it on the Discovery Channel. The magnetic field in the Fish Palace was seriously screwed up—the pried-open door, the dying Maglite—and just now the feeling that somebody was definitely looking at him. He stood, felt for a light switch, but couldn’t find one.

  “Fuck, man,” he said. He gave the Maglite a shake and the beam came back, weak and intermittent. He keyed his shoulder radio. “Marge?” he said, half whispering.

  The dispatcher’s voice crackled into his earpiece. “Pinsky? That you?”

  “Yeah, listen—I’m down at the Fish Palace. Somebody pried the door open and I’m inside. I don’t think there’s anybody in here, but the lights ain’t working and the whole deal just don’t feel right. Send over a
backup unit, would you?”

  “That’s a ten-four. Sergeant Winters is on. She’s checking an alarm call up at the Heights. I’ll have her run right over.”

  Pinsky took a deep breath. It was in the kitchen, he thought. Whatever it was that was watching him. The big open kitchen that customers passed on their way to the dining room; the kitchen with its big commercial ranges and refrigerators, everything in stainless steel, oversized copper-bottomed pots and pans hanging from metal racks overhead. The workspace was separated from customer traffic by a wide counter, where the cooks plunked down the finished orders—steamed lobster, watery corn, microwaved potato—hefted on big trays by the waitstaff and delivered to tourists wearing plastic bibs. Pinsky stood on his tiptoes, trained the Maglite behind the counter as well as he could, aiming it down toward floor level—nobody back there, he was pretty sure. The Maglite dimmed to almost nothing, came back.

  “Come on, baby,” Pinsky said. “Don’t die on me now—you’ve got a fucking lifetime guarantee!”

  Nobody back there, he thought, but still, he could feel it—somebody’s looking at me. The lobster tank burbled. The lobsters. Pinsky laughed. “The fucking lobsters,” he said, training his flickering light on the tank.

  It was a big tank, maybe four feet long by three feet wide and two feet deep, standing behind and slightly above the counter, about halfway between the front door and the dining room. It was full of murky water; the filtering system bubbled fervently.

  Dozens of lobsters strode around in its depths, climbing over one another or staring with bright bead-eyes out at the red-haired police officer with his flashlight. They varied in size from little pound and a quarter chix to a few venerable giants of five pounds or more. They seemed excited: waving their antennae, bonking each other with their banded claws. Three or four swarmed slowly over a melon-sized object that rested on the tank’s slimy bottom. In the split second before Pinsky dropped his sputtering Maglite, killing it once and for all, he realized that the thing in the lobster tank was a human head. It wore glasses. Its expression, he would remember even years later as he told the story yet again to his fellow officers, seemed remarkably bland.

  Chapter 11

  The house was on fire. Coffin ran to the stairs, but they were awash in flame—a storm of smoke and sparks roared up from the living room, hot little embers showered onto the rugs, Coffin’s arms, his bare feet.

  “Jamie!” he called, but she was gone. For a brief moment he wondered if she’d set the fire; and then he thought that he might have, just a small fire in the living room, never intending the whole house to burn down. Then he remembered the baby—the baby! He ran to the baby’s room, which was filling with smoke. Huge stuffed animals leaned against the walls, baring their sharp teeth—a lion, a monkey, a dragon. He had to save the baby—he could hear it crying out in its crib, catlike, alarmed. Somewhere a phone was ringing—it sounded very far away.

  “I’ve got you,” Coffin said, reaching for the baby, which had turned into a sleek and glistening harbor seal. “I’ve got you…”

  * * *

  Coffin sat up with a start. The phone was ringing. “Jesus fuck,” he said. His T-shirt was damp with sweat.

  “Phone,” Jamie said, still asleep.

  There was no smoke, no fire. Coffin answered the phone.

  “Frank?” It was Lola. “Sorry to call so late.”

  “What’s up?”

  “We’ve got a homicide. And you’re really, really not going to like it.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, Coffin was standing in front of the big glass lobster tank at the Fish Palace. “Son of a bitch,” he said, vision blurring. “It’s Dr. Branstool.”

  Branstool’s hair floated like kelp. A lobster appeared to be nibbling his ear. Coffin put a hand out, steadied himself on the varnished oak countertop.

  “You all right, Frank?” Lola said. “Maybe you’d better sit down.”

  “Yeah,” said one of the EMT’s, a stout, mustached man in his forties named Johnny Sousa. “You ain’t lookin’ so good, Frankie.” He turned to Lola. “Is this his dead body phobia? I heard about that—thought it was a joke. Funny thing, a cop with a fear of dead bodies.”

  “They got a name for that,” said another EMT. He was Sousa’s physical opposite—slim and clean-shaven—Coffin didn’t know his name. “Necrophobia—fear of death and dead bodies. There’s, like, hundreds of different phobias you could have. Know what homichlophobia is?”

  Sousa shook his head. “No freakin’ idea.”

  “Fear of fog,” the slender EMT said. “How about bufonophobia?”

  Coffin waved a hand to get their attention. “Guys?”

  Sousa winced. “Sorry, Frankie.”

  For a long minute no one said anything. They stood, gazing into the tank. A big two-pounder crouched on Branstool’s head, delicately waggling its mandibles.

  “You know,” Sousa said finally, “it puts a whole new spin on the idea of a lobster dinner.”

  * * *

  Coffin and Lola stuck around, along with the two EMTs, waiting for the coroner to arrive from Chatham. Jeff Skillings was there, too, and Pinsky—the former summer cop that Coffin had decided to hire permanently—looking pale but resolute. It was late, almost 3:00 A.M., but a small crowd of onlookers huddled in the cold across the street, in front of the Captain Alden.

  While they waited, a couple of state police detectives Coffin didn’t know pulled up in a red, unmarked Mustang. They were big, burly men with close-cropped hair, all business in nearly identical jeans and leather car coats. They flashed their badges for the local cops, then went about the task of documenting the crime scene, each with a silver Flip Cam.

  “Where’s Tony?” Lola said. “He usually comes out for these kinds of things.”

  “Yeah,” Pinsky said. “I’m surprised he’d want to miss a deal like this.” Pinsky was small and skinny, with brick red hair. Coffin hadn’t thought much of him at first. Pinsky had had trouble coming to terms with Provincetown’s LGBT population—now the majority in Provincetown, even in the off-season—his first summer on the job, and Coffin had been certain that it wouldn’t work out. But then Pinsky met LaWonda, a very tall and very beautiful African American transgendered woman, and his attitude had changed markedly for the better. He and LaWonda moved in together, and Pinsky quickly evolved into a kind of unofficial liaison between the PPD and the transgendered community. He didn’t look like much, Coffin thought, but he was turning out to be a pretty good cop.

  “Tony’s in Boston,” Coffin said. “Or should be. I gave him some leave time. He’s under some stress.”

  “Is it about them flyin’ saucers of his?” Pinsky said. “Seems kind of crazy to me.”

  “Flying saucers?” Lola said. “The ones over Pilgrim Lake?”

  Coffin’s head was beginning to hurt. “Not you, too,” he said.

  Lola shrugged. “I haven’t seen them, but Kate has. She said the Cape Air pilots see stuff out here all the time. She thinks it’s probably experimental military aircraft from the Air National Guard base.”

  “That ain’t what Tony thinks,” Pinsky said. “He thinks it’s aliens, and they’re coming for him.”

  Lola laughed. “Poor Tony.”

  Pinsky took a pack of Camel Lights out of his shirt pocket and lit one. “What do you think, Chief?” he said. “Ever seen a UFO?”

  “Those things’ll kill you,” Coffin said.

  Pinsky grinned, offered the pack. “Want one?”

  Coffin took a cigarette, puffing it to life while Pinsky lit it with a plastic Bic.

  “I’m telling,” Lola said.

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I most certainly would.”

  Coffin dropped the cigarette, crushed it out with the toe of his boot. “You women are relentless,” he said.

  “Seriously,” Pinsky said. “Ever seen anything like that out here, Chief?”

  “Just some lights in the sky over Herring Cove
,” Coffin said. “They say it’s jet traffic, backed up from Logan.”

  “It’s a funny business.” Pinsky took a meditative drag on his cigarette. “On the one hand, you got stuff that looks like flying saucers all the way back in prehistoric cave paintings. On the other hand, everybody you see that’s a big UFO buff is either a scam artist or crazy as a shit-house mouse. Kinda hard to sort it all out.”

  “If they’re really here,” Sousa said, “it’s the biggest government cover-up in history. By far.”

  “If they’re really here,” Lola said, “what’s with the cat-and-mouse game? Show your little green selves already.”

  The two state police detectives put their cameras back in their coat pockets and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  “You’re Coffin, right?” the taller one said.

  The shorter one lit a cigarette. “You’re like a freakin’ living legend.”

  “This is my partner, Sergeant Winters,” Coffin said. “And this is Officer Pinsky.”

  “Bitters,” the tall one said. He stuck out a big, bony hand, and Coffin shook it.

  “Hump,” said the short one.

  “Hump?” Lola said.

  “His real name’s Humphrey,” Bitters said. “He goes by Hump.”

  “Anybody know the guy in the tank?” Hump asked.

  “His name’s Branstool,” Coffin said. “He ran the nursing home.”

  “Where’s the rest of him?”

  Coffin shrugged. “Hasn’t turned up yet. Where’s Mancini?”

  “Home fuckin’ his new missus.” Bitters snickered. “If he’s got any sense.”

  “Wouldn’t count on him having any sense,” Hump said.

  Coffin rubbed his chin. He needed sleep. Failing that: coffee, a cigarette. “He remarried?”

  “Yeah. Trophy blonde. Maybe five years older than his daughter. He’ll come out tomorrow, probably, along with the CSS boys.”

  “I thought all the Crime Scene Services guys got laid off,” Pinsky said.

  “There’s still a couple of teams,” Bitters said. “Part-timers.” He made a gesture: a loose fist bobbing up and down over his groin. “Mancini’ll probably put in a request, since it’s high profile.” He turned to Hump. “We’re done, right?”