The Taking of Libbie, SD (Mac McKenzie #7)

A red tanker truck disconnected from the pump truck and sped off. A second tanker quickly replaced it, and a firefighter worked frantically until the hoses were resupplied with water.

“What the hell?” I said again.

“It’s the ol’ tanker shuffle,” a voice said.

An old man leaning on a cane was standing behind me on the sidewalk. He brushed his nearly nonexistent hair with his hand. I drifted back to where he stood.

“What do you mean?”

“We have only one water hydrant in this town that works properly,” he said. “We call it the sacred hydrant, down on Main. So what we hafta do, we hafta shuttle our water tankers back and forth from a fill site to the pump truck, kinda like a bucket brigade. One’s got twelve hundred and fifty gallons; the other holds fifteen hundred. Luckily, the fill site is less than a mile from here, so it won’t be much of a problem. If it were outside of town, this fire, we’d be fucked. As it is…” The old man lowered his head, gave it a slow shake, and raised it again. “Eight-man crew to cover a whole town—it’s ridiculous. Should have fifteen at least. I’d lend a hand, but…” He raised his cane for me to see.

Like everyone else, I kept staring at the fire. It was tragic, yet also quite seductive, almost beautiful. An enraged elemental beast slaking a hunger so old only stones and gods remembered. The mystery writer Nevada Barr wrote that. Now I knew what she meant.

I watched the fire crawl up the outside wall of the Danne home. Flames started venting in the open window on the second floor.

“Huh,” the old man said. “That shouldn’t be happening.”

“What?”

“The flames in the window. This here is an exterior fire; fire is burning mostly on the surface, not burning through the wall, you can tell. To spread so rapidly to the second floor like that, it must be feeding off an accelerant of some kind.”

“An accelerant?”

“Yeah. Look. You got black smoke coming off the wall, there. See it? Black smoke, usually that means petroleum-based products. The rest of the fire—that’s white smoke. Even the roof where you have tar paper and oil-based shingles, that’s white smoke.”

“Do you think the fire was set?”

“Looks like,” the old man said. “’Course, I could be wrong. These throwaway houses, the way they’re built now, using all them lightweight construction materials. Used to be, back in my day, builders used dimensional lumber to make your wood frames, had masonry walls, wood floors—there was mass to resist the heat; the building’s support system had a longer life expectancy. That woulda given you time for an interior attack. Go inside to get at the fire without worrying about the damn roof comin’ down on your head. Now, hell, the cheap crap they use cuz they wanna keep the cost down—your plywood and fiberboard and plastics and crap; walls built to carry only as much load as you need to meet code—you just can’t risk it. No, sir.

“Ten years ago, I woulda been the first to say you can’t put out no fire standing outside shooting through windows and holes in the roof. Now, now you gotta use them blitz attack nozzles to overpower the fire, cool the exterior and then go interior. ’Course, if you got someone inside that needs rescuing, you forget all that crap and just go get ’im.”

I stood silently and watched the firefighters go about their business. The old man said the boys knew what they doing, and I guess it must have been true because they managed to knock down the blaze in just over a quarter of an hour. After that it was all about cooling hot spots. My impression was that the water damage would be far greater than the fire damage.

Once the blaze was extinguished to their satisfaction, the firefighters used giant fans to help vent the house of smoke. The old man moved forward, and I went with him. The firefighters and a few neighbors began carrying belongings from the ground floor onto the lawn, where they were covered with a tarp. No one was allowed to go upstairs until an engineer determined if it was safe to use the staircase, although from the look on Rick Danne’s face, I knew that as soon as someone’s back was turned, he would give it a try. A man carrying a large overstuffed chair by himself became lodged in the doorway, and I helped him out. He and I made a few more trips in and out of the house, rescuing furniture, before I actually bumped into Cathy. Her face was smudged with soot, and her hair appeared singed. Her eyes held a kind of wild expression that I had never seen before, as if they were trying to convey too many emotions at once. She stared, and for a moment I thought she did not recognize me. A single word told me otherwise.

“McKenzie,” she said.

“I am so, so sorry,” I told her.

I took a deep breath and waited for the angry words, even blows, that I felt I deserved—I promised myself I would accept them all without complaint or defense. They didn’t land. Long moments passed before Cathy spoke.

“It’s terrible,” she said.

“Yes, it is.”