Trumps of Doom. CHAPTER 5,6
CHAPTER 5
I came jogging up the street in the light of late afternoon and halted when I was abreast of my car. I’d almost failed to recognize it. It was covered with dust, ashes, and water stains. How long had I been away, anyhow? I hadn’t tried to reckon the time differential between here and where I’d been, but my car looked as if it had been standing exposed for over a month. It seemed intact, though. It had not been vandalized and . . .
My gaze had drifted past the hood and on ahead. The building that had housed the Brutus Storage Company and the late Victor Melman no longer stood. A burnt-out, collapsed skeleton of the place occupied the comer, parts of two walls standing. I headed toward it.
Walking about it, I studied what was left. The charred remains of the place were cold and settled. Gray streaks and sooty fairy circles indicated that water had been pumped into it had since evaporated. The ashy smell was not particularly strong.
Had I started it, with that fire in the bathtub? I wandered. I didn’t think so. Mine had been a small enough blaze, and well confined, with no indication of its spreading while I was waiting.
A boy on a green bicycle pedaled past while I was studying tie ruin. Several minutes later he returned and halted about ten feet from me. He looked to be about ten years old.
“I saw it,” he announced. “I saw it burn.”
“When was that?” I asked him.
“Three days ago.”
“’They know how it started?”
“Something in the storage place, something flam-”
“Flammable?”
“Yeah,” he said through a gap-toothed smile. “Maybe on purpose. Something about insurance.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. My dad said maybe business was bad.”
“It’s been known to happen,” I said. “Was anybody hurt in the fire?”
“They thought maybe the artist who lived upstairs got burned up because nobody could find him. But they didn’t see any bones or anything like that. It was a good fire. Burned a long time.”
“Was it nighttime or daytime?”
“Nighttime. I watched from over there.” He pointed to a place across the street and back in the direction from which I had come. “They put a lot of water on it.”
“Did you see anyone come out of the building?”
“No,” he said. “I got here after it was burning pretty good.”
I nodded and turned back toward my car.
“You’d think bullets would explode in all that fire, wouldn’t you?” he said.
“Yes,” I answered.
“But they didn’t.” I turned back.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He was already digging in a pocket.
“Me and some of my friends were playing around in there yesterday,” he explained, “and we found a mess of bullets.”
He opened his hand to display several metallic objects. As I moved toward him, he squatted and placed one of the cylinders on the sidewalk. He reached out suddenly, picked up a nearby rock and swung it toward it.
“Don’t!” I cried.
The rock struck the shell and nothing happened.
“You could get hurt that way-“ I began, but he interrupted.
“Naw. No way these suckers will explode. You can’t even set that pink stuff on fire. Got a match?”
“Pink stuff ?” I said as he moved the rock to reveal a mashed shell casing and a small trailing of pink powder.
“That,” he said, pointing. “Funny, huh? I thought gunpowder was gray.”
I knelt and touched the substance. I rubbed it between my fingers. I sniffed it. I even tasted it. I couldn’t tell what the hell it was.
“Beats me,” I told him. “Won’t even burn, you say?”
“Nope. We put some on a newspaper and set the paper on fire. It’ll melt and run, that’s all.”
“You got a couple of extras?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“I’ll give you a buck for them,” I said.
He showed me his teeth and spaces again as his hand vanished into the side of his jeans. I ran Frakir over some odd Shadow cash and withdrew a dollar from the pile. He handed me two sootstreaked double 30’s as he accepted it.