Page 62

CHAPTER 62

SEEN FROM A DISTANCE, the house on the corner seemed no different than those around it. Every window and doorway was lit up, and there was movement inside. But as Baby moved with the crowd toward the weatherboard building, she smelled smoke on the wind. A primal energy coursed through the people converging on the house. Fear. Excitement.

It was a fire lighting up the building.

Two windows on the bottom floor exploded. Baby could see flames between the silhouettes of people crowding around the property. Smoke billowed out of the broken windows, upside-down waterfalls of coiling blackness. She pushed to the front, nudged a guy out of the way so hard, he toppled over on the grass, clearly drunk. People were watching the house burn and taking videos on their phones. She didn’t see a single person calling for help.

“Call the damn fire department!” she yelled. Nearby, someone cackled. She heard some mutters of refusal. These people weren’t the type who called 911 for anything, ever. Emergency services meant problems. It meant witnesses. Rock-solid proof of whereabouts and times. The ambulance earlier had been bad enough.

Baby hoped the light from the fire or the smoke on the wind would alert someone more responsible a few streets away. She looked through the open door of the burning house and saw flames stroking the walls of the hall on both sides. She turned, planning to dash back to Arthur’s and grab her own phone. She saw the old man at the edge of the road. His glasses were orbs of gold light from the inferno.

Then the scream came again, the same skin-tingling sound that had snapped Baby awake. It came from the second floor. She rushed forward, realizing with weird, panicked clarity that her feet were bare. The porch boards were warm. She looked down and saw glowing embers dancing beneath them through the gaps in the wood. The hall was blocked by fire.

“Up there!” someone yelled. Baby staggered back, narrowly missed being clobbered with a wooden plank that had fallen from the second floor and bounced off the porch awning. Someone was kicking boards away from a window. A hand shot through the gap, waving.

“Somebody help us!”

Baby looked at the crowd, saw lazy red eyes. Grins. Grimaces. Stupefaction was the best thing she saw, people’s bewilderment at what to do to answer that cry. The fire was so loud, Baby couldn’t tell if there were sirens coming. She hoped there were. She hoped normal people beyond the reach of the houses bought up by Enorme were on their phones, calling for help. But she couldn’t wait to find out.

She raced through the yard to the back of the house, praying the fire hadn’t reached there yet. She got lucky. It had begun in the front room and gone up. She scaled the awning over the back porch and clambered up the exterior cladding, her fingernails biting into a window ledge and her bare toes scraping the paintwork. Baby had popped a few windows in her brief time as a PI. She braced her shoulder against the top of the window frame, tucked her arm into her T-shirt, and smashed the window with her elbow. A shard of glass scraped the outside of her thigh as she squeezed into the house and hurried across the empty room.

The hall was black with smoke. Her eyes and nose ran. Baby fought her way through, coughing, to the front. A teenage boy and girl were crouched at the window, waving their arms. They must have gone upstairs when they saw the flames on the first floor, thinking they’d pop out the window and instead finding themselves trapped. Baby marched over, grabbed them by the backs of their T-shirts, and hauled them toward the back stairs.

“Come on! Come on! This way!”

It felt like a minute or less had passed since she’d entered the house. The flames had been one floor down. Now they were here, melting the cheap plastic frame of a picture that had been hanging on the wall, making it drip like melted ice cream onto the floor. Baby turned the couple around and shoved them toward a bathroom. There was one window, long and covered with frosted glass. She shoved it open. Hot air blasted past her.

“It’s too high! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!” the girl squealed. She clung to Baby like a drowning person, a frantic, painful, skin-cutting grip. There was nothing else to do — Baby punched the girl in the stomach. When she doubled over, Baby turned her and shoved her head-first out the window. The girl tumbled and landed flat on her back on the soft grass, groaning.

Baby turned to the guy. He went willingly. The consequences of not getting a move on were plain. Baby watched him slide carefully out the window, legs first, and drop onto the grass below with a grunt. With her T-shirt held to her mouth and nose, her head already spinning from smoke inhalation, Baby closed her eyes and jumped out the window.