With the third pop she got tired of the stove game. That was because something else happened. There was suddenly a red glare from above her head, a hissing sputter, then flames.
Courtney stepped back and watched the juice carton burn. The flaming wax shot off the side of the carton like miniature fireworks. One piece of burning cardboard fell onto the table and set a week-old New York Post on fire. A cookbook (A Hundred Glorious Jell-O Desserts) went next.
Courtney loved the flames and watched them creep slowly along the table. They reminded her of something ... A movie about a baby animal? A deer? A big fire in a forest? She squinted and tried to remember but soon lost the association and stood back to watch.
She thought it was great when the flames quickly peeled away the Breeds-of-Dog contact paper Rune had painstakingly mounted on the walls with rubber cement.
Then they spread up to the ceiling and the back wall of the houseboat.
When the fire became too hot Courtney moved back a little farther but she was in no hurry to leave. This was wonderful. She remembered another movie. She thought for a minute. Yeah, it was like the scene where Wizardoz was yelling at Dorothy and her little dog. All the smoke and flames ... Everybody falling on the floor while the big face puffed and shouted ... But this was better than that. This was better than Peter Rabbit. It was even better than Saturday morning TV.
chapter 26
THE TOURISTS COINCIDENTALLY WERE FROM OHIO, RUNE'S home state.
They were a middle-aged couple, driving a Winnebago from Cleveland to Maine because the wife had always wanted to see the Maine coast and because they both loved lobster. The itinerary would take them through New York, up to Newport, then on to Boston, Salem and finally into Kennebunkport, which had been featured in Parade magazine a year before.
But they made an unplanned stop in Manhattan and that was to report a serious fire on the Hudson River.
Cruising up from the Holland Tunnel, they noticed a column of black smoke off to their left, coming, it seemed, right out of the river. They slowed, like almost everybody else was doing, and saw an old houseboat burning furiously. Traffic was at a crawl and they eased forward, listening for the sirens. The husband looked around to find a place to pull off to get out of the way of the fire trucks when they arrived.
But none did.
They waited four, five minutes. Six.
She asked, "You'd think somebody'd've called by now, wouldn't you, dear?"
"You'd think."
They were astonished because easily a hundred cars had gone by but it seemed that nobody had bothered to call 911. Maybe figuring somebody else had. Or not figuring anything at all, just watching the houseboat burn.
The husband, an ex-marine and head of his local Chamber of Commerce, a man with no aversion to getting involved, drove the Winnebago up over the curb onto the sidewalk. He braked to a fast halt in front of the pier where the flames roared. He took the big JCPenney triple-class fire extinguisher from the rack beside his seat and rushed outside.
The wife ran to a pay phone while he kicked in the front door of the houseboat. The smoke wasn't too bad inside; the hole in the rear ceiling of the houseboat acted like a chimney and was sucking most of it out. He stopped cold in the doorway, blinking in surprise at what he saw: two girls. One, a young girl, was laughing like Nero as she watched the back half of the houseboat turn into charcoal. The other, a girl wearing a yellow miniskirt, two sleeveless men's T-shirts
and low boots dotted with chrome studs, was tied in a chair! Who'd do such a thing? He'd read about Greenwich Village but this seemed too sick even for a Sodom like that.
He pulled the pin of the fire extinguisher and emptied the contents at the advancing line of flames, but it had no effect on the fire. He carried the little girl outside to his wife and then returned to the inferno, opening his Case pocketknife as he ran. He cut the wires holding the older girl. He had to help her walk outside; her legs had fallen asleep.
Inside the couple's Winnebago the little girl saw the older one's tears and decided it was time to start crying herself. Three minutes later the fire department arrived. They had the fire out in twenty. The police and fire department investigators knocked on the campers' door. The girls stood up and went outside and the couple followed.
A huge black cloud hung over the pier. The air smelled of sour wood and burnt rubber--from the tires that had dangled off the side of the boat to cushion it against the pier. The vessel hadn't sunk but much of the structure on the deck had been destroyed.
One of the detectives asked the older girl, "Could you tell me what happened?"
She paced in a tight circle. "That goddamn son of a bitch he tricked me he lied to me I'm going to find him and have his ass thrown back in jail so goddamn fast.... Shit. Hell. Shit!"
"Shit," Courtney said, and the husband and wife looked at each other.
The police asked questions for almost a half hour. The girl was telling a story about a man who was convicted wrongly of murder then got released, only now it was clear he'd done it after all and there was a big fat man named Jack Nestor, who had a gun and wanted to kill them and he was involved in the first killing. The couple lost a lot of the details--just like the cops must have too--but they didn't really need to hear any more. They had enough of the facts for a good traveling story, which they'd tell to friends and to themselves and to anybody they happened to meet on the way to Maine and which unlike a lot of the stories they'd told didn't need much embellishment at all. Finally a tall, balding man in a plaid shirt and blue jeans and with a badge on his belt arrived and the girl fell into his arms, though she wasn't sobbing anymore or hysterical. Then she pushed him away and went into one of her tirades again.
"Goodness," the wife said.
When the girl calmed down she told the cop the couple had saved her life and he introduced himself to them and said thank you. They talked about Ohio for a few minutes. Then the cop said that the girls could go to the Bomb Squad and stay there until he was off duty and the little girl said, "Can we get another hand grenade? Please?"
And that was when the couple decided not to do what had crossed their Midwestern minds--ask the girls if they would like to stay with them in the camper that night--and figured it would probably be best if they pressed on to the alternate destination of Mystic, Connecticut, which came highly recommended in their guidebook.
AT ELEVEN THAT NIGHT, JACK NESTOR SAID HE NEEDED A real drink and pulled off the highway at a motel somewhere in Virginia.