Nominee: Shamus Award For Best Original P.I. Paperback

Ballantine Books, $4.99
ISBN 0-345-38010-X

Torch Town Boogie

By Steven Womack

Chapter 1

It was a magnificent fire, a marvelous fire, the kind of fire whose brilliance penetrates even closed window shades and eyelids. I'd been asleep barely an hour, had just plunged head first into the black hole that opened up before me right after I folded my paperback closed and snapped off the light.

I didn't consciously hear the sirens. Maybe they were incorporated into a dream. I only know that at some point I became aware of a dull red glow dancing around in the paisley blackness behind my shuttered eyelids. I drifted on in sleep, wondering where the glow came from and if it was real. But something about the light was pulling me up out of the hole, drawing me slowly upward. With each rising moment, my sense of trouble grew. Just before I broke the surface and opened my eyes, I rolled over in bed, away from the light, to throw my arm over her.

Only she wasn't there. I opened my eyes in a panic. I heard the sirens now, and felt around on the bed.

She was gone. But where? Then I remembered. We'd shared dinner and a decent bottle of Chilean cabernet, then had adjourned to what passed for the bedroom in my attic apartment above Mrs. Hawkins's house. We'd made passionate but quiet love, knowing full well that it was late enough for Mrs. Hawkins to have removed her hearing aids, but taking a certain naughty delight at being careful anyway. Like two teenaged kids necking downstairs while their parents slept restlessly above them, we'd tussled and locked and exploded together, then lay sweating with the cool autumn air blowing over us through the raised window.

Then she went home. Didn't want to have to sneak out ahead of Mrs. Hawkins, the early riser. I'd been sorry to see her go, as always. But there was dinner to look forward to tonight, this time at her condo over on the better part of town, where one's overnight guests were one's own business.

The sirens grew louder. I shook my head, tried to focus. Damn cabernet. Great stuff, but splitting a bottle between two was about twice my usual ration. I couldn't think clearly, not yet anyway. But I had sense enough to roll over, toward the window.

This great and wonderful light show played through the pulled shade, growing both in intensity and variety of colors by the second. It had been all red at first, but was now punctuated with bursts of blue and a steady, pulsating yellow. I scooted across the bed and planted both feet on the floor, then stood and raised the shade.

My eyes widened and I forgot that I was standing in front of an open window stark flapping naked.

It was the house diagonally across the street. House, in fact, was an understatement. Like so much of East Nashville, the block I lived on was a strange hodgepodge of architectural styles and price ranges. Mrs. Hawkins's home was brick and stucco, a late 1930s cottage that by local standards was still practically new, and immodestly cheap. But across from her and down two lots was, by anyone's standards, a nineteenth century mansion. It was a grand survivor of the great fire of 1914, the catastrophic firestorm my grandmother witnessed before my father was even born; the one where half the population of Nashville gathered on the banks across the river and watched most of the other half burn to the ground. But this convoluted, now somewhat seedy, Victorian dowager had survived. She had weathered fire, tornado, storm, blizzard, and a fleet of owners, tenants, children, pets, burglars, assessors, repairmen, as well as the deterioration of a once proud neighborhood and its subsequent slow, painful gentrification. She had survived it all.

Until tonight. And now I stood transfixed in front of her, as naked as the day I was born, as she slowly became enveloped in brilliant orange and red and dancing white flame. Surrounded by the lime greenish-yellow pumpers of the Metro Nashville Fire Department, the orange and white paramedic vans, and the blue on white squad cars of the Metro Police Department, she was the centerpiece of a grand kaleidoscopic opera, her death cries the crackling of century-old roof rafters, the screeching of collapsing floor joists, the popping of exploding electrical circuits. I stared ahead, unable to take my eyes off her.

As I awakened to the horror of the scene before me, my chest was heavy with sadness, but my head pounded with anger. Someone out there was having his own private Kristallnacht.

The East Nashville Arsonist had struck again.

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