California Fire and Life
Don Winslow
Praise for Don Winslow’s
CALIFORNIA FIRE AND LIFE
“One fiery-fun read.… Only Don Winslow could make this bad boy snap, crackle and pop.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A successful thriller, raised above the ordinary by two things: Winslow’s prose style and the expertise he acquired in fifteen years of working at the same job as his hero.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Reads like a forties crime novel with prose so raw it makes you feel hard-boiled.… To the names of great literary detectives, add Jack Wade.”
—U.S. News & World Report
“Artfully captures the hot, often incendiary quality of life in Southern California.… I’ll never strike a match casually again.”
—The News & Observer (Raleigh)
“A premium read … [with] as many twists and turns as the Pacific Coast Highway.”
—Fortune
“A hot page-turner.”
—San Antonio Express-News
“Winslow’s arson thriller is a surefire beach-book winner.… Moves at a brisk pace.… Engaging and thought provoking. Good title. Good book.”
—The Star Ledger (Newark, NJ)
“From the very first pages, this book pulls us in with its haunting descriptions of fire, its complex and surprising plot, and its likable hero.… A burning tale that keeps its heat all the way to the end.”
—Syracuse Herald-American
Don Winslow
CALIFORNIA
FIRE AND LIFE
Don Winslow is a former private investigator and consultant. He lives in California.
www.donwinslow.com
BOOKS BY DON WINSLOW
The Winter of Frankie Machine
The Power of the Dog
California Fire and Life
The Death and Life of Bobby Z
While Drowning in the Desert
A Long Walk Up the Water Slide
Way Down on the High Lonely
The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror
A Cool Breeze on the Underground
FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2007
Copyright © 1999 by Don Winslow
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1999.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Winslow, Don.
California fire and life / by Don Winslow.—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3573.I5326C35 1999
813′.54—dc21
98-50910
eISBN: 978-0-307-82459-2
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
To the claims guys and their defenders. It was an honor.
Acknowledgments
Many people—most of whom it would be imprudent to thank by name—helped me in the research of this book, and I thank them all. Among those I can name, my undying gratitude to the ever patient Dr. Edward Ledford, president of the Zoex Corporation in Lincoln, Nebraska, for his guidance and counsel in regard to gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers and countless other issues involving the testing of debris samples. My thanks as usual to David Schniepp for sharing his knowledge of arcane surfing matters and south coast lore and legend. My gratitude to my wife, Jean Winslow, for her patient and expert drafting of the floor plans of the Vale house and for countless kindnesses.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 1
33
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
1
Woman’s lying in bed and the bed’s on fire.
She doesn’t wake up.
Flame licks at her thighs like a lover and she doesn’t wake up.
Just down the hill the Pacific pounds on the rocks.
California fire and life.
2
George Scollins doesn’t wake up, either.
Reason for this is that he’s lying at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck.
It’s easy to see how this might have happened—Scollins’s little Laguna Canyon house is a freaking mess. Tools, wood, furniture lying all over the place, you can hardly walk across the floor without tripping on something.
In addition to the tools, wood and furniture, you have paint cans, containers of stain, plastic bottles full of turpentine, cleaning rags …
This is also the reason the house is a bonfire.
Not surprising, really.
Not surprising at all.
California fire and life.
3
Two Vietnamese kids sit in the front of a delivery truck.
The driver, Tommy Do, pulls it off into a parking lot.
“Middle of freaking nowhere,” says Tommy’s buddy, Vince Tranh.
Tommy doesn’t give a shit, he’s happy to be getting rid of the load, a truck full of hot stuff.
Tommy pulls over by a Caddy.
“They love their Caddies,” Tranh says to him in Vietnamese.
“Let ’em,” Tommy says. Tommy’s saving for a Miata. A Miata is cool. Tommy can see himself cruising in a black Miata, wraparound shades on his face, a babe with long black hair beside him.
Yeah, he can see that.
Two guys get out of the Caddy.
One of them’s tall. Looks like one of those Afghan hounds, Tommy thinks, except the guy’s wearing a dark blue suit that has got to be hot standing out there in the desert. The other guy is shorter, but broad. Guy wears a black Hawaiian print shirt with big flowers all over it, and Tommy thinks he looks like a jerk. Tommy has him tabbed as the leg breaker, and Tommy is going to be glad to get his money, unload and get the fuck back to Garden Grove.
As a general rule, Tommy doesn’t like doing business with non-Vietnamese, especially these people.
Except the money this time is too good.
Two grand for a delivery job.
The big guy in the flowered shirt opens a gate and Tommy drives through it. Guy closes the gate behind them.
Tommy and Tranh hop out of the truck.
Blue Suit says, “Unload the truck.”
Tommy shakes his head.
“Money first,” he says.
Blue Suit says, “Sure.”
“Business is business,” Tommy says, like he’s apologizing for the money-first request. He’s trying to be polite.
“Business is business,” Blue Suit agrees.
Tommy watches Blue Suit reach into the jacket pocket for his wallet, except Blue Suit takes out a silenced 9mm and puts three bullets in a tight pattern into Tommy’s face.
Tranh stands there with this oh-fucking-no look on his face but he doesn’t run or anything. Just stands there like frozen, which makes it easy for Blue Suit to put the next three into him.
The guy in the flowered shirt hefts first Tommy, then Tranh, and tosses their bodies into the Dumpster. Pours gasoline all over them then tosses a match in.
“Vietnamese are Buddhists?” he asks Blue Suit.
“I think so.”
They’re speaking in Russian.
“Don’t they cremate their dead?”
Blue Suit shrugs.
An hour later they have the truck unloaded and the contents stored in the cinder block building. Twelve minutes after that, Flower Shirt drives the truck out into the desert and makes it go boom.
California fire and life.
4
Jack Wade sits on an old Hobie longboard.
Riding swells that refuse to become waves, he’s watching a wisp of black smoke rise over the other side of the big rock at Dana Head. Smoke’s reaching up into the pale August sky like a Buddhist prayer.
Jack’s so into the smoke that he doesn’t feel the wave come up behind him like a fat Dick Dale guitar riff. It’s a big humping reef break that slams him to the bottom then rolls him. Keeps rolling him and won’t let him up—it’s like, That’s what you get when you don’t pay attention, Jack. You get to eat sand and breathe water—and Jack’s about out of breath when the wave finally spits him out onto the shore.
He’s on all fours, sucking for air, when he hears his beeper go off up on the beach where he left his towel. He scampers up the sand, grabs the beeper and checks the number, although he’s already pretty sure who it’s going to be.
California Fire and Life.
5
The woman’s dead.
Jack knows this even before he gets to the house because when he calls in it’s Goddamn Billy. Six-thirty in the morning and Goddamn Billy’s already in the office.
Goddamn Billy tells him there’s a fire and a fatality.
Jack hustles up the hundred and twenty steps from Dana Strand Beach to the parking lot, takes a quick shower at the bathhouse then changes into the work clothes he keeps in the backseat of his ’66 Mustang. His work clothes consist of a Lands’ End white button-down oxford, Lands’ End khaki trousers, Lands’ End moccasins and an Eddie Bauer tie that Jack keeps preknotted so he can just slip it on like a noose.
Jack hasn’t been inside a clothing store in about twelve years.
He owns three ties, five Lands’ End white button-down shirts, two pairs of Lands’ End khaki trousers, two Lands’ End guaranteed-not-to-wrinkle-even-if-you-run-it-through-your-car-engine blue blazers (a rotation deal: one in the dry cleaners, one on his back) and the one pair of Lands’ End moccasins.
Sunday night he does laundry.
Washes the five shirts and two pairs of trousers and hangs them out to unwrinkle. Preknots the three ties and he’s ready for the workweek, which means that he’s in the water a little before dawn, surfs until 6:30, showers at the beach, changes into his work clothes, loops the tie around his neck, gets into his car, pops in an old Challengers tape and races to the offices of California Fire and Life.
He’s been doing this for coming up to twelve years.
Not this morning, though.
This morning, propelled by Billy’s call, he races to the loss site—37 Bluffside Drive, just down the road above Dana Strand Beach.
It takes him maybe ten minutes. He’s pulling around on the circular driveway—his wheels on the gravel sound like the undertow in the trench at high tide—and hasn’t even fully stopped before Brian Bentley walks over and taps on the passenger-side window.
Brian “Accidentally” Bentley is the Sheriff’s Department fire investigator. Which is another reason Jack knows there’s been a fatal fire, because the Sheriff’s Department is there. Otherwise it would be an inspector from the Fire Department, and Jack wouldn’t be looking at Bentley’s fat face.
Or his wavy red hair turning freaking orange with age.
Jack leans over and winds down the window.
Bentley sticks his red face in and says, “You got here quick, Jack. What, you carrying the fire and the life?”
“Yup.”
“Good,” Bentley says. “The double whammy.”
Jack and Bentley hate each other.
That old thing about if, say, Jack was on fire, Bentley wouldn’t piss on him to put it out? If Jack was on fire, Bentley would drink gasoline so he could piss on Jack.
“Croaker in the bedroom,” Bentley says. “They had to scrape her off the springs.”
“The wife?” asks Jack.
“We don’t have a positive yet,” Bentley says. “But it’s an adult female.”
“Pamela Vale, age thirty-four,” Jack says. G
oddamn Billy gave him the specs over the phone.
“Name rings a bell,” Bentley says.
“Save the Strands,” Jack says.
“What the what?”
“Save the Strands,” Jack says. “She’s been in the papers. She and her husband are big fund-raisers for Save the Strands.”
A community group fighting the Great Sunsets Ltd. corporation to prevent them from putting a condo complex on Dana Strands, the last undeveloped stretch of the south coast.
Dana Strands, Jack’s beloved Dana Strands, a swatch of grass and trees that sits high on a bluff above Dana Strand Beach. Years ago, it was a trailer park, and then that failed, and then nature reclaimed it and grew over and around it, and is still holding on to it against all the forces of progress.
Just holding on, Jack thinks.
“Whatever,” Bentley says.
Jack says, “There’s a husband and two kids.”
“We’re looking for them.”
“Shit.”
“They ain’t in the house,” Bentley says. “I mean we’re looking for notification purposes. How’d you get here so soon?”
“Billy picked it off the scanner, ran the address, had it waiting for me when I got in.”
“You insurance bastards,” Bentley says. “You just can’t wait to get in there and start chiseling, can you?”
Jack hears a little dog barking from somewhere behind the house.
It bothers him.
“You name a cause?” Jack asks.
Bentley shakes his head and laughs this laugh he has, which sounds more like steam coming out of a radiator. He says, “Just get out your checkbook, Jack.”
“You mind if I go in and have a look?” Jack asks.
“Yeah, I do mind,” Bentley says. “Except I can’t stop you, right?”
“Right.”
It’s in the insurance contract. If you have a loss and you make a claim, the insurance company gets to inspect the loss.
“So knock yourself out,” Bentley says. He leans way in, trying to get into Jack’s face. “Only—Jack? Don’t bust chops here. I pull the pin in two weeks. I plan to spend my retirement annoying bass on Lake Havasu, not giving depositions. What you got here is you got a woman drinking vodka and smoking, and she passes out, spills the booze, drops the cigarette and barbecues herself, and that’s what you got here.”
“You’re retiring, Bentley?” Jack asks.
“Thirty years.”
