Heartland by David Hagberg

trade from Studs Logan, one of the most famous of all Detroit torches, before Logan became a victim of his own handiwork.
    For a few years afterward, Benario had worked Logan’s territory, and in ten indictments he had been convicted only once, for setting fire to a warehouse for a client who needed the insurance money more than he needed his business. The boys hired Benario a crack lawyer out of Los Angeles, and in three months Benario
was back on the streets, free on a technicality.
    Eighteen months ago, Louie had burned down the home of a General Motors executive who had been putting the heat on a union-organized numbers racket. The executive was a fighter, and Louie had been advised by his friends to get out of Motown for a year or two until the smoke cleared.
    Louie did just that, and had fallen instantly and deeply in love with New Orleans, whose mild winters and ultra-hot summers reminded him of a furnace. His kind of place.
    He stopped for a moment, away from the railway traffic signals, adjusted the heavy pack on his right shoulder, and peered through the dense fog. He knew his objective was less than a block away. But he could see nothing except for the swirling mist, and after a bit he continued forward.
    In his years Benario had set fire to no less than thirty warehouses, nineteen hotels, two nursing homes, a dozen or more private residences, and even a Chicago police precinct house for an irate out-of-town client. In those blazes, he had been responsible for at least ninety-five deaths and more than three hundred and fifty serious injuries, including a dozen or so firemen.
    But Benario never thought of himself as a murderer. He was a torch, plain and simple; a man devoted to fire.
    In the distance to the east, he heard a siren. He stiffened instinctively, a faint smile coming to his lips. There would be sirens after this job. Lots of sirens. The thought broadened his grin, and he chuckled out loud.
    This would be his biggest job ever, made even more important by the sheer size of his target. It was the largest grain-elevator complex in the world, and brand
new. Owned by the Cargill conglomerate, it had been put in service less than six months ago, to replace hundreds of antiquated elevators up and down the delta. It would burn beautifully, the little man had assured him. The hot yellow flames would reach hundreds of feet into the sky. People for miles around would taste the smoke. Newspaper headlines across the country would blare: GREATEST GRAIN DISASTER IN HISTORY. LARGEST FIRE IN THIS DECADE. THE WORK OF AN EXPERT ARSONIST.
    Benario had to laugh out loud with the sheer magnificence of it all.
    On top of all that, like frosting on a cake or the cherry atop a sundae, was the fact that Benario had finally come into his own as an internationally known torch. The little man who had hired him for this job was a foreigner. French or Jewish or a Polak or something. Not only was he foreign, he was a little man, not much taller than Benario. They saw eye to eye.
    He laughed even louder at his little joke. Eye to eye, watching the flames that’d tower over the tallest man in the world.
    â€œEye to eye,” he sang a tuneless melody. “Eye to eye, watching the pretty flames. My pretty, my pretty, watching my pretty flames, eye to eye to eye.”
    A series of massive structures loomed out of the darkness to the right, toward the waterfront, less than a hundred yards away. Benario stopped in his tracks, hiccoughing as he choked off his song.
    He could see now the dim halos formed around the lights at the base of the grain elevator, and around the red lights at the top.
    He took a few steps forward, over the rail, and then scrambled down into the ditch beside the tracks. There
was activity over there this evening beyond the chainlink fence. Trucks were coming and going with their loads of grain. He could hear the dull, deep-throated mechanical noises of a grain ship tied up at the dock, although he was