Untouchable by Scott O'Connor Page B

powerful the smell was.
    He didn’t know if there had ever been grass in the small patch of front yard or if the grass had burned up or what. It was just dirt now, rutted with tire tracks and boot-prints, slithery snake trails from fire hoses. There was a big plastic garbage bin overturned in the front yard, melted almost perfectly in half. The front door of the house was missing, maybe burned down or kicked in by the firefighters, but there was a heavy steel security door still in place, closed tight. It looked ridiculous with the blown-out windows and the holes in the roof. Who would want to break into the house now? The Kid thought of somebody closing the security door when they left, a policeman or fireman, which he guessed made sense. What did you do when you were the last person to leave somebody’s house, even if it had burned down? You closed the door behind you.
    The houses on the street were so close together that it was hard to believe the entire block hadn’t caught fire, that the flames hadn’t leapt across the street, shot out up the hill toward Sunset, toward The Kid’s house. The Kid tried to imagine the scene as Michelle had described it, the satellite trucks, the newswoman from Channel Two. It seemed impossible that the fire had been contained in such a small space.
    No one had survived. The Kid knew this. Michelle had been right. No other conclusion could be drawn by looking at the house. Someone had been inside and hadn’t gotten out. He just had to look at the house to know.
    He wondered what would happen to the house next. Somebody would come and tear it down, he guessed. Bulldozers, dump trucks, men with shovels. They’d knock over what was left, haul it away. Spread new dirt across the lot, build another house. Once the smell was gone, once the people on the street had moved away or died, no one would know the house had even been here. No one would know what had happened, what had been left.
    He looked around to make sure that no one was watching, then he stepped to the side of the house, placed his hand against the outside wall. He wasn’t sure why he was doing this, what he expected. What he thought it would feel like. It was strange, what it felt like. It felt like a body, like a human being, like a person’s side, their ribcage, breathing slowly, in and out, settling down after something scary, something awful. It felt soft, it felt fragile. It felt warm.
    Midnight in Van Nuys. The flat, still depths of the San Fernando Valley. They drove the vans down the narrow aisles of a vast public storage facility, between rows of low, identical garages, their headlights sweeping across the steel doors, gravel crunching under their tires, deeper in, down rows with more garages, through long stretches of darkness between security lights, peering out the vans’ windows, looking for numbers above the doors. Bob was in the first van, following a makeshift map Mrs. Fowler had drawn on the work order, as per the caller’s directions. Darby and Roistler were in the second van, trailing close behind.
    Their headlights found him standing in front of a garage door in the middle of a row, smoking a cigarette, coughing into the crook of his elbow. Young guy, dark-featured and heavy-lidded, wearing a baggy gray jogging suit, a thick gold chain around his neck, a Yankees ball cap pulled low over his eyes. He did this weird thing where he slapped the hood of each van as it came to a stop in front of the garage, a quick blast with the heel of his hand as if he were congratulating them for winning a race.
    “It’s about fucking time,” he said. “How long have I been standing here? Two hours, at least.”
    Bob checked the work order on his clipboard, turned his wrist to look at his watch. “You Tino?”
    “You Bob?”
    “Forty-seven minutes,” Bob said. “Call placed to our dispatcher just after eleven pm.”
    “Look, Bob, give me a break, okay? I’ve been standing out here for I don’t know how long