Fire Works in the Hamptons : A Willow Tate Novel (9781101547649) (18 page)

I ignored his wishes. “I know what we can do. You can bring the mayor to his room and wipe out Barry's memory of everything he learned about us.”

“I already called the mayor. He's in Albany trying to get the state to cough up more money for the school programs they insist we have. He'll be home tomorrow, if he doesn't forget what time his plane leaves.”

“Jensen—Jenner—will have the article written by then, unless he's waiting to see the fire lights tonight,” Piet said. “We need to act now.”

I offered to go to the motel where he was staying and divert Barry. I'd say I forgot to tell him about my new book, which was the purpose he gave for writing the damn article, the lying slug. While I had him outside, someone—I looked at Piet—could go around back and smash his equipment.

Piet refused. He was no criminal. “And I'm not going to jail because you trusted a good-looking slimeball.”

The fire captain, who was also the building inspector, hurried into the chief's office. If Barry was at the Harbor Inn, Mac swore, there'd be sprinklers. Mac had insisted on them himself. All we had to do was hold up a match to set them off and flood him and his equipment.

Mac looked at the pipe in his hand—the suddenly cold, dead tobacco—then at Piet. “Guess that won't work.”

The next suggestion came from Micky, the firehouse maintenance man. He wanted me to call in a fake fire alarm so the volunteers came with hoses pumping.

The village finance director tried to crowd into the small office. We didn't need a fire alarm, he said, a bomb scare would do. Evacuate the motel, confiscate the equipment as an agent of terror.

As if that would hold up in court, where we had to move, to fit in more people, including Mrs. Ralston and the baby. Everyone shouted their ideas, from giving Barry a bottle of drugged wine to feeding him laxative-laced brownies. The chief held up his hand for quiet. He didn't want to hear any more. There'd be no breaking and entering. No false fire alarms, no damned bomb scares, no damage to private property, no poisoning the perp either. He'd go to the motel himself and tell Barry we don't like our visitors operating under false pretenses and ask him to leave.

That wouldn't work and we all knew it. Barry'd only move to Montauk's motel strip and spy on us from there. We had to destroy his equipment—flash drives and external hard drives, iPads or smart phones, even yellow legal notepads—then keep him from rewriting the story another time, on another computer. Or calling it in, the way newsmen used to. If he hadn't sent it in yet.

We needed the mayor, and a miracle.

No, offered the tech guy, Russ, who'd been updating the juror rolls. We needed a cone.

This was not the time for ice cream, but I'd take it.

He meant a cone of electronic silence. Russ was middle-aged now, but he made legends as the kid who shut down the stock market on a school trip to the Exchange. And he wreaked havoc with the power grid at the high school when he failed the computer class he could have taught. They'd shipped him out to Royce University to get control, and a conscience. Score one for the freaks in London. Now Russ volunteered to shut down the motel—the electricity, the wi-fi, the cable—to keep Barry from filing his story.

Piet raised his eyebrows and whispered to me: “He can do that?”

I raised mine back. “You can put out fires, can't you?”

Judge Chemleki banged his gavel. “What about the first amendment, you know, freedom of speech and all that?”

Everyone shouted him down. Homeland security overrode the constitution, didn't it? The Feds thought so. If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for us, wasn't it?

Mr. Graystone, the village lawyer, timidly raised his hand—the only one to do so—and in a quavery voice noted that the police could arrest the intruder if he was registered at the motel under a fake name. He'd be out on bail by morning, of course, but they'd have a little more time for the mayor to get home and to keep Barry from going public with his suspicions.

Unless he already had. Maybe that's why Barry was here in the first place. Lord knew there were plenty of rumors about Paumanok Harbor after the spate of murders and drug raids, the mysterious mares and the unidentified mayhem while the unseen—except by me—troll wandered the streets. Yeah, the place just might interest a sensationalist rag sheet and its nepotic columnist. I bet he was a lousy writer.

Piet had his phone out. “Shutting it off at the other end,” was all he said until he completed the call. “Someone at DUE will close down the magazine, for libel or something. Or they'll simply do what they do to hackers. That's what DUE is for, to protect its people and keep their secrets.”

Barry and his father would only start another scandal sheet, if they didn't already own a bunch. That's what they did. Everyone knew it. And Barry'd write another story, under another name.

Unless the mayor got to him.

Even the mayor's gift wasn't infallible. The problem with wiping out a memory was it left room for new memories. The mayor couldn't follow Barry around, destroying every conversation he had with the nontalented residents and visitors. He couldn't keep Barry from seeing something strange and wanting to write about it.

“I say we drown the guy once and for all,” came from the back of the room.

The judge banged his gavel again. Uncle Henry put his hand on his revolver. “None of that talk, now. We are a peaceable town. And we don't need any more bad publicity.”

What we had to do, everyone seemed to think, was keep Barry busy so he couldn't compose another story or see anything worth investigating.

They looked at me. “No, I am not going to entertain that rat bastard. If you are suggesting anything more, you should be ashamed of yourselves.”

A few of the men looked at their shoes. Mrs. Ralston clapped. So did Elladaire, mimicking her.

“It's poker night tonight, isn't it?” I asked. A handful of heads nodded sheepishly, as if it were another secret. “So invite Barry. Russ can interrupt cell phone transmissions, so he can't get a message that his story got lost. And try to get Mayor Applebaum on an earlier flight.”

More nods, but mutters that the shithead most likely cheated. And how could Tom levitate the cards, or Bunny keep the room free of smoke when a stranger sat in? More importantly, they didn't play all night. Barry was still going to want to look at the lights in the salt marshes.

Once more I was the focus of every eye in the room, and George Washington's, from the painting over the judge's bench.

I bit my lip. Gulped twice. Then said, “I guess I'll have to try to keep the lights away until the mayor gets back or Barry leaves.”

Piet took my hand. “And I'll put them out if he comes too close. We work together.”

Sure. I drew pictures for bugs and he pictured me naked. What a pair! We were partners in a situation we didn't understand, didn't know how to resolve, and didn't have an inkling where to begin. And we were all the town had. My heart sank.

“And no more fires, you hear?”

“No fires,” we chorused. My heart sank lower.

They looked relieved. I wasn't. How the hell were we supposed to make good on that promise?

The problem with working with self-assured, talented, independent-minded people in authority was that they were self-assured, talented, and used to giving orders, not taking them. Put a couple of big dogs together, you get a pissing contest. Put a bunch of wizards together, you get a clash of power. We had a police chief, a fire captain, a judge, a lawyer, the woman who actually ran Town Hall, a technical engineer, and handfuls of other psionic experts. In other words, too many chiefs, not enough Indians.

Good thing Barry did most of the work himself.

I knocked on his door. When he answered and I saw the computer plugged in, I asked him to come out for a short walk with me and Elladaire.

He said he was busy writing.

I said I'd remembered something important for the story.

He came with me out to the motel's front lawn, his room out of sight. Before I set the baby down to play in the grass, I smelled her diaper, to check if it needed changing. It did. Barry wrinkled his perfect nose and curled his luscious lips.

Now I truly intended to tell him I'd changed my mind about the story. The sneer and the sniff—and knowing what a dick he was—changed my mind again. “How dare you,” I started. Then I shouted and stamped my foot and tossed Elladaire's dirty diaper onto his sandal-shod foot.

“You are a cheater and a liar and a user and a dirt bag, Barton Jenner the Turd!”

“And what are you, if not using me for publicity for your stupid picture books?”

I gasped. “You—”

People came out of the motel, yelling. “The power's out! Someone call the electric company.”

Barry cursed. “I didn't shut off my computer.”

He ran back around the building to his room. I followed with naked Elladaire. Barry had the laptop and his phone in his hands when I got there. “Shit, both batteries must be dead, too.”

He rushed past me to the motel's lobby, where the desk clerk was lighting candles. “No telling how long the power'll be off this time.” The candles caught, which meant either Piet was too far away, or he was thinking really, really dirty thoughts.

Barry cursed some more, then shouted, “Does anyone have a phone that can text?”

Half the people in the lobby had no idea what he was talking about. The other half were having trouble with their own phones. “Must be trouble at the cell tower.”

Barry pounded his fist on the registration desk, which sent one of the candles off its dish, onto the stack of Chamber of Commerce brochures, which caught on fire, which had people pushing and screaming, which jostled another candle that ignited the curtains.

The sprinklers went off, the automatic call went out to the fire department, and everyone fled outside. The fire engines arrived—miraculously, two of the motel guests noted—in minutes.

“We were training nearby,” Mac shouted, running past us. While half his men went around back, to check the rooms for guests or smoke, Mac directed his hose at the office. And at Barry, whose pant leg had caught a spark. His cell phone got drowned.

In seconds the fires were out. Piet appeared. Or vice versa, but no one noticed.

The police chief and the motel owner arrived at the same time. Mr. Hinkley wanted Barry arrested for starting the fire and causing all the damage. The clerk and I both saw him knock over the first candle in a rage.

“Bullshit. I'll sue you for negligence if your fucking sprinklers damaged my computer.”

“You'll do it from some other motel,” Mr. Hinkley told him. “Or a jail cell. And I just heard you might have used a false name at registration.” He turned to the judge, who'd ridden on one of the fire trucks. “Isn't that illegal? It ought to be.”

Piet, Chief Hammersmith, and I followed Barry to his room. The place was dripping, so was his camera, but his computer didn't look bad, still plugged into the wall. Then the lights came back on, the TV and the clock and the air-conditioning. They came on in a burst. Smoke came from the computer, then a sizzling noise. Then it went black and Barry wailed in anguish as if he'd been the one electrocuted by the power surge.

“Sorry about that,” Piet said. “You should always unplug them in a power outage. Or use a surge suppressor.”

Barry was storming around, kicking the bed, knocking the chair across the room, dumping his suitcase full of soggy clothes onto the floor.

“You don't want to be causing more damage here, son,” Uncle Henry told him. He put his arm around the younger man and led him out of the room. “I'd hate to have to lock you up, this being my poker night and all. In fact, I think you ought to go cool off a bit.”

Mac came in then, and apologized for soaking Barry's phone. “To make up for it, here's my cousin's card. He has a nice little bar on the road to Springs. Tell him I sent you, and drinks are on me.”

One of the firemen said he was going there, too. Could he have a ride?

They called the fireman Tank because he could drink more than anyone in town and never get drunk or passed out. He winked at me as he passed by. He'd keep Barry busy for a long, long time, right into tomorrow morning. He'd be in no condition to write anything, not even his name, whatever it was. Then the mayor could join him for lunch.

So we'd dodged a bullet, temporarily. Now we had to face the flying firing squad.

CHAPTER 18