And now it might just save Jake's life and Simon's. If nothing else, they could hang on it until Luis could get help. She side-stroked over to the ladder, towing Simon along. It was slow going--
"Jesus," Simon gurgled, tugging at the crooked arm under his chin. "Let me go. I can't breathe."
Jake let go and he went under. "That's the last time I save your life, Aamot," she said, grabbing the ladder with one hand and pulling him back up by his shirt with the other.
"I sure hope so," he said, spitting out a mouthful of water.
Jake pushed him toward the ladder. "Thank God, I don't have to tote you up this," she said, her heart thumping like crazy now that she had the time. "You go first."
He did, climbing slowly and stopping two-thirds of the way up to rest.
"Luis," Jake called up as she waited behind Simon on the ladder. "Light."
No answer. Simon continued up and over the top of the seawall, then collapsed in a heap next to it. Jake followed.
"You're bleeding," she said, touching his forehead.
He nodded wordlessly and put his hand over hers, bringing it to his mouth so he could kiss it. "Thank...you..." He was still trying to catch his breath.
"How do you feel?" she asked. It was hard to tell in the light, or in the absence of light, but he looked like he was about to pass out.
Didn't stop him from trying to stand up, though.
"You need to stay sitting," she said, as he pushed himself up, and started searching through his pockets for something.
"I have to call in." He had a lights-on-nobody-home kind of look on his face. "We need to find Angela before she does something stupid."
"Stupider than trying to kill you?" Jake asked, still trying to make him sit down.
"All these people here..." Simon stopped suddenly and then looked Jake straight in the face, like she'd just arrived. "I've lost my cell phone. Do you have one?"
Jake pointed at her dripping clothes. "Sorry, buddy, I forgot my purse."
He just stared at her.
Jake sighed. Loopy or not, Simon was right, Angela could do all sorts of damage in the state she was in. Insane.
"Luis has a cell," Jake glanced around for him as she spoke.
It was weird that Luis didn't have his lens stuck in their faces, interviewing them for the late news.
But the camera operator was still on the same story--just a different angle. He was turned away from them, his camera trained on Angela, not ten yards away. The woman must have stood there and watched the whole thing, anxious to see how her handiwork turned out.
Bitch.
Angela started, and Jake realized she’d said it out loud.
And it had felt good. Really good.
"
Bitch!
"
She was screaming it now as she advanced on Angela.
"
Bitch, bitch, bitch!
"
Confronted with a crazy woman to rival herself, Angela turned and sprinted off across the landfill.
*****
The titanium salutes of the finale were thundering overhead, piercing the fog, and seeming to light Angela's way as she ran. The sound bounced off the glass of the Waverly Apartments--the windows her father had talked about, with Mrs. Fetcher and her little dog behind them.
Angela ran past the firing console and past a flash of Pat's face and then of Tudy's. She ran through the ring of cars and over the wires that criss-crossed the firing area, and along the widening ribbon of finale shells and mortars.
Angela ran like an angel, her father had said, but that was in the past, too, like everything else.
Jake--who smelled of dead fish and gasoline--caught up with her at the final shell in the final mortar.
Pasquale's shell.
*****
The fireworks were getting louder and faster, shells erupting from the line of mortars that multiplied exponentially as they pointed the way to where Angela stood in the center of the ring of headlights, like she was some kind of deity.
The deity was going down.
Jake launched herself. She planned to beat the crap out of Angela and then throw her into the lake like she had thrown Simon. And Ray. And Pasquale.
"You killed them, didn't you?" Jake screamed, forgetting the swim and the run, and moving onto the third part of tonight's triathlon: pummeling Angela in the side with her fists. The woman was scrunched up into the fetal position, so it was all Jake could get to. "Even your own father?"
Jake might have greater upper body strength from swimming, but Angela had the advantage of runner's legs. She kicked out sideways, catching Jake in the knee and toppling her.
Angela stood up, towering over Jake on the ground. "I did my father a favor," she screamed, her foot lashing out at Jake.
Jake grabbed it. "Killing him was a favor? To who, yourself?" The noise and light from the shells going up around them was so intense that Jake was getting disoriented. She managed to get up on her knees.
"My father was sick," Angela protested. "I couldn't let him suffer."
Good thing she hadn't been around when
Jake
was sick. "So you put your father down like you would a dog? Like you tried to do with Lugosi?" She had hold of Angela's whole leg now, wrapping herself around it like it was a tree she was climbing.
"You don’t understand. He was going to die anyway." Angela was trying to shake Jake off. "But he would have ruined Firenze Fireworks first."
Now
there
was a motive Jake could believe. "You killed him to protect your company."
Angela had inched back toward the apex of the finale line, Jake clinging to her leg like a bull terrier. Now the fireworks woman stopped and bent down to scream into Jake's face. "No!"
Jake turned her head to avoid the flying spit, thinking that if Angela could see herself in a mirror, she'd probably surrender out of pure mortification. Assuming the witch even had a reflection. Jake held tight to the other woman's leg. "No? Then why?"
"I killed him," Angela's hands closed on Jake's throat, "because it was the only way I could keep him."
*****
Simon had cut directly across the landfill toward the finale, negotiating the cables by the headlights of the Firenzes' vehicles. His head still hurt like hell and he was groggy, but when he'd seen Jake take off, he'd known where she was going.
So Simon had followed, albeit a little slower and a lot more unsteadily than he'd like. And now, he finally caught sight of Angela and Jake in the dead center of the ring of headlights. Jake was on her knees in front of Angela, and Angela had her hands around Jake's throat.
As Simon started for them, the noise from the titanium salutes cut off abruptly. In the sudden eerie silence, he saw Jake drive herself upward, pulling at Angela's thumb with her right hand, while giving her a shove in the stomach with the heel of her left hand.
It was just enough to throw Angela off balance and send her stumbling back. She caught herself, but froze when she saw Simon, almost like she couldn't decide whether to run
to
him or away from him. Then she cocked her head and looked up at the empty sky, like she'd just registered the silence.
Silhouetted in the glow of the headlights, Angela Firenze Guida spread her arms wide and fell backwards.
*****
The last shell of the night broke through the fog bank, climbing high into the sky before finally exploding.
It was the biggest shell, of the clearest, most vibrant blue anyone had ever seen. It seemed to hang in the air forever, sapphire strobes arching slowly down to evaporate into the fog from whence it came.
Pasquale Firenze’s True Blue Shell.
At last.
The sea of people making for the parking lots stopped and looked to the landfill as one, when the shell exploded. They could see nothing through the fog, but they looked anyway.
There they stood unmoving--their children, their blankets and their coolers in hand. Like a giant game of Statue Maker.
And when the echo off the Waverly came a second later, they turned in that direction, too.
So when the low, slow CRRRRACK began, when the glass of the Waverly Apartments trembled, when the windows finally shattered and all came tumbling down, they could say--would always say--that they’d been there to see it.
*****
"Don't move."
Jake had no intention of moving. She was enjoying having Simon run his hands over her arms, and legs, and...
Simon?
She opened her eyes, and sat up abruptly, the top of her head colliding with his chin. "How'd you get here?"
Simon rubbed at this jaw. "Ran, sort of. Only to take a head-butt from you, to go with where Angela teed off on me." He pulled her close. "You're okay?"
Jake nodded into his shirt. "You?"
"Yeah."
Jake stayed with her head on Simon's chest, listening to him breathe and trying not to think. Or look, for all the good it did her.
Not twenty feet away from them was a huddled figure on the ground. Jake had seen Angela's body carried up about ten feet on the shell, so she knew the other woman had taken the impact squarely.
Which was why Jake couldn't believe her eyes when the body got up.
When it reached down and picked up what looked like a camera, she believed it.
Luis.
But not just Luis. All around, figures were converging on them, silhouetted against the headlights. It was like a scene from
Night of the Living Dead
.
But, in this version, the living were coming to look for the dead, not the other way around.
And Jake wasn't about to let Luis record it.
She opened her mouth to call him off, but then realized Luis hadn't even seen the Firenzes. He was holding the camera up, still taping as he walked to investigate a small, dark shape on the ground nearby. He stopped and looked down. Then he dropped the camera.
Simon got up and pulled Luis away from Angela's dismembered leg as the shadowy figures approached and then veered away from the other once-human debris scattered on the ground in the ring of light.
George:
"
It’s nearly five a.m. and we‘ll be signing off in just a moment, but first we‘re going to read, once more, the note Angela Firenze Guida left with us. It was meant to be a tribute to her father, who died in last Friday’s explosion, but now it seems it's also her epitaph:
"'
My father loved nothing better than to be directly under the shells when they broke. He told me once that the only thing better would be
sitting
in the sky with them.
And now...
he is.
'"
Neal:
"
And now, so too, is Angela Firenze Guida. For TV8...
"
Simon knocked on the production van door at the stroke of five. He was carrying two lattes.
Jake took one like the caffeine-junkie that she was. "Thank you, thank you, thank you. Where in the world did you get these so early?"
"Flattened my face against the front window of That Coffee Place, when they were getting ready to open. I must have looked pretty pathetic because they took pity on me. The coffee wasn‘t brewed yet, but they made these for me."
"You do look pathetic, but at least you got to change." Jake was looking down at her own clothes, which were now dry, stinky and wrinkled, instead of wet, stinky and wrinkled.
Simon, on the other hand, was wearing a forest green shirt, apparently fresh from the cellophane package, since it still had folding wrinkles and a stick pin in it. "That Henley looks nice on you," she said, removing the pin.
Simon, who was busy taking the lid off his latte, turned red. "Thanks, I just bought it. The bag was still in the Explorer."
"Guess you do have some shopping to do, to replace everything you lost in the fire." She took a sip and shuddered. "Gosh, that's good."
"Are you sure you should be working?" he asked, watching her.
"You are," Jake pointed out.
He tilted his head. "Yeah, but--"
"Yeah, but you're a professional, huh? Used to getting bludgeoned and then coming back for more." She grinned at him. "How's your head?"
"Okay. You probably saved my life, you know." He said it like it hurt a little--not his head, but to admit he'd needed saving.
"So we're even. You saved mine in the fire." Jake's grin got bigger, and then died out.
"
People here said the blue shell was the most beautiful thing they'd ever seen. They had no idea of the carnage below the fog.
"
Simon took the latte from her hand and set it on the counter before she could spill it. "I think Angela planned to die,
"
he said after filling her in on what Angela had told him.
"
That's why she ran for her father's mortar. That's why she stopped and counted before she threw herself on the shell. She was counting down the timing fuse."