It was still hours from dawn, but the horizon glowed ahead. A cluster of vehicles blocked the street before they could see the blaze. David had to think through the location, a new development. It was a construction site, he remembered . . . Oh. Hell. The mosque.
A couple of dozen people were there already, black silhouettes against the flames, which rose some thirty feet up into the night sky. Only remnants of the structure remained, bones.
David and Spady came near to it, near enough to feel the heat press against their faces. Then there was someone in front of them, a woman, her eyes wide and intense and angry. It was Aaliyah. She recognized David, but he saw, too, that she recognized Spady, remembered him from the village council meeting, remembered the venomous things he had shouted at her and her people.
She was yelling loud enough to be heard over the roar of the fire.
“Do you see? You let this happen! You let them get away with attacking my people! With threatening us! And now this! We only want to be able to worship God—the same God that you worship—and they attack us with fire!”
David looked past her, at the fire, then scanned the surrounding area. The construction site was in the midst of a residential area, new houses packed tightly on small lots.
“Hell,” David said.
Aaliyah circled around David, forcing him to confront her.
“The mosque is gone! It’s too late to save it. Don’t you understand? Are you just going to ignore me?”
It wasn’t that he didn’t feel anything for her. That he blamed her for her anger. His training had kicked into gear, and he knew that as bad as things were, they were about to become much, much worse.
“Later. Right now, we need to contain this fire.”
“But . . . it’s done.”
David clapped his hand on her arm. He pointed at the edge of the construction site, where stacks of lumber had begun to combust.
“That wood may as well be gasoline, ma’am.”
He turned, pointing to the tufts of decorative grass planted in the yards of neighboring homes, bending and swaying in the gusting wind.
“That grass is going to catch next. The wind will blow embers onto the roofs. The shingles will start to catch, one to the next. The whole goddamned town is going to burn down if we don’t stop it.”
He could see it in her eyes then. The recognition that there were no fire trucks on the scene. No firefighters. No police. No sirens.
“Where the hell is the fire department?” she demanded.
“You’re looking at it,” David said.
He turned to Spady.
“We need the water truck. Now! Call Brooke . . . Everyone. We need as much help as we can get.”
Spady disappeared into the dark. Aaliyah followed as David strode toward the fire.
“What do you mean, you’re the fire department?” she asked.
“We have one truck. And some volunteers.”
She was shaking, panic setting in. “Most of these houses, they’re my people’s.”
He nodded but kept his eyes on the fire.
“I know.”
Just then the wind gusted. As the towering fire danced and bowed, it spit off a shower of sparks that wafted, a swirl of stars, spiraling through the dark of space, wheeling toward the tall grass. There, a group of neighbors stood, watching.
The embers landed amid the grass. Another gust stoked them, and flames licked up off of the ground.
“Move!” David yelled at the onlookers. “Goddammit, move!”
David sprinted at them, waving his hands. The crowd startled then and ran onto the street, joining the rest who had gathered. He’d seen plenty of bad fires before, but this was different. Before, it wasn’t uncommon that a prairie would alight from a stray match, lightning strike, or some old farmer’s burn pile going out of control. But those fires raged in mostly wide-open space, where there might only be one house every mile or two. This one could take a whole city if he didn’t stop it. This one could kill.
“Who lives in these houses?” David shouted, pointing at the neighboring homes.
A few hands went up.
“You have hoses? Sprinklers? Turn them on. Don’t worry about the fire. Spray the yards. Spray the houses. Spray as much water as you can on the roofs.”
They all stared.
“Now!”
Several of them darted into action. David turned to the others.
“We need shovels. Axes. Whatever we can get.”
He pointed to the ground.
“Here. Dig.”
Everyone started to move, Aaliyah’s husband leading them toward the neighboring houses and garages. David blocked off some teenagers.
“You. I need you to go into all of these houses. Make sure everyone is outside. Everyone. Take them there, in the street, away from the fire.”
They darted off.
Already, the tall grass roiled with flames, a tide surging toward the houses. In the yard of one, an in-ground sprinkler system started up, spritzing water. In several others, men wheeled out hoses and began spraying.
“What are you going to do?” Aaliyah asked David.
He didn’t answer. He was already moving toward the construction site. Amid a pile of tools, he found a hammer and stuck the handle through his belt at his back. He picked up a shovel and circled around the burning grass, moving between it and the houses. There was no time to think about how badly his face and his ribs ached, how exhausted he was. He would deal with that later.
Some of the men had emerged with tools of their own. They stood and watched him. David said nothing, just set in to work.
Fifty feet back from the growing fire, David lifted the shovel high up into the air and plunged it down, cracking the arid, brittle ground. He scooped up as much dirt as he could, overturning the grass, flinging dirt forward into the maw of flames.
Again. Blade up. Down. Toss dirt. Again. Again.
It was an impossible task. Each shovel-full of dirt so small.
The flames fed on the fuel of the grass and grew taller. Each burst of wind pushed the wall of fire closer.
Used to be, wind only blew west to east. But the giant changed that. Now it came over and around him in unpredictable swirls and eddies, shifting almost constantly.
Smoke and heat hit David, singed his nostrils, choked his throat, set his eyes to watering.
He stopped only for a moment, to pull off his shirt and tie it around his nose and mouth.
Then he resumed digging.
He recognized the man beside him as Aaliyah’s husband. Digging. Throwing dirt.
The other men joined in.
They formed their own wall, men coughing in the smoke, shielding their eyes, some of them still wearing pajamas, turning one blade of dirt after another.
Sweat mixed with soot and soil and ran down David’s forehead, stinging his eyes. It was only when he reached up to wipe it away that he realized his hat was gone, blown off in the wind and chaos.
A truck hauling a trailer rumbled over the curb, onto the yard of the nearest house. The trailer held a large plastic tank, the kind used to spray pesticides on fields.
David saw it out of the corner of his eye and hurried toward it as two men hopped out—the McClintock brothers.
“Barney. Sam. You spray the firebreak, okay?”
They didn’t say anything, just nodded and set to work, unspooling hoses, firing up a small generator, dousing the upturned dirt with water. In front of it, the men kept shoveling.
More trucks appeared then. More men. Locals. Striding forward with shovels and pickaxes, joining the work without a word. They joined in with the Muslim men, all of them working side by side, deafened by the howl of the wind, the roar of the oncoming flames.
A siren sounded, distant.
That would be Spady with the pump truck, David knew. Once it was here, they’d be fine. As long as the fire didn’t leap over them.
He wouldn’t complete the thought. Just then, the wind gusted strong enough to rock David back on his heels. A flurry of embers burst up from the tall grass, like snowflakes in a blizzard, and showered down on the roofs of the closest houses.
“Ah, hell,” David muttered.
Once sparks hit a house, they could catch in a million ways. Ignite the tar of the roof. Slip into an air vent and ignite the structure from the inside out.
He scanned the houses. Maybe they’d be lucky.
They weren’t. A thin plume of smoke leaked up from a vent on one house. Within seconds, fingers of flame emerged.
David dropped his shovel and raced toward the house. His eyes went up to the roof, to the flames.
David came to a gutter and started climbing, awkwardly, using a porch railing to hoist himself up.
The roof was a steep pitch. His knee protested at every delicate step. He was thankful that at least no one had sprayed water on this house yet. The shingles would’ve been too slick to climb.
Steadily, he inched up to the ridge line; he sat down, straddling it, and pulled himself toward the flames. The fire was in the attic. The heat would build inside with nowhere to escape, turning the whole house into a bomb. There was only one hope of saving it.
David stopped ten feet from the vent and reached back. Thank God the hammer hadn’t fallen out as he climbed. It was a sturdy hammer, heavy, with a sharp claw at the back of it. Not as good as a hatchet, but it could work. It would have to.
With the claw side pointing down, David smashed the hammer into the shingles. Barely a dent. Again. Again. Again.
Finally, he broke through the shingles and cast them aside with his off hand.
He hammered down again, into the wood of the roof. Again. Again. Blow by blow, the wood dented, splintered. He didn’t allow himself to think. Just one more strike. And one more. One more.
Aaliyah had found her husband, and they stood, staring up.
“Sheriff, what are you doing?” she asked.
David kept hammering. Wham. Wham. His arm and back ached. He could feel the heat of the fire beneath him, through the roof. He was running out of time before the whole structure would combust beneath him.
One more.
With a satisfying crunch, the hammer punched through the wood.
David yanked his face back as a belch of scalding air and fire erupted from the hole. He kept hammering, widening the hole, letting out more heat.
Then it began to rain.
No, not rain. Water, spraying onto the roof. Spady was back with the pump truck. He and another of the volunteers took a second hose and sprinted into the house through the front door.
They’d saved the house. And as David looked back from his high vantage point at the remains of the mosque and the field of grass, he saw that the break had held. The fire was contained.
He eased himself back. A metal extension ladder landed against the side of the house. David skidded over and climbed down, his legs and arms shaking so bad the ladder rattled against the gutter.
The sky had just begun to lighten to the east, from black to a rich, navy blue. It felt like only minutes had passed, but they’d been fighting the fire for hours. Aaliyah stood there with her son and husband. Imam Bey was there, too, though it took David a second to recognize him, dressed informally.
David approached, pulling his shirt from his face and tugging it back onto his torso.
“Missus Bakhtiari, I’m sorry. I’ll find out who did this. I promise.”
His voice was raspy, almost too faint to hear. Even as he spoke the words, he knew it was impossible. Unless there was a witness, they had no hope. Whatever evidence had existed was consumed. One more case with no resolution. One more way in which he’d failed his town.
Aaliyah held up her hand.
“Later. Not tonight.”
As the last remnants of the fire faded, people gathered slowly toward them. Muslims. Locals. Nearly a hundred people. All of them exhausted, eyes watering, hands and clothing stained black with soot.
The wind began to ease up, whistling a somber tune. Imam Bey reached out his hand. David took it.
“Thank you,” the imam said.
“I’m sorry we didn’t get here in time to save the mosque.”
Imam Bey looked around. Somehow, he was smiling.
“We are not hurt, any of us. Because of you, brother Saadiq and his family still have their home. If it is okay with you, I would like to say a blessing.”
David nodded.
The others came in closer. The imam raised his hands to the lightening sky. The Muslims began to take each other’s hands while the locals watched. Aaliyah held her hand out to David. He took it, then extended his other hand to her husband. Soon, all of them held hands as the imam began to intone in Arabic.
David closed his eyes. He couldn’t understand the words, but he felt them. Then the voice was gone, and they released each other’s hands.
Did this moment mean everything? Nothing? He supposed only time would tell.
Imam Bey looked past David, at the rest of the locals.
“With this prayer, I offered thanks to God for sparing our lives, for protecting us. I also lowered myself before His power and mystery. He is great, and His will is beyond any man. Somehow, He can take that which seems bad and use it for the purpose of good. Mostly, I thanked Him for you. You are all a blessing, our neighbors.”
Several Muslim women appeared carrying boxes of food, bottles of water, urns of coffee. Someone retrieved a folding table from a house, and right there in the street of the cul de sac, they served an impromptu breakfast.
David stepped into line first, and the other locals followed. He took what looked like a large pastry in a napkin and sat on a curb. He sniffed at it, then bit into a soft blend of bread, egg, and meat, spices he didn’t recognize. Maybe it was just how hungry he was, but he couldn’t imagine that food had ever tasted better.
“Murtabak,” Aaliyah said, watching him eat. “It’s sort of a cross between an omelet and a pancake.”
“Holy shit, it’s amazing,” David said, crumbs falling from his mouth. “Sorry. Pardon the language. I think I’m too tired to have a filter.”
Aaliyah laughed.
“Oh, I barely go ten minutes these days without saying worse than that. Anyway, if you want more, Hassan and his family make them at their diner.”
She pointed toward one of the men who had been digging the firebreak alongside David.
“His wife went with some of the others to get food for everyone. You think those are good? Try the sweet kind. I eat too damn many of them.”
David looked across his team of volunteer firefighters. He thought back to the night of the village council meeting. Spady had been the loudest in attacking the mosque, but most of the rest of them had been there, too, yelling along with him. Now they sat together, sharing breakfast. And Spady. Where had Spady gone?
“So, you’re the sheriff and the fire chief?” Aaliyah asked.
“Sort of. I mean, fire chief isn’t really a title. I hear about emergencies as soon as they happen, being the sheriff. It makes sense for me to round everyone up. It’s so damn dry here, a fire gets started, the wind can push it out of control in a hurry.”
“Why isn’t there a fire department?”
“No money for it, for one thing. Plus, it’s how we’ve always had to do things around here. Somebody needs help, everyone comes out to help. There’s no ‘them’ to rely on. Course, town’s too big for that now, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe that’s how it goes. Everything has to change eventually.”
He went back to eating. The stinging in his throat and lungs had started to fade. One of the children walked up, carrying David’s hat. It was dusty but intact. She held it out.
“Thank you,” David said. “I’d be good and lost without this.”
Spady was gone, so Brooke gave David a lift back to his truck, where he’d left it at the new courthouse. She’d arrived just after David went up on the roof, she said.
Once he was back at his truck, he pulled out his phone and saw a notification. Something had triggered one of the motion cameras. As exhausted as he was, as much as his body ached, he felt a sudden surge of energy. Maybe it worked. Maybe one thing would go right.
He opened the app, and a green-and-black video appeared. He could just make out the outlines of the tombstones. It was the cemetery. Nothing.
And then . . . a shape moved across the screen.
A coyote, sleek and muscular, moving silently through the night, between tombstones. A predator, stalking.
The coyote turned back, as if in recognition of being watched, and then darted out of view, continuing its hunt.