Looking out the dirty windshield of the car he’d been living in, Daniel Acoda knew there was something karmically just, even poetic, about his addiction to Zovis. Daniel’s father, Maurice R. Acoda, was the chief exec of International Pharma Corporation, the maker of the painkiller and various other synthetic pheromones, and that year alone had made a fifteen-million-dollar bonus, thanks to record-breaking sales of the wildly addictive drug.
As is most often the case, Daniel’s dependency was born of necessity. He broke his leg on the first day of a family ski vacation, and after the five-hour surgery—the screws and rods to ensure that he could walk again—his father came into the hotel room with a cup of soup and a warning.
“Danny, I know the doctor prescribed this shit…” Maurice took the orange bottle from the nightstand and gave it a shake. “But you shouldn’t touch this stuff … Tough it out,” he said and shut the door.
But after the vacation, Maurice was never around to see that his advice was taken. And so one day, without much guilt or forethought, Danny pulled the bottle from his hoodie and popped two pills down his throat. The buzz was nearly instant. A vibration, a hum, a warm light stretching to the darkest, achiest places inside him. Simply put: the pain was gone.
It wasn’t long before the bottle was empty, but with the aid of his doting mother, Danny secured another thirty. The problem was when the drugs wore off, Danny now had two sources of pain: the one in his leg, and one much deeper than nerve and bone. An unreachable pain that started in his skull and radiated to every nerve and fiber of his body, from the top of his head to his fingertips and toes and the core of his person.
The bottle sat on the second shelf of his medicine cabinet, behind the mirror, and each time he approached it, the image reflected a slightly different face. Before that bottle was gone, Daniel had figured out ways to ensure it would be filled again. But by his junior year, his classmate sources were already inadequate or had been kicked out of school altogether. Danny himself, despite extremely generous donations to the school by his family, had been placed on academic leave, and had spent twelve weeks in a rehab in Malibu.
After his seventeenth birthday, Daniel’s parents tried a tough-love tactic and kicked him out. They did let him keep his car—the Mercedes E-Class he’d been given for his sixteenth birthday—and he packed it with clothes, his laptop, and phone and charger and drove away.
One method Daniel used to protect himself against arrests was trading online. He would swap his ever-dwindling array of fancy watches and clothes for small stashes, and it was this bartering system on the darkweb that led Daniel to a supplier, a guy who went by the handle Star_Man.
Star_Man was different: instead of trading physical objects, he wanted Daniel to perform tasks—the delivery of a package, that kind of thing. Of course Daniel knew he’d become a mule, but Star_Man had promised him that he’d never be given much, nothing that would amount to more than a slap on the wrist if he got caught. And perhaps it was desperation that caused Danny to believe what was so clearly a lie. So there he was, carting parcels around the greater Los Angeles area under the hot summer sun. At the end of each task, he was given a location where he would find an envelope stuffed with enough Zovis to tide him over until the next task.
I have an insurance scheme, Star_Man’s Wickr message said one afternoon. I want you to start a fire that will burn across a piece of property I own.
He sent Daniel a copy of a deed and an insurance policy with a rider for fire in excess of three million dollars for an old wooden barn. For this bit of pyromania blended with insurance fraud, Star_Man offered Daniel a month’s supply, a nicely sized carrot.
All you gotta do is light a fire in the ring and walk away, Star_Man’s message said. The wind will do the rest.
It was unseasonably warm, the Santa Anas whipping through the Valley at over forty miles per hour, the night Daniel drove his Mercedes to the property with a gas can, a cigarette lighter, and a copy of the LA Times. He’d grown comfortable with felony, as long as it didn’t do direct harm to anyone, not even an animal, so the first thing he did was make sure the barns were empty. Confident this would be a victimless crime, he walked around the field until he found the crude firepit—a brush pile ringed by cinder blocks. He dragged branches from around the ranch, erected a nice, tall pile of brush, lit the wad of paper, and stuffed it into the middle. He blew furiously and stepped back to watch the flames lick up through the dry branches. The heat was so intense he turned his face from it, and he heard horses in a barn in the distance, neighing frantically.
Just as the Santa Anas began scattering ash across the sagebrush, Daniel wondered what he had done. But it was already out of control, fire jumping through the acreage and consuming the barn in a matter of minutes. Daniel looked around the wide field in futile panic. He fled to his car, and sped toward the pickup spot for the envelope, hoping, praying, for rain.
The devastation was something Daniel could never have fathomed. By 10 a.m. the following morning, forty thousand acres in rural and suburban Los Angeles had been consumed. The parcel of land where the barn had been positioned was much like the wadded-up paper in the pyramid Daniel had built—the center of the tinderbox in the Valley north of Los Angeles, and with the direction of the winds, the fire had all it needed to accelerate.
It raged on for five more days. On Day Seven, when the fires were officially out, reports estimated 3.5 billion dollars in damage, eighty-five lives lost, and 459,000 acres burned. And on that same day, Maurice sat at his desk in his high-rise office, the wall of windows behind him framing a city still shrouded in the aftermath of smoke. His phone buzzed with a text from an encrypted number. A link. Normally he would never have clicked on it, but the caption caught his attention: There is no greater wildfire than Avarice. A YouTube video began playing, showing his son Daniel popping a handful of pills before lighting the great bonfire that would turn Southern California into a crematorium.