Kit saw the trees against the luminous sky line, the square silhouette of the truck, the palely white porch bannister. Flame squirted from the truck and his body was seared. He fell down the steps and lay without moving on his back.
He wished, seeing the stars as they began to swim and cavort, he’d at least grabbed the shotgun and plugged a couple of them.
In the parlor, the men turned toward the rigid women. “Going to be a nice little party,” one said, licking his lips. “Private-like.”
Others laughed. One yelled, “Hey— Red! Come on in! We found five of ’em!”
They moved toward the four girls and their mother.
She said, softly, “Pray, children.”
But nobody was listening to prayers that night.
12
Toward morning, but in that part of the hours when it should have been darkest, Henry left his second-in-command at his desk and went out in the night with the police lieutenant, Lacey. Some streets, some avenues, were slots leading arrow-straight to the fire storm, box-ended with flame.
Other thoroughfares merely caught the downbeat of illumination. On them, great shadows danced as the grotesque, the monstrous pyre flickered in the sky. Here and there, night infiltrated a row of houses, loomed in a stand of stores or glowered from the windows of a stalled streetcar.