The Burnt House. Faye Kellerman

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      That house was occupied by a young Hispanic woman in a maid’s uniform and small Caucasian preschoolers. He told her she must leave with the children. “Do you have a car?” Decker asked her in English.

      “I try calling Missy. The phone no work.”

      Decker switched to Spanish. “You have to leave the house. You carry the little girl; I’ll get the big one.” He hoisted a boy of around four into his arm while holding the crying poodle. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

      “What about Missy?” the housekeeper asked frantically.

      “Tell your boss that the police made you leave.” Decker spied the neighbor across the street loading his family into his van. He darted across the street with the kid and the dog in his arms. He spoke to a man who appeared to be in his forties. “Take the woman and children with you. They’re stuck without transportation out of here.”

      “There’s no room,” the neighbor said, folding his arms across his chest.

      “Then take out the boxes and make room!” Decker shouted.

      The man backed down and found room in the car. “Not the dog,” the man insisted. “I’m allergic.”

      Decker didn’t press the dog. As he crossed back, he knocked on the hood of a sedan driven by a young mother. Her baby was in the back. She rolled down the window. Decker said, “Can you take the dog? The owners aren’t home.”

      “Is it friendly? I have a baby.”

      Decker knew the dog was scared and sometimes fearful animals bite. He told the woman he’d try someone else and finally managed to palm off the mutt on a mother with a teenage boy who was home, sick with the flu.

      The door-banging on the next three houses went unanswered, but he did rescue another small dog and two cats. He was forced to leave behind several big dogs, trapped inside the houses or behind fences. His main concerns were humans, not animals, but it made him feel sick to leave these poor, pathetic pets. But he—like everyone else—would deal with that later.

      His throat was scorched with dry heat, his eyes burning behind the goggles.

      The next residence on Decker’s list was occupied by a woman carrying suitcases to her car. After giving her orders to leave immediately, he asked her if she could transport the pets he was holding. She agreed without hesitation and left her house, sobbing as she started up her car.

      Smoke clouded any remnants of sunshine. The sky was dark charcoal and all Decker could make out were the pinpoint beams of headlights as cars filed out of the neighborhood. Mechanically, he jogged from one house to another, picking up any stray pet he could tote and giving them to the fleeing residents in the area, checking off address after address to make sure that no one was left behind.

      An hour into his searching, he knocked on the door of a wood-sided one-story shingle. At first, it appeared that no one was home. But when he knocked again, Decker thought that he might have heard something, a muffled scream or yelp. It could have been animal, it could have been his imagination, but it could have been human. Something in his gut told him to go inside.

      Lowering his shoulder, he rammed the door several times until the lock splintered and the door swung open.

      The interior of the house was dark clouds of smoke.

      “Anyone home here?” he shouted.

      The response was a strangled cry: it seemed to be coming from the back. He made his way through the acrid hallway and found an elderly, bedridden, sweat-soaked woman who must have been in her nineties. It was nothing short of a miracle that she was still breathing. The woman’s wheelchair was folded and tucked into the corner. She was trapped and as scared as a treed squirrel.

      “Thank God!” the woman mouthed, tears pouring from her eyes.

      Decker unfolded the chair, lifted the sticks-and-bones woman from the bed, and eased her into the chair. Her nightgown was wet with sweat, urine, and runny feces. She was shivering even though it was close to a hundred degrees inside. He found a clean blanket and draped it over her skeletal frame. Then he noticed a pharmacy’s worth of medication resting on her nightstand and stuffed the vials into his pockets. “Don’t worry. I’ll get you out of here.”

      “Thank God!” the woman said again.

      As he wheeled her through the smoke-laden living room, he said, “You’re all alone here, ma’am?”

      “My nurse.”

      “What about your nurse?”

      “We heard a terrible crash …” The woman was trembling as if she had palsy. “She said she’d be back for me.”

      “How long ago was that?”

      “A long time …”

      “Does she have a car?”

      “Yes … in the driveway.”

      There wasn’t any car in the driveway. The nurse had probably fled as soon as she saw the flames. Decker wheeled the old lady outside, pushed her in her chair for half a block until he found a van stuck in traffic on the road. He knocked on the driver’s window and a startled woman looked at him and then quickly away. He knocked again and presented his badge. She rolled down the glass.

      “I need you to take this woman out of here. She was abandoned in her house.” Decker pulled out the medication from his pockets. “Take these with you.”

      The woman didn’t respond, dulled by panic and fright. Eventually, as Decker kept talking, she comprehended what he was asking her to do. She depressed the unlock button and Decker opened the back door. He belted the old lady inside next to the woman’s five-year-old boy. The child gave the old woman a shy smile and then, in an act of altruism, offered her his lollipop.

      The old woman cried. She grabbed on to Decker’s hand. “God bless you.”

      “You, too.” He hefted the woman’s wheelchair into the back of the van and thanked the driver, who was still too scared and too stunned to respond verbally.

      After he had finished his initial list, he moved on to residences that were farther down the road but still very much in the sweep of the firestorm. With all that jet fuel to burn and broken gas lines to feed the inferno, it would be a long, long time before things were under control.

      The fire marshals wanted to clear a two-mile radius. A residential area like this one included not only private homes but condos and apartment buildings. That amounted to a lot of people and a lot of cars. Decker regrouped with his detectives and made new assignments.

      Hundreds of remaining doors to knock on: the terrified eyes, soot-streaked arms holding boxes, fingers gripping suitcases. Forms flitted from house to house, vehicle to vehicle. Loose animals roamed the streets, crying out with choked and desperate barks, visibility close to nil.

      It wasn’t hell but it was a good facsimile.

      He worked without interruption as the fire burned deep into the night.

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