Mommy is all burned up.
Jack's so bummed he doesn't know whether to drive the car or suck on it.
The totally downer picture of Pamela Vale's death smacks him in the face: marriage fucked up, kids off at nightmare grandma's house, a lonely woman hits the vodka and the cigs and gets a longer oblivion than she was looking for.
Tough shit, he thinks. So what? She's not the only person who died today.
So, why do I care?
It's just the whole damn thing, he decides. It's drunk Pam Vale burning herself up in her bedroom, it's Bentley taking about ten minutes to call her death an accident, it's the grieving husband hustling to the phone to ask about his money, it's the All-Star Anal Retentive Mother from Hell charging her widowed son and motherless grandchildren bust-out retail for room and board.
And it's the kids, with their alkie mother and their shifting-cloud father and a grandmother who's about as warm as a steel ruler, and it's Daddy says Mommy is all burned up.
And there's this thing – this feeling, this suspicion, this paranoia, this sick thing – smoldering in the back of his cynical brain. The sooty glass, the dog outside, the blood-red flame, the black smoke…
Daddy says Mommy is all burned up.
Call Me Nicky, Jack thinks.
Call you a sick twist.
Telling your kids that.
Be honest, Jack tells himself. The main reason you don't like Nicky is because he's a real estate developer. One of those classic '80s schlock artists who made the big quick dollar throwing up shit all over the south coast. Shaving off the hillsides, pounding out building pads on bad soil, tossing up condos and apartment buildings with cheap materials and shoddy construction.
That's your fucking California, Call Me Nicky. You invent your own California and ruin mine. Reinvent yourself and invent me out.
And now he gets Nicky's involvement with Save the Strands. A fucking developer fighting development. Of course, the Vale house looks out over the Strands. It's just a NIMBY thing – Not in My Back Yard. I got my million-dollar view – don't fuck it up. I got my California.
Shit.
Like you're any different.
You're the same guy without the money.
It's not Nicky Vale.
It's me, Jack thinks.
My pathetic fucking excuse for a life, which mostly consists of sifting around in the ashes of other people's lives, trying to put things back together again. Like that can happen, like that can ever happen.
Putting ashes together again.
"Christ, listen to yourself," he says.
Fucking pathetic, self-pitying, burned-out.
Cold ashes.
Jack, the ace fire guy, a burnout case.
Now, that's funny.
The cell phone rings.
"I shouldn't be telling you this," the voice says.
But…