“I ask you a few questions?” Pellam began.

Sibbie said nothing.

He started the Betacam, hoping her short-term memory was better than the recollections of her youth.

“Yo, you with CNN?” the boy asked, staring at the glowing red eye of the Sony.

“Nup. I’m working on a movie. I took some pictures of your mother last month.”

“Geddoutahere!” He cloaked his astonished eyes. “A movie. Wesley Snipes, Denzel, yeah! Shit.”

“You have any idea how the fire started?”

“Be the crews,” the boy said quickly.

“Shutcha mouth,” his mother barked, abruptly slipping out of her mournful reverie.

Crews meant gangs. “Which ones?”

The woman remained silent, eyes fixed on a key that passing traffic had pressed deep into the asphalt. Beside it was the butt end of a brass pistol cartridge. She looked up at the building. “Lookit that.”

Pellam said, “It was a nice building.”

“Ain’t shit now.” Sibbie snapped her fingers with a startling pop. “Oh, I’ma be one a them.”

Pellam asked, “One of who?”

“Livin’ on the street. We gonna live on the street. I’ma get sick. I’ma get the Village curse and I gonna die.”

“No, you’ll be okay. The city’ll take care of you.”

“The city. Shit.”

“You see anybody around the basement when the fire started?”

“Hells, yeah,” the boy said, “What it is. Be the crews. I seen ’em. This nigger keep his eyes open. I-”

Sibbie viciously slapped her son’s cheek. “He didn’t see nothing! All y’all ain’t worry about it no more!”

Pellam winced at the slap. The boy noticed his expression but the tacit sympathy didn’t comfort any more than the blow’d seemed to hurt.

“Sibbie, it’s not safe around here,” Pellam said. “Go to that shelter. The one up the street.”

“Shelter. Shit. I save me a few things.” Sibbie motioned toward her shopping bag. “Be looking for my mama’s lace. Can’t find it, shit, it gone.” She called out to a cluster of sightseers, “All y’all find any lace ’round here?”

No one paid her any attention. “Sibbie, you have any money?” Pellam asked.

“I got fi’ dollar some man give me.”

Pellam slipped her a twenty. He stepped into the street and flagged down a cab. Pellam held up a twenty. “Take her to the shelter, the one on Fiftieth.”

He glanced at his potential fare. “Hey, man, I’m going off duty-”

Pellam silenced him with another bill.

The family piled in. From the back seat Ismail, eyes cautious now, stared at Pellam. Then the cab was gone. He hefted the Betacam, which now weighed a half ton, and lifted it to his shoulder once again.

What’s this? A cowboy?

Boots, blue jeans, black shirt.

All he needs is a string tie and a horse.

Yee-haw, Sonny thought. Everybody’s tawking at me…

He’d watched as the cowboy had stuffed the shriveled-up nigger lady and her little nigger kids into a cab and had returned to the charred remains of the tenement.

As he’d been doing for the past several hours Sonny studied the destroyed building with pleasure and a modicum of itchy lust. At the moment he was thinking about the noise of fire. The floors had fallen, he knew, with a crash but nobody would have heard. Fire is much louder than people think. Fire roars with the sound of blood in your ears when the flames reach your, say, knees.

And he was thinking of the smell. He inhaled the unique perfume of scorched wood and carbonized plastic and oxidized metal. Then, reluctantly, he surfaced from his reverie and studied the cowboy carefully. He was taping the fire marshal as he directed an exhausted fireman to hoe through some refuse with his Halligan tool, combination axe and crowbar. Invented by Huey Halligan. An all-time, world-class firefighter, pride of the NYFD. Sonny respected his enemies.

He knew a lot about them too. For instance, he knew that there were 250 fire marshals in the City of New York. Some were good and some were bad but this one, Lomax, was excellent. Sonny watched him taking pictures of the alligatoring on a piece of charred wood. The marshal had spotted that right away, God bless him. The black squares on the surface were large and shiny, which meant the fire was fast and it was hot. Useful in the investigation. And the trial – as if they’d ever catch him.

The marshal picked up a six-foot hook and broke through a ground-floor window, shone his flashlight inside.

A few years ago the city created the Red Hat patrol in the fire marshal’s department. They’d give marshals red baseball caps and sent them cruising through high-risk arson areas. Those were the days when Sonny was just learning his trade and it had been very helpful to flag the marshals so obviously. Now they dressed like regular plainclothes schmucks but Sonny had enough experience that he didn’t need red hats to spot the enemy. Now Sonny could look in a man’s eyes and know that he made fires his living.

Either starting them or putting them out.

Sonny, no longer quite so happy, feeling shakier and sweatier, glanced at the big camera in the cowboy’s hand. A cable ran to a battery pack in a canvas bag. It wasn’t one of those cheap videocams. This was the real thing.

Who exactly are you, Joe Buck? What exactly are you doing here?

Sonny began to sweat harder (which didn’t bother him though he’d been sweating an awful lot lately) and his hands began to shake (which did bother him because that was a very bad thing in someone who assembled incendiary devices for a living).

Watching tall, thin Joe Buck take some more footage of the burnt-out tenement. Sonny decided he hated the cowboy more for his height than because he was shooting so fucking much tape of a building he’d just burned down.

Still, in some part of his heart, he hoped the tapes were good; he was proud of this little fire.

After he’d started the blaze and slipped back out through the basement door, he’d hidden in the construction site across the street and turned on his Radio Shack scanner. He heard the dispatcher put out a second-alarm assignment. It had been a 10-45, code 2 call. He was pleased about the alarm – which meant a serious fire – but disappointed about the code, which meant that there’d been only injuries, not fatalities. Code 1 meant death.

The cowboy continued to shoot for a few minutes. Then he shut the big camera off and slipped it back into his bag.

Sonny glanced again at the fire marshal and his cronies – my gosh, that’s one huge faggot assistant. Lomax told the big boy to order a backhoe and start the vertical excavation as soon as possible. Silently Sonny told them that this was the correct procedure for investigating a fire like this.

But Sonny was getting more and more worried. Pretty soon he was all worry, the way a corridor fills with smoke; one minute it’s clear, the next it’s dense as cotton.

The reason, however, wasn’t Lomax or his huge assistant. It was the cowboy.

I hate that man. Hate him, hate him, hate him hatehimhatehim.

Sonny tossed his long blond ponytail off his shoulder, wiped a sweating forehead with shaking hands and eased through the crowd, closer to Joe Buck. His breathing was labored and his heart slammed in his chest. He sucked smoke-laden air into his lungs and exhaled very slowly, enjoying the taste, the smell. Beneath his hands the yellow tape trembled. Stop that stop that stop that stopthatstopthat!

He glanced up at Pellam.

Not quite a foot taller. Maybe a lot less than that. Ten inches, if Sonny stood up straight. Or nine.

Suddenly a new spectator eased between them and Sonny was jostled aside. The intruder was a young woman in a rich, deep-green double-breasted suit. A businesswoman. She said, “Terrible. Just awful.”

“Did you see it happen?” the cowboy asked.

She nodded. “I was coming home from work. I was on an audit. You a reporter?”