Grist 04 - Incinerator by Timothy Hallinan

“wiv.”
    “With a tilt?” I asked.
    “Wrapped all in black,” she repeated. “Walked wiv a tilt. Crippled. Clubfoot, if you ask me.” She got up. “Squeaked, too. Now where’s that blanket?”
    Hammond said, “Squeaked?”
    Hermione was back on the street, and I was nowhere.
    I was in the precise section of nowhere where the burnings had taken place, the area Los Angeles calls Skid Row. Skidded Row would be more precise; it’s where people wind up at the end of their skid. For a few people, a statistically dismissible few in these years of Republican optimism, the trapdoor beneath their lives drops open one day, and they find themselves on a slide, a slide greased with alcohol or psychedelics or opiates or racial discrimination or just plain rotten luck, and the end of the slide dumps them out on Skidded Row. Some of them bring their children with them. The American postnuclear family.
    What the hell did “squeaked” mean?
    I’d considered the idea that I knew the Incinerator and dismissed it as useless. I was inclined to agree with Schultz, up to a point: He might know me, but I certainly didn’t know him. Our lives are full of people who remember us with love or loathing, and whom we’ve forgotten entirely. He’d sounded, in Hermione’s description, like a fairly memorable figure: tall, blond, walked with a limp. I’d played flash cards with my memory for hours after the meeting without coming up with anyone who fit the bill. Of course, the limp could have been faked. The hair could have been a wig. He could have been a dwarf on stilts, too.
    Why hadn’t he killed her? She’d seen him. Under the circumstances, chivalry didn’t seem like an acceptable reason.
    So at four on a hot Monday afternoon, I was walking aimlessly around the outskirts of Little Tokyo in downtown L.A., looking at people with neither money nor hope, feeling guilty about Annabelle Winston’s five-thousand-dollar check in my pocket, and—and doing what? Gathering impressions, I told myself. Visiting the scenes of the crimes. This was where they’d happened: This was where the Incinerator had materialized nine times, tall, black, slanting, and squeaking, over his sleeping, wine-sodden victims, poured gasoline on them, and struck a wooden kitchen match. The police had found wooden kitchen matches at all the scenes, broken matches that had failed to strike. I imagined him, frenzied, furious, desperate to light the sacred flame, flinging the defective ones aside. He must have been frantic. But he’d taken the time to stand there and strike match after match, moments that must have seemed like centuries to him.
    Gathering impressions, I looked down at two men, two unimaginably filthy men, sleeping as though they were dead in the doorway of an abandoned shop. Their limbs were sprawled loosely, and one of them had thrown his arm heavily over the chest of the other. I could have been John Philip Sousa, marching band in tow, and they wouldn’t have known I’d paid them a visit.
    Setting people on fire, I thought, is a labor-intensive method of murder. For one thing, it requires that the victim hold still. First you had to squirt the gasoline, four times, according to the first letter, and then you had to strike matches until one finally caught, and the victim had to cooperate by not going anywhere in the meantime, while three or four or five matches broke or sputtered out before you got the one that did the job.
    Schultz came unbidden to mind—I certainly wouldn’t have consciously summoned him—and said something about it being unusual that the Incinerator struck at people at the bottom of the social ladder, such a smug phrase, and I suddenly dismissed the Incinerator’s verbiage about carrion and biological misfire, and imagined myself asking him the question: “Why the homeless?”
    “They hold still,” he answered in my imagination.
    Experimentally, silently asking someone for pardon, I nudged one of the sleeping men with my