Down These Strange Streets (George R.R. Martin) (Kitty Norville 6.50)

I

DREAM.

Eric Salvador always knew it was a dream; he just couldn’t affect it or get out of it or do anything except watch and smell and taste and feel an overwhelming sick dread as it unfolded. There hadn’t really been a burned-out MRAP at the end of the village street by the mosque. That had been somewhere else, that little shithole outside Kandahar he’d seen on his first tour, and it had only been there one day. It was a composite of all the bads, building up to the Big Bad itself.

A couple of other things are right for the day, he thought.

The way Olsen flicked the little Raven surveillance drone into the air, and the buzz of its engine as it climbed to circle above them, and the dopy little smiley-face button with fangs he’d glued to the nose of the Corps’ thirty-five-thousand-dollar toy airplane. He’d tried to put little fake Hellfire missiles under the wings too, and Gunny had torn him a new asshole about it. The way the translator was sweating and his eyes were flicking here and there, you wondered if it was just the heat or generalized fear or if he knew something he wasn’t saying.

Christ, I’ve had this fucking nightmare so many times I’m starting to sound like a movie critic.

Smith always went into the door of the compound the same way, the way he really had. Regulation, the two of them plastered on either side, Jackson taking out the lock on the gate with a doorknocker round, whump-boom, the warped old planks smacking inward as the slug blew the rusty lock into the courtyard, Smith following, his M-4 tucked into his shoulder and Jackson on his heels.

The explosion was always silent. Silent, slo-mo, the flames leaking around the fragments of wood and the two men flying and just enough time to realize Oh, shit, this is a bad one before a giant’s hand picked him up and threw him backward until there was the impact and the pain.

Only this time was different. This time something walked out of the fire to where he lay with the broken ends of his ribs grating under the body armor that had saved his life.

The shape twisted and its wrongness made him want to scream out the bloody foam in his lungs, but the eyes were flecked yellow. And the voice slithered into his ears:

“Who’s been a naughty boy, then?”

He began to sink into the dry dusty earth, and it flowed into his mouth and nose and eyes, the dust of ages and of empires.

“Naughty!”

“Christ!”

He lay panting in the darkness, smelling his own sweat and waiting to be sure he was awake—sometimes he dreamed he was, and then the whole thing started cycling through his head again. It was blurring away already, details fracturing like sunlight through a drop of water. His hand groped for the cigarettes on the bedside, and then he remembered he’d stopped.

“Go back to sleep,” he told himself. “Dreaming’s no worse than remembering, anyway.”

Christ.

THE FIRE DEPARTMENT WERE TURNING OFF THEIR HOSES; DANK STEAM ROSE into the night, and chilly water dripped from the buildings to either side where they’d sprayed to keep the flames from spreading; there was a blank wall across the street. It was high-desert winter, cold, dry, moonlight visible on the white peaks of the Sangres floating off to the north.

“So what made it burn down, hey?” Salvador asked the investigator from the fire marshal’s office.

“Arson,” she said to the detective. “And it burned up.”

“Yeah, arson. Some specifics would be nice, Alice,” he said.

“That’s the thing. I can’t find any reason it should have burned. None of the usual indicators. It just did.”

“Very much.”

He ducked under the yellow police tape, a stocky man of thirty or so with a mustache and a blue jowl who’d put on a few pounds lately, not many, not enough to hide his hard outlines, with his coarse black hair still in a highand-tight. There was a deep scar across one olive cheek, and he rubbed at it with a thumb; it hurt a little sometimes, where the flying metal of the IED had cracked the bone. The scar ran down under his mustache, giving a bit of a quirk to his mouth.

“One thing I can tell you,” the investigator said. “This thing burned hot.”

“Heavy accelerants? I can’t smell anything.”

“Right, gasoline or diesel you usually can. But damned if I can prove it yet, maybe with the lab work . . . I’d say yes, though. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if it wanted to burn. There’s no sign it started in one place and spread. Everything capable of combining with oxygen just went up all at once, whoosh. The cutlery melted, and that’s a lot hotter than your typical house fire.”

The building had been a little two-story apartment house, one up and one down. This wasn’t far off Canyon Road and the strip of galleries and was close to the Acequia Madre, the ancient irrigation canal, which meant it had been fairly expensive. But not close enough to be real adobe, which in Santa Fe meant old and pricey. Brown stucco pseudo-pueblo-Spanish-style originally over frame, like nearly everything in town that stayed on the right side of the building code.

Alice had worked with him before. She was a bit older than he—midthirties—and always looked tired, her blond hair short and disorderly. He liked the way she never let a detail slip by, no matter how hard she had to work at it.

“Santa Fe, where prestige is a mud house on a dirt road,” she quoted. “So it’s not likely an insurance torch. Not enough money here.”