Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [120]
The room filled with smoke. I started choking. In the hall, the smoke alarm was shrieking. Waving my hand in front of my face, I stumbled across the bedroom to open the window.
Lopez was breathing hard, coughing, and staring at the bed in appalled amazement. As if for good measure, he aimed the extinguisher at it again and covered the blackened, smoking wreck with a thick film of white foam. Then he looked around the room to make sure nothing else needed dousing.
I dragged a chair into the hallway, climbed up onto it, and silenced the shrieking smoke alarm overhead. Then I opened my front door and went out into the stairwell, where I assured several neighbors who were emerging from their apartments that things were under control and they didn’t need to evacuate the building. I reentered my apartment and opened my remaining windows. A robust wind blew into the living room, and I realized with relief that the stifling heat wave was breaking at last—and that this wind would help clear the apartment of smoke pretty quickly.
Lopez came out of my bedroom, still carrying the fire extinguisher. I realized my legs were shaking, and I sat down suddenly. He sat nearby.
There was a long moment of stunned silence as we sat there, catching our breath and waiting for our hearts to stop pounding.
Finally, I got up and poured two glasses of cold water. He accepted the water with absentminded thanks as I sat back down.
He drained his glass, then said, “Did Jeff or Max smoke when they were here tonight?”
“No. They don’t smoke.”
“Have you started smoking?” he asked.
“No.”
“Has anyone who smokes been in that bed?”
“No. I mean, that’s none of your business. I mean . . .” I shook my head and tried to pull myself together. “Why are you asking?”
“A smoldering cigarette in the sheets is the most logical explanation for what just happened,” he said. “I think.”
“Oh.”
“But if no one’s been smoking in your bed . . .”
“Yes?” I said.
“I suppose something must be wrong with the mattress. I mean really wrong.”
“Bad manufacturing?” I said in a daze. “Flammable materials?”
He nodded. “And spontaneous combustion. Maybe because of, um, unaccustomed friction.”
Our eyes met, and I recalled what we’d been doing in that bed when it had burst into flames. I suddenly felt my skin flush.
I cleared my throat and said like a reasonable adult, “Should I call the fire department?”
“No. The fire’s out.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “But I’m going to get an arson investigator over here. We’ll find out exactly what happened.”
When he finished his call, he said, “I’m sorry, Esther. It’s Sunday night. Since this isn’t an emergency, tomorrow is the soonest someone will come.”
“I can sleep on the couch,” I said, as if this were the most important consideration in the life of a person whose bed had just inexplicably burst into flames while she and a man were in it together.
“We need to take that mattress outside. I don’t think it’ll catch fire again, but since it shouldn’t have caught fire in the first place, I don’t want it in this apartment all night.” He glanced at a text message on his phone. “Then I’ve got to get my ass out to Queens right away, or I’m off this case.” He looked at me. “And all that crap about zombies and bakers notwithstanding—”
“Bokors,” I corrected. “And there’s only one.”
“Whatever,” he said. “I want to know what happened to those bodies. More to the point, I want to find whoever scared you half to death in the street that night, stole your purse, and left a severed hand lying around.”
Max wanted to find that person, too. But I decided this wasn’t a propitious moment to point that out.
In the silence that followed his statement, Lopez seemed to realize he was barefoot and shirtless. He rose to his feet, went into the bedroom, and came out a minute later, wearing his sandals and buttoning his shirt—which looked undamaged by what had just happened.
While he finished fastening his buttons and then tucked the garment into his pants, he said, “It