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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 flagthe 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?”
    “I’m doing a film about some of the tenants in the building.”
    “A film. Cool. A documentary? I’m Alice.”
    “Pellam.”
    Pellam, Sonny thought. Pellam. Pell-am. He pictured the name and spoke it over and over and over in his mind until, like the top of a column of smoke, it was there but was no longer visible.
    “At first,” she continued, looking at the cowboy’s, at Pellam ’s lean face, “it was like there was nothing wrong, then all of a sudden there were flames everywhere. I mean, totally everywhere.” She carried a heavy briefcase stamped Ernst & Young in gold and with her free hand twined her short red