Thefts of Nick Velvet Read Online Free PDF Page B

afternoon was calm and clear, with a musty heaviness about the air that hinted at a change in weather before the long weekend really got under way. Sam Fitzpatrick and his wife were at the pool—she was sunning herself while he was typing a reply to a letter in the morning’s mail.
    It was midafternoon when he first smelled the smoke, and glanced over the fence at the nearby field. “Lydia! There’s a grass fire here! Come look!”
    “Hadn’t we better call the Fire Department, Sam?” The fire already had a good start, spreading in a sort of ring that reached from the distant woods almost to Fitzpatrick’s line.
    “Damn! I suppose I’d better.” But then they heard the rising wail of the schoolhouse siren, and the answering call from the firehouse. The volunteers were on their way.
    Within ten minutes the flaming field had been converged on by two pumpers and a pair of auxiliary water trucks. There were no hydrants out this far, and the volunteers had to bring their own water supply. Fitzpatrick knew most of the volunteer firemen by name, but this day a stranger in rubber coat and leather helmet came running up to the fence.
    “Mr. Fitzpatrick?”
    “Yes. That’s quite a blaze you’ve got there.”
    “Sure is.” The stranger turned up his collar and glanced over Fitzpatrick’s shoulder. “We need more water than our trucks can supply. Could we throw a hose into your swimming pool and pump out the water?”
    “What? Say, don’t I know you from somewhere?”
    “Better hurry,” the fireman warned him. “A shift in the wind could endanger your house.”
    “Well … all right, I suppose so.”
    In a moment the heavy canvas hose was over the fence, splashing into the deep end of the pool. The fireman gave a signal to the nearest pumper and they started to drain Sam Fitzpatrick’s water. Off in the distance two firemen played a smaller hose on the leading edge of the fire.
    The familiar-looking fireman was everywhere, directing activities, shouting orders. After a half hour, when the pool was already half empty, one of the auxiliary water trucks pulled out through the high grass to get a refill at the town tank.
    Finally, when another truckload of water and the remainder of the pool’s supply had been used up, the fire began to retreat and die. Sam Fitzpatrick watched it with relief, and he called out to the familiar-looking fireman, “You fellows want a drink?”
    “No time now, sir. Thanks anyway.”
    “What about my pool?”
    “The trucks will be out tomorrow to refill it. Thanks for your help.”
    Fitzpatrick watched them pull away and then walked over to stare into the empty swimming pool. At the deepest end a few inches of water remained, but otherwise there was only the damp concrete below.
    He started to light a cigarette, then stopped suddenly with the lighted match in midair. He’d just remembered where he had seen the fireman before.
    Asher Dumont was waiting in her sports car a few miles down the road. Nick hopped off one of the pumpers and tossed his helmet and rubber coat onto the seat. Then he ran over to the car. “Where do you want it? Nineteen thousand gallons of Sam Fitzpatrick’s swimming-pool water, as ordered.”
    “You’re mad,” she said with a laugh. “I never thought you’d be able to do it.”
    “I’ve had harder assignments than this.”
    “But I still don’t understand. The firemen—”
    “While we were pumping out his pool with a big hose and filling up one of the auxiliary water trucks, we were fighting the fire with a small hose from the other truck. With the high grass he couldn’t see which hoses went where. And when the first truck was full, we took it out and brought in another empty one. Each of the pumpers has a 1,000-gallon tank of its own, so we had plenty of water without using the water from the pool.”
    “But these are the real firemen and their trucks!”
    Nick nodded. “I gave them $100 each and told them we wanted to shoot a film for