Page 107 of Whistle

From where Harry stood, the man, jaw wide, appeared to have the contents of an entire package of cigarettes—a good twenty of them, if not more—jammed into his mouth, and every one of them was lit. It was as bizarre a sight as Harry had ever seen, like something an onstage comic would do to provoke a laugh, or a magician might attempt before disappearing in a cloud of smoke.

Delbert lay there spread-eagled, and even though he appeared to be struggling to breathe, and despite his chest going up and down in clear distress, he made no attempt to spit out the cigarettes wadded into his mouth.

“Delbert!” the woman cried. “What are you doing?”

Given her size and age, Harry was thinking, that woman was not meant to be climbing a TV tower. She had one arm looped into a metal brace and appeared to be struggling to get her breath. Harry hadn’t met this woman when he had come here before to warn Delbert off his harassment campaign but was guessing it was his mother.

“Mrs. Dorfman,” Harry shouted. “Get down from there!”

She looked at him and said, “He’s gone crazy!”

Harry wanted her off that tower for more reasons than her own safety. Once she was off it, he could scramble up there himself, get onto the roof, and save Delbert from his own insanity. If Harry couldn’t get up there, they’d be waiting until the fire department arrived with scaling equipment, or simply shot water onto the roof to douse those cigarettes.

Harry could hear fire engine sirens in the distance and was betting they were still two or three minutes away.

At the house next door, a second-floor window had been raised and a girl who looked about the same age as Harry’s son, Dylan, was watching the show unfold with great interest. Where the fuck were her parents? Harry thought. They needed to get her away from the window. But the kid was the least of his worries.

“Get down!” he said again to the woman, who had not moved.

There was so much smoke emanating from the man’s mouth and trailing out of his nose that his head was becoming lost in the cloud.

“Delbert!” Harry shouted. “Delbert, it’s Chief Cook! Stop what you’re doing! Spit out those cigarettes!”

The woman was now working her way down the TV tower, one horizontal brace at a time. Harry headed that way, ready to start his ascent. He nearly pushed her off when she had one rung to go.

Harry grabbed a metal bracing above his head, got his boot on a lower one, and up he went. The braces on the tower were a good foot apart, broader than on a ladder, but Harry scaled the tower quickly. As he reached the roof—it wasn’t a steep slope, easily navigated provided you paid attention to what you were doing—and was putting his first foot onto it, he got a better view of Delbert.

All the cigarettes clustered together were like one Marlboro four inches long and three inches wide. The tips, red and glowing, began to meld. Ashes, mixed with still-burning flecks of tobacco, drifted onto his shirt, the skin of his cheeks and neck, and into his hair.

“Shit,” Harry said under his breath, and began to make his way across the roof.

Delbert’s hair began to catch fire, and a few seconds later his head erupted into flames.

“Christ!” Harry shouted, closing the distance between Delbert and himself, peeling off his sport jacket and throwing it over the man’s face in a bid to put out the fire.

“He never moved,” Harry had told his wife, Janice, when he got home much later that evening. “He just lay there.”

“You did what you could,” she’d said.

Harry was thinking about that now, sitting at the diner counter in a fresh jacket. Had he done all he could? Maybe, if he hadn’t had to wait for Mrs. Dorfman to get down off that TV tower, if he’d gotten up there ten seconds sooner, he might—

“Any sign of our friend?”

Harry was shaken out of his dark reverie. He looked up from his notebook to see Jenny filling his porcelain mug with coffee.

“Say again?”

“Gavin,” Jenny said. “Found him yet?”

Harry shook his head regretfully. “No.”

Jenny leaned in close so that no one else would be able to hear what she had to say. Harry could smell bacon in her hair.

“People are on edge, Harry. Don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but everyone’s kinda freaking out.”

“Say it ain’t so,” Harry whispered back. “Suggestions?”

“Harry, my area of expertise is putting enough bacon and eggs and hash browns into people so that one day they clutch their chest and drop dead of a heart attack but they’re still smiling when they go because we serve the best breakfast within fifty miles. It isnottrying to figure out why everyone in Lucknow is losing their shit. That’syourjob.”

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