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with false expectations; I’d wanted to find the town unchanged, my friends waiting to greet me.
    gannet was a kind of tonic I’d hoped would make me feel better. It had been a silly, self-serving notion. I turned back to the row of pegs on the wall and retrieved my coat. I don’t know, Greta. Seems to me everyone here’s a little too steamed up. If you like, I’ll tell the SA to keep an eye on this bunch.” She stepped forward and stopped me from putting on my coat. My ague, evasive tone had made her quite angry by now. “Don’t you pat me on the head, Joe Gunther. I don’t need you looking down on me.
    I watched her eyes, narrow with fury, remembering a similar look n Wingate’s face, and Rennie’s as he had walked away after being punched.
    Compared with theirs, Fox’s had been cool and superior, displaying an icier, perhaps more threatening anger.
    I removed Greta’s hand from my coat and put it on, bidding her goodnight, suddenly eager to escape back into the cold. Outside, I shook my head. Anger is no byproduct of self-contentment. I couldn’t hake the ominous feeling that Wingate and his wife, Greta and Rennie, and God knew how many other people in this town were all in the process of slipping their mental anchor lines, yielding to the different frustrations that had consumed them over time. I wondered in how many of them this rage might be controllable, and in which ones it indicated a ship drifting toward the rocks.
    A searing pain in my shoulder blew me awake. “Ow. Damn.” “Wake up-fast.” Buster punched me again, hard. “Cut it out, goddamn it.”
    “Siren’s blowing-we got a fire.” He was already out the door and heading for the stairs.
    As I stumbled out of bed, groping for my clothes, I could hear the eerie funereal wail of the firehouse siren, rising and falling, a persistent, nagging, penetrating noise that made my hair stand up on end.
    Slipping my shoes on unlaced, holding my coat under one arm, I stumbled downstairs to the front door. As I kicked it open, Gannet’s siren enveloped me, making the air vibrate. Buster’s pickup was already rolling down the driveway, the passenger door open. Come on. Move it.”
    I half-ran, half-jumped onto the seat next to him. The sudden acceleration slammed the door for me and threw me back against the seat as we squealed down the street. “There,” he shouted, pointing down South Street as we drew abreast. “Looks like that house we were in earlier.” We came to a skidding stop next to the firehouse just as the siren blew its last mournful note. The firehouse doors were already open and I could hear the roaring of both truck engines being fired up.
    Pickup trucks and cars appeared out of nowhere, parking helter-skelter up and down the road, as half-dressed men ran toward the fire trucks, even as they eased out of their tight berths. Buster and I clambered aboard the 55, next to a young man wearing glasses and a mustache. “Hi, Chief.” “Hey, Paul. Hand me that helmet.” Paul cracked my knee with the stick shift as we pulled into the road. It was a two-man cab, and I was the third man in the middle.
    Buster shouted out the window at one of the other firemen, “Call East Haven and East Burke, we’re going to need backup on this.” The driver hit the toggles for the red lights and siren, which, considering the size of the town and the short distance we had to travel, seemed a little excessive to me. It also made it hard to hear myself think. I could see Buster’s lips moving, but I couldn’t tell if he was muttering or shouting.
    As Buster had suspected, it was the same house Bruce Wingate had been thrown out of earlier, several of its windows now glowing orange or actually leaking flames. The smoke above the building reflected the hellish pink glimmer. As we pulled up, I saw where someone, presumably Fox, had nailed a piece of plywood over the broken window.
    Everyone piled out of both trucks and began grabbing equipment: hatchets,