Free Fire Lover by Joseph Wambaugh Page B

north through the San Joaquin Valley, past endless truck crops and grazing land. There are mountains, the Sierra Madres to the west, the Tehachapis to the east, and then one passes through Bakersfield, once a destination for the Okie migration of the Great Depression, still a vital agricultural zone where folks can tune their radios to real country stars such as George Strait and even the old Bakersfield homeboy Buck Owens, rather than crossover cowboys.
    After Bakersfield, there's not much until you arrive in the town of Tulare, and if you weren't already aware of it, you'll have an idea how crucial the farms and ranches of California are, not only to the state but to the country. Then, somewhere around the fourth hour of driving, you'll arrive in the city of Fresno, site of the arson seminar, but if you drive like John Orr, you'll get there much faster. He could drive with even more gusto now that he was wearing glasses full-time to correct the nearsightedness that had started to affect his shooting scores.
    There were 242 conferees - arson investigators, prosecutors, insurance investigators, cops, and firefighters - arriving that Tuesday from all over the state. The weather was foggy, cold, and miserable that year, and most of the seminar participants stayed in and around the hotel, networking and boozing it up in the restaurant and bar. Of course, some of the more restless ventured out looking for action, such as there was. Fresno was a growing city of 350,000, but it had managed to retain much of its rural ethic. The conferees from the big cities said there was nothing to do there except watch grapes turn into Fresno raisins.
    That conference might have come and gone and passed from memory except for the stunning events that took place starting on the first evening, when the city was swarming with men and women whose lives were dedicated to fire prevention and suppression.
    At 8:30 p. M., about an hour after some of the registers had been closed at Payless Drug Store on North Blackstone Avenue, an employee spotted smoke rising up from a display of sleeping bags that had been tightly packed in a cabinet. He saw the bags suddenly burst into flame, setting off the overhead sprinklers. Helped by the sprinklers' deluge of water, the store manager contained the fire with a handheld fire extinguisher. There was a lot of water damage, but nobody had been seen in the area at the time the fire was spotted, so it was difficult to say what had caused it. The store manager was issued a citation because his fire alarms were not in good working order.
    A witness reported seeing a deaf-mute, or perhaps a firebug posing as a deaf-mute, in the vicinity of the fire's point of origin shortly before it ignited. Nobody thought too much about that fire at Payless Drug Store until an occurrence on Thursday evening that got everybody thinking.
    It happened once again on Blackstone Avenue, this time at Hancock Fabrics, right across the street from Payless Drug Store. The first and best witness was a shopper who had been examining some fabric at the cutting table in the center of the store when she glanced up and saw smoke in the northwest corner of the building. The smoke was gray, but instantly turned inky black, and then the smoke cloud erupted in a ball of flame. And she watched slack-jawed as the fireball divided into fingers of fire that "danced" up the walls and along the ceiling. It all happened so unbelievably fast.
    Then, pandemonium. An announcement of "Fire!" sounded on the intercom, and customers and clerks were running to the exits. The woman who had first spotted the smoke had a rudimentary understanding of heat, fuel, and air, and she told the others outside the building that they should close the doors to starve the blaze until the firefighters arrived. And she tried, but the fire would have none of it. With all of her weight pressing against the exit doors, the voracious blaze flexed and roared and in a blast of terrible power