Curtis and the Caliente Conundrum

July 21 took the grand prize for hottest day in the recorded history of Earth, whooping July 2023. July 2025 was a frontrunner for the title next summer, so doings in the Gaza and Trump’s attempted comeback tour and Simone Biles pretty much took the steam out of the story.

And while Curtis was normally a net-balance sort of guy, the local July 29 numbers were what really counted. Beyond an afternoon upswing in fender benders at the intersections where the Walgreen’s displayed the high two-digit temp, the usual domestic and street shit extreme Fahrenheit ignited, randomly hopscotching outages, and cable brownouts kept things hopping. Curtis no longer sported blue and a bodycam, so he focused on affairs that had reached a more Bradburyan degree.

“Paper actually ignites anywhere from 425 to 475,” Chris informed Detective Mead after Sterling the battalion chief advised her to give the now charcoal skeleton that had been a 2023 Soul a little time to settle. “Don’t know why Bradbury fixed on Fahrenheit 451, except maybe an odd number seemed more scientifically credible or memorable.”

“Well, like Sterling said, this was three times hotter than Bradbury, so what do you even expect to find?”

“You never know.”

This was on the furthest West Side, where the GPS gave up the ghost and you could still break your neck on remnants of a once-peppy mining-and-rail-based economy if you didn’t first walk into a meth deal. The charred Kia smoldered dead center on a weedy cement pad where fire’d eaten the attached rail plant decades before. The surrounding lot was a dense tangle of foliage that would have made for a lovely pyrotechnic display save somebody’s sense of civic responsibility or dump-and-dash mentality. The first calls had rolled in around 6:15, presumably after the gas tank blew, though the Soul wasn’t discovered for 90 minutes more. Factor another hour for two houses worth of Millington’s second-finest to secure the scene, and Curtis was free from his first mayhem of the day by the time it was declared a murder scene.

“So the dude at the Gemm’s Mart,” the pregnant tech began as she again batted the detective’s well-intentioned hand away. “Was he just fucking crazy?”

Curtis shrugged. “Too dead to tell me. But I had to guess, attacking a guy and his two little boys in a grocery store parking lot at 7 in the a.m. may signal mental distress. Witness on his way to work says the guy suddenly just charged the car, and the next thing, Dad and Allegedly Fucking Crazy are wrestling with a .38. Lucky Dad got the upper hand. God knows what set the guy off, but I’m sure this heat didn’t help.”

“Heat-induced irritability. The discomfort just drives you out of your skin, out of your mind. Assaults go up, gun violence -- study in The Lancet said major cities get a 4.5 percent jump in sexual offenses with every 41-degree hike in daily mean temperature.”

“Fucking crazy.”

“Preach.”

As they reached the no-longer-Kia, Curtis was drenched and Chris exhilarated. She took a near-360 from passenger fender to driver’s window, and bent in to examine the blackened corpse.

“Had to guess, dude – mastoid processes, jaw angle, brow ridges. Gotta check that sciatic notch. Oh. Oh, shit. Shit. Fucking shit.”

“You done conjugating, what?”

“What’s missing here?”

Curtis bent sideways. “Skin, hair, upholstery? Hey, what the hell you doing?” Curtis pursued Chris off the pad and into the adjacent calf-high weeds. She suddenly dropped, and the cop shot off toward her, but Chris bobbed back up bearing a trophy. A five-fingered trophy with muscular shreds and tendrils hanging from the point where the arm bone connects to the shoulder bone.

“Blast musta blown it clean off,” Chris sang. “That’s what I’m talking. Grab me a bag.”

Tugging an XXL ziploc free, he pivoted to find Chris on her ass in the weeds, red hair pasted to her skull, skin draining to an unhealthy ochre. Her cargo shorts were soaked.

 “Timing’s a real motherfucker, right?” Chris gasped as Curtis dropped to both knees and Sterling’s people scrambled across the lot. She spasmed again, and grabbed both Curtis’ arm and the disembodied limb at her thigh. “The burns. Fourth degree. They need to—”

“Jesus,” Curtis pleaded. “I saw him. You just fucking breathe.”

“Nooo,” the tech wailed. “Not fire. Fuh-fuh-fffffff...” She screamed, crumpling into the grass. 

**

“He’d been upset, more than--” Jeannette Priester stopped mid-sentence. The widow’s tone had been eerily calm, in Curtis’ view, a rational response to be summoned to identify the only remaining identifiable piece of Dean Priester. “He wouldn’t tell me why he was heading out so early – I don’t think he even intended to wake me up. He didn’t have to be at the auto parts ‘til 9.”

Early Afghan-era Marine ink had resolved the initial question while posing a dozen more. The morgue’s reception area was cadaver cool, and Curtis now felt a cold-induced irritation and a burning desire to get this poor woman on her way. He glanced toward the red-eyed teen who’d been silent throughout the ordeal. “You know what might have been bothering your dad?”

Rachel Priester glared. “He was always on my ass – or hers’ – about something.” Mom’s jaw opened, closed. Curtis sensed this was a routine exercise. “He always had to make a big fucking fight out of everything. Almost got me fired a week ago.”

“Honey, you need let your boss know you won’t be in?” Jeannette inquired.

“Yeah, that’s the priority right now,” Rachel snapped. “I texted him. All the games got cancelled for the heat, so they can live without me. All right?”

 “Here’s my number, you got any questions, OK?” Curtis hastened.

Rachel was gone before her mother could tuck the card into her purse and pursue her. Curtis slapped his thighs, then pushed through the reception door. The coroner was ogling Dean Priester’s solo arm.

“You know, heat-induced labor is supposedly a wives’ tale – no definitive medical evidence,” the pathologist muttered. “Then again, we haven’t had heat quite like this before, and I’d told Christina more than once to at least pace herself.”

“And how’d that go? Uh huh. Hey, Mace, Chris wanted me to check with you about some burns on the victim.”

Mace frowned. “This was an arson victim. Burns might be expected.”

“The arm.”

The coroner peered at the limb. “Well, she must have been in a state of delirium, because this is the only part not—” Mace stopped, bent closer as if Priester’s rigored fingers had beckoned. “Well, this is odd. I guess you couldn’t expect Chris to have been a little more precise at the moment, but there are severe burns, well, of a sort. Frostbite.”

**

“Double cheeseburger with rings, and a medium peanut butter shake. Need my protein.”

The disembodied teen locked up momentarily on superfluous data. “That’ll be $10.55. Pull on up.”

Curtis pulled on up. The louvered drive-thru window squeaked open to a rush of refrigerated air and an utterly dead face typical of summer daytime service. The flagship West Side walk-up was staffed by young hardasses, the East Side Lovell’s by perpetually grudging suburban princesses. Curtis pulled his VISA, but a bass voice cut through the cold front.

“Don’t take it,” Marty Lovell ordered the cadaver-faced teen. “Man’s defending our city.”

Curtis rapped the card on the stainless steel sill. “I told you a dozen times. You take it, now.”

Lovell grunted. The girl breathed deeply in a potent comment on boomer bro games.

“Yo, and Marty, any chance you can bring that burger out yourself? Be on the patio.”

The teen returned Curtis’ plastic and the glass shutters slammed together.

Detective Mead took a spot between the strip plaza church and the electronic slots joint, and trudged to the concrete slab Lovell’d had poured over the former bank branch lot. Curtis cracked a smirk as Lovell trucked over with a bag full of fat and carbs and the cop’s sweaty shake.

“Know we got AC with the indoor plumbing, right?” the owner grimaced.

A trickle tickled Curtis’ spine as he toasted his shake. “This is a conversation best had out of adolescent earshot, Marty. Rachel Priester. She works here, right? Hooked it up when she said all the softball games got cancelled tonight.”

Lovell scratched the back of his hand. “League rule when it hits 95 – wreaks havoc on the week’s receipts. Eat your burger before it vaporizes. Yeah, Priester’s a special problem. But not mine any more.”

Curtis’ brow arched, releasing a rivulet he swiped away. “You fire her?”

“She’s OK when she’s not feuding with her little mean girl buddies or yapping on her phone. I just sent her to Siberia for reeducation.”

“Locust Avenue. Bet her folks about stroked out over that.”

“Her dad — you know Dean? — was totally on-board. He thought maybe she might benefit from a little time among the ‘peasants.’ Ah, you know what I mean.”

Curtis waved a battered onion. Lovell’s on Locust was a summer cooling station for the neighborhood’s socioeconomically diverse souls, regulating emotional and social temps on the hottest Central Illinois evenings. But the walkup was an ice cube in a simmering -- occasionally roiling -- melting pot of three-job/three-room households, clueless gentrifiers with a hard-on for gables, and a growing bilingual/gender-fluid presence that emulsified normally burbling biracial tensions especially when the Fahrenheit flared. It was a lot to put on a Caramel Walnut cone.

“Kid running the Locusht shop?” Curtis inquired through a wad of burger.

Lovell snorted. “Marty Jr.’s not the sharpest knife, and still a real pussyhound, but he can deal with these West Side toughs, and he’s come up with some pretty sharp business moves.”

“Like?”

“You used to spend most of your summers at Locust and Market. How would you say things compare with 25 years ago?”

“Still the best in town.”

“With sales up probably 300 percent, between fairs and festivals and the cake sideline and shit,” Lovell grinned. “But we gotta keep quality high. One point, Marty Jr. wanted to be a master chef, specialize in this molecular gastrology shit. You know, they give you a pile of foam and a pill and that’s your steak dinner. A DUI and a pregnancy scare woke him up, but he brought in some liquid nitrogen tanks here and on Locust. You can make a ton of product quicker, and you don’t have as much ice crystals, so it’s actually smoother.”

“Cool,” Curtis replied. “You do that yourself? Secret recipe and all?”

“Insurance company doesn’t want the kids blinding themselves or breaking a finger off handling the nitro. I was gonna make the next four days’ worth last night, but then we had to get Marty Jr. up at the crack to make sure we were set for the weekend.”

“Why?”

“Fucking blackout this morning. Wasn’t sure when Ameren might get things going again. Then an outage on Locust shut Marty Jr. down before he could get to the fifth batch. Can we please fucking move this inside? I’m about ready to stroke out.”

He didn’t know the half of it.

**

“No, pretty much what I was expecting,” Curtis mumbled, disconnecting before the harried Ameren gal could fire off the obvious comeback. He thumbed in a second number, glancing across Locust at a gaggle of kids clamoring for sweet, chilly relief.

“Yeah, me,” he grunted. “You got it? Great. I wouldn’t normally guess he’d give you trouble, but he’s had all day to let the steam build, so see you can’t quietly separate and secure the crew before you move on Junior. Usually just three this time of day. Nah – you guys got it.”

Curtis didn’t bother to lock up – the only real risk here on East Locust was having to explain to his own guys why the asshole with the Trump sign on his overwatered lawn had Karen’d him. He strolled past the ice cream truck playing that tinkling carnival crap Curtis had always found more Pennywise than Bozo. Day like this, even off-band Rocket Pops tasted like Haagen-Dazs.

The Williamsburg blue siding was only beginning to go ash, dandelions were winning over the lawn, and a single bay held a dinged Focus. Curtis took a cauterizing breath, strode up the cracked walk to a narrow porch, and pressed a yellowed button.

The door opened after a beat to a thirtysomething who conjured a mid-day brownout of a smile. Kent Fortner still wore the same teal polo shirt and khakis, but his thick brown hair was a one-sided tangle that betrayed a day on the couch.

“Shit, Detective, come in. Like Hell out there.”

“Imagine not too different here,” Curtis murmured despite the ocean freshness inside the small ranch.

“What? Oh, yeah. Tried to get some rest, but I can’t get it out of my head. You get hold of that psycho’s family?”

“Got hold of yours,” Curtis responded, and the living room seemed to cool 10 degrees. Fortner had begun his descent to the rumpled couch, but now he straightened.

“You told me you had the day with Ian and Jeremiah, but your wife, well, ex, told me that was yesterday, according to your joint custody schedule. The boys were worn out, you told her – could they stay over and you drop them in the morning? She was only too eager, since Trace -- that’s his name, right? -- wanted to stay over at her place. Well, your place, right, at one time?”

“Had another case today, you mighta seen it on the noon news. Guy got crispy-fried on the West Side? The wife was in shock, devastated, but the daughter, her first thought was to call the boss, let him know she wouldn’t be in. Yeah, Dad was no prize, but shit, right? Then, I thought, what if she had another reason to call the boss? This boss, now, is a genuine piece of work. Barely skated out of a statutory rape charge few years back, and his very own dad calls him a ‘pussyhound.’

“Now, this girl’s dad is what you’d call an alpha male. You don’t mess with his own, and somewhere along the way, he found out Boss had been messing big-time. Prolly checked her texts, like I did this afternoon. Girl wasn’t too happy about that, but I pointed out her amor du jour had cremated her dad.

“Now, you’re asking how this relates. It’s providence, Kent. God or Fate or whatever threw us a bone – with flesh and some anomalous evidence attached. Like providence led Richard Beemer to the Gemm’s Mart to scrounge the dumpsters, then across the parking lot past your car. Shoulda wondered why you went for an early morning grocery run with your sons, as it turns out, four blocks from the ex’s. And why you parked so far back when the lot was virtually empty. How your boys managed to sleep through you wrestling a gun out of a crazy man’s hand and shooting him twice. No -- providence was Beemer looking in the windshield of the only car in that part of the lot. Witness saw what he was conditioned to see -- what he didn’t see was Beemer trying to wrestle your .38 out of your hands. Then we show up, and whatever was in your head, your soul, well, that was out of your hands. What was in your head, you don’t mind me asking? Were you going to do it in her driveway, maybe finish her, too? Then you decided this was a colder way out?”

“She fucking texted me – Trace had popped the question, and could I bring the boys home right away so they could tell them together? Home. Thank God I couldn’t do it…”

“Well, since you can’t thank Richard,” Detective Mead conceded. “You seem like a one-gun type of guy, and even if we weren’t down a…person…I’m pretty sure it’s downtown. Kent?”

Fortner’s skeleton at that moment seemed to collapse, and he dropped to the couch.

“All right, then,” Curtis nodded.

**

“I play it cool,

And dig all jive;

That’s the reason

I stay alive.

My motto,

As I live and learn, is:

Dig and Be Dug

In Return.

“Deep for, yep, a 50-cent Dollar Tree card.”

“Power’d gone out at the Walgreen’s.”

“Well, the bunny with the foam finger is pretty awesome,” Chris acknowledged. “So that’s what, the Backstreet Boys?”

“Yeah, not in front of Grissom.” Curtis sank back in the over-padded nursing chair in the glow of the Birthing Center lamp and the disheveled tech and her son bonding against a bared shoulder. “Langston Hughes, in fact. Thought of it today, folks losing their heads, including me while you were screaming yours off. Call it my 50 cents worth for Grissom there. Always stay frosty. Like his mom.”

“Aw. I was fucking with you about Hughes, by the way. So spill. I didn’t see you anywhere on WEEK when they brought the Lovell kid out. Liquid nitrogen, right? Why he burned the body?”

Curtis nodded approvingly. “Marty Junior didn’t have time to replace the damaged tank. Called our friend Sterling, got a look at the FD’s hazmat logs, and put the victim’s daughter together with tasty postgame treats. A blackout alibied Lovell Senior, but the outages never rolled anywhere near Locust and Market. Marty Junior had a foul-tempered, frostbitten body to get rid of, then an Uber ride back to Locust. Yeah, you heard it. Professor Moriarty, the boy is not.

“For now, suffice it to say we all may be DQ-ing it for the next five years, and I’m kinda glad Grissom’s daddy skipped the jurisdiction. Enough heat-induced aggravation and idiocy for one day.”     

“Yeah, you guys suck. Hey -- just fucking with you. Like I kinda been about ‘Grissom’ the last couple months. Curtis, meet Jordon.”  

“Praise the Lord,” Curtis yawned.