The phone rang at ten minutes to three. Jack Morrison was sitting in his office with his feet on the desk, a half-empty bottle of rye on the floor beside his chair, and a case file on the desk that he wasn't reading because reading required attention and attention was something he had stopped providing himself about six months ago.

The phone rang. Jack didn't move. It rang again. He picked it up on the fourth ring.

"Morrison."

"Mr. Morrison? This is—look, I don't know who you are, but someone told me to call you. Someone said you're the kind of man who gets things done."

"Everyone's someone's something. Who's this?"

A pause. The kind of pause that means the man on the other end is deciding whether to hang up or keep talking. Jack had learned to recognize it from years of sitting in rooms full of men who were deciding exactly that.

"My name's Gary. I work for—never mind that. What I need to know is: would you look at a piece of land for me? Just look at it. Tell me what you see."

"What do I get?"

"Five hundred dollars. Cash."

Jack looked at the rye bottle. It was half empty. He looked at the case file. It was empty. He looked out the window at the Los Angeles sky, which was the color of a dirty dishpan.

"Send me the address," he said.

The land was in the San Fernando Valley, a flat expanse of cracked earth and scrub brush that stretched to the horizon in every direction. Jack drove out there at noon on a Tuesday, the kind of bright, merciless California sun that made everything look sharper than it deserved to look.

The address led him to a gate that opened onto a dirt road. At the end of the road was the burning ground.

It wasn't much to look at. A patch of earth maybe two acres across, covered in dry grass that was slowly turning to ash. The grass wasn't on fire—not exactly. It was smoldering, like a cigarette left too long on an ashtray, and from beneath the surface came a heat that made the air shimmer.

Jack got out of his car and walked to the edge of the patch. He crouched down and touched the ground. It was warm. Not hot—warm, like a body that had recently been alive.

He stood up and looked around. The land was surrounded by a chain-link fence that had been pushed over in places. Beyond the fence, the land was normal: dry, dusty, unremarkable. Inside the fence, the ground was slowly burning from the inside out.

He took out his notebook and wrote: Ground fire. Source unknown. Approx. two acres. No visible flames. Heat source subterranean.

He was writing that when a car pulled up behind him. It was a black Packard, the kind of car that cost more than most people earned in a year. The driver got out and walked toward Jack. He was tall, thin, and wore a suit that was too expensive for the location and too clean for the dust.

"Mr. Morrison," the man said.

"That depends on who's asking."

"Victor Crawford. I own the land next to yours."

Jack didn't turn around. He was looking at the burning ground. "You own the land next to it. Not the land itself."

"No. I don't." Crawford's voice was smooth, the kind of voice that had been trained by people who paid him to sound smooth. "But I will, once the city condemns it."

"Condemns it?"

"For public safety. A piece of land that's burning from the inside is a hazard. The city will condemn it, and then—" He gestured at the burning patch with a long, elegant hand. "—it will be mine. At a price the city sets, which will be considerably less than what it's worth once the fire is out."

Jack turned around and looked at Crawford properly. He was a handsome man in the way that some people are handsome without trying—the kind of handsomeness that comes from money and power and the knowledge that the world bends to your will.

"And the fire," Jack said. "What about the fire?"

"That's what you're here to find out. I've had geologists look at it. Engineers. Scientists. Nobody can figure out where it's coming from. I thought maybe you could."

"I'm a detective, Mr. Crawford. Not a fireman. Not a scientist. A detective."

"Same thing, in a way. You look at things. You find out what happened. That's all I need."

Jack looked back at the burning ground. He crouched down again and put his ear to the earth. He heard it then: a low, distant sound, like the breathing of something very large and very deep.

"Where did this start?" he asked.

Crawford hesitated. Just for a moment, but Jack caught it. "I don't know. It just—appeared. Three months ago."

"Three months. That's a long time to wait before calling a fireman."

"I've been waiting for the right person."

Jack stood up. He brushed the dirt from his knees. "How much are you paying me?"

"Five hundred dollars."

"Make it a thousand, and I'll tell you what I think is happening."

Crawford smiled. It was a practiced smile, the kind that costs nothing and means less. "Done."

Jack looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, "You're burning the coal underground."

Crawford's smile didn't change. "I don't know what you mean."

"You have a technology. Something that turns coal into gas underground. You're testing it on my land. It's not working. The gas is escaping. The coal is burning. And you've been waiting three months for someone to figure out why before you admit that it doesn't work."

Crawford was quiet. The wind moved across the burning ground and carried the smell of smoke.

"It's a promising technology," Crawford said finally. "It just needs refinement."

"Refinement. That's one word for it." Jack looked at the burning patch. "How much land are you planning to cover with this refinement?"

"All of it. The entire valley. Imagine it, Mr. Morrison. Clean energy from beneath the earth. No smoke, no soot, no mines. Just—energy. Pure, clean, endless."

"Until it burns."

"Until it burns. Yes."

Jack turned and walked back to his car. He got in and sat for a moment, looking at Crawford through the windshield.

"I'll write up my report," he said. "You'll get your check."

"Thank you, Mr. Morrison. You've been most helpful."

Jack drove back to the city in silence. He stopped at a bar on the way and had three whiskeys, neat. He went back to his office and wrote a report that told Crawford exactly what he wanted to hear: the fire was natural, caused by a seam of coal that had ignited itself through oxidation, a rare but well-documented phenomenon, no cause for concern.

He sent the report to Crawford at noon the next day. At three, Crawford called and said the land was his. At four, he called and said the condemnation proceedings had begun. At five, he called and said Jack's check was in the mail.

Jack didn't get the check.

He found out a week later, when he ran into Maggie Stone at a bar on Wilshire. Maggie was a reporter for the Times, the kind of reporter who asked questions that made men like Crawford lose sleep.

"Have you heard from Crawford?" she asked.

"No. Why?"

"I'm investigating a land deal. He's buying property in the San Fernando Valley at below-market prices. The buyers all say the land is hazardous—burning ground, toxic soil, something that makes it worthless. But I can't find any official condemnation orders. And the prices he's paying are suspiciously low."

Jack felt something move inside him. It had been a long time since anything had moved inside him. It took him a moment to identify it. It was guilt.

"I wrote a report for him," he said.

Maggie looked at him. "What kind of report?"

"A geological survey. Said the fire was natural. Said it was no threat."

Maggie's face went very still. "When?"

"Three months ago."

She was gone before Jack could stop her. He watched her walk out of the bar, her coat flaring behind her like the wings of a bird taking flight, and he knew two things: that he had just made the worst mistake of his life, and that Maggie Stone was going to pay for it.

He was right about both.

She found the drilling equipment buried beneath the burning ground. She found the contracts between Crawford's company and a geological firm that specialized in underground gasification. She found the safety reports that had been suppressed, the warnings that had been ignored, the men who had tried to tell Crawford that the technology wasn't ready and had been paid to stay quiet.

And she found the men.

Not the executives or the engineers or the councilmen who had taken Crawford's money. The men who had actually drilled the wells, actually lit the first fires, actually stood on the burning ground and watched the earth open beneath their feet and said nothing.

Jack went to see them. There were three of them. They lived in a small apartment complex near downtown, the kind of place where the walls are thin and the rent is low and the men who live there have learned to ignore the sounds of other men's lives.

They didn't want to talk. They had signed agreements. They had been paid to stay silent. If they talked, they would be sued into oblivion.

Jack sat in a room with them for two hours. He didn't ask them to break their agreements. He didn't ask them to risk their lives. He just asked them to tell him what they had seen.

And they told him. They told him about the drilling, about the moment when the coal caught fire and the heat rose through the ground like a living thing, about the engineers who said it was under control and the men who knew it wasn't, about the meetings where Crawford smiled and said refine it and the engineers smiled and said yes sir and everyone in the room knew that refine it was a euphemism for figure it out before anyone gets hurt and nobody had figured it out at all.

When Jack left, it was past midnight. The streets of Los Angeles were quiet, the kind of quiet that comes from exhaustion rather than peace. He walked to his car and sat in the driver's seat for a long time, thinking about what he had heard.

He went home and wrote everything down. Every word the men had said. Every detail he had seen on the burning ground. Every interaction he had had with Crawford. He put it all in a manila envelope and addressed it to every newspaper in the state, to every regulatory agency, to the Attorney General's office.

He made three copies. He kept one for himself.

The next morning, he delivered the originals. He watched them get stamped and logged and sent. He stood in the post office and watched the clerk drop the envelope into the outgoing bin and felt something he hadn't felt in a long time.

Not hope. Hope was too big a word. Something smaller than hope. Something like the satisfaction of doing the only thing you could do in a situation where doing nothing was the default and doing something was a burden.

He went back to his office. He packed a bag. He wrote a note for Lucille—his wife, who was lying in bed upstairs, her breathing shallow, her face pale in the morning light that came through the blinds—and he left it on the kitchen counter.

He didn't say where he was going. He didn't say when he would be back. He just wrote: Sorry I'm late.

He drove east out of Los Angeles. He drove until the city was a smudge on the horizon. He drove until the road ran out and the desert took over, vast and empty and indifferent to the small troubles of small men.

He got out of the car and walked into the desert. He didn't look back.

The story ran in the Times on the front page. Crawford was indicted. The drilling equipment was seized. The burning ground was sealed off. The men who had drilled the wells testified before a grand jury.

Jack Morrison didn't see any of it. He was somewhere in the Mojave, walking, thinking, disappearing.

Lucille died six months later. Maggie Stone wrote the story. It ran on page eight, beneath an advertisement for Crawford's oil pipeline.

The burning ground is still there. You can see it from the highway if you know where to look. A patch of cracked earth, surrounded by a chain-link fence, slowly consuming itself from the inside out.