The Forged License

Chapter 5 — The Fire

The fire made the six o’clock news.

Marcus was in his truck outside the Graybar supply house on Buckeye Road, engine running, air conditioning fighting the October heat, a pallet of 12-gauge wire waiting on the loading dock, when the anchor’s voice cut through the radio: “A small electrical fire broke out this afternoon in a unit at the Copperline Towers luxury condominium complex in downtown Phoenix. No injuries reported. Officials say the blaze was contained to a single kitchen.”

Marcus turned the volume up.

A reporter stood in front of the tower, microphone in hand, the glass facade rising behind her into the hard blue sky. “Residents tell us this is the third electrical incident at Copperline Towers in two months,” she said. “Management has not returned our calls.”

Third incident. Marcus’s hands tightened on the wheel.

The segment cut to a statement from Whitaker Development, read by the anchor in a flat voice: “Whitaker Development takes resident safety seriously. Preliminary findings suggest tenant misuse of a portable heating appliance. Our electrical systems meet or exceed all applicable codes.”

Tenant misuse. Marcus snorted out loud in the cab of his truck. In October. In Phoenix, where it was still ninety-one degrees at six in the evening, somebody had supposedly been running a space heater hard enough to start a kitchen fire.

His phone rang. Jenna.

“You seeing this?” she asked. In the background, he could hear the news playing on their kitchen TV.

“Yeah.”

“Marcus, that’s the contract you lost. The one Whitaker underbid by four hundred dollars.”

“I know.”

A pause. Then Jenna said, very quietly, “If that wiring is as bad as you think it is, those people are living on top of a bomb.”

He thought about Teresa’s shaking hands. He thought about fourteen bid sheets, photographed and sold. He thought about his father’s voice: Somebody’s baby sleeping over your work.

“I have to do something,” Marcus said.

“Then do it right,” Jenna said. “Get proof. Real proof. Not suspicion, not a feeling — proof. And Marcus — be careful. A man who’ll steal your bids will do worse if you corner him.”

She hung up. Marcus sat in the parking lot for a long time, watching the heat shimmer off the asphalt, watching the supply house forklifts move pallets like patient insects. He thought about the tower — twenty-two stories, hundreds of units, families — and the melting outlets, and the wrong-sized breakers he’d only heard rumors of so far.

He pulled out his phone and called the number for the City of Phoenix Development Services Department, electrical inspections division. He got a receptionist with the weary cheer of someone who’d been transferring calls all day.

“I’d like to file a formal complaint,” Marcus told her. “About the electrical work at Copperline Towers. I’m a licensed master electrician, and I have reason to believe there are serious code violations — possibly dangerous ones.”

The receptionist took his name, his license number, and his phone number. “Can I get a reference number for the complaint?” Marcus asked.

“We don’t issue those,” she said, a little too quickly.

Marcus wrote down the date, the time, and the name she’d given — Pruitt — on the back of a supply house receipt. No reference number. No paper trail. He folded the receipt into his wallet anyway.

“Inspector Pruitt handles that district,” she said. “He’ll be in touch.”

“When?”

“Hard to say. He’s very busy.”

Marcus thanked her and hung up.

At the loading dock, the forklift driver — a young guy named Eddie — nodded at the television playing in the break room. “Crazy, huh? That tower fire. My cousin lives there. Says her lights flicker every night.”

“She should call the city,” Marcus said, signing for the pallet.

“She did. They told her it was normal.” Eddie shook his head. “Rich people building, you know? They don’t care about people like us.”

Marcus loaded the wire into his truck, the copper heavy and honest in his hands. People like us. He thought about Mrs. Kowalski on the fourteenth floor, about Mr. Chen’s dead outlets, about a building full of people being told their fear was “normal.”

He wasn’t people like us or people like them. He was the man who fixed what was broken. And Copperline Towers was broken.

He drove home with the radio off, the setting sun glaring straight into his windshield. Lily was doing homework at the kitchen table. Jenna was making salad. Everything was normal and warm and safe, and Marcus stood in the doorway for a moment just looking at them — his wife’s flour-dusted hands, his daughter’s tongue caught between her teeth over a math problem — because he had a feeling, a cold and certain feeling, that normal was about to get very hard to hold onto.

“Dad,” Lily said without looking up, “you’re blocking the light.”

Marcus smiled and moved. He sat down at the table, stole a cherry tomato from the salad bowl, and asked Lily about her day. But underneath the ordinary evening, his mind was already working the problem the way he’d work a faulty circuit: start at the source, trace every connection, and don’t stop until you find the break.

Tomorrow: lunch with Teresa. The truth, all of it.

And after that? After that, Copperline Towers.