His thoughts were rudely interrupted by Kyle, who practically burst through the door from the stairwell, walked quickly to his desk and threw his bag on a chair.

“Fantastic,” Kyle declared, to nobody in particular. “Absolutely fantastic.”

Quinn didn’t reply. You didn’t bother replying to Kyle. In a way, his manner of conversation was like a bad computer program. No matter what input you gave, his output would always be the same.

“I mean fantastic,” Kyle said again, for the first time really turning to Quinn.

“What is fantastic?” Quinn asked, not exactly expecting it to make any difference.

“The fire last night. Whooh, boy,” and Kyle shook his head as if he could not believe someone had not seen this “fantastic” thing. “Makes me wish I were still a fireman.”

“Thought you were a policeman,” Quinn shot back.

“Of course, of course,” Kyle said, as if this were a minor detail. “But we handled fires all the time. But last night. Last night was…”

He stopped as if searching for the right word.

“Fantastic?” Quinn offered, smiling slightly to himself.

“Yes,” Kyle said, and pointed to Quinn, gesturing with his finger to his nose. “Yes. Absolutely fantastic. This stupid kid was playing with matches in the garage and managed to light some dry wood lying around.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad,” Quinn said.

“Yeah, well, you should have seen what happened next,” Kyle said, savoring the moment, his hands twitching slightly while his eyes shifted away from Quinn and stared into space.

“The kid ran out, got his parents. And they ran in. And the father saw it, right? He knew what was going to happen.”

“What happened?” Quinn asked, still vaguely looking more at his computer, which looked like it was crashing again, than Kyle.