Harry wanted her off that tower for more reasons than her own safety. Once she was off it, he could scramble up there himself, get onto the roof, and save Delbert from his own insanity. If Harry couldn’t get up there, they’d be waiting until the fire department arrived with scaling equipment, or simply shot water onto the roof to douse those cigarettes.

Harry could hear fire engine sirens in the distance and was betting they were still two or three minutes away.

At the house next door, a second-floor window had been raised and a girl who looked about the same age as Harry’s son, Dylan, was watching the show unfold with great interest. Where the fuck were her parents? Harry thought. They needed to get her away from the window. But the kid was the least of his worries.

“Get down!” he said again to the woman, who had not moved.

There was so much smoke emanating from the man’s mouth and trailing out of his nose that his head was becoming lost in the cloud.

“Delbert!” Harry shouted. “Delbert, it’s Chief Cook! Stop what you’re doing! Spit out those cigarettes!”

The woman was now working her way down the TV tower, one horizontal brace at a time. Harry headed that way, ready to start his ascent. He nearly pushed her off when she had one rung to go.

Harry grabbed a metal bracing above his head, got his boot on a lower one, and up he went. The braces on the tower were a good foot apart, broader than on a ladder, but Harry scaled the tower quickly. As he reached the roof—it wasn’t a steep slope, easily navigated provided you paid attention to what you were doing—and was putting his first foot onto it, he got a better view of Delbert.

All the cigarettes clustered together were like one Marlboro four inches long and three inches wide. The tips, red and glowing, began to meld. Ashes, mixed with still-burning flecks of tobacco, drifted onto his shirt, the skin of his cheeks and neck, and into his hair.

“Shit,” Harry said under his breath, and began to make his way across the roof.

Delbert’s hair began to catch fire, and a few seconds later his head erupted into flames.

“Christ!” Harry shouted, closing the distance between Delbert and himself, peeling off his sport jacket and throwing it over the man’s face in a bid to put out the fire.

“He never moved,” Harry had told his wife, Janice, when he got home much later that evening. “He just lay there.”

“You did what you could,” she’d said.