Firestorm Read online

  Lawrence grinned up at them, his teeth white and perfect, then reached back and Anna tensed.

  “Breakfast,” he said, presenting them with a badger dead of severe head trauma.

  Joseph started to giggle, high and sweet like a young girl. Anna became infected and laughter bubbled out.

  Gonzales looked from one to the other, a tentative smile on his face as if he was willing to join in if only someone would share the joke with him. “What? What’s so funny?” This innocuous phrase tickled Anna and Joseph all out of proportion.

  Anna could hear the hysteria, feel it hard in her rib cage. It was out of control but it felt good.

  GONZALES WAS HAILED the conquering hero by everyone but Hugh Pepperdine. He made a sullen remark about the Great White Hunter that brought the blood into Lawrence’s cheeks but Anna thought she saw it for what it was, good old-fashioned envy.

  Lawrence and John cleaned and skinned the badger with Black Elk’s Buck knife. The San Juans, it seemed, went for the most part unarmed.

  Just for something to do, Anna watched for a while, but the steaming entrails and the casual gore of men used to dressing game got to her and she retreated back to the relative civility of camp.

  Howard and Joseph were talking quietly. Paula appeared to be asleep. Jennifer hadn’t moved from where she sat back from the fire pit. Anna settled close to her, closer than she normally would, hoping to share some of her warmth with the other woman.

  Jennifer’s bare hands rested on her knees. Anna pulled off her glove and touched the back of Short’s fingers. They were ice cold.

  “Jen,” she said softly. A second or two elapsed before Short responded to the sound of her voice. Jennifer’s eyes were unfocused, her cheek muscles sagging like those of a much older woman.

  “After we eat, we’ve got to talk,” Anna said.

  “I thought you were a vegetarian.” Short spoke in a monotone.

  “Under duress I’ve been known to eat my little friends. Jen, you’ve got to snap out of it,” Anna said.

  Jennifer’s eyes were glazing over. Clearly, she just didn’t give a damn.

  Anna changed tack. Softness left her voice. “A man’s been murdered. The only person I really know is you. I can’t afford to trust anybody else. You’ve got to help me.”

  A flicker, the merest gleam of interest, enlivened Jennifer’s blue eyes. From the distant past, Anna remembered her sister telling her one of the few things other than drugs and exercise that could help pull someone out of a clinical depression was helping others, virtue its own reward, medically speaking.

  “After we eat,” Anna said just as if Jennifer had agreed, and scrambled to her feet before Short had time to reject the idea.

  Anna wasn’t sure she wanted to know who’d knifed Leonard Nims. Even less did she wish the perpetrator to know she knew. But perhaps the puzzle would pull Jennifer out of herself, give her something healthier—if that was the right word given the circumstances—to focus on. If they turned anything up, they could hand it over to Frederick Stanton when they got off the ridge.

  Stanton. The idea of rescue, of a savior, of warm caring arms, made Anna weak and weepy. With an unconscious twitch she shrugged the thought off.

  BADGER WAS AS aggressive and feisty inside Anna’s belly as the animal was purported to be when defending its position in the food chain. Having given up her carnivorous ways for nearly a decade, her stomach found the gamey meat a challenge to digest.

  Seeing the look on her face as she carefully chewed each bite Stephen said: “It’s fat-free and organically grown.”

  Anna shot him a dirty look and doggedly chewed on. Stephen’s chunk seemed to be putting up a fight of its own. Cursing, he yanked his left glove off with his teeth and tackled the meat bare-handed.

  “I’ll eat yours, Anna,” Pepperdine offered.

  Anna scowled and swallowed. Nauseating, politically incorrect, stringy—it didn’t matter. Strength was legal tender when the niceties of society were stripped away, and she had no intention of going bankrupt before she had to.

  Failing with Anna, Hugh began eyeing Jennifer’s meat. Short held the badger without interest.

  “Eat that,” Anna ordered.

  Mechanically, Jennifer bit off a chunk, chewed and swallowed.

  “Eat all your badger or there’ll be no rat pudding for dessert,” Lindstrom said firmly, and was rewarded by a ghost of a smile.

  Everyone’s spirits were up. Not only because of the food—they’d not been without long enough to suffer more than discomfort—but because they had taken back the reins. Lawrence was a San Juan. He’d brought home the bacon. No longer were they helpless children cowering and waiting for someone to rescue them. They were, as in Brando’s famous line, “contenders.” Men facing the wilderness. Even the women. Macho was a state of mind.

  Though Anna didn’t so much as fish—she hadn’t the heart to stop that silvery flash of life—and the meat curdled in her belly, she felt it. All for one and one for all: the Musketeer credo permeated the group around the fire. Except for Hugh Pepperdine. He’d not forgiven Lawrence for being the day’s hero and tried to build himself up and tear Gonzales down with a series of inane remarks.

  They were so close in age some competition was inevitable, and Pepperdine’s attributes, assuming he had any, Anna thought uncharitably, didn’t translate well outside the city limits. Pepperdine lost on all counts: looks, courage and endurance. Probably the most damaging thing was that Hugh tried desperately to be liked and failed. Lawrence never had to try.

  When Anna had forced down all the badger she could and Jennifer had eaten all she was going to, Anna announced: “I’m going to the bathroom,” and fixed Short with a pointed stare.

  As they walked away, Lindstrom called after them: “Firefighters don’t go to the bathroom in groups.” Laughter followed them out of sight around the boulder.

  Seated on rocks a hundred yards up the creek, an icy fog isolating them from sight as well as sound, Anna told Jennifer everything she’d seen, thought or been told. She recounted the criminal histories Stanton had gathered, how the body was found, the knife, the blood on the glove where Nims had evidently tried to pull it out, the depression in the sand from the weight of the second body. She told Jennifer that the corpse had been searched by someone and of Neil Page’s furtive hiding motions. Though Jennifer had been there when LeFleur came in with a split lip, Anna went over that.

  Jennifer sat like a lump and Anna couldn’t tell if she was listening or not. When she finished the recital, she waited. After a full minute, the younger woman stirred. Pushing her matted hair back off her face, she stared down the creek bed.

  “Josh and I were close,” she said, the words made visible as her breath steamed in the air. “He was just a year older than me and it was like we were the same age. He got mono when we were kids and got held back a year so in high school we were even in the same grade.”

  She was talking. Anna didn’t much care about what. Cold seeped through the seat of her britches from the rock, stealing what little warmth Lawrence’s badger had brought her, but she sat stock-still for fear of interrupting.

  “We went to college together in computer science. Josh was smarter than me but I worked harder so we made the same grades. We’d go to parties together and wait for Mr. Right.” Jennifer laughed.

  There was nothing Anna could say. She thought of her sister and tried to think of the words that would comfort her if Molly died. There weren’t any.

  “What was he doing in this part of the country?” she asked to keep Jennifer talking.

  Tears tracked the grime on Short’s face and her nose was running. “Josh got a job programming a new security system for Harrah’s in Reno—Reno’s where he met Stephen. They were both into computers and hit it off right away. Anyway, the money was good and Josh said he needed to get out of Memphis for a while so he went.

  “He fell in love with the mountains. I’m a river girl. I got to be by a big muddy riv
er at least a few months out of the year or I just don’t feel right. But Josh said he’d found his spiritual home. He got all excited about trying to save it—you know, stopping logging or saving those speckled owls—whatever. It wasn’t just a social thing with Josh. He really cared. That’s part of what got me interested in being a park ranger, though I thought I’d mostly just like playing at it for a while. New places, new people, something different to do. Josh was doing some kind of environmental thing down where the burn started. I guess that place where he was camped was going to be logged off or something.”

  Instead Joshua Short lost control of his campfire, lost his life and destroyed the forest he was hoping to save. Anna kept her cynicism to herself. Now wasn’t the time. There would never be a time.

  “I’m sure gonna miss him,” Jennifer said simply.

  “Yeah.”

  They sat without talking. Anna tried to massage some heat into her hands. Jennifer fished a bandanna, more black than red, from the pocket of her brush jacket and smeared the mess on her face. Where she managed to wipe it clean she left streaks of white.

  “What do you want me to do about Len’s murder?” Short asked.

  It was working. Jennifer was looking and sounding alive again. Anna rubbed the corners of her mouth with a thumb and forefinger to pull out the smile she felt building there.

  “I’m pretty sure Nims was carrying food instead of a fire shelter like he was required to. We know he was knifed during the firestorm, probably by someone who’d meant originally to save the guy’s life. We know he was stabbed by his own knife and something was stolen from the corpse. Start with Neil Page. Go out and see if you can find whatever he was hiding out in the woods. Talk to him. We need to find out exactly where everybody deployed. The only person I actually saw crawl out of his shake ’n’ bake was Howard.”

  “He could have killed Len, then got back into his own shelter,” Jennifer said.

  “I counted. Eight shelters. Nine people. There’s no way of knowing whose is whose. By the time I figured it out all the shelters had been gathered and reused to make the bivouac.”

  “Okay. Howard’s out,” Jennifer conceded. “His hands are bad. I doubt he could’ve held a knife well enough anyway. He can’t even close them.”

  “You do Page,” Anna said. “I’ll take John and see what I can find out. Be discreet. The last thing we want to do is stir up a hornet’s nest.”

  “Might beat hunting badgers for breakfast.”

  Anna let the smile claim her mouth. Jennifer Short was coming around.

  CHAPTER

  Sixteen

  LINDSTROM MET ANNA and Jennifer halfway back to the bivouac. “Sorry to break up the party,” he said with no trace of his usual humor. “It’s Howard. He’s taken a turn for the worse.”

  Helplessness and fatigue bore down on Anna. The bad news brought back some of the dead look to Jennifer’s eyes. Morale had grown so fragile. “Jen, follow up on that stuff we were talking about,” Anna said sharply. If the comment aroused Lindstrom’s curiosity, he didn’t have the energy to pursue it.

  Black Elk was lying near the boulder, his breath rattling ominously in his chest. Under the soot his flesh was chalky and dry, the rims of his eyes red. Joseph and Lawrence stood nearby talking in the hushed tones people use around a deathbed. Neil had disappeared again. Hugh and John were gone as well. Paula huddled as far from the sick man as she could get and still remain within the enclosure. The atmosphere of optimism brought on by their unexpected meal had evaporated.

  “Where’s LeFleur?” Anna demanded as she stooped and pushed under the jury-rigged shelters. There was nothing the crew boss could do but it annoyed her that he’d jumped ship.

  “He and Hugh went up on the ridge to radio Base,” Joseph said.

  Anna glanced at her watch. The badger incident had chased the call from her mind. Aggravation grew along with the absurd notion that calling Base, calling Frederick Stanton, was her exclusive domain.

  “Makes sense,” she said, and knelt near Black Elk. “Hey, Howard, how’re you doing?” Picking up his wrist, she held her fingers over his radial pulse and watched the seconds flit by on her digital watch: one hundred and twenty beats per minute and thready.

  “I’m good,” Howard said. “I breathe better when I sit up some.”

  Lindstrom knelt at the man’s other side. “I laid him down after he lost his lunch,” he told Anna.

  “Don’t like badger?” Anna laid the back of her hand against Howard’s neck.

  “Guess not.”

  Black Elk’s breathing was shallow and rapid, his skin cool to the touch.

  “Joseph, get me the yellow packs,” Anna said. He brought them from where they’d been cached at the far end of the boulder and Anna and Stephen stuffed them beneath the injured man till they’d made a pad that propped him in a semi-sitting position. No longer able to hide his pain, Howard moaned when they moved him.

  The bandages on his arms and hands were damp. Anna pinched up the skin on the back of his arm where the flesh was intact. It remained tented for several seconds after she released pressure. He was losing too much fluid.

  “Better, big fella?” Stephen asked when they’d settled him.

  Howard nodded.

  “I’ve always wanted somebody to call me that,” Anna said. Howard smiled for her but it cost him.

  “Where’s my radio?” he asked. “If I had my radio I could listen for you guys. There might be something.”

  His mind was wandering and Anna felt a clammy tickle of fear. “It’s right here, Howard.” She took the radio off her belt and put it on his chest. He cradled it with his ruined arms and seemed comforted.

  “I can listen,” he said. “You never know.”

  Anna rocked back on her heels and looked around. Their helmets were of plastic. “Somebody had those old-fashioned metal hard hats,” she said aloud. “Where are they?”

  “John wears one,” Jennifer volunteered, and: “Here it is.” The other belonged to Black Elk. They found it half buried in the sand next to him. “Get me some embers,” Anna told Joseph. “Fill both these hard hats. I want one at his feet and one close up. We need to keep him warm.

  “Paula?”

  Paula Boggins looked up through a tangle of filthy hair. Anna had paid little attention to the girl once her superficial burns had been dressed and warm clothes found for her. When a whimper or a word did catch Anna’s attention, she had written Boggins off as weak but in no danger. Seeing the dark blue eyes through the haze of hair, Anna noticed something else. Much as she hated the overused term “survivor,” she knew one when she saw one. She’d seen eyes like Paula’s in old photographs from World War II, and on the six o’clock news. She’d seen them when she’d pulled injured climbers off rock faces. The eyes of the people who made it. They crawled, fought, ate their fellows; they did whatever they had to and they lived.

  “Paula, could you do me a favor?” Anna asked with sudden respect.

  The girl responded to the unaccustomed tone with a slight straightening of her shoulders. “What?” she asked warily.

  “Howard’s burns are weeping. He’s losing heat and fluid. I’m going to get some snow melted and keep it warm. Could you help him drink a little every few minutes or so?”

  Paula looked behind her as if there might be someone else Anna was addressing. “Sure,” she said.

  By the time Joseph came back with the coals, the water was warmed and Paula had curled up next to the big firefighter with something resembling concern registered on her dirty face.

  “Ember mines are getting few and far between,” Joseph said as Anna placed the hard hats close enough to warm Howard but not so close they’d burn and banked sand around them to hold them steady.

  “Where’d Lawrence take off to?” Lindstrom asked.

  “He went to get Anna’s radio back from Barney,” Joseph said neutrally.

  “Jesus,” Anna growled. “I’d better go run interference.”

&n
bsp; She followed the now well-beaten trail up toward the ridge. Fog lay over everything, damp and disheartening. Raw air sawed at her throat as her breath came faster. The temperature hung around thirty degrees, not fluctuating with day or night. White rime was beginning to form on the black carcasses of the trees. Cold soaked through the sweat to chill Anna’s skin and she found herself lost in a fantasy of a hot bath and a glass of hearty burgundy.

  For a long moment she wished she hadn’t sworn off alcohol. It didn’t seem fair to feel guilt simply for wanting something when there was no chance in hell of getting it. And she did want it: the bath, the booze. Every cell in her body set up a vibration of yearning that brought saliva to her mouth.

  Needing a distraction, she took the same medicine she’d prescribed for Jennifer: murder.

  With the exception of Black Elk, any one of them could have killed Len. To push a sharp blade between the ribs of an unsuspecting man didn’t require a great deal of strength.

  The firestorm had descended in fury and left in a pall of suffocating smoke. Anna remembered seeing several people when she first stumbled into the wash but with everyone dressed alike, masked with bandannas and seen through veils of blowing smoke and ash, she couldn’t say who was who. Or where. Or when.

  The number of suspects could be significantly reduced by the simple expedient of finding out who was actually seen getting into or out of their shelter. It was possible lies would be told but Anna doubted it. The San Juans got along well enough for the most part, but they weren’t close-knit—not enough to lie for one another. Disparate ages, jobs, agencies, backgrounds kept them from forming the esprit de corps often found in hot shots, the elite initial attack crews who trained and worked together for the entire season.

  Howard, Joseph and Lawrence seemed to have formed the fastest friendship but even that struck Anna as more a friendship of convenience than a real kinship of like souls. She doubted it would lead to an exchange of Christmas cards.