Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (4 page)

She stirred, got her arms under her, and laboriously shifted the upper half of her body over from one side of the cot to the other for a while. Some eighteen-year-old girls might have wept at the news the Man had brought today, but not Sidonia Harper. There was a dogged toughness about her that made even her mother wonder sometimes. As soon as she'd heard what the Man had to say, she'd started revising her thinking about more freedom, making peace with the denial. She'd learned how to make peace with a lot of things since that awful night two years before when she'd gone through the fire-escape rail and down to the concrete alley below. . . .

So there wouldn't be any lift to carry her chair down. Well, that was all right. Someday, she thought, things were going to be different and she wasn't going to need any lift.

8

On a mountainside north of Leavenworth, Washington, on the night after Pamela Tate died, Frank Barrington reached the uppermost corner of the 160-acre controlled-burn area about four-thirty in the morning and turned west along the firebreak line his crew had been busy digging for the past three weeks. He turned to survey the vast burned-out area below him, parts of it

Down the line toward him a big girl came trudging along, a huge black water pack on her back, hard hat down over her ears. She was even grimier than Frank was, smeared from top to toe with ashes and soot. She looked very tired. "Ho, Becky," Frank said as she stopped to wipe sweat off her forehead.

"Hi," the girl said. "Larry finally got that tanker pump working again, so we've got some water up here at last. Where do you want us to put it?"

"Those spot fires up there," Frank said. "I'll get Billy and Sue up here to help you. How does it look farther over?"

"Not too bad," the girl said. "There was a flare-up over beyond that granite rockfall that scared me a couple of hours ago; I thought it was going to jump the line, but only a few sparks went over." She sighed wearily. "I'm just glad we finally got the bugger burned, that's all. Before we had a lightning storm and the whole mountainside went up."

The "bugger" was 160 acres of heaped-up piles of small logs, stumps, branches and other debris left over from a logging operation two years before, baked tinder-dry by long seasons of hot summer sun and no rain—a terrible forest-fire hazard in these steep Cascade mountains until it could safely be burned out. The problem was finding the chance: after watching closely for three weeks, it had not been until 8:30 the previous evening that the humidity had finally gotten high enough to make a controlled burn possible, and Frank and his crew had made their move. As Fire Boss, it had been his responsibility to coordinate the whole operation—send out the lighting crews to touch off the heaps of rubble, keep the tanker trucks rolling to supply the pumps carrying water through hoses high up the mountainside, patrol the firelines himself for spot fires and bring in crewmen where they were needed. Now, nine hours later the acute danger was over as long as the wind didn't come up, but it would be another ten hours of mop-up before any of ihe crew could leave.
Damned logging companies,
he thought.
They love to get their greedy hands on those logs—but they can't be bothered with a decent cleanup. Forest Service has to do that.

His walkie-talkie crackled and he took it off his belt. "Frank? Larry here," a tiny voice sounded. "How's it doin'?"

"Looks pretty good so far," Frank said.

"It looked great from down here. Seen anything?"

"I jumped a big bull elk about an hour ago, right up here in nil that smoke."

"Smoke don't bother those big guys any," Larry said. He paused. Then: "Frank, the Super just called. Wants you back down at the office."

Frank blinked at the walkie-talkie. "In Leavenworth? When?"

"Like right now. That's what he said."

"Hey, man, I've got a slash burn going. I can't just walk off and take a twenty-mile drive."

"I'm supposed to relieve you," Larry said. "He wants you down there fast."

The burn was still far too hot to pick his way through it, and it took Frank half an hour to get down the outside fireline to the place where the pickups were parked. He looked at Larry, already shouldering the Fire Boss's pack, but Larry just spread his hands and shrugged. As Frank started his pickup down the rough mountain road toward the highway to Leavenworth, he grew more and more apprehensive.
Nobody hauls a man off a burn like this,
he thought,
unless there's a real bastard of a fire going somewhere else.
He didn't have the only first-attack fire crew in the Wenatchee District, for God's sake—but if something else wasn't burning, why would the Super be in his office at 5:30 in the morning?

Forty minutes later Frank stalked into the little Leavenworth Ranger Station, filthy and reeking, and stuck his head in the door of the Super's office. "Hey, man, what's going on? You got a big fire somewhere?"

"No, no. Nothing like that." The Super was a small, wiry, balding man of about sixty with blue eyes and a gentle face. "Nothing like that at all. Come on in, have a seat." He waited until Frank settled his huge bulk onto a frail office chair, his face quite unreadable. "That burn doing all right up there?" he asked.

Frank frowned. "Of course it is. You talked to Larry, you know it's going fine. You didn't call me off to ask me that."

"No, that's true. I didn't." The Super avoided Frank's eyes, fiddled with a marking pen on his desk. Then he took a deep breath. "Frank, I understand that you've been close to Pamela Tate this summer, is that right?"

Frank looked at the man. "You might say that."

"Maybe very close," the Super said.

"We're engaged to be married," Frank said. "Is that close enough?" He sat forward and stared at his boss, frowning. "Why? What about Pam? She's on patrol up in the Enchantments right now. She's not due back until tomorrow afternoon."

"Did she seem sick in any way when you saw her last? Before she started up there this time?"

"Lord, no," Frank said. "She was healthy as I am. Say, what the hell is this, anyway? Is something wrong with Pam?"

"I'm afraid Pam ran into some trouble on this patrol," the Super said quietly. "I thought you'd better know."

Frank was on his feet, towering over the desk. "What kind of trouble, up there? A bear? There hasn't been a grizzly up there since we shot that old sow eight years ago."

"It wasn't a bear, it was something else. A hiker found her lying half in and half out of her tent about noon yesterday and packed all the way out to report it. We sent Doc Edmonds and two of the trail crew up there in a chopper last night the minute we got word. They brought her out. Just got down an hour ago. They dropped her pack and tent over at her apartment." The Super paused. "She—she looked like she'd been worked over with a bill bat."

"Great God. Nobody ever assaults anybody up in a place like that! But at least she's healthy as a horse. She'll mend." Frank turned for the door. "Where is she now? Wenatchee General? I've got to see her."

"Frank, you don't understand. Pam's dead. She was dead when the hiker found her. We brought out her body."

The big man stood frozen by the door for long seconds. Then in horrible slow motion he raised a huge clenched fist and drove it smashing into the wall by the door, once, twice, three times,

\

until the plaster crumbled. "You aren't lying to me?" he said finally. "This isn't some kind of lousy joke?"

"1 don't make that kind of joke," the Super said, "and I'm not lying. I'm as sick about it as you are." His voice broke momentarily. "I don't know what happened up there, Frank, but whatever it was, it was something foul. Doc Edmonds should still be there at the morgue in Wenatchee. He may have some answers by the time you get there, if you want to go down."

He didn't know how he got there, his vision frozen down to a lunnel, his mind frozen, his emotions frozen. He didn't even know where the morgue in Wenatchee was located, but presently he found it, a long, gray, antiseptic-smelling room with two bare stainless-steel tables and white bathroom tiles on the floor dipping down to two metal drains. A bank of big filelike drawers along one side of the room, with red tags on the doors. At the end of the room was a small office-laboratory with glass windows looking out onto the morgue room. He saw Dr. Harry tidmonds there, writing on a long yellow legal pad. The doctor, Ihin and bearded and fortyish, came out to meet him. "Frank, I'm sorry as hell about this. ..."

Frank shook his head. "Nothing you did."

"If there's anything I can do . . ."

"Yes. You can tell me what happened."

Doc spread his hands. "It looks like pneumonia, plain and simple. She'd been dead about ten hours when the hiker found her on Wednesday. That's about all I can tell you."

"Pneumonia!
I can't believe it. Doc, I was up at four Monday morning, helping her stuff her pack for that patrol. She wasn't sick then, not even a little. She hasn't been sick all summer, and she was in absolutely prime physical shape on Monday morning. Now you tell me what kind of pneumonia cuts somebody like that down in
forty-eight hours or less?"

"I don't know. Sometimes an atypical bug turns up."

"Did you take any tests?"

"I took a sputum smear and stained it. It just showed a gram-negative rod, looked a lot like an ordinary colon bacillus except it didn't take the stain very well. But some strains of
E. coli
can be murder when they get into the lung."

"What about cultures?"

Doc sighed. "I plated out the sputum, of course, and some lung tissue, and some blood. But I'm not sure anything will grow, it was almost thirty hours post-mortem before we even got the stuff in an incubator. The X rays were pretty plain, though." He pulled out films and stuck them up on a viewer. "I took these with a portable machine. Even post-mortem you can tell there was no functioning lung tissue at all. Solid beefsteak. And my physical exam confirmed it—no air movement at all."

"But so fast ..." Frank groped for something to say. "What about the autopsy?"

"No legal permission. Her only family is her father. We contacted his engineering office in New York. He's down in the jungle in southern India somewhere, designing artesian wells. There aren't any phones, no way to reach him."

"What about the Coroner?"

"He's satisfied there was no foul play. Won't issue the order."

"Look, I was engaged to that girl," Frank said angrily. "Maybe not officially, exactly, but I was. Let
me
give permission for an autopsy."

"That wouldn't satisfy a judge, Frank. I'm sorry. But that reminds me." He picked up a small box from the office desk and handed it to Frank. "I think you ought to have these, legal or not."

The box contained two plain gold earrings and a small star-sapphire pendant on a white-gold chain. There was a brownish smudge on the oval surface of the blue stone. Frank worked consciously to control his shaking hands as he tucked the box in his pocket. "I want to see her, Doc."

The doctor's tired eyes met his straight on. "I don't think you do, Frank, believe me. Not really."

"I've got to."

The doctor walked over to one of the drawers in the wall and drew it out full length. He pulled down the gray plastic cover and turned his back. A long moment later Frank turned away too, his face as gray as the plastic. "Those welts."

"She may have taken a fall in the rocks. We don't know."

"She walked on rocks like a goat."

Doc shrugged. "Just lying dead on the hard ground can leave welts on the skin, Frank."

"All over her body?" Frank turned to the man. "Okay," he said finally. "You're writing your report in there? Will you do me a favor and run off a copy for me? Just—unofficially?"

"Sure, Frank. I know she was somebody special." Doc looked at him closely. "Where are you going now?"

"Home."

"Do you want a sedative? A little Valium?"

"No, thanks. I've got a real great sedative at home."

Frank Barrington drove back slowly to Leavenworth in his beat-up old pickup, his mind twisting, for the first time beginning to grasp the horrible enormity of what had happened.
Pneumonia. Maybe took a fall on the rocks. Worked over with a ball bat. Lying dead on the hard ground. And all this in less than forty-eight hours.

It was all nonsense. There was something else, something else altogether. Something more vicious than any of that.

Frank Barrington walked into the hot little second-floor apartment about two in the afternoon, exhausted and drained. The blow had hit him too hard, too suddenly, too unbelievably to cope with it adequately; he had to back off and give his mind lime to adjust. Stop thinking for a while. He went into the kitchen, poured half a glass of whiskey and drank it neat, then poured more over some ice and sat down in the deep chair in the living room. He seldom drank much, ordinarily; he liked to have his head and body working right, but this was something different.

He looked around at the little place, with so much of her about it, as if she were just in the next room. He could hear her banging pots out in the little kitchen alcove, swearing at the secondhand electric stove that wouldn't heat till she turned it up high, lighting candles on the table for romantic glow over a scorched gourmet dinner, handing him the pot if he dared to say a word. Sometimes bold in bed, sometimes like a frightened doe, guarding herself, hesitating, undecided whether to stand fast or bolt. The only woman in his life that he had ever totally, desperately, hopelessly loved, and now gone.
In forty-eight short hours.