Firestorm-pigeon 4 (2 page)

"Do tell."
"Welllll," he said, drawing out the word in exaggerated confidence, making her laugh. "Jennifer said—"
"Wait," Anna interrupted. "In my exalted capacity as spike camp security officer-cum-medic, am I going to have to take any action on this tidbit? Because if I am don't tell me."
"Jennifer said," Stephen pressed on, "that John got into an altercation that led to fisticuffs. Wish I'd been there," he sighed dramatically. "I do so love violence. That other BLM guy, Leonard Nims, took a swing at John. Connected on the second try."
Anna vaguely remembered Nims. He was a GS-7 supervisor from the Bureau of Land Management in Farmington, New Mexico. Prematurely white hair and a black mustache gave him striking looks and the hard muscled body of an athlete belied his age—late forties, she guessed. Nims would have been handsome if he could have dropped his Napoleon complex. At five-foot-eight or -nine he hadn't earned it. The chip on his shoulder reduced his stature.
"Jennifer said Joseph broke it up," Stephen went on. Joseph Hayhurst was a Mescalero Apache born and raised in the foothills of California, educated at Berkeley, a latecomer to his Indian heritage. The juxtaposition of cultures had created a fascinating mix of New Age artist and Indian rights fundamentalist. He wore his hair long and tied back, as did most of the Shoshone and Arapahos, but it was cut short in front and curled around his face. A fashion a multitude of white artists strove for in closet trysts with their girlfriends' curling irons.
"Jennifer said he threatened to spank the both of them if it happened again because darned—'darned,' don't you just love it? 'Dagnabbit, you motherfuckers, now quit that...' "
"Anyway..." Anna was too tired to enjoy a ramble, however entertaining.
"Anyway, darned if he was going to get sent off the fire before he'd paid for last winter's vacation."
Joseph was a squad boss for the San Juans. A crew consisted of twenty firefighters divided into two squads. The crew boss was responsible for all twenty, the squad bosses for eight to ten firefighters each. If anyone got into trouble, the troublemaker wasn't the only one sent home. All twenty were demobilized.
"What was the fight about?" Anna asked.
"Back in Farmington John works for Nims. Now he's Nims's boss and Nims is working for him. I guess it wasn't sitting too well. Jennifer says they haven't got on from the git-go. Nims is the crew boss trainee, so LeFleur is training his own replacement, so to speak. The Bureau of Land Management is grooming Nims for better things. In lieu of LeFleur, is my guess. By the by, was you and LeFleur a-sparkin' out there in the gloaming?"
Anna whistled a few bars of "Matchmaker" from "Fiddler on the Roof." "Firefighters hate sparks."
"Do you know why Smokey the Bear never had children?" Stephen asked.
"Because every time his wife got hot he hit her with a shovel."
"Old joke," he apologized.
"Old jokes are the best."
"Goodnight."
"About damn time."
"Darn time, please."
Headlights raked across the canvas wall, chased by the growl of a diesel engine.
"Oops," Stephen said.
"I'll get it." Anna sounded as if it were a doorbell ringing at an inappropriate time.
The truck driver, Polly or Sally—Anna floundered for the name—was one of the many local people hired to assist in the logistics of feeding, cleaning and fueling a city of a thousand souls appearing suddenly in the wilderness. The girl always seemed to avoid Anna. Whether the avoidance was personal or coincidental, she had no idea.
"It's late, I'll have to stay over," the driver said defensively as she bounced her plump little body out of the vehicle. Four of the six nights spike camp had been in existence she'd found some way to have to stay over. Anna suspected she had a sweetheart.
"Makes sense," Anna said amiably, and waited to see what reason would be given for the long trip up the mountain this time.
"I got a thing here for you or John what's-his-name, the crew boss guy." As she leaned into the cab the girl's head vanished behind a curtain of lush brown hair, clean and worn loose. After a moment's rustling she emerged with a folded sheet of paper. She handed it over, and Anna was aware of a cheap but enticing perfume.
"Thanks... Sally." She hazarded a guess at the name.
"Paula."
Anna'd lost a round. "Paula. Sure. Sorry. Breathing too much smoke."
Paula seemed anxious to get away so Anna quit muttering apologies. "If you want you can pitch your tent behind the medical unit," she offered. "There's a flat spot there."
"No. I got a place all staked out." The woman bunched a tent into her arms and started toward the trees behind the Porta-Johns where the Sho-Raps were camped.
Anna unfolded the note and read it by the light of her flashlight. "The body of the man found burned near Pinson Lake just outside Lassen Volcanic National Park has been identified as Joshua Short, brother of seasonal park ranger Jennifer Short, out of Mesa Verde, Colorado, now serving on the San Juan Plateau crew."
"Jesus." Anna turned the page over in hopes of finding more information but it was as blank as it had been two seconds previously. Jennifer's brother. Anna thought of her own sister, Molly, how lonely she would be were she to lose her, and tremendous sadness swept over her. Carefully she refolded the note and tucked it in her shirt pocket. This was not a bit of paper to be passed carelessly from hand to hand. That it had arrived so publicly bespoke a crassness or negligence Anna had trouble crediting the information officer with. On a hunch she shined her flashlight into Paula's truck. On the second sweep she found it: a blue For Your Eyes Only envelope with her and LeFleur's names on it had been torn open and hastily discarded. The spike camp's inamorata was a nosy little beast.
Clicking off the light, Anna stood for a moment in the silence and breathed the pleasant odor of pine smoke. The death note in her pocket was heavy as a brick. Moving slowly to put off the inevitable, she wandered in darkness toward the San Juan crew tent.
One end of the tent was tied open for fresh air. The other closed off in complete darkness. In September, in the Cascades, nights were cold, and frost was on the ground most mornings. Anna looked down the row of inert forms. Several world-class snorers sawed at the air but no one was awake. Between the sleeping bags was a tangle of yellow fire packs. The packs were a nightmare of webbing and plastic buckles designed to hook together all the necessary components needed on the line: fire shelter, water, fusees, gloves, helmet, goggles, brush jacket and earplugs.
Near the open end of the tent LeFleur lay on his back, one arm thrown over his eyes. Joseph Hayhurst was curled next to him, his hands tucked under his cheek like an innocent. Anna spotted Nims by the white hair. His face was to the back of the tent. Jennifer was lost in the darkness somewhere between the sleeping men.
After a moment, Anna turned and crept away. Tomorrow would be soon enough to tell Jennifer. This might be the last good night's sleep she would enjoy in a while.
Chapter Two
"IT'S TIME."
The voice came through warm thick darkness and was most unwelcome. Anna retreated, curling deeper into oblivion.
"We miss your bright eyes and sweet smile." The same voice, sugary this time, but still odious.
"Bugger off," Anna grumbled.
"Oooh, now there's a thought..." A rough shake loosed Anna entirely from the comforting embrace of sleep. Stephen, sitting on the army cot laid head to head with hers, was lacing up his boots.
"It's still dark," Anna complained.
"And cold. The glamour never stops. You've got ten seconds to do girl things, then I'm lighting the Coleman and to hell with your modesty."
"I would have had a son about your age if I hadn't drowned him at birth."
The EMT laughed. Anna could hear him groping for the lantern as she dragged on her underpants. Drafts, sharp as knives with the early frost, stabbed into the warm sanctity of her sleeping bag as she performed her morning contortions.
Finally decent in a yellow NoMex fire shirt, she unzipped the bag. The new day hit her thighs like ice water. By the glare of a flashlight she watched Lindstrom battling the Coleman. Twenty-six or -seven, six-foot-two, strong, even-featured, with sandy hair so thick it stood out like fur, he reminded Anna of the boys who'd ignored her in high school. His hands betrayed his bulk with their long sensitive fingers. The hands of a flutist. Or a gynecologist. Once or twice Anna'd glimpsed a mean streak but it only served to make him more interesting.
He looked at her with narrowed eyes. "Anna?"
"I'm awake. Don't push me." She dragged on the olive drab trousers one leg at a time like the rest of the world.
The only people up earlier than the medical unit were the food servers and Anna blessed them in the name of Pele the fire goddess and half a dozen lesser gods as she poured her first cup of coffee. About halfway through the stumbling dark, back toward the medical tent, caffeine burned the remaining fog from her brain and she remembered her chores. Jennifer Short's brother was dead.
Remembering the dead, a fading image of Zachary wavered behind her eyes: a slender dark man, forever twenty-nine, brown eyes glowing across an electric candle in a Brew and Burger in Manhattan. "If you asked me to marry you, I'd say yes," Anna had said. And he had asked.
Zach had been dead for so many years she should have quit counting. There had been other men since, men to spend the days with, men to pass the nights, but none to soften the loneliness. One, maybe, she amended: Frederick Stanton, an offbeat FBI agent she'd worked with on two homicides, once when she was a ranger on Isle Royale in Lake Superior and again several months ago in Mesa Verde National Park. Dinner, a hike through Indian ruins, a kiss that reminded her the animals went two by two, then he was on a plane back to Chicago.
Just as she'd been metaphorically dusting off her hands and consigning her emotions to a well-stocked Ships Passing in the Night file, a letter had come. Not a love letter, that would have set off alarms. Men who fell in love with women they didn't know were prone to other easily abandoned fantasies. Frederick's letter was funny. Laughter, like touch, was a form of pure communication, the funny bone an underappreciated erogenous zone.
Anna touched her shirt pocket as if she carried Stanton's letter over her heart. The death memo was still there, one of the perks of never changing clothes. The feel of the slick paper jarred her into the present and she cleared her mental decks for what lay ahead.
Spike camp had awakened. Muttering firefighters, subdued from too little sleep, boiled out of tents like yellow jackets from a disturbed hive. Flashlights sparked off lemon-colored NoMex and the tramp of heavy boots scuffed the worn earth.
A small woman, surrounded by three men so big that, in her white tee shirt, she resembled an egret among cows, chattered out of the dark woods beyond the Porta-Johns. Paula. One of the men was Howard Black Elk. The other two were strangers to Anna.
"Wait up," Anna shouted. The girl looked alarmed, her three bodyguards undecided, the desire to defend Paula against some imagined attack and the urge to flee battling in their brains. Flight won and the girl was alone when Anna reached her.
There were those rare creatures who suffered from a phobic reaction to authority but finding four of them together was unlikely. Anna made a mental note to pry into Paula's affairs when she didn't have more pressing matters to attend to.
"Hold off going down the mountain," Anna said. "I may have a passenger for you."
Paula looked relieved and again Anna felt a flash of suspicion, an occupational hazard. Sometimes she had the sense of being a cat in a world of birds, some bigger and meaner than she. Small furtive movements set off her alarms but she was never sure whether she was predator or prey. "I'll get back with you in thirty minutes or so."
Jennifer Short was in the breakfast line. In the name of nutrition, Anna put off telling her for another quarter of an hour. Then, having exhausted all delay tactics, she took Jennifer and her crew boss, LeFleur, behind the medical tent under one of the great old Jeffrey pines that shaded the camp.
To the east the sun was consuming the glitter of hot spots with its own superior fire. Lurid red light, filtered through smoke, bathed the camp.
"I have bad news," Anna said, and she handed the younger woman the note. As if in slow motion, Jennifer's face crumpled. Her mouth opened slightly as she read, her lips and eyes took on the soft quiver of a child's, tears ran down her cheeks. Once she looked to Anna as if for a reprieve but there was none.
"Her brother died," Anna explained to LeFleur. One of the crew boss's callused hands reached out but stopped before it reached Jennifer. He shot Anna a look of such anger for a second she thought he might try and kill the messenger.
After a moment he said to the air between Jennifer and Anna: "You'll want to demob. Get home. Anna will work it out." With the air of a man escaping, he walked away.
Jennifer stopped him: "I won't go."
LeFleur looked back without turning.
"He died in this fire, in the Jackknife, that's what it says. I need to stay, fight this fire." Jennifer pushed her face back in shape and mopped her tears with her sleeve.
"That's not the way it works," LeFleur said. "We can't use you if your mind's on something else. Go home."
He was right, but still Anna wanted to smack him.
"There's nothing wrong with my mind," Jennifer snapped. For an instant anger banished grief and Anna took back her slap. LeFleur's unorthodox therapy seemed to give at least short-term relief.
The crew boss stared at Jennifer and she glared back. Tears poured down her face, but the softness, the quiver had gone.
LeFleur lit a Pall Mall and flicked the match toward the barren earth around the medical tent. Crew bosses had close to absolute power over the twenty firefighters under their care. On a fireline, as in battle, somebody had to be in charge. After a lengthy weighing of Lord knew what factors he said: "If Anna can square it with the brass you can stay with the San Juan."
"Go on out with the crew today," Anna said. "I'll catch a ride down the mountain and see what I can do."
Jennifer nodded curdy. "Excuse me," she whispered, and left Anna and LeFleur under the pine. They watched her walk away, spine straight, shoulders back.
"Women on the fireline," LeFleur said disgustedly, stubbed his cigarette out on the sole of his boot, shredded the paper and let the tobacco scatter.