Firestorm-pigeon 4 (6 page)

For a few minutes he stared at men in blue-and-white football jerseys running from other men in purple and white. The Bears and the Vikings. Usually Frederick forced himself to watch the highlights and memorize the scores on the off chance he had to pass as one of the boys at some point the following day. Now he wasn't aware of what was on the screen. Behind his eyes he watched a small-framed, middle-aged woman, streaks of gray through the infernal braid she used to incarcerate her hair, crumpled naked in a shower crying and swearing at him.
More fun than petting a bobcat, he thought, and smiled. Somewhere in the heap of materials he'd dumped on the floor was a letter from her. He'd put off answering it one day at a time for three weeks. Too much to say and no way to say it that was guaranteed to charm and amuse. Several drafts had already been consigned to the trash as sophomoric. With Anna he had to use his best material, the new relatively honest stuff. From the beginning he sensed she'd spot anything glib—or worse, would know if he tried too hard.
In the short time he'd known her, he'd had the heady sense of being an angler with a particularly wily and powerful fish on his line.
Not that Frederick fished, except as a less than biblical fisher of men, but this was how he imagined a deep-sea fisherman might feel with a muscular iridescent marlin on the end of his line. A glimpse of rainbow sparkling through the gray of an ocean wave, a sense of triumph. The line suddenly slack; the prize eluding. Exhilaration at feeling the tug once again.
Frederick felt that tug now. Sipping delicately at the scotch, he wondered who had whose hooks into whom.
His right hand strayed back to the telephone. Pushing a button on the remote, he muted the television. He didn't turn it off. Whenever he was home the TV was on. Sound, color, the electronic simulation of life kept him company. Over the years he'd grown so used to it the place felt cold, haunted without it.
He dialed the Bureau's number from memory. Timmy Spinks answered and Frederick was relieved. Spinks was young but he was sharp and, Stanton hoped, just inexperienced enough not to realize Frederick was about to use Bureau equipment and personnel to his own ends.
"Timmy, Frederick Stanton. Get me everything you can on the firefighters caught in that burn out in California. Do you know what I'm talking about?"
"Yes, sir. It was all over the news."
"That's the one. I want to know what anybody else knows. Who is missing. If anybody's dead and who. What's being done. Everything."
"Yes, sir."
Sir. Timmy made Stanton feel old but since it was old and revered the FBI agent let it pass. "Call me at home. I'll be in all evening."
Stanton hung up and looked at pictures of beautiful women and shiny cars move silently across the television.
The San Juan Plateau crew would be out of the Colorado/New Mexico area. That much was obvious. Anna had mentioned in her letter that half the rangers in the park were fighting fires out west. What were the odds Anna was on a fire? On the Jackknife?
A thousand to one. With Anna those odds didn't settle Stan-ton's nerves.
He could always phone her. There couldn't be too many Pigeons in southern Colorado. Information should have no trouble tracking her down.
I'm curious, not concerned, he told himself. If I reached her I wouldn't have much to say. But it was the specter of saying it badly that stayed his hand.
He fixed himself supper and ate in front of the TV, placing bits of food on the edge of his plate for Daniel to share. The little bird kept up a running conversation in a low and liquid warble but Frederick was lousy company.
Until the phone rang, and it occurred to him he had no recollection of what he had eaten or what he was watching, he didn't realize he had been waiting.
"Agent Stanton," he said as if he were at his desk in the office.
"Hi, Dad. It's Candice."
Frederick forced the disappointment from his voice. "Hiya, sweetheart. What's up?"
There followed a long and rambling account of triumphs and political coups on the student newspaper at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. After she hung up, Frederick scanned his memory. He was relatively sure he'd made all the right noises but he hadn't really been paying attention. Parental guilt prodded. A gentle poke: Candice was his one success out of three children. Through the divorces and the moves the two of them had managed to stay close.
"I love my girl," he said to Daniel.
The bird cocked its head and looked up out of one bright beady eye expecting attention, but the exchange was over. Frederick's eyes were back on the television, his mind in neutral.
When the phone rang a second time half an hour later he answered "Hello," cognizant of where he was.
"Agent Stanton? It's Timmy. Tim."
Stanton felt a familiar tightness in his belly. He'd first noticed it after he'd become a father for the second time. Driving home late—back in the days when home was populated by more than a bird and TV set—the last block before he turned onto Oakland Avenue where he could see his house, he'd get a slight clutch wondering if good news or bad news or no news awaited.
The house had always been standing, no burned-out shell, no roofless statistic in the wake of a tornado, no children with scarlet fever or black plague. But the tightening was there till he'd closed the door behind him. It was a game he played with himself.
"What've you got for me?"
"Not a whole lot. Events conspired, you might say."
Frederick crushed mounting impatience. "Begin at the beginning."
"Evidently the fire was a bit of a sleeper. It'd just been creeping along for several days. Pretty routine. About two this afternoon a cold front came in. The National Weather Service forecast it. They were counting on the precip to put the fire out. That's what gets most of them out—not as glamorous as I'd thought. This time the winds got bad, sheared in a canyon, fuel was dry and boom! The thing just exploded. Like a bomb. A squad—half the San Juan Plateau crew—was building line on about a two-hundred-acre finger of the fire. Sort of a thumb-shaped burn. When the wind sheared it blew up from two hundred acres to thirty-five hundred acres in less than an hour. Must've been awesome." Timmy's youth crept through the professional recital.
Frederick was pushing the receiver against his head, bruising the delicate if generous ear tissue. He loosened his grip. "The crew?"
"They were cutting back the whole operation. The San Juans were camped out a ways—twenty miles or so from the main camp. One squad had already been taken off the fire as well as two other guys, one with bronchitis and one with back problems. The other squad—about half the crew—was finishing up a section of fireline they'd been building. They may have gotten caught in the path of the fire when it went out of control. They're the ten missing."
"May have? No one's checked?" Frederick was angrier than he had a right to be and it bled into his voice.
Affronted, Tim was all business when he responded and Frederick made a mental note to be effusive in his thanks once he'd gotten what he wanted.
"No, sir. They can't. The fire burned over the camp, the heli-spot and the road for they don't know how many miles. The storm pushing the winds came in with snow at the higher elevations and sleet and rain in the valleys. Winds are still high. Visibility nil. Aircraft arc grounded and they can't get machinery up the road. Some have started up on foot but there's no news yet and there's been no radio contact from the missing crew. Word is they have hand-held radios but they're only good for line-of-sight. They're meant for the crews to talk to each other. The commander said they might be able to reach the Incident Base camp if they were high enough. So far they haven't called in or responded. I talked with Gene Burwell. He's the incident commander. He said as soon as the weather breaks they'll get helicopters up there. According to the National Weather Service it should start clearing mid-morning tomorrow."
Frederick digested that. Tim Spinks waited silently.
The incident commander, not the information officer; Timmy must have cloaked himself in the armor of the Bureau. Frederick felt a small stab of embarrassment. He'd headed up enough bad situations to know how costly and irritating it was to have to shift mental gears to talk with other agencies. Especially those not directly involved.
"Good job, Tim," he said, and meant it. "Have you got a list of the missing crew members?"
"John LeFleur, Crew Boss, Newton Hamlin, Leonard Nims, Howard Black Elk, Joseph Hayhurst, Jennifer Short, Lawrence Gonzales and Hugh Pepperdine."
No Anna Pigeon. Frederick felt a wave of relief so strong it surprised him and he wondered why he hadn't asked for the names first. Mentally he wrote it off to the orderly progression of his mind but he suspected it was pain avoidance.
"Read them again." Jennifer Short rang a bell. He'd worked with a ranger with that name in Mesa Verde. "Again." This time he counted on his fingers as Tim read off the names. Eight.
"How many in a crew?"
"Twenty, sir."
"A squad?"
"Ten."
Twenty total, ten demobed, two invalided out. That left eight. "You said there were ten missing. Who are the other two?"
"Emergency medical technicians running the medical unit. A Stephen Lindstrom out of Reno, Nevada, and an Anna Pigeon from Colorado."
There it was. Frederick felt the tightness harden into a knot. "Are you on all night, Tim?"
"Yes, sir.
"Keep an eye on things. Call me if there are any changes."
"Yes, sir."
"Thanks a bunch, Timmy. You've been super," Frederick added sincerely, remembering his promise to himself. Vaguely he wondered why he always waxed dopey in gratitude. It disarmed people. He'd used the technique so long it had become habit. A self-made nerd, he said to himself without rancor. Whatever worked.
Absently he turned the sound back on the television, banishing the emptiness of the room. Danny hopped along the back of the sofa and onto Frederick's head where he chirped happily, picking through the fine dark hair.
Of course Anna was on the Jackknife. Never had Frederick met a woman with such a propensity for disaster. In high school he'd known a kid like that, Desmond Gallagher. He hadn't thought of Desmond in twenty years hut now he was clear and lively in Stanton's imagination. Desmond himself was a slight, pleasant, intelligent boy but he seemed a vortex for strange events. If Desmond walked by a liquor store there was a ten to one chance it was being robbed. If he sat too long at a bus stop odds were a nearby water main would break or a passing Brinks truck would lose its brakes and careen into a fruit stand.
Anna apparently had that lightning-rod quality.
She attracted you, Frederick thought, then wondered why he equated himself with a natural disaster.
Danny still on his head, Stanton rose and shuffled into the tiny kitchen. Dishes were washed and dried and put away and the stove top wiped clean. The one-man breakfast table, like every other flat surface in the house, was piled with papers and magazines.
Frederick had to read them before he allowed himself to throw them out. Information: one never knew what might be important. Stanton tried to assimilate it all and he was blessed— or cursed—with an excellent retention and retrieval system. At Trivial Pursuit he was unbeatable.
He dumped his unfinished scotch in the sink, then washed and dried the glass. Alcohol didn't hold a tremendous appeal for him but it seemed a man ought to have at least one vice to come home to and he never took to tobacco.
He put the glass in the cupboard with four others exactly like it stacked two by two, and stood staring into the shelf as if waiting for a floor show to begin on a miniature stage.
He was worried for Anna's safety, for her comfort, for her life. To a lesser extent, and perhaps more impersonally, he felt a kernel of sadness for the others, Jennifer Short, the Newts and Johns and whoevers. Those were the honorable emotions floating up into the dark of his mind like the messages that used to float up into the black window of a "magic" eight ball he'd been given as a child.
Less than honorable and more compelling was anxiety for himself, for his future. "Future" wasn't quite right. Destiny, Frederick thought, and smiled without being aware of it. To lose Anna Pigeon would be to lose some elusive possibility, some potential fate that was grander, more satisfying than the one that trickled in through his windshield and across his desk every day.
The woman represented a chance.
A chance at what, Frederick wasn't sure. Maybe the all-encompassing "brass ring." A chance he couldn't bear to lose. At forty-four, twice divorced, there might not be many chances left.
Chapter Six
A ROAR FILLED Anna's ears. She didn't know if she was screaming or not. Probably she was. A terrible fear of being crushed by the immensity of what was coming poured through her and she had to fight down a panicked need to throw off the flimsy aluminum shelter and run. Nowhere left, she told herself. And she remembered her father's voice from childhood telling her if she ever became lost to stay put and he'd come find her. Stay put, she told herself.
She must have spoken the words aloud because fine, burning grit filled her mouth and throat. Each breath scorched the membranes of her nose and fired deep in her lungs.
Wind grabbed at the shelter, tore up the edges, thrusting fistfuls of super-heated air beneath. Pushing her elbows and knees against the bottom of the shelter where it folded under, Anna fought to hold the shelter down, the fire out.
Her mind rattled, grabbed onto a prayer long forgotten: now I lay me down to sleep—The end flashed like a telegram behind her eyes before the first words were formed and she jettisoned the rest as too prophetic.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America... She filled her mind with soundless shouting. An impotent wizard fending off genuine magic with a barren incantation.
All hell broke loose above and around her.
Fire pierced the aluminum tent in a dozen places. Sparks were falling, burning through: the shelter was a scam. Soon she would burst into flame. Spurts of adrenaline racked Anna's insides. With the odd unpleasant thrill came a stray thought: how much of the stuff could one gland secrete? Surely a quart had been pumped through her veins in the last hour.
Red, burning, a spark fell on her sleeve. She flicked her arm but couldn't dislodge it. No smolder of cloth followed, no burning through to the flesh. With a jolt of relief that brought tears to her eyes she realized the sparks were not sparks, not embers, but pinholes along the folds in her shelter. The orange light was the light of the fire, but outside glowing through. Classes in fire behavior she'd thought long forgotten came back to her. All shelters had these pinpricks, signs of wear and age. Normal. Okay. Normal. One nation under God, indivisible...