Hotshots (16 page)

“So the idea is to save forests by letting them burn?” I asked.

“In the long run. In the meantime we advocate controlled burns.”

“You've had a couple of forest fires nearby, I hear.”

“Right, and nine firefighters were killed unnecessarily.”

“What do you think the Forest Service should have done in the South Canyon?”

“Let it burn,” she said, looking me right in the eye. She wasn't smooth or pretty, but her convictions gave her a certain raw power.

“What about the houses that go up in smoke?”

“As far as I am concerned, they can burn, too.”

“Isn't that kind of drastic? People do get attached to their homes.”

“Then they shouldn't build near wilderness areas,” she replied. Wolves are smart and wary. You'd expect a woman who hung out with them to have a good bullshit detector, but hers seemed to be working overtime. I hadn't asked
that
many questions. Yet already her eyes were narrowing and her shoulders getting hunched and tense.

“Are you a reporter?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then why all the questions?”

“Just naturally curious, I guess.” It was a weaselly answer and I got a ferret's response.

“What did you say your name was?” she barked.

“I didn't. I have to get going; I'm meeting someone at McDonald's. Thanks for your help.”

“Did you find out what you came here for?” she asked.

“More or less,” I replied.

******

Leaving an irritated and suspicious woman behind me at Forest Sentinels, I walked down the street to McDonald's. It was only one o'clock and I still had an hour to kill, so I got myself a Big Mac
with
fries and sat down near the window to eat and wait for the Kid. It was lunchtime; McDonald's was crowded but not packed. I was just finishing up my hamburger when a guy with a tray in his hands stopped at my table and asked if he could join me. Maybe he thought I was the best-looking woman in the restaurant. Maybe not.

“Have a seat,” I said. My dining companion had a narrow face, a sharp nose, dark shoulder-length hair, and a scrawny build. He moved gingerly, which made him kind of comforting after all the super-fit and athletic people I'd recently met. He put down his tray and picked up his hamburger. He'd sought me out; I let him make the first move.

“You visiting Oro?” he asked in a raspy voice.

“That's right.”

“How do you like it?”

“It's okay. There seem to be a lot of very fit people in this town.”

His smile was thin but appealing. “Is that why you're thinking about moving up here? You want to get in shape?”

“Not really.” I'd told my lie about moving to Oro to two people. I put my money on the woman from Forest Sentinels as the person who'd passed it on to him. “You're from Forest Sentinels?” I asked.

He was cutting his fries into tiny pieces and choosing his words with care. “I am affiliated with them.”

On what basis? I wondered. He didn't have the polished teeth, rumpled cotton, shiny-haired look of an Ivy League environmentalist. He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. His lank hair fell in front of his face. Maybe Forest Sentinels was reaching out for support, which could be a good thing. Environmentalism doesn't have to be a class struggle. We all stand to lose when the environment gets trashed. Before I could ask what exactly he did for Forest Sentinels I had another coughing fit.

“That's a bad cough,” he said.

“It's getting better.”

“What are you? Some kind of investigator?”

“I'm a lawyer,” I said.

Usually a knee jerks when I name my profession, but this guy just gave me another thin smile. “So why all the curiosity? Forest Sentinels is Ms. O'Connor's baby. She gets uncomfortable when people ask too many questions.”

“Has she got something to hide?” I asked.

“No. She's up front.”

“She does speak her mind,” I said.

“You told her you were from New Mexico?” He brushed his hair back from his face.

“
That's right.”

“So what are you doing here? Are you representing someone in Oro?” He was asking a fair number of questions himself.

“I can't say; it's a matter of client confidentiality.”

“Where is it in New Mexico that you're from? Santa Fe?”

“Albuquerque.”

“Albuquerque.” He looked out the window, where kids were swinging and sliding on McDonald's multicolored playground. His eyes were dark and sad when they turned back to me. “I've been through some bad times,” the eyes said. “I'll take care of you,” some women might have answered, but not me and apparently not wolf woman either, or she'd have had his picture on her desk.

“Where'd you get the cough?” he asked.

It must have been all over the Oro news that an Albuquerque lawyer was caught in the East Canyon fire. My cough could have blown my cover, but whether that would matter or not remained to be seen. “I was in a forest fire.” I told him.

“Which one?”

“East Canyon.”

“That's too bad,” he said.

“Isn't it?”

The Kid had appeared in McDonald's doorway looking curly-haired and upbeat. I stood up and waved him over.

“Friend of yours?” my companion asked.

“You could say that.”

The guy picked up his tray and prepared to make a getaway.

“What'd you say your name was?” I asked him.

His mouth laughed. His eyes did not. “I didn't,” he replied.

“Who was that?” the Kid asked, watching no-name environmentalist maneuver his way through the obstacle course of McDonald's. The Kid's voice had that proprietary tone men get when they think a rival has appeared on the scene. Did the guy have rival potential? I wondered. I thought not; he was too dark and brooding for me.

“He's an environmentalist connected to Forest Sentinels. That's all I know,” I replied.

The Kid went to get himself something to eat. I looked out the window to see what kind of vehicle the guy drove away in, but he wasn't driving. He crossed the street and walked slowly up the hill.

“Did you find Oscar Ribera?” I asked the Kid when he returned with his Big Mac.

“Yeah. Did you find the insurance agent?”

“
I did and he was very cooperative. I found out that Ken Roland has good insurance. He'll make a lot of money on the ashes of his house.”

“Guys like him always make a lot of money, no?”

“Yes. How's Oscar doing?”

He shook his head. “He's living with a bunch of guys in a trailer. It's not so crowded now; there's not much work in the summer and many of the guys go someplace else. In the winter they work in restaurants and hotels and take turns sleeping on the floor. It costs too much to live close to the ski areas. They have to drive far on the snowy roads. They leave in the dark, they come home in the dark. I think it was the right move for me to go to Albuquerque.”

“I know it,” I said. Business was booming in the Duke City. A good mechanic could make as much as an average lawyer. But the Kid would land on his feet wherever he went.

We cruised by Forest Sentinels on our way out of town, but I didn't see any brown truck parked near the office. We took the Chama route home, stopping for a few minutes at Abiquiu Reservoir, where the Kid wanted to watch the water flow and listen to the wind blow. But after having witnessed the ashes of Ken Roland's house I was anxious to make sure mine was still standing. Adobes don't burn very often, but they can. When we got back to town, the Kid dropped me at my door and went to the shop to check up on Mimo, his parrot.

My house was exactly as I had left it. The kitchen was still waiting for a backhoe to show up. The Kid's clothes were in the closet. I walked through the house looking at the vigas and the tiles, touching the fireplace and the walls. I never thought it could happen to me, but I was falling in love with a house. Once you've slept in it, had sex in it, been sick in it, then a house becomes a home. It doesn't take long to fill it with memories and stuff. When you torch someone's home, I thought, you turn their soul to ashes. Hard to imagine someone burning up his own home, but people commit suicide often enough.

I walked into the empty room and was standing there when the Kid arrived. He looked at the white walls, the brick floors, the empty
nicho,
mentally filling it up, I knew, but with what? Family? Friends? Guys sleeping on mattresses on the floor? His stuff?

“Are you always going to keep this room empty?” he asked.

“Why not?” I replied. It wasn't a luxury or a necessity—just a kind of clearing like Ramona's yard. She'd had to work to keep her place empty and, so it seemed, would I.

“Mimo gets lonely in the shop at night,” the Kid said.

A house also becomes a home when there's a child in residence, but a parrot? “I don't think so,” I said.

19

O
N
T
UESDAY MORNING
I called Sheila McGraw. “How was your weekend?” I asked.

“I had to take my dog to the vet. Otherwise okay. How 'bout you?”

“Interesting. I went back to Thunder Mountain.”

I knew what she'd be doing, pushing her glasses back up her nose. “And what did you find there?”

“Ken Roland.”

“Oh, him.”

“He had a good insurance policy.”

“We're checking it out, Neil. A guy who loses an expensive house in a fire is a suspect, and we're looking into his girlfriend Karen, too. She was at Roland's house that afternoon, but she's not a likely suspect; she's an animal lover. The sheriff's deputies had to drag her out of the place kicking and screaming about Bambi. Doesn't it seem unlikely to you that a guy would torch a house with a girlfriend in it?”

“He may not have known she was in it. She told me she didn't feel well and came home from work early.”

“Henry's up there this week investigating.”

“Roland invests in the computer industry, a risky business. If I had the resources I'd check out his financial situation.”

“You lookin' for a job?”

If I was, it wasn't her job. “Just trying to help. I also ran into some birders who were unhappy about the spotted owl situation.”

“Names, addresses?”

I had two half names, one partial address, but that would lead to the brown truck and that was a lead I wasn't ready to give up until I knew whether or not it would help my case. “No,” I said. “They told me they were members of Forest Sentinels.”

“The woods are full of angry people these days. Ranchers, hunters, birders, environmentalists, Forest Sentinels, the Wise Use Movement, you name it. Everybody's pissed and everybody has a different idea of who owns the West. The place is turning into an emotional tinderbox. It's getting so Forest Service employees are afraid to go anywhere in their green rigs, but I still believe the East Canyon fire
was
an inside job. Whoever started that fire knew what he or she was doing. Ramona Franklin came in voluntarily, by the way.”

“Good.”

“She's a woman of few words. Less talk than action, I'd say. Henry did better with her than I did. She mentioned you advised her to come in and I want to thank you for that.”

“I suggested she get her own lawyer.”

“She says she doesn't want a lawyer. She wants to handle this the Indian way. She says she went to the mountain to leave a tribute to Joni Barker and that she was coming down when she saw the fire, heard you screaming, and covered you with her fire shelter. If anybody can tell me what the Indian way is, I'd sure like to know. I hear all this talk about Indians revering fire and suffering when trees go up in smoke, but I've been in the South Dakota office. They started fires up there often enough when they needed powwow money. Supposedly this country was all virgin timber before the white man came and a squirrel could leap from Maine to California without ever touching ground. It's bullshit. The Indians have known how to start fire and have used it for their purposes for a long, long time. Was torching the mountain Ramona's idea of a tribute to the dead firefighters? Is it the Indian way to incinerate a member of the Forest Service because you want to prove a point, or because you bear a grudge, or because he threatens to fire you?

“Excuse me,” she said. “I'm thinking out loud.”

How did she know about the firing threat? I wondered. Could Mike Marshall have told her? Was she even smarter than I'd given her credit for? I was glad this conversation was taking place over the phone so she couldn't see the expression on my face. It was a Marlboro (or a poor substitute) moment and I was already reaching for the Ricola bag. “Tom Hogue threatened to fire Ramona?” I asked as disingenuously as I was capable of.

“Actually he didn't have the power, but he was mouthing off about it around the Forest Service. Hogue was the old Forest Service. He wasn't known for diplomacy and he had zero respect for women. If you ask me he was the wrong person at the wrong time for the wrong job. The only qualification he had was seniority. It wouldn't surprise me if the things he said made their way back to Ramona. Just because she doesn't talk much doesn't mean she doesn't listen. Don't get me wrong about Indians. They do a great job for the Forest Service, but they keep things to themselves and why not? You can't blame them for not trusting us, can you? But because they're private, they're like a drive-in movie screen that everybody tries to project larger-than-life images on. They weren't savages when we got here and they're not all saints and shamans now. You think about stuff like this when you were given a name like mine. If Ramona set that fire, whatever her reasons for doing it, arson is arson and I'm going to treat her just like any other perp. She was friendly with your clients' daughter, I hear.”