Firestorm

by Nevada Barr

  On impulse, Anna shouted: “Hugh!”

  The only response was a crunching rearrangement of body parts on snow. Noise pinpointed location: a pile of downed snags twenty feet from where she stood. Since it had neither color nor shadow, she’d not realized it was big enough to hide anyone. “Come out from behind that deadfall,” she called. “You’ve got to be getting cold hunkered down like that. Don’t be such an ass.”

  The insult gouged Pepperdine out of hiding. A yellow hunchback materialized above the snags—Hugh’s back with its yellow pack strapped firmly in place—then his face as he pushed himself up.

  They stared at each other across a field of white. Anna was at a loss for words. Those that came to mind were of the four-letter variety and inherently unproductive. What was passing through Pepperdine’s mind, she could only guess at. Embarrassment had flitted across his face, anger chasing it quickly away. His brain was in overdrive, she suspected, spinning desperately in an attempt to turn the situation around to where he wasn’t the idiot.

  “I need your radio,” Hugh said, as if that was what he’d come for.

  “Why? You seem fairly adept at sneaking and eavesdropping. No sense in carrying the extra weight.”

  “I suppose you were planning on keeping the fact that Sir Lawrencelot is an arsonist under wraps.” Hugh changed tactics. “Did it ever cross your so-called mind that he killed Len to keep him from telling? Or is the mama lion protecting her mate?”

  Words were to Pepperdine what whiskey was to some men. Anna could see him getting drunk on his own verbiage. With it, he found the courage to step out from behind the screen of burned logs. His eyes locked on hers in an unwinking stare and she recalled one of her instructors saying when you saw that look, get ready to fight or make love.

  Casually, she rebalanced herself, got her fanny off the fender, moved her weight to the balls of her feet. “We only protect our young,” she said. “I don’t know where you’re getting all this stuff from but it’s growing a bit thin.”

  Hugh snorted. “You’ve been sniffing around Lawrence since day one. If you’d seen him facedown in the dirt whimpering like a girl, maybe you’d lose your taste for Mexican.”

  More words, more courage. Anna didn’t like it. Pepperdine had a screw loose somewhere and she felt inadequate to handle him. “What put a burr under your saddle about me and Lawrence? I hardly know the guy. I’m old enough to be his mother,” she threw in for good measure.

  “I saw you and sonny boy at that hot springs lake…Mom.” The coupe de grace delivered, Hugh took several steps toward her. “I’ll be taking that radio from now on.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Anna said. “Howard’s feeling so bad I doubt he’d miss his. When we get back down the hill, let’s ask him.”

  “The battery’s dead in Howard’s.”

  Anna had switched hers out with Howard. He needed the comfort; she needed the communication. Evidently Pepperdine had already taken the liberty of “confiscating” Black Elk’s radio a second time.

  Hugh advanced a couple more steps. “I’ll be taking that radio.”

  “You and whose army?” Anna meant it as a joke, a way of lightening the mood and underlining the absurdity of the situation. Pepperdine took it as a challenge. He pushed his brush jacket back like a TV gunslinger and began fingering the hilt of Black Elk’s Buck knife.

  “Stop playing with that damn knife,” Anna snapped. “You’re making me crazy.”

  “This knife?” Hugh said innocently, and pulled the thing from its sheath. He turned the blade this way and that as if catching the light. “This knife scares you, doesn’t it?”

  Anna said nothing. She was racking her brain for any kernels of information her sister might have let fall when discussing her psychiatric practice on the handling of dangerous lunatics.

  Pepperdine made a feint toward her and when she flinched, he laughed.

  “Give me the knife,” she said evenly.

  “Give me the radio.”

  Anna could see no harm in that. Back in camp, when she had help, she could always get it back. Hugh could do less damage with a Motorola than with a weapon. “Sure.” She pulled it from its leather holster.

  Hugh’s face took on a crafty look, taking her easy capitulation as a sign of his power. “No deal,” he said.

  Anna raised the radio to her lips and thumbed down the mike button. “Frederick, are you still standing by?”

  Hugh rushed her.

  Instinct told her to run. Her legs quivered with the need to comply. But something warned her flight would further excite Pepperdine. She’d seen small dogs in hot pursuit; the moment the cat stopped the little beasts invariably backed off.

  Hugh wasn’t grasping the knife like he knew how to use it. The hilt was in his palm and his index finger extended along the blade, the way children are taught to hold a knife when cutting their food. His arms were in front of him, close together as if he intended to tackle rather than slash her.

  These things were noted in the seconds it took him to close the distance between them. The observations were mildly reassuring but the look on Pepperdine’s face was not. Committed to an insane act, he was intent on carrying it through.

  At Anna’s back was the truck. She’d effectively limited her escape routes. Dodging left or right was likely to result in some portion of her person getting pinned between the iron and Hugh’s bulk.

  Reflexes superseded thought; she threw herself up and back, her butt landing on the hood. Crablike, she scrabbled across the ice-slicked surface.

  Hugh dove after. The knife collided with Anna’s left ankle, cutting into her boot leather. Black Elk kept his equipment honed and in good condition. Anna didn’t thank him for it.

  Kicking out, she connected with Hugh’s shoulder. Recoil sent her off the far side of the hood. Breath was knocked out on impact but there was no time to give in to the shock. Overcoming the panic of airlessness, she pushed herself to her feet.

  Hugh was stretched across the hood like a stag brought home from the hunt. He’d be on top of her in a heartbeat. With the knife clutched now more in the fashion of a weapon than a butter knife, he clawed at the hood, trying for purchase.

  The Motorola was still in Anna’s grasp. With all the strength she could muster, she brought it down on Pepperdine’s wrist. He screamed and his fingers flew open, the knife skittering down the hood and into the snow.

  Anna dropped the radio and grabbed Pepperdine by the hair and the back of his collar. Using her weight she pulled. Ice helped and Hugh’s two hundred pounds slid across the hood, shot out and fell; a belly flop into the frozen snow.

  Before he could recover, Anna jumped on his back, one knee in his sacrum, the other on the small vertebrae of his neck. With both hands, she grabbed one of his and twisted it up behind his back.

  Writhing, Hugh tried to buck her off.

  Anna cranked down on his arm. “Lay still or I’ll bust it. Swear to God, I will.”

  Pain did what logic could not and Hugh stopped struggling.

  Both of them were breathing hard. Seconds ticked by. Anna was trying to figure out what to do next. He was too big to control, too crazy to let go.

  “Okay,” he panted. “Let me up. Come on, Anna, don’t be a bitch.”

  A laugh barked out of Anna’s lungs. Hugh was whining, apparently totally oblivious to what had just transpired. “You’ve got to be kidding. You just attacked me with an eight-inch Buck knife. I’m never going to let you up. If you move, I’ll break your arm.” She tweaked it to prove she could. “If you move twice I’ll break your neck.” She shifted to the knee on his vertebrae to lend weight to her threat. “It might not kill you but as a quadraplegic, maybe you won’t be such a pain in the ass.”

  “The snow is burning me. I’m getting frostbitten. You can’t leave me here with my face on the ground.”

  Face on the ground. The phrase jogged something in Anna’s mind and she stared into the nothing that was the sky trying to lure the memo
ry out.

  “If you’d seen him facedown in the dirt whimpering likea girl…”

  Hugh had said that of Gonzales. Anna could only think of one circumstance where Pepperdine might have witnessed a scene like that. After the blowup they’d all been facedown in the sand and, she was willing to bet, even the bravest among them had let a whimper or two escape.

  “You saw Lawrence get out of his shelter,” she said with certainty. “Admit it or I’ll break your arm.”

  “Duress. Won’t hold up in court.” Hugh gasped through the pain.

  “I don’t care. I just want to hurt you.” To prove it, she did.

  Hugh shrieked.

  “It wasn’t that bad,” she said, annoyed. “I hardly even twisted it. As Mom used to say, ‘Quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.’ Lawrence. The shelter,” she prompted, putting enough pressure on Pepperdine’s arm to make a fracture seem like a distinct possibility.

  “Okay! I saw!” he yelped. “You’re going to break my frigging arm!”

  “Fucking arm, Hugh. I’m going to break your fucking arm. So you helped Lawrence out of his shelter. Good. Now, you knew Nims was dead. None of us did. How come? Did you kill him, Barney?” At the sound of the hated nickname, Anna realized what she was doing was cruel. Later she would probably feel guilty. At the moment she just didn’t give a damn.

  “No. I just guessed. We’d been through a frigging fire!”

  “Fucking fire,” Anna corrected, and tweaked his arm. “You knew. You killed him.”

  “He wanted to get in my shelter,” Hugh blurted out.

  Meanness went out of Anna, taking her strength with it. The firestorm roaring down the mountain, Nims without a shelter, begging to be let in, begging for his life. Pepperdine, a bigger man, stronger, pushing him away, condemning him to be burned alive. Hugh was guilty, not of sticking a knife in a man’s ribs, but of craven cowardice. In many ways it was worse and Anna’s contempt was tempered with pity.

  She still knelt on Hugh and he lay compliant, afraid she’d carry out her bone-crushing threats, but the time had passed.

  “If I let you up, what are you going to do?” she asked wearily.

  “Nothing, I promise. Just let me up. My face is frozen.”

  “Don’t get up till I say, okay?”

  “Okay. Just get off me.”

  “Stay,” Anna ordered. She backed away from him, retrieved the radio and the knife, then moved around to the far side of the truck. “You can get up now.”

  Hugh pushed himself to his knees, then struggled to his feet and brushed the snow from his jacket and trousers. “I suppose you’re going to rush back and blab everything,” he said bitterly.

  “Not unless you annoy me in some small way.”

  He stood, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his eyes not meeting hers, and Anna wondered what he was up to. “Can I have my knife back?” he said finally.

  “Nope.”

  “Anna, do you read? Anna, come in please.” It was Frederick on her radio.

  Hugh sneered as best he could and walked toward the trail leading back to camp. Ten yards from her he stopped and turned.

  “You can tell your boyfriend he doesn’t need to track down how Paula makes her living. She’s a whore. A hooker. She’s been working the camp. Everybody knew it. Everybody but you. A trained observer—you should get into another line of work.”

  Anna had guessed but she’d been so slow on the uptake she didn’t feel like defending herself.

  “You’re Mr. FLETC, why didn’t you report it?” Anna returned, but she knew the answer. He wanted to be one of the guys.

  Hugh turned his back on her and she keyed the mike.

  “Anna here.”

  “Jeeminie! Don’t you ever do that to me again,” Frederick exploded over the airwaves. “What’s going on up there?”

  “It was nothing. Snow falling or something.” Anna’s back ached from wrestling with Pepperdine and she was in a foul mood. “Forget about Boggins. Just follow up on the Joshua Short thing for me.”

  “I will. And you call me at eight. You. Call me. Got that?”

  “No problem.”

  “We’re going to get you down off that ridge.”

  “I know you are. I’m turning my radio off now.”

  “Ten-four. Eight o’clock, Anna. Don’t leave me standing at the altar.”

  Anna laughed. “Eight o’clock.” She turned off the radio and leaned her elbows on the truck in an attempt to ease her back.

  Black Elk, Lindstrom, Gonzales, Page and Pepperdine were off the hook. That left only LeFleur, who hated Nims and wanted him out of the way professionally; Joseph Hayhurst, removing Nims to stop the oil lease; and Boggins. Paula was hooking. Black Elk’s words now made sense: Nims should have paid like everybody else. Len had “messed” with Paula. Since injured virtue wasn’t an issue, attempted rape or blackmail very possibly was. Getting thrown out of camp would cost Paula a bundle in unearned revenues. And she would be blackballed from any fire camp in the future.

  LeFleur, Hayhurst, Boggins.

  And Short. The time for trusting her fellow men—if there ever had been a time—was gone. No one had seen Jennifer leave her shelter. Blood stained her left glove. Anna knew of no motive, no previous connection between Short and Nims, but it was turning out there were a whole hell of a lot of things she didn’t know.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-Two

  STANTON HELD THE portable radio between his knees. Anna hadn’t told him the truth, he knew it. While he’d been helplessly “standing by” something had happened. He was worried and hurt, he admitted. Getting to know Anna Pigeon wasn’t going to be easy. She’d been alone too many years; come to rely on herself too much. Life was a team sport.

  Aloneness, loneliness, had knocked on Frederick’s door like the proverbial wolf more than once in the dozen years since his last divorce, but his children—Candice mostly—had kept the wolf at bay. She needed him and, therefore, he needed her. The littles of his life could make her laugh, understand; they could comfort and sometimes even educate. So he told them.

  Candice, as yet, had no fear of intimacy and she shared her stories with him: boyfriends, classes, concerts. In turn he was amused, comforted, educated.

  Anna had had a husband, Frederick knew. He’d died. Dead was not good. Dead was a tough act to follow. Women got addicted to widow’s weeds. Anna guarded her loneliness like a treasure she hoarded as a gift for dead what’s-his-name. Frederick doubted he could compete and he was wondering if he wanted to.

  He looked at the knot of white pine he’d found and the pattern came clear. The monkeys were not tied together by telephone line. They weren’t tied together by anything. They were seated back to back, each oblivious to his companion, anxiously scanning the horizon for some sign of the other. Frederick fixed the image in his mind though he knew he needn’t bother. Every time he looked at the wood he would see it in the grain.

  He put the radio back in its charger and pulled the notebook with his lists close enough he could read it.

  “Boggins/Livelihood” was crossed out, “Josh/Arson” underlined. Duncan Foley, the retired BLM timber coordinator from Susanville, had returned his call regarding Nims. Foley hadn’t been too specific. It sounded as if senility rather than reticence slowed his tongue, but Frederick had been left with the impression Anna’s suspicions were correct: Nims had some shady deal with the lumber barons that couldn’t be proven and it had been deemed in everyone’s best interests that he move on quietly.

  Frederick had yet to reach anyone at Aztec, Pepperdine’s home park.

  Putting his hands over his eyes, he began constructing a mental chart that would be the basis of his investigation into the arson and the subsequent death of Joshua Short.

  The known: The Jackknife fire had been started near Pinson Lake in the immediate vicinity of Mr. Short’s camp. Mr. Short and his dog had perished in the blaze. Mr. Short was camping at Pinson Lake preparatory to stagin
g some kind of protest against a local lumber company to stop cutting in what was believed by some to be an environmentally sensitive area. Mr. Short was an experienced outdoorsman and an environmental activist.

  Frederick had seen no official paperwork on the incident but the accepted explanation seemed to be that Short had either set the fire intentionally or had inadvertently let his campfire burn out of control.

  Other than that, Stanton hadn’t a clue. He needed to see the coroner’s report, review the records in the case, talk with the Forest Service’s arson investigator and visit the scene of the deaths. This last might prove of little value. Fire, snow and other investigators would have destroyed what physical evidence there was.

  Working as a private citizen Frederick had already pushed the limits of not only ethics but legality. His first phone call was to his boss’s home on the outskirts of Chicago.

  “Jack’s laying down,” Mrs. McGinnis said disapprovingly. Frederick had met Jack McGinnis’s wife several times on social occasions and knew her to be a friendly, charming woman. The disapproval stemmed from thirty years of having her husband’s leisure time co-opted by the Bureau.

  “I’m awful sorry, Mrs. McGinnis, but this is important.”

  “It’s always important,” she said tartly. The phone receiver clattered against wood and Frederick knew she was going to wake Jack.

  “Yeah. Stanton. What’s up?” Jack McGinnis had the gravel voice of a man who has abused whiskey and cigarettes most of his life and the jowly face to match but as far as Frederick knew he was a teetotaler with no vices except working too hard and drinking too much coffee.

  Frederick explained the situation on the Jackknife with the murder and the suspected arson. “Both crimes were committed on federal lands,” he said. “We’ve got jurisdiction.”

  “I don’t recall the Forest Service clamoring for our invaluable assistance,” Jack said dryly.

  Frederick kept quiet. Jack McGinnis was seldom talked into anything. He was a crusty, dissipated-looking computer. Facts were fed in. He processed them and produced a result. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred he was right. Or closer to right than anyone else.