Firestorm

by Nevada Barr

  “Fine,” Anna said sourly, but she believed him. “You’re a swell guy. So get me the hell out of here.”

  “I can’t go to jail.”

  “There were extenuating circumstances,” Anna managed. Sulphurous mud crawled in her mouth with every word. “They’ll go easy on you.”

  “Sure. Crazed faggot revenges homo lover. Juries love that. I can’t go to jail, Anna. It’d kill me. I can’t be locked up. I’m sorry.”

  From the corner of her eye, Anna noticed the little dam of gray mud that kept her from falling into the lake was cracking, beginning to fall apart.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-Eight

  AS ANNA PRIED up an eyelid, Hugh Pepperdine flinched away then squawked at the pain the movement caused. “Don’t sit up yet,” Anna cautioned. He blinked up at her. His eyes had a vague unfocused look.

  “What’s your name?” Anna asked.

  “What happened?”

  “Do you know what day it is?” Anna asked, then realized she didn’t know what day it was.

  “Tuesday.” Hugh’s eyes were clearing. They roved slowly over Anna’s face. “Who are you?”

  “You’ve had a blow to the head,” Anna explained. “You’re probably concussed. Do you know your name?” she pressed.

  “Shit. It’s you, Anna.” Pepperdine closed his eyes. “What happened to your face?”

  Anna reached up and felt of her nose and cheeks. Hair, ears, skin, all were filled with gummy whitish mud. Maybe Hugh wasn’t as bad off as she’d feared. She’d scarcely recognize herself.

  “Don’t you remember?” she asked.

  “I remember coming up here after what’s-his-name,” Hugh said, eyes still closed. “What hit me? My head feels like it’s broken.”

  Anna ran her hands over his skull, touching lightly, looking for any abnormalities. She worked her fingers down the back of his neck feeling for displaced or deformed cervical vertebrae, checked his ears for fluid and behind them for the bruised look of battle signs that sometimes accompanied severe head trauma. “You’ve got a knot the size of an ostrich egg on the back of your head but I don’t think anything’s fractured. You’ll have a headache for a few days.”

  Running her hands down his arms and legs, Anna pinched and poked and asked questions till she’d satisfied herself there was no central nervous system damage. Hugh lay still, letting her conduct her secondary survey. “Looks like everything still works,” she said when she’d finished, and: “You honestly don’t remember a thing after coming up here?”

  “I said that,” Hugh replied testily. “Is my head injury making you deaf?” Then his tone changed to one of fear. “Why? Does that mean anything?”

  “No. No,” Anna reassured him hastily. “It’s fairly common. You get a hard enough knock on the head, you forget the events immediately prior to the injury. It’s not like you forget all your past lives. It’s usually just a matter of minutes that get erased.”

  Hugh seemed determined to sit up at this point so Anna helped him. Groaning, he held his head between his hands in the necessary cliché of a man with head pain. “It feels like my head’s the size of a beach ball and made of lead,” he complained.

  “It’ll get better,” Anna promised. “Can you walk?”

  He started to shake his head then thought better of it. “Not yet.” Carefully, so as not to jar his brain, Hugh lifted his face and looked around. Streaks of blue showed through the fog. The sun was not yet up but the light was strong enough to paint the steam in pale shades of peach.

  “Where’s Lindstrom? I was chasing Lindstrom. I remember that much.”

  “You really don’t remember?” Anna asked for the third time. He just glared at her. She took it for a “no.”

  “I got knocked down the bank, almost to the lake. You pulled me out. Lindstrom hit you and you fought. Stephen fell back, into the thermal area. You got knocked down and hit your head.”

  “Lindstrom?”

  “By the time you’d got me up the bank he was gone.”

  “He sank in that stuff?” Pepperdine had the decency to look appalled.

  Anna didn’t reply.

  Pepperdine worked his head gingerly from side to side testing its limitations. “Hey, I saved your life,” he said with sudden realization.

  “Yeah,” Anna said. “I owe you a beer. Can you walk?”

  With help, Hugh got to his feet. Half a dozen times on their slow walk back to the wash he asked her again what happened, reminded her again that he’d saved her life. Anna restricted her responses to grunts and nods as much as she could. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that one day Hugh’s memory of those minutes would return. She was gambling that by then he’d be so in love with the story she’d told him that he’d cling to it for the rest of his days.

  ENCLOSED IN THE artificial night of the shelter, the others were just beginning to stir as Anna and Pepperdine limped into camp. Outside the tent, John and Joseph Hayhurst were muttering in low voices and stamping life back into their feet.

  “What the hell happened to you two?” LeFleur asked. The last vestige of heat was gone from Anna’s mud pack. Not only did she look like the living dead but her wet clothes had chilled her to the point she spoke like a zombie, through clenched jaws. “Long story,” she managed. “Jen’s busted an ankle. You’ll need a couple of guys to carry her out. Let me dump Hugh and I’ll show you where she is.”

  Anna pulled aside the shelter flap. Paula, dutifully wearing her jacket, had nonetheless curled herself around Black Elk, sleeping cold to keep him warm.

  “Everybody make it?” Anna asked as Paula woke. She laid a hand on Howard’s neck. Pulse and breathing reassured her. “Not much longer now,” she said, and ducked outside.

  WITH THE FIRST rays of the sun came the welcome sound of a helicopter thumping through the still air. Common miracles but Anna felt blessed.

  Joseph and John were carrying Jennifer, Anna trailing behind. They didn’t even stop at the bivouac, but turned south up the trail to the heli-spot.

  Two men met them. Two clean, warm, well-fed men with a stretcher and medical gear. Neither was Frederick Stanton, but Anna forgave them. “We’ve got a man with bad burns down in the wash. Take him and the guy with the head injury first,” she said. “This woman’s ankle’s broken. She’ll keep.”

  John and Joseph stepped to one side as the medics jogged down the incline. Young and strong and handsome in their gray jumpsuits, they reminded Anna of Stephen. That life was over and it saddened her.

  Up on the heli-spot the pilot was unloading coolers from a shiny Bell JetRanger. Not since Anna’d watched Cinderella’s pumpkin metamorphose into a glittering carriage had she seen such a lovely equipage. The pilot, a balding overweight man in his fifties, helped Joseph and the crew boss to park Jennifer on one of the coolers. Lawrence and Neil joined the group and the pilot set about serving them with such good cheer they became heady with it. The adventure was over, they were saved. Glory hallelujiah. Everybody but Jennifer drank hot cocoa and laughed too much. Jen remained shut in her own dark world. It would take more than a hot bath and a good meal to cure what ailed her.

  The medics brought Hugh and Howard up to the heli-spot. Paula walked beside the stretcher, her hand resting lightly on the frame near Howard’s arm. More helicopters began chopping up the segment of sky above them. “Press,” the pilot said. “They’ve been buzzing around like flies for two days.”

  The medics loaded Hugh into the helicopter then slid the stretcher bearing Howard into its slot. “Paula,” he said clearly. It was the first word he’d spoken in Anna couldn’t remember how many hours.

  “Can I go?” Paula asked simply. Gone were the sexual overtones that had once accompanied all requests.

  “What do you weigh?” Helicopter pilots were the only people on earth who got an honest answer to that question. Few were willing to die for their vanity.

  “A hundred and thirty-one.”

  “Get on board.”

&
nbsp; As Paula was buckled in, John nudged Hayhurst. “Maybe she can hang up her spurs, make an honest man of him.”

  “It’d save him a fortune, that’s for sure,” Joseph replied.

  Pepperdine had been right; everyone had known but Anna.

  The helicopter departed in a frenzy of wind and noise. Left again to themselves, quiet descended on the group, hilarity of relief evaporating as their losses began to sink in.

  “That was some story Hugh was telling,” Neil Page said. “How much of it’s true?”

  Anna pressed her cocoa into Jennifer’s hands and poured another for herself before squeezing onto the cooler close to the other woman. Jen would need any comfort that could be offered in the next couple of minutes. Short couldn’t but have noticed Stephen had not come back. Anna guessed she was afraid to ask why.

  “It’s true more or less,” Anna answered Page.

  Lawrence shook himself as if a goose walked over his grave. “They’ll never find his body in that soup,” he said.

  Anna made no comment.

  “I doubt they’ll even try.” LeFleur swirled the cocoa in his foam cup. “That area is too unstable, too unpredictable. I’d be damned if I’d go out there in a little rowboat and try to drag that lake. It probably goes clear down to the center of the world.”

  Jennifer’s head was sunk between her shoulders, her injured foot propped up in front of her. “Stephen?” she asked quietly.

  “Hugh said he lost the fight and fell in that thermal lake,” Page said bluntly. Anna shot him a dirty look.

  “My fault,” Jennifer said in a whisper so low only Anna could hear. “I should have left well enough alone.”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Anna said firmly and wondered if she was lying. She liked to think she would have figured it out anyway but there was no way of knowing.

  To block everyone’s pain including her own, Anna thought of home and heat and Frederick Stanton. Unconsciously, her hand went to her mud-caked hair. “How do I look?” she asked Jennifer. “I look like shit, don’t I?” Jen didn’t even hear. “Drink your cocoa,” Anna ordered, and Short put the cup mechanically to her lips.

  Neil Page rummaged through the pockets of his brush jacket and produced a rumpled pack of Harley Davidson cigarettes. Shaking one partway out of the foil, he offered it to John. LeFleur looked dumbfounded, a man seeing the Holy Grail. “You had these all along? You son of a bitch,” he said, but he took the cigarette, snapped off the filter and fumbled for a light.

  “There weren’t enough,” Neil said, unperturbed.

  Anna stared at the men lighting up. All those times Neil had been sneaking off to smoke so he wouldn’t have to share.

  “You bummed John’s last cigarette,” she said, suddenly remembering.

  Neil’s hand, cupped around his lighter, froze for a second, then he flicked the lever and sucked in a lungful of smoke. “Forgot I had my own,” he said.

  Harley Davidsons. Len Nims had been smoking Harley Davidsons the morning he’d come to the medical unit tent. Page had robbed Len’s corpse for smokes. Anna looked away.

  The helicopter returned for a second load. Anna, Jennifer, Neil and Lawrence were loaded into the back of the Bell Jet. One of the medics stayed behind with Joseph and John to wait for the last trip.

  The shriek of the engine blotted out all else and the machine lifted into the air. To the east the sun burned through in a blinding flood of life and Anna felt resurrected. Joy permeated her bones, dissolved aches, tempered cold. It was grand to be alive.

  Short, crumpled in the seat next to her, her foot bare and splinted with pillows, propped on the bench opposite, experienced no such lifting of the spirits and Anna felt an overwhelming rush of pity. Grief over the death of her brother would be softened by time. Guilt over the horrible demise of Stephen Lindstrom would not. Jennifer had been to the thermal lake. There would be nightmares. As Garrison Keillor said: “Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving.”

  Anna looked away from the young woman’s despair, stared out the window. The sky was touched with a thousand shades of peach and silver. Below, in the shadow of a distant ridge, the rising tide of light picked out a glowing spot of color.

  “Want to see something pretty?” Anna shouted impulsively in Jennifer’s ear.

  Jennifer barely shook her head.

  “Come on,” Anna insisted. “It’s beautiful.”

  “No.” Jennifer mouthed the word soundlessly.

  “Look, damn it.” Putting a hand on the back of Jennifer’s neck, Anna dragged the woman halfway across her lap, directing her eyes out the window. For a moment Jen stared without seeing. “Look down, the far ridge,” Anna yelled.

  Then Jennifer saw it, a tiny speck of bright NoMex yellow working its way purposefully toward the rising sun. She shot Anna a questioning look and Anna nodded.

  Jennifer laughed. “God, but that’s gorgeous.” She looked a moment longer then straightened up, smiling.

  “I told you,” Anna shouted. A moment later she leaned over and yelled: “Frederick’s meeting me. How do I look?”

  “Like shit.”

  “You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?”

  “I know,” Jennifer shouted back. She took Anna’s hand and held it till they’d landed.