“Roger that—5214. I’ll wake everyone up. Over.”
“I’m heading for the blaze now. Over.”
“You’re a temp. Stay at the lookout. Over.”
“I’m fifteen minutes away. I’m a trained firefighter; I have equipment.”
“You are? You do? But—”
Sam cut her off with a press of the Talk button. “It’ll be at least an hour before you can get anyone to the lake. Over.”
The dispatcher chose not to debate that point. “It’s against the regs. Don’t do anything stupid. Three-one-one, out.”
Sam dumped the radio on the countertop and pulled on her boots. She heard the radio call to Paul Schuler, the law enforcement ranger who patrolled the west side campgrounds at night. The rest of the calls would be made via telephone; other staff members would be asleep at home. If all went smoothly, the west side crew might reach the lake in forty-five minutes. Most of them lived in the small town of Forks, less than fifteen miles away. But in that time, a fire could consume acres of forest. With luck, she might be able to extinguish a couple of small blazes before wildfire dug its ugly claws too deeply into the forest.
Lili jammed her feet into her own hiking boots.
“No,” Sam said. “You’re staying here.”
The fountain of dark hair bounced as Lili’s chin jerked up. “You can’t leave me here! What if the fire comes this way?”
Good point. If the fire turned in this direction, she might not make it back to get Lili. Damn! “Then I’ll have to drop you—”
“Where?” Lili’s voice was shrill. “There isn’t anywhere.”
Sam stared at her, trying to think of a safe place to deposit the child. Her mind was filled with visions of flames licking through the forest, a small fire growing larger by the second. Panic growing as birds and deer and bear circled within the smoke, tree frogs frantically searching for twigs that wouldn’t scorch their skin.
“The trees are burning right now,” Lili said, as if reading her thoughts.
Sam didn’t need to be reminded: her imagination was loud with screams of terrified animals.
“I’ll do exactly what you say.” Lili made the sign of the cross over her chest.
“You bet you will.” Sam blew out the Coleman, stuffed her flashlight and first-aid kit into her daypack. Her fire-retardant suit, along with shovels and Pulaskis, were locked into a metal toolbox in the park’s oldest pickup at the bottom of the tower.
Lili worked in silence, throwing gear and water bottles into her own pack as Sam picked up the radio again. When the dispatcher finally answered, Sam informed her that Lili Choi would be riding with her to Marmot Lake. She heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end.
“No choice,” Sam said into the radio void. “Three-two-five, out.”
2
THE old pickup fishtailed in soft dirt at the turnoff to the logging road, jerking Sam’s hands on the wheel. Lili braced herself against the dash, but said nothing. Sam drove with her window rolled down, analyzing the night air for smoke. So far, she detected only a faint acrid scent that might well be her imagination. The heavy steel gate arms that should have barricaded Road 5214 sagged on their posts, wide open, the padlock dangling from a length of chain. There was no need for the key in her pocket. Had the chain had been cut? She couldn’t spare the time to check.
Armies of hemlocks, red cedars, and Douglas firs flashed by in the headlights, occasionally reaching out to rake the speeding vehicle with spiky branches. A bottlebrush of needles whipped through the open window, stinging Sam’s neck and shoulder.
The air along the road was still clear, the forest quiet with dappled moonlight. The summer had been typically rainy on the Olympic Peninsula: the vegetation was lush and green. Maybe the fire would fizzle out before they even got there.
The acrid odor grew stronger near the water. Sam skidded to a stop in the tiny gravel parking lot on the east bank of Marmot Lake. Ghostly fingers of smoke glided over the silvery water. A tongue of flame burned orange along the west shore, its reflection bright in the lake surface. The blaze looked reasonably small. Potentially manageable.
Jumping out, Sam ripped open the tailgate of the pickup, yanked out the fire gear. She extracted one shovel and one Pulaski. She stepped into the heavy firefighting pants, hauled up on the suspenders. Lili frowned at the strange axe-hoe head of the Pulaski, then clasped her fingers around the shovel. Sam squelched her protest—if she couldn’t leave Lili in the fire tower, she certainly couldn’t leave her in the truck. At least the girl was willing to carry her share of the load. Sam shoved her fireproof jacket into Lili’s hands. “Put this on.”
The jacket hung down almost to the girl’s knees and covered her hands. Sam shrugged on her spare, a medium size that swallowed up her slender frame in a similar fashion. She had no fireproof pants that would even remotely fit the child; her own were so huge the rolled-up cuffs collected more debris than they shed. Thank heavens Lili wore heavy jeans and leather hiking boots, not the popular rubber and foam sneakers that so easily melted.
She knelt in front of Lili, snugged her only helmet onto the child’s head. “You’ve got to do exactly what I tell you.”
“Duh,” Lili muttered impatiently. “I already promised.” Her face gleamed with excitement, but her brown eyes were calm.
Sam hoped her own gaze was as steady. “The radio will be right here in my pocket. If anything happens to me, you grab the radio and run back here, okay?”
The girl dipped her chin in response.
“Do you know how to work the radio?”
Lili rolled her eyes. “Of course.”
Sam tucked the radio into her jacket pocket, shouldered the Pulaski, pulled out her flashlight, and started down the trail. Lili’s footsteps stayed close behind as they jogged along the root-gnarled path that bordered the small lake. As they neared the west shore, the smoke thickened.
Then the enemy was in sight, and providing enough light that Sam flicked off the flashlight. The fire was larger than she’d hoped. Waves of flames lapped at the thick cushion of duff under the evergreens. Dead twigs on lower limbs burst into sparklers. One isolated cedar was fully engulfed, a fountain of fire that lit up the surrounding forest. The Biblical burning bush rose in her imagination. She snorted at the absurdity.
“Over here, Lili.” Sam paralleled the blaze, weaving her way to the far side of the fire between spindly evergreens and ferns nearly as tall as she was. Smoke hung dense and foglike; so far the air remained still. If they could contain the flames to the lakeshore, the conflagration should burn itself out.
She attacked the line of flame at her feet, using the hoe side of the Pulaski to claw loose dirt over burning fir cones and needles. Beside her, Lili coughed as she beat the backside of the shovel against flames at the base of a tree.
“Use the dirt,” Sam shouted above the crackle of flames. “Make a bare strip that the fire can’t cross. Throw dirt on the flames.” She choked on the last word. Puffing, she dragged mounds of duff away from the hungry flames. Beneath the usual forest detritus, the ground was rock-strewn glacial till, requiring teeth-jarring jabs to loosen even a tablespoon of soil.
Lili gamely scooped a shovelful of pebbles and managed to smother the glowing embers at her feet. She stepped forward to tackle a larger bloom of flames.
Sam lunged after her, pulled her back. “Don’t worry about anything between here and the lake. Stay beside me. We’ve got to hold this line, keep the fire from spreading.”
Hold the line—the mantra of the firefighting course. Surround the enemy. Confine the conflagration, make it eat everything it has now so it will starve to death later.
Beating back a fire had been much easier during training, back when, right out of college, she’d rehearsed for the ranger job she’d never landed. But that was—jeez, fifteen years ago? Sweat coursed down her neck to join the swamp of perspiration coating her entire body under the heavy fire suit. In what she knew were minutes but seemed l
ike hours, she and Lili managed to beat back only a few yards of flames.
She hated fire. When there was fire, there was nothing else. The scent of cedar and wildflowers, the melody of bird calls and tree frogs vanished, leaving only smothering smoke and blistering heat and the popping and crackling and hissing of death. And just when you thought you had finally beaten it into a flat still blackness, fire could spring to life again like a relentless villain in a horror movie.
The forest behind them was still cool, green, quiet. The landscape in front cackled and spat like a battalion of demons. Every smack of the Pulaski radiated pain up Sam’s arms and neck into her skull. Her sinuses burned. A section of downed limb flared up in front of her, yellow flames bright against blackened ground. She stabbed her axe blade into the rotten wood, flung the burning chunk into the flames a couple of yards away, clearing the zone at her feet.
The wind was rising; the acrid air licked across her sweaty brow and stung her eyes. She hazarded a quick glance at Lili. Tears streaked glistening channels through black smudges on the girl’s face. How long could the child keep up the hard work? For that matter, how long could she herself keep it up? Where was the rest of the crew?
To her left, an arrow of fire snaked up the skeleton of a dead cedar. With a whoosh like a sudden intake of breath, a limb overhead burst into flames, a Fourth of July sparkler that showered them with fiery bits of bark and needles. Sam curled her fingers into Lili’s collar and yanked her out of the rain of embers. Caught off-guard, the girl stumbled against her. Sam stepped back to recover her footing.
The ground disappeared beneath her boots. What felt like solid rock slammed first into her spine, and then collided with the back of her skull. Her jaws snapped together. Her teeth sliced into her lower lip. The Pulaski crashed down across her thighs. With a great roar, the flame-lit surroundings transitioned into nothingness like the screen pixels between photos in a computer slide show.
Was that Lili shrieking? The surge of blackness threatened to engulf her. No! Shake it off, no time to pass out. Lili’s counting on you. Breathe. Now. Just do it. Now.
With Sam’s first painful intake of air, feeling and vision rushed back. The earth beneath her was cool. Far above the chaos of the fire, stars winked through thin streams of smoke. Lower, toward the ground, Lili’s smoke-darkened face peered anxiously down at her. And then there were other faces, rangers Paul Schuler and Mack Lindstrom and a gray-haired fellow whose name she couldn’t remember. The roar in her head drowned out all other sounds.
A stinging bumblebee of pain registered in front of her left ear, and she raised a hand toward it. Mack’s heavy boots thudded onto the ground beside her. He swatted a glowing ember away. As if the burning coal had blocked her ears, her hearing suddenly returned.
Mack’s square face blotted out everything else. “You shouldn’t move.”
Groaning, she pushed herself to a sitting position.
“Okay, so don’t listen to me. You okay, Sam?”
“Think so.” The air hurt her lip and tongue and the inside of her cheek, where her teeth had torn into the soft flesh. Her mouth filled with bitter liquid. She spat onto the ground. Blood ran down her chin. A quick exploration with her fingertips revealed a gash in her lip and a lump already growing at the base of her skull. Sam sucked in another deep lungful of air, coughed once, then gasped, “Just knocked the breath out of myself.”
Taking Mack’s extended hand, she pulled herself to her feet. “I’m too old for this shit.”
The last words came out “thith thit.” She spat again, dug a toe into the dirt, grabbed a root that spiked out of the earth wall overhead, and pulled herself skyward. Mack’s hands pressed against her buttocks, a gesture she would ordinarily have protested. Under the circumstances, she was grateful for the boost. On her hands and knees, she crawled out of the crater, feeling like a drunk who had just come to after spending the night on the barroom floor.
A low wolf whistle sounded from behind her, and she glanced over her shoulder to spy a man leaning on his shovel, leering at her, his teeth unnaturally white in his smoke-darkened face. Just her luck, the only firefighter paying attention would be Arnie Cole, a smarmy forest service ranger she’d been trying to avoid since their first meeting over two months ago. A few yards away, Joe Choi, in full fire gear, clasped Lili to his chest. Catching a glimpse of her over Lili’s head, he raised a hand and gave Sam a thumbs-up sign. In a line that stretched into the hazy distance, ghostly yellow-and-green-clad figures wielded shovels and Pulaskis. Over the crackling and hissing, she heard the loud whine of the portable pump on the lakeshore. Its racket added a treble note to the pounding in her head.
Mack clambered up beside her, one fist clamped around her Pulaski. She stood on the edge, swaying slightly as she stared into the dark void. The crater was easily fifteen feet across and at least seven feet deep. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? “Was that always there?”
Alwayths theah? The three syllables stabbed. Blood streamed down her chin, and sudden tears blurred her vision. She covered her lips with cupped fingers to smother the pain.
“How would I know? This is your area.” Mack pressed her Pulaski into her hands and reached for the shovel he’d left on the ground.
Ah yes. The fire was destroying her area. Suck it up, Westin. Raising the Pulaski, she stumbled toward the glowing edge. She’d kill it for sure this time. Vengeanth ith mine, sayeth the fat-lipped firefighter.
An hour later, the fire was out. Only a few acres lay in smoking gray ruins. Most of the firefighters, including Joe and Lili, had gone home, but the ones who remained divided the devastation among themselves and tromped through it toward the lake, stirring ashes and turning over smoldering chunks of wood to ensure the flames wouldn’t spring to life as soon as they departed. Sam was pulverizing a smoldering ember into ashes when Mack yelped from fifty yards away.
“Holy shit!”
It took her a minute to locate him in the moonlight among the skeletons of trees. He was on his knees beside a charred tree trunk. Had he hurt himself? After making sure she had permanently blinded the glowing eye on the ground, she trudged toward him.
Side by side, they stared at the blackened log, still smoking on the forest floor. It was wearing boots.
3
THEY both dug out flashlights to take stock of the situation. The body, dressed in ash-smudged camouflage trousers, khaki shirt, and leather boots, lay mostly in Elk Creek, which was now a slow trickle of sludge. The face was turned into the scorched ferns along the bank, the visible portion a mass of blisters interrupted by a singed eyebrow. Blackened hair was clumped into snarls by congealing blood that flowed from a gaping wound at the back of the head.
Sam’s stomach lurched at the odor of charred flesh. Not even an illegal hunter deserved this end. “Is he—”
A dribble of blood slid over her lower lip. She wiped it on her sleeve and pressed her lips together to lessen the flow from the gash her teeth had cut.
Mack pressed his fingers to the victim’s neck. After a few seconds, he said, “Can’t feel a pulse.” He placed his hand in front of the blistered lips, then, after another interval, shook his head. “We’re going to need a body bag.”
Slipping his fingers under the web belt at the broad waist, he tugged. With an obscene sucking sound, the body broke free of the mud and flopped over onto its back. A hand, its fingers curled, came to rest on the toe of Sam’s boot.
The transformation made her gasp. The side of the face that had been pressed to the ground was untouched by fire. An ivory cheek shone through streaks of gray mud. The wisp of hair that hung over the half-moon eyebrow was a warm honey blond. Gold loops threaded both earlobes.
“Holy shit,” Mack said again. “It’s Lisa Glass.”
The name didn’t mean anything to Sam. “Who’s Lisa Glass?”
“Trail crew,” he murmured.
The trail crew, a group of seasonal workers Sam hadn’t met, had started work about ten weeks ear
lier in the north section of the park. The job—clearing existing trails of debris and hacking new paths out of the mountainous terrain—was grueling physical labor, most often performed by teenage delinquents working off community service sentences from juvenile court. It surprised her that this girl had been among them, although judging by her long muscular body, Lisa Glass would be physically able to wield a pickaxe and sledgehammer. Sam regretted not getting to know this tough young woman.
Mack’s head jerked up. “She’s alive! I just saw her take a breath.”
“What?” Sam knelt and gently pushed up an eyelid.
The pupil that stared back at her flashlight beam was an unmoving black well surrounded by ice blue iris. Suddenly the victim’s chest moved with a jerky breath.
“She’s unconscious,” Mack confirmed. “And I moved her. Oh God.” He wadded his jacket front in a fist, his sooty brow creased with anxiety. “I couldn’t feel a pulse or breath, I swear.”
“It’s okay, Mack, I would have done the same. You didn’t know she was still alive.” Sam brushed a tangle of burned hair away from Lisa’s blistered face. A wedge-shaped piece of skin from the girl’s cheek peeled away with the strand, and Sam froze, paralyzed by the horrible sight. In Lisa’s case, life might not be a blessing.
IT was midmorning by the time Sam arrived at Mack’s apartment building. In its first life, the structure had been a rambling farmhouse, as evidenced by its wide covered wooden porch and cedar plank floors. The flower-stenciled front door opened onto a tiny lobby with a sitting area and mailboxes for the three tenants. After stepping into the interior gloom, Sam raised her eyebrows at the unexpected sight of a lanky form sprawled across one of the two chairs.
The man had stretched out his gray-trousered legs and slouched down into the faded brown velvet armchair until he could rest his head atop the back cushion. A lightweight gray sports jacket had hiked up around his shoulders and waist. At least twenty-four hours’ worth of beard darkened his square jaw line, lending the olive skin a bluish cast above the neckline of his navy shirt. A loosened gray-and-white tie hung limply around his neck like a broken leash. His eyes were closed.
Bear Bait (9781101611548) Page 2