Murder on the Horizon

by M. L. Rowland

  “Okay.”

  “Try to keep your eyes open and actually look at what you’re shootin’ at.”

  Gracie shook out her hands, relaxed her shoulders, and let the revolver hang loosely at her side. “I feel like a gunfighter at the O.K. Corral or something. Who was that? Matt Dillon? Jesse James?” A bead of sweat trickled down her temple.

  “Whenever you’re ready, just shoot.

  “No, Wyatt Earp. Somebody else was there, but I can’t remember who.”

  “Just fire the weapon. See what you hit.”

  Gracie looked down at the target.

  Lifted the revolver.

  Pow, pow, pow!

  “Did I miss again?” She squinted at the target.

  Beside her, Jim coughed a laugh. “Nice grouping.”

  There was a single large hole in the target right in the middle of the silhouette man’s crotch.

  * * *

  GRACIE SWOOPED UP the long highway switchbacks leading up the backside of the mountain from the desert. She sped up for the straightaway, braked for the sharp hairpin curve, sped up again.

  Her ears still rang and her hands were tired from gripping the heavy revolver. “And that gun is teeny,” she said out loud.

  In the end, when she had taken aim and actually hit the target, nicking the silhouette man’s pinky finger, she had sighed with relief and called it good, saying thanks and good-bye to Jim and that she would see him again the following week. He had looked less than thrilled.

  Beep! Beep! Beep!

  Gracie unclipped her SAR pager from the waistband of her shorts and looked at the screen.

  “Mandatory evacuation issued for entire valley. All SAR report to SO.”

  “Oh, shit! This is it,” she said and floored the accelerator.

  As Gracie wove back and forth on the switchbacks, she was preoccupied with her deadeye with a gun. Once she received the evacuation page, she noticed what hadn’t registered before—pickups and cars filled with boxes and furniture, larger trucks pulling fifth wheel RVs and animal trailers, all leaving the valley, a harbinger of the bumper-to-bumper traffic nightmare to come.

  The Ranger soared over the final rise leading down onto the eastern portion of the valley. Gracie gasped, hauled on the steering wheel, slammed on the brakes, and slid to a stop on the gravel at the side of the highway.

  The Timber Creek valley lay nestled between long parallel mountain ranges, a medley of evergreens dabbed with earth and granite. Timber Lake announced its presence as a strip of cobalt blue in the distance. Overshadowing all else, billowing high into the cloudless morning sky from a point on the southern mountains, was a tower of thick, gray smoke.

  “Oh, my God,” Gracie whispered. Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, leaning forward to stare out through the windshield, she allowed herself several moments of sheer awe at the terrifying power of nature. Then turning off the choking fear like a water faucet, she swung the Ranger back out onto the pavement and raced down the highway into the valley.

  Gaining reception as soon as she topped the rise, Gracie grabbed up her cell phone from the passenger’s seat and speed-dialed the camp kitchen. Allen answered after only one ring.

  “Allen. Gracie. The Sheriff’s Department has issued a mandatory evacuation for the entire valley. We need to evacuate camp. I’m way out by Greene’s Lake. Twenty-five, maybe thirty minutes out depending on how backed up traffic is already. Will you go find Mr. Mowry and start the evacuation process? I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “On it,” Allen said, his voice calm, unruffled. If Gracie had been standing next to him, she would have kissed him. “Can’t see any smoke up here for the trees,” he continued. “But you can smell it.”

  “I don’t know anything about the fire yet—where it is exactly and how much time we have. But I’m assuming worst-case scenario. As quickly as possible, you need to get the hell out of there, too.”

  Gracie and Allen had worked out in advance that, in the event of an evacuation, Allen would drive down to West Covina to stay with his mother. And he knew that Gracie would remain up in Timber Creek, working the evacuation.

  Even though Gracie also knew Allen would take her dog with him to his mother’s, she double-checked, “You’ll take Minnie?”

  “Don’t give the little girl another thought. She’ll be safe and sound with me.”

  “Thank you,” Gracie said, tears blurring her eyes. “Gotta go. See ya in twenty-five or so.”

  “Later.”

  Steering with her left hand, Gracie guided the Ranger around the north side of Greene’s Lake. Phone in her other hand, she disconnected from camp and speed-dialed the Sheriff’s Office. To the deputy who answered, she said, “Gracie Kinkaid, Search and Rescue. ETA is I hope not more than two hours.” Even though she knew the deputy was swamped with incoming calls, she couldn’t help asking, “Is the fire in the Santa Anita Canyon?”

  “Affirmative,” the deputy answered. “As of about thirty minutes ago.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Gracie said and disconnected.

  Her third and last call was to the office of the church that owned Camp Ponderosa. In the previous week, she had spent several hours on the telephone with church officers and their insurance company discussing priorities and policies and procedures, working out in advance every detail of a camp evacuation. Now that the evacuation notice had been issued, the call proved quick and painless.

  Gracie disconnected, tossed the phone onto the seat beside her, and punched the accelerator all the way down to the floor.

  CHAPTER

  27

  GRACIE turned the Ranger into the parking lot of the Sheriff’s Office.

  It had taken her less than two hours to drive across town and up to camp, wave good-bye to the corporate executives as well as Allen and Minnie, load into her truck a single small box of irreplaceables, flash drives, and the safe from the office, change into her SAR uniform, and drive back down winding Cedar Mill Road from camp. All the way through town, slowed by the burgeoning traffic, she trailed a caravan of green National Forest Service vehicles and a single bright red box truck announcing in bold, white lettering ARAPAHO HOT SHOTS.

  Gracie pulled into a space in the SO parking lot and trotted inside the substation building. Ten minutes later, trailing behind Carrie Matthews, she walked out again with an HT wedged into a pouch on her radio chest pack.

  Carrie split off to grab her gear from the trunk of her car. She heaved it into the bed of the Ranger and climbed into the passenger’s seat as Gracie started the engine.

  The Ranger made a left turn out of the parking lot. “What’s your call sign?” Gracie asked.

  “Ten Rescue Fifty-one.”

  Gracie thumbed the microphone on the radio. “Control, Ten Rescue Twenty-two.”

  “Ten Rescue Twenty-two,” replied a male dispatcher.

  “Departing the SO with Ten Rescue Fifty-one on board.”

  “At eleven oh six.”

  The women drove two miles east to the only venue large enough for a large-incident Command Post—the valley’s Convention Center, a wide, one-story brick building with a low-angle green metal roof and ringed by tall ponderosa pines. In the wide, undulating field behind, domed firefighter tents had already sprouted like green and orange and blue mushrooms.

  In the parking lot, Gracie threaded the truck in and out of the rows of cars, trucks, and other vehicles identified by insignias and emblems as belonging to agencies from multiple jurisdictions: local, county, and state fire, National Forest Service, Sheriff’s Department, Search and Rescue, California Highway Patrol. Finally locating an open space at the far corner of the lot, she left Carrie behind and wound her way back through the sea of vehicles, waving across to two men from a neighboring SAR team whose faces she remembered, but whose names she didn’t.

  Taped to the front
of one of two reinforced steel entry doors were hand-printed signs, one reading MEDIA with an arrow pointing to the right, another announcing in huge block letters, ALL INCOMING PERSONNEL MUST CHECK IN HERE!

  Gracie walked in through a propped-open door and was immersed in the organized chaos that was a large-incident Command Post in the Initial Attack stage.

  Every light blazed. The cavernous main room bristled with activity—men and women wearing white, gray, or orange uniform shirts, or yellow Nomex. Several people sat eating their lunches at the long rows of conference tables and steel folding chairs that had been set up in the middle of the room. Affixed to easels and cream-colored cement-block walls along the right side of the room were three enormous briefing maps along with laminated boards displaying Incident Objectives, Organization Assignments, Safety Reminders, and other critical incident information. Doors along the far wall opened up to rooms bursting with desks, laptops, copy machines, boxes of paper, telephones, currently or soon to be occupied by, Gracie figured, the incident muckety-mucks—Incident Commander and Section Chiefs for Planning, Logistics, and Finance.

  Somewhere out in the field was the Operations Section Chief, tasked with the monumental job of directing all firefighting personnel and equipment—strike teams and task forces, bulldozers, water tenders, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft.

  The enormity and complexity of fighting a large-scale wildfire was mind-boggling, the expenditure in terms of manpower and dollars staggering.

  To the left of the door where Gracie entered was a long table to which a sign written in the same large block letters had been taped: ALL PERSONNEL CHECK IN HERE! Behind the table, a woman, already looking as frazzled as her bushy silver hair, stood separating rumpled sign-in sheets into piles and muttering something about herding cats. Orange Sheriff’s Department patches on her white uniform shirt identified her as a Citizen Volunteer. The orange name tape above the breast pocket read: K. PARKER.

  Gracie walked up to the check-in table. “Gracie Kinkaid,” she said. “Checking in two members of Timber Creek SAR.”

  K. Parker handed Gracie a clipboard. “Need both names and info on the 211. Vehicle info on the 218.”

  According to the ICS Form 211, Lenny, Warren, Jon, and four other Timber Creek SAR members had arrived ninety minutes earlier and were presumably already out in the field working their assignments.

  As Gracie filled in the forms, K. Parker asked, “Did you check in with SAR Staging?”

  She shook her head. “Didn’t see anyone around.”

  “They’re scrambling. Always hard playing catch-up. When you’re outside, let ’em know you’re here.”

  “Got it.”

  “They’ll give you an assignment and paperwork.”

  Gracie indulged herself a half minute to study four USGS topographical maps taped together to create one large map of the Timber Creek valley and the southern mountains, depicting the perimeter of the Shady Oak Fire and evacuation zones as of six o’clock that morning.

  She stepped sideways to a laminated chart displaying the most current updates on the fire, zeroing in on Weather at the bottom of the page. Relative Humidity: 14 percent. She bypassed Haines Index and focused on the day’s forecast: Sunny. Temps low to mid-80s. Sustained winds SE. 10–12 mph. Gusting to 25.

  Anxiety gave the knot in Gracie’s stomach an extra twist. An afternoon of high, hot, dry winds from the southeast, and Camp Ponderosa could explode like a blowtorch.

  * * *

  “SAR GROUP, GROUND Four,” Gracie said into the radio microphone as she steered the Ranger off to the side of the road. Carrie was out of her seat before the truck came to a stop.

  “Go ahead, Ground Four,” a male voice answered over the radio.

  “Beginning assignment at corner of State Route 38 and Peter Pan.”

  “At twelve fifty-two.”

  Cutting the engine, Gracie climbed out of the truck and circled around back where Carrie was already threading arms through the straps of her backpack.

  Ground Four’s evacuation assignment was a neighborhood north of Timber Lake, an eclectic mix of ramshackle and higher-priced houses and cabins, already frenetic with activity—families and young people and seniors cramming everything they reasonably and not so reasonably could into whatever vehicles they possessed: cars, pickups, trailers, campers, RVs.

  “Kinda like a really jumpy block party,” Gracie said, hauling on her own backpack.

  A California Department of Forestry helicopter, looking like a behemoth prehistoric insect, its water bucket dangling beneath, cut a wide swath over their heads, then dropped out of sight behind the tall pines at the end of the block.

  Gracie gathered up assignment maps and information flyers, handing Carrie half. “Wanna take the right side of the street?” she asked. “I’ll take the left?”

  “Sure.”

  “Work our way down to the end, left on Tinker Bell, left on Tiger Lily, right on Nana, that way.”

  “Got it.”

  “Got flagging tape?”

  Carrie held up a roll of the neon orange plastic ribbon. “When we contact someone personally, right?”

  “Yeah. Somewhere visible. Mailbox. Porch railing.”

  “Got it.”

  “Pen and paper?”

  Carrie patted the side pocket of her pants.

  “Okay,” Gracie said. “Let’s go.”

  The Ground Four team walked quickly from street to street, stopping at every house within the assignment area, talking with every person they saw, handing out flyers, imparting information about the fire itself, evacuation routes, emergency shelters down the hill.

  A jittery tension sparked the air. Some people were relaxed, friendly, even laughing, exhibiting an amped-up energy as if they were embarking on a grand adventure. Others were fraught with worry, afraid, anxious to leave the valley and be out of harm’s way. Some had lived through an evacuation before. For some it was a new nightmare.

  Thirty minutes into their assignment, Gracie turned onto Michael Street and kicked something with the toe of her hiking boot. She looked down. In the duff of pine needles lay a jackknife. “Hey!” She bent to pick it up. Brushing off the grit, she opened it. Two blades, pliers, screwdriver, corkscrew, wire cutter. “Look what I just found.” She held up the knife so Carrie could see from across the street. “Almost new!”

  “Jealous!” Carrie called back.

  Gracie slipped the knife into the side pocket of her pants as she climbed the front steps of the house on the corner. “Sheriff’s Department Search and Rescue,” she called, knocking on the rusty screen door. “This is a mandatory evacuation.”

  Seconds passed. No one answered the door. But someone was home—a beat-up old pickup truck was parked in the overgrown driveway along the side of the house.

  Gracie knocked again. “Search and Rescue. The valley’s under a mandatory evacuation order.”

  The front door was yanked open. A man, unshaven, graying hair askew, holes in a dirty white T-shirt, glared out at her through the screen and barked, “Get the hell off my porch!”

  “I’m with the Sheriff’s Department Search and Rescue. There’s—”

  “I ain’t leavin’!”

  “For your own safety,” Gracie said, “Fire officials and the Sheriff’s Department are strongly urging everyone to leave the valley. If you choose to remain, you’re doing so at your—”

  “Take my chances. Get the hell off my porch!”

  “Thank you. Have a good day.” Gracie walked back out to the road, making a note of the address on a sheet of paper on a clipboard. Then she tied a streamer of orange flagging tape to the mailbox, its paint chipped and the pole tilted south.

  The next couple of houses were clearly unoccupied, no vehicles in the driveway, no answer to a knock or ring of the doorbell, window shades pulled down, curtains drawn. />
  Walking past a vacant lot filled with sage and rabbitbrush, Gracie lifted her nose to the air and inhaled. Nothing at first, then she caught it, as if floating in on a high breeze, the faintest hint of smoke. She craned her neck, trying to catch a glimpse of the smoke, but the neighborhood pines were too tall and close together.

  She stepped up onto the porch of the next house, past plastic pots with fake pink geraniums, and pressed the doorbell.

  She waited.

  No one came to the door.

  Someone was definitely home. She could hear stealthy movements inside the house.

  Hopefully not another old sourpuss. Or worse. She took a step back, wondering if the business end of a shotgun was going to emerge from a window.

  Finally someone fiddled with the front lock for what seemed like a full minute, then the door slowly opened. What emerged was not a shotgun, but the quintessential little old lady. Frail. Arms as thin as twigs. The backs of her hands covered with quarter-sized bruises.

  Through the open door, Gracie could see the interior of the house was a throwback to the 1950s with an entire wall filled with framed black-and-white pictures and tidy lace doilies pinned to the backs of twin raspberry-colored armchairs. Bing Crosby crooned up from somewhere inside.

  The woman looked up at Gracie with blue eyes, milky with cataracts. “Can I help you?” she asked in a voice so faint Gracie had to lean down to catch her words. “Are you lost?”

  Gracie smiled down at her. “No, ma’am. I’m with—”

  A reedy male voice floated out over the woman’s shoulder. “Who is it, Frieda?”

  “I’m with the Sheriff’s Department,” Gracie said. “Search and Rescue.”

  From inside the house, louder this time. “Gosh dang it, Frieda! Who is it?”

  The woman turned away from the door, hand gripping the frame as if it was the only thing keeping her upright. “Did you say something?”