Cold Fire Page 3

  “Come on, you don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m not a serial killer. I don’t keep a chainsaw in my car.”

  He stared at her a beat, then grinned disarmingly. “Actually, you look more like the type who favors bludgeoning with a blunt instrument.”

  “I’m a reporter. We use switchblades. But I haven’t killed anyone this week.”

  “Last week?”

  “Two. But they were both door-to-door salesmen.”

  “It’s still homicide.”

  “Justifiable, though.”

  “Okay, I accept your offer.”

  Her blue Toyota was at the far curb, two back from the parked car into which the drunk driver had slammed. Downhill, the tow truck was just hauling away the totaled pickup, and the last of the policemen was getting into a patrol car. A few overlooked splinters of tempered glass from the truck’s broken windows still glimmered on the blacktop in the late-afternoon sunshine.

  They rode for a block or so in silence.

  Then Holly said, “You have friends in Portland?”

  “Yeah. From college.”

  “That’s who you were staying with?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They couldn’t take you to the airport?”

  “They could’ve if it was a morning flight, but this afternoon they were both at work.”

  “Ah,” she said. She commented on clusters of brilliant yellow roses that hung from vines entwining a split-rail fence at a house they passed, and asked if he knew that Portland called itself the City of Roses, which he did. After another silence, she returned to the real conversation: “Their phone wasn’t working, huh?”

  “Excuse me?” “Your friends.” She shrugged. “I just wondered why you didn’t call a cab from their place.”

  “I intended to walk.”

  “To the airport?”

  “My ankle was fine then.”

  “It’s still a long walk.”

  “Oh, but I’m a fitness nut.”

  “Very long walk—especially with a suitcase.”

  “It’s not that heavy. When I’m exercising, I usually walk with handweights to get an upper-body workout.”

  “I’m a walker myself,” she said, braking for a red light. “I used to run every morning, but my knees started hurting.”

  “Mine too, so I switched to walking. Gives your heart the same workout if you keep up your pace.”

  For a couple of miles, while she drove as slowly as she dared in order to extend the time she had with him, they chatted about physical fitness and fat-free foods. Eventually he said something that allowed her to ask, with complete naturalness, the names of his friends there in Portland.

  “No,” he said.

  “No what?”

  “No, I’m not giving you their names. They’re private people, nice people, I don’t want them being pestered.”

  “I’ve never been called a pest before,” she said.

  “No offense, Miss Thorne, but I just wouldn’t want them to have to be in the paper and everything, have their lives disrupted.”

  “Lots of people like seeing their names in the newspaper.”

  “Lots don’t.”

  “They might enjoy talking about their friend, the big hero.”

  “Sorry,” he said affably, and smiled.

  She was beginning to understand why she found him so appealing: his unshakable poise was irresistible. Having worked for two years in Los Angeles, Holly had known a lot of men who styled themselves as laid-back Californians ; each portrayed himself as the epitome of self-possession, Mr. Mellow-rely on me, baby, and the world can never touch either of us; we are beyond the reach of fate—but none actually possessed the cool nerves and unflappable temperament to which he pretended. A Bruce Willis wardrobe, perfect tan, and studied insouciance did not a Bruce Willis make. Self-confidence could be gained through experience, but real aplomb was something you were either born with or learned to imitate—and the imitation was never convincing to the observant eye. However, Jim Ironheart had been born with enough aplomb, if rationed equally to all the men in Rhode Island, to produce an entire state of cool, unflappable types. He faced hurtling trucks and a reporter’s questions with the same degree of equanimity. Just being in his company was oddly relaxing and reassuring.

  She said, “That’s an interesting name you have.”

  “Jim?”

  He was having fun with her.

  “Ironheart,” she said. “Sounds like an American Indian name.”

  “Wouldn’t mind having a little Chippewa or Apache blood, make me less dull, a little bit exotic, mysterious. But it’s just the Anglicized version of the family’s original German name—Eisenherz.”

  By the time they were on the East Portland Freeway, rapidly approaching the Killingsworth Street exit, Holly was dismayed at the prospect of dropping him at the airline terminal. As a reporter, she still had a lot of unanswered questions. More important, as a woman, she was more intrigued by him than she had been by any man in ages. She briefly considered taking a far more circuitous route to the airport; his lack of familiarity with the city might disguise her deception. Then she realized that the freeway signs were already announcing the upcoming exit to Portland International; even if he had not been reading them, he could not have failed to notice the steady air traffic in the deep-blue eastern sky ahead of them.

  She said, “What do you do down there in California?”

  “Enjoy life.”

  “I meant—what do you do for a living?”

  “What’s your guess?” he asked.

  “Well ... one thing for sure: you’re not a librarian.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You have a sense of mystery about you.”

  “Can’t a librarian be mysterious?”

  “I’ve never known one who was.” Reluctantly she turned onto the airport exit ramp. “Maybe you’re a cop of some kind.”

  “What gives you that idea?”

  “Really good cops are unflappable, cool.”

  “Gee, I think of myself as a warm sort of guy, open and easy. You think I’m cool?”

  Traffic was moderately heavy on the airport approach road. She let it slow her even further.

  “I mean,” she said, “that you’re very self-possessed.”

  “How long have you been a reporter?”

  “Twelve years.”

  “All of it in Portland?”

  “No. I’ve been here a year.”

  “Where’d you work before?”

  “Chicago ... Los Angeles ... Seattle.”

  “You like journalism?”

  Realizing that she had lost control of the conversation, Holly said, “This isn’t a game of twenty questions, you know.”

  “Oh,” he said, clearly amused, “that’s exactly what I thought it was.”

  She was frustrated by the impenetrable wall he had erected around himself, irritated by his stubbornness. She was not used to having her will thwarted. But he had no meanness in him, as far as she could see, and no great talent for deception; he was just determined to preserve his privacy. As a reporter who had ever-increasing doubts about a journalist’s right to intrude in the lives of others, Holly sympathized with his reticence. When she glanced at him, she could only laugh softly. “You’re good.”

  “So are you.”

  As she stopped at the curb in front of the terminal, Holly said, “No, if I were good, by now I’d at least have found out what the hell you do for a living.”

  He had a charming smile. And those eyes. “I didn’t say you were as good as I am—just that you were good.” He got out and retrieved his suitcase from the back seat, then returned to the open front door. “Look, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. By sheer chance, I was able to save that boy. It wouldn’t be fair to have my whole life turned upside down by the media just because I did a good deed.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” she agreed.

  With a look of relief, he said, �
�Thank you.”

  “But I gotta say—your modesty’s refreshing.”

  He looked at her for a long beat, fixed her with his exceptional blue eyes. “So are you, Miss Thorne.”

  Then he closed the door, turned away, and entered the terminal.

  Their last exchange played again in her mind:

  Your modesty’s refreshing.

  So are you, Miss Thorne.

  She stared at the terminal door through which he had disappeared, and he seemed too good to have been real, as if she had given a ride to a hitchhiking spirit. A thin haze filtered flecks of color from the late-afternoon sunlight, so the air had a vague golden cast of the kind that sometimes hung for an instant in the wake of a vanishing revenant in an old movie about ghosts.

  A hard, hollow rapping noise startled her.

  She snapped her head around and saw an airport security guard tapping with his knuckles on the hood of her car. When he had her attention, he pointed to a sign: LOADING ZONE.

  Wondering how long she had sat there, mesmerized by thoughts of Jim Ironheart, Holly released the emergency brake and slipped the car in gear. She drove away from the terminal.

  Your modesty’s refreshing.

  So are you, Miss Thorne.

  All the way back into Portland, a sense of the uncanny lay upon her, a perception that someone preternaturally special had passed through her life. She was unsettled by the discovery that a man could so affect her, and she felt uncomfortably girlish, even foolish. At the same time, she enjoyed that pleasantly eerie mood and did not want it to fade.

  So are you, Miss Thorne.

  5

  That evening, in her third-floor apartment overlooking Council Crest Park, as she was cooking a dinner of angel-hair pasta with pesto sauce, pine nuts, fresh garlic, and chopped tomatoes, Holly suddenly wondered how Jim Ironheart could have known that young Billy Jenkins was in danger even before the drunken driver in the pickup truck had appeared over the crest of the hill.

  She stopped chopping in the middle of a tomato and looked out the kitchen window. Purple-red twilight was settling over the greensward below. Among the trees, the park lamps cast pools of warm amber light on the grass-flanked walkways.

  When Ironheart had charged up the sidewalk in front of McAlbury School, colliding with her and nearly knocking her down, Holly started after him, intending to tell him off. By the time she reached the intersection, he was already in the street, turning right then left, looking a little agitated ... wild. In fact he seemed so strange, the kids moved around him in a wide arc. She had registered his panicked expression and the kids’ reaction to him a second or two before the truck had erupted over the crest like a dare-devil’s car flying off the top of a stunt ramp. Only then had Ironheart focused on Billy Jenkins, scooping the boy out of the path of the truck.

  Perhaps he had heard the roar of the engine, realized something was approaching the intersection at reckless speed, and acted out of an instinctive perception of danger. Holly tried to remember if she had been aware of the racing engine as early as when Ironheart had collided with her, but she could not recall. Maybe she had heard it but had not been as alert to its meaning as he had. Or perhaps she hadn’t heard it at all because she had been trying to shake off the indefatigable Louise Tarvohl, who had insisted on walking with her to her car; she had felt that she’d go stark raving mad if she were forced to listen to even another minute of the poet’s chatter, and she had been distracted by the desperate need to escape.

  Now, in her kitchen, she was conscious of only one sound: the vigorously boiling water in the big pot on the stove. She should turn the gas down, put in the pasta, set the timer.... Instead she stood at the cutting board, tomato in one hand and knife in the other, staring out at the park but seeing the fateful intersection near the McAlbury School.

  Even if Ironheart had heard the approaching engine from halfway down the block, how could he so quickly determine the direction from which the truck was approaching, that its driver was out of control, and that the children were consequently in danger? The crossing guard, initially much closer to the sound than Ironheart, had been taken by surprise, as had the kids themselves.

  Okay, well, some people had sharper senses than others—which was why composers of symphonies could hear more complex harmonies and rhythms in music than could the average concertgoer, why some baseball players could see a pop fly against a glary sky sooner than others, and why a master viniculturist could appreciate subtler qualities of a rare vintage than could a stoned-blind wino who was only concerned with the effect. Likewise, some people had far quicker reflexes than others, which was part of what made Wayne Gretzky worth millions a year to a professional ice-hockey team. She had seen that Ironheart had the lightning reflexes of an athlete. No doubt he was also blessed with especially keen hearing. Most people with a notable physical advantage also had other gifts: it was all a matter of good genes. That was the explanation. Simple enough. Nothing unusual. Nothing mysterious. Certainly nothing supernatural. Just good genes.

  Outside in the park, the shadows grew deeper. Except at those places where lamplight was shed upon it, the pathway disappeared into gathering darkness. The trees seemed to crowd together.

  Holly put down the knife and went to the stove. She lowered the gas flame under the big pot, and the vigorously bubbling water fell to a slow boil. She put the pasta in to cook.

  Back at the cutting board, as she picked up the knife, she looked out the window again. Stars began to appear in the sky as the purple light of dusk faded to black and as the crimson smear on the horizon darkened to burgundy. Below, more of the park walkway lay in shadow than in lamplight.

  Suddenly she was gripped by the peculiar conviction that Jim Ironheart was going to walk out of darkness into a pool of amber light on the pathway, that he was going to raise his head and look directly up at her window, that somehow he knew where she lived and had come back for her. It was a ridiculous notion. But a chill quivered along her spine, tightening each knotted vertebra.

  Later, near midnight, when Holly sat on the edge of her bed and switched off the nightstand lamp, she glanced at her bedroom window, through which she also had a view of the park, and again a chill ran up her back. She started to lie down, hesitated, and got up instead. In panties and T-shirt, her usual sleeping attire, she moved through the dark room to the window, where she parted the sheers between the drapes.

  He was not down there. She waited a minute, then another. He did not appear. Feeling foolish and confused, she returned to bed.

  She woke in the dead hours of the night, shuddering. All she could remember of the dream were blue eyes, intensely blue, with a gaze that penetrated her as completely as a sharp knife slicing through soft butter.

  She got up and went into the bathroom, guided only by the thin wash of moonglow that filtered through the sheers over the window. In the bathroom she did not turn on the light. After she peed, she washed her hands and stood for a while just looking at her dim, amorphous reflection in the silvery-black mirror. She washed her hands. She got a drink of cold water. She realized that she was delaying her return to the bedroom because she was afraid she would be drawn to the window again.

  This is ridiculous, she told herself. What’s gotten into you?

  She reentered the bedroom and found herself approaching the window instead of the bed. She parted the sheers.

  He was not out there.

  Holly felt as much disappointment as relief. As she stared into the night-swaddled reaches of Council Crest Park, an extended chill quivered through her again, and she realized that only half of it was generated by a nameless fear. A strange excitement coursed through her, as well, a pleasant anticipation of ...

  Of what?

  She didn’t know.

  Jim Ironheart’s effect on her was profound and lingering. She had never experienced anything like it. Although she struggled to understand what she was feeling, enlightenment eluded her. Mere sexual attraction was not the explan
ation. She was long past puberty, and neither the tidal pull of hormones nor the girlish desire for romance could affect her like this.

  At last she returned to bed. She was certain that she would lie awake for the rest of the night, but to her surprise she soon drifted off again. As she trembled on the wire of consciousness, she heard herself mumble, “those eyes,” then fell into the yawning void.

  In his own bed in Laguna Niguel, Jim woke just before dawn. His heart was pounding. Though the room was cool, he was bathed in sweat. He’d been having one of his frequent nightmares, but all he could recall of it was that something relentless, powerful, and vicious had been pursuing him ...

  His sense of onrushing death was so powerful that he had to turn on the lights to be certain that something inhuman and murderous was not actually in the room with him. He was alone.

  “But not for long,” he said aloud.

  He wondered what he meant by that.

  AUGUST 20 THROUGH AUGUST 22

  1

  Jim Ironheart peered anxiously through the dirty windshield of the stolen Camaro. The sun was a white ball, and the light it shed was as white and bitter as powdered lime. Even with sunglasses, he had to squint. Rising off sun-scorched blacktop, currents of superheated air formed into mirages of people and cars and lakes of water.

  He was tired, and his eyes felt abraded. The heat illusions combined with occasional dust devils to hamper visibility. The endless vistas of the Mojave Desert made it difficult to maintain an accurate perception of speed; he didn’t feel as if the car was streaking along at nearly a hundred miles an hour, but it was. In his condition, he should have been driving a lot slower.

  But he was filled with a growing conviction that he was too late, that he was going to screw up. Someone was going to die because he had not been quick enough.

  He glanced at the loaded shotgun angled in front of the other bucket seat, its butt on the floor, barrels pointed away from him. A full box of shells was on the seat.

  Half sick with dread, he pressed the accelerator even closer to the floorboard. The needle on the speedometer dial shivered past the hundred mark.

  He topped a long, gradual rise. Below lay a bowl-shaped valley twenty or thirty miles in diameter, so alkaline that it was mostly white, barren but for a few gray tumbleweeds and a stubble of desert scrub. It might have been formed by an asteroid impact eons ago, its outlines considerably softened by the passage of millennia but otherwise still as primeval as any place on earth.

  The valley was bisected by the black highway on which mirages of water glistened. Along the shoulders, heat phantoms shimmered and writhed languorously.

  He saw the car first, a station wagon. It was pulled off to the right of the roadway, approximately a mile ahead, near a drainage culvert where no water flowed except during rare storms and flash floods.

  His heart began to pound harder, and in spite of the rush of cool air coming out of the dashboard vents, he broke into a sweat. This was the place.

  Then he spotted the motor home, too, half a mile beyond the car, surfacing out of one of the deeper water mirages. It was lumbering away from him, toward the distant wall of the valley, where the highway sloped up between treeless, red-rock mountains.