Cold Fire Page 8

  raising taxes again. She had always known that the news industry flourished on gloom, disaster, scandal, mindless violence, and strife. But suddenly it seemed to be a singularly ghoulish business, and Holly realized that she no longer wanted to be an insider, among the first to know this dreadful stuff.

  Then, just as she was about to close the file and switch off the computer, a headline arrested her: MYSTERIOUS STRANGER SAVES BOY. The events at McAlbury School were not quite twelve days in the past, and those four words had a special association for her. Curiosity triggered, she instructed the computer to enlarge the quadrant in which the story began.

  The dateline was Boston, and the story was accompanied by a photograph. The picture was still blurry and dark, but the scale was now large enough to allow her to read the text, although not comfortably. She instructed the computer to further enlarge one of the already enlarged quadrants, pulling up the first column of the article so she could read it without strain.

  The opening line made Holly sit up straighter in her chair: A courageous bystander, who would say only that his name was Jim, saved the life of Nicholas O’Conner, 6, when a New England Power and Light Company vault exploded under a sidewalk in a Boston residential area Thursday evening.

  Softly, she said, “What the hell ... ?”

  She tapped the keys, instructing the computer to shift the field of display rightward on the page to show her the multiply enhanced photo that accompanied the piece. She went to a bigger scale, then to a still bigger one, until the face filled the screen.

  Jim Ironheart.

  Briefly she sat in stunned disbelief, immobilized. Then she was stricken by a need to know more—not only an intellectual but a genuinely physical need that felt not unlike a sudden and intense pang of hunger.

  She returned to the text of the story and read it through, then read it again. The O’Conner boy had been sitting on the sidewalk in front of his home, directly on the two-by-three-foot concrete lid that covered the entrance to the power company’s vault, which was spacious enough for four men to work together within its subterranean confines. The kid had been playing with toy trucks. His parents had been within sight of him on the front porch of their house, when a stranger had sprinted along the street. “He comes right at Nicky,” the boy’s father was quoted, “snatches him, so I thought sure he was a nutcase child molester going to steal my son.” Carrying the screaming child, the stranger leaped over a low picket fence, onto the O’Conners’ lawn, just as a 17,000-volt line in the vault exploded behind him. The blast flipped the concrete lid high into the air, as if it were a penny, and a bright ball of fire roared up in its wake. Embarrassed by the effusive praise heaped on him by Nicky’s grateful parents and by the neighbors who had witnessed his heroism, the stranger claimed that he had smelled burning insulation, heard a hissing coming from the vault, and knew what was about to happen because he had “once worked for a power company.” Annoyed that a witness had taken his photograph, he insisted on leaving before the media arrived because, as he put it, “I place a high value on my privacy.”

  That hair’s-breadth rescue had occurred at 7:40 Thursday evening in Boston—or 4:40 Portland time yesterday afternoon. Holly looked at the office wall clock. It was now 2:02 Friday morning. Nicky O’Conner had been plucked off that vault cover not quite nine and a half hours ago.

  The trail was still fresh.

  She had questions to ask the Globe reporter who had written the piece. But it was only a little after five in the morning in Boston. He wouldn’t be at work yet.

  She closed out the Press’s current-edition data file. On the computer screen, the standard menu replaced the enlarged newspaper text.

  Through a modem she accessed the vast network of data services to which the Press subscribed. She instructed the Newsweb service to scan all the stories that had been carried by the wire services and published in the major U.S. newspapers during the past three months, looking for instances in which the name “Jim” had been used within ten words of either “rescue” or the phrase “saved the life.” She asked for a printout of every article, if there should be any, but asked to be spared multiples of the same incident.

  While Newsweb was fulfilling her request, she snatched up the phone on her desk and called long-distance information for area code 818, then 213, then 714, and 619, seeking a listing for Jim Ironheart in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and San Diego counties. None of the operators was able to help her. If he actually lived in southern California, as he had told her he did, his phone was unlisted.

  The laser printer that she shared with three other workstations was humming softly. The first of Newsweb’s finds was sliding into the receiving tray.

  She wanted to hurry to the cabinet on which the printer stood, grab the first printout, and read it at once; but she restrained herself, focusing her attention on the telephone instead, trying to think of another way to locate Jim Ironheart down there in the part of California that locals called “the Southland.”

  A few years ago, she simply could have accessed the California Department of Motor Vehicles computer and, for a small fee, received the street address of anyone holding a valid driver’s license in the state. But after the actress Rebecca Schaeffer had been murdered by an obsessed fan who had tracked her down in that fashion, a new law had imposed restrictions on DMV records.

  If she had been an accomplished computer hacker, steeped in their arcane knowledge, she no doubt could have finessed entrance to the DMV records in spite of their new safeguards, or perhaps she could have pried into credit-agency databanks to search for a file on Ironheart. She had known reporters who honed their computer skills for just that purpose, but she had always sought her sources and information in a strictly legitimate fashion, without deception.

  Which is why you’re writing about such thrilling stuff as the Timber Trophy, she thought sourly.

  While she puzzled over a solution to the problem, she hurried to the vending room and got a cup of coffee from the coin-operated brewer. It tasted like yak bile. She drank it anyway, because she was going to need the caffeine before the night was through. She bought another cup and returned with it to the newsroom.

  The laser printer was silent. She grabbed the pages from its tray and sat down at her desk.

  Newsweb had turned up a thick stack of stories from the national press in which the name “Jim” was used within ten words of “rescue” or “saved the life.” She counted them quickly. Twenty-nine.

  The first was a human-interest piece from the Chicago Sun-Times, and Holly read the opening sentence aloud: “Jim Foster, of Oak Park, has rescued over one hundred stranded cats from—”

  She dropped that printout in her wastecan and looked at the next one. It was from the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Jim Pilsbury, pitching for the Phillies, rescued his club from a humiliating defeat—”

  Throwing that one aside, as well, she looked at the third. It was a movie review, so she didn’t bother searching for the mention of Jim. The fourth was a reference to Jim Harrison, the novelist. The fifth was a story about a New Jersey politician who used the Heimlich maneuver to save the life of a Mafia boss in a barroom, where they were having a couple of beers together, when the padrone began to choke to death on a chunk of peppery-hot Slim Jim sausage.

  She was beginning to worry that she would come up empty-handed by the bottom of the stack, but the sixth article, from the Houston Chronicle, opened her eyes wider than the vile coffee had. WOMAN SAVED FROM VENGEFUL HUSBAND. On July 14, after winning both financial and child-custody issues in a bitter divorce suit, Amanda Cutter had nearly been shot by her enraged husband, Cosmo, outside her home in the wealthy River Oaks district of the city. After Cosmo missed her with the first two shots, she had been saved by a man who “appeared out of nowhere,” wrestled her maddened spouse to the ground, and disarmed him. Her savior had identified himself only as “Jim,” and had walked off into the humid Houston afternoon before the police arrived. The thir
ty-year-old divorcée had clearly been smitten, for she described him as “handsome, sort of muscular, like a superhero right out of a movie, with the dreamiest blue eyes.”

  Holly could still picture Jim Ironheart’s intensely blue eyes. She was not the kind of woman who would refer to them as “dreamy,” although they were certainly the clearest and most arresting eyes she’d ever ... Oh, hell, yes, they were dreamy. She was reluctant to admit to the adolescent reaction that he had inspired in her, but she was not any better at deceiving herself than she was at deceiving other people. She recalled an initial eerie impression of inhuman coldness, upon first meeting his gaze, but that passed and never returned from the moment he smiled.

  The seventh article was about another modest Jim who had not hung around to accept thanks and praise—or media attention—after rescuing Carmen Diaz, thirty, from a burning apartment house in Miami on the fifth of July. He had blue eyes.

  Poring through the remaining twenty-two articles, Holly found two more about Ironheart, though only his first name was mentioned. On June 21, Thaddeus Johnson, twelve, had almost been pitched off the roof of an eight-story Harlem tenement by four members of a neighborhood youth gang who had not responded well to his disdainful rejection of an invitation to join their drug-peddling fraternity. He was rescued by a blue-eyed man who incapacitated the four thugs with a dazzling series of Tae Kwon Do kicks, chops, thrusts, and throws. “He was like Batman without the funny clothes,” Thaddeus had told the Daily News reporter. Two weeks prior to that, on June 7, another blue-eyed Jim “just seemed to materialize” on the property of Louis Andretti, twenty-eight, of Corona, California, in time to warn the homeowner not to enter a crawlspace under his house to repair a plumbing leak. “He told me a family of rattlers had settled in there,” Andretti told the reporter. Later, when agents from the county’s Vector Control inspected the crawlspace from the perimeter, with the aid of a halogen lamp, they saw not just a nest but “something out of a nightmare,” and eventually extracted forty-one snakes from beneath the structure. “What I don’t understand,” Andretti said, “is how that guy knew the rattlers were there, when I live in the house and never had a clue.”

  Now Holly had four linked incidents to add to the rescue of Nicky O’Conner in Boston and Billy Jenkins in Portland, all since the first of June. She typed in new instructions to Newsweb, asking for the same search to be made for the months of March, April, and May.

  She needed more coffee, and when she got up to go to the vending room, she saw that George Fintel had evidently awakened and staggered home. She hadn’t heard him leave. Tommy was gone, as well. She was alone.

  She got another cup of coffee, and it didn’t taste as bad as it had before. The brew hadn’t improved; her sense of taste had just been temporarily damaged by the first two cups.

  Eventually Newsweb located eleven stories in March through May that fit her parameters. After examining the printouts, Holly found only one of them of interest.

  On May 15, in Atlanta, Georgia, a blue-eyed Jim had entered a convenience store during an armed robbery. He shot and killed the perpetrator, Norman Rink, who had been about to kill two customers—Sam Newsome, twenty-five, and his five-year-old daughter Emily. Flying high on a cocaine, Ice, and methamphetamine cocktail—Rink had already killed the clerk and two other customers merely for the fun of it. After wasting Rink and assuring himself that the Newsomes were unhurt, Jim had slipped away before the police arrived.

  The store security camera had provided a blurry photograph of the heroic intruder. It was only the second photo Holly had found in all the articles. The image was poor. But she immediately recognized Jim Ironheart.

  Some details of the incident unnerved her. If Ironheart had an amazing ability—psychic power, whatever—to foresee fatal moments in the lives of strangers and arrive in time to thwart fate, why hadn’t he gotten to that convenience store a few minutes sooner, early enough to prevent the deaths of the clerk and other customers? Why had he saved the Newsomes and let the rest die?

  She was further chilled by the description of his attack on Rink. He had pumped four rounds from a 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun into the madman. Then, although Rink was indisputably dead, Jim reloaded and fired another four rounds. “He was in such a rage,” Sam Newsome said, “his face red, and he was sweating, you could see the arteries pounding in his temples, across his forehead. He was crying a little, too, but the tears ... they didn’t make him seem any less angry.” When done, Jim had expressed regret for cutting Rink down so violently in front of little Emily. He’d explained that men like Rink, who killed innocent people, brought out “a little madness of my own.” Newsome told the reporter, “He saved our lives, yeah, but I gotta say the guy was scary, almost as scary as Rink.”

  Realizing that Ironheart might not have revealed even his first name on some occasions, Holly instructed Newsweb to search the past six months for stories in which “rescue” and “saved the life” were within ten words of “blue.” She had noticed that some witnesses were vague about his physical description, but that most remembered his singularly blue eyes.

  She went to the john, got more coffee, then stood by the printer. As each find was transferred to hard copy, she snatched it up, scanned it, tossed it in the wastecan if it was of no interest or read it with excitement if it was about another nick-of-time rescue. Newsweb turned up four more cases that indisputably belonged in the Ironheart file, even though neither his first nor last name was used.

  At her desk again, she instructed Newsweb to search the past six months for the name “Ironheart” in the national media.

  While she waited for a response, she put the pertinent printouts in order, then made a chronological list of the people whose lives Jim Ironheart had saved, incorporating the four new cases. She included their names, ages, the location of each incident, and the type of death from which each person had been spared.

  She studied that compilation, noting some patterns with interest. But she put it aside when Newsweb completed its latest task.

  As she rose from her chair to go to the laser printer, she froze, surprised to discover she was no longer alone in the newsroom. Three reporters and an editor were at their desks, all guys with reputations as early birds, including Hank Hawkins, editor of the business pages, who liked to be at work when the financial markets opened on the East Coast. She hadn’t been aware of them coming in. Two of them were sharing a joke, laughing loudly, and Hawkins was talking on the phone, but Holly hadn’t heard them until after she’d seen them. She looked at the clock: 6:10. Opalescent early-morning light played at the windows, though she had not realized that the tide of night had been receding. She glanced down at her desk and saw two more paper coffee cups than she remembered getting from the vending machine.

  She realized that she was no longer wallowing in despair. She felt better than she had felt in days. Weeks. Years. She was a reporter again, for real.

  She went to the laser printer, emptied the receiving tray, and returned with the pages to her desk. Ironhearts evidently were not newsmakers. There were only five stories involving people with that surname in the past six months.

  Kevin Ironheart—Buffalo, New York. State senator. Announced his intention to run for governor.

  Anna Denise Ironheart—Boca Raton, Florida. Found a live alligator in her family room.

  Lori Ironheart—Los Angeles, California. Songwriter. Nominated for the Academy Award for best song of the year.

  Valerie Ironheart—Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Gave birth to healthy quadruplets.

  The last of the five was James Ironheart.

  She looked at the heading. The story came from the Orange County Register, April 10, and was one of scores of pieces on the same story that had been published state-wide. Because of her instructions, the computer had printed out only this single instance, sparing her sheafs of similar articles on the same event.

  She checked the dateline. Laguna Niguel. California. Southern California. The Southland.
<
br />   The piece was not accompanied by a photograph, but the reporter’s description of the man included a reference to blue eyes and thick brown hair. She was sure he was her James Ironheart.

  She was not surprised to have found him. She had known that with determined effort she would locate him sooner or later. What surprised her was the subject of the piece in which his full name appeared at last. She expected it to be yet one more story about snatching someone out of death’s grasp, and she was not prepared for the headline: LAGUNA NIGUEL MAN WINS SIX MILLION LOTTO JACKPOT.

  2

  Having followed the rescue of Nicholas O’Conner with his first untroubled night of sleep in the last four, Jim departed Boston on Friday afternoon, August 24. Gaining three hours on the cross-country trip, he arrived at John Wayne Airport by 3:10 P.M. and was home half an hour later.

  He went straight into his den and lifted the flap of carpet that revealed the safe built into the floor of the closet. He dialed the combination, opened the lid, and removed five thousand dollars, ten percent of the cash he kept there.

  At his desk, he packed the hundred-dollar bills into a padded Jiffy envelope and stapled it shut. He typed a label to Father Leo Geary at Our Lady of the Desert, and affixed sufficient postage. He would mail it first thing in the morning.

  He went into the family room and switched on the TV. He tried several movies on cable, but none held his interest. He watched the news for a while, but his mind wandered. After he heated a microwave pizza and popped open a beer, he settled down with a good book—which bored him. He paged through a stack of unread magazines, but none of the articles was intriguing.

  Near twilight he went outside with another beer and sat on the patio. The palm fronds rustled in a light breeze. A sweet fragrance rose from the star jasmine along the property wall. Red, purple, and pink impatiens shone with almost Day-Glo radiance in the dwindling light; and as the sun finished setting, they faded as if they were hundreds of small lightbulbs on a rheostat. Night floated down like a great tossed cape of almost weightless black silk.

  Although the scene was peaceful, he was restless. Day by day, week by week, since he had saved the lives of Sam Newsome and his daughter Emily on May 15, Jim had found it increasingly difficult to involve himself in the ordinary routines and pleasures of life. He was unable to relax. He kept thinking of all the good he could do, all the lives he could save, the destinies he could alter, if only the call would come again: “Life line.” Other endeavors seemed frivolous by comparison.

  Having been the instrument of a higher power, he now found it difficult to settle for being anything less.

  After spending the day collecting what information she could find on James Madison Ironheart, with only a two-hour nap to compensate for the night of sleep she had lost, Holly launched her long-anticipated vacation with a flight to Orange County. On arrival, she drove her rental car south from the airport to the Laguna Hills Motor Inn, where she had reserved a motel room.

  Laguna Hills was inland, and not a resort area. But in Laguna Beach, Laguna Niguel, and other coastal towns during the summer, rooms had been booked far in advance. She didn’t intend to swim or sunbathe anyway. Ordinarily, she was as enthusiastic a pursuer of skin cancer as anyone, but this had become a working vacation.

  By the time she arrived at the motel, she felt as if her eyes were full of sand. When she carried her suitcase into her room, gravity played a cruel trick, pulling her down with five times the usual force.

  The room was simple and clean, with enough air-conditioning to re-create the environment of Alaska, in case it was ever occupied by an Eskimo who got homesick.

  From vending machines in the breezeway, she purchased a packet of peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers and a can of diet Dr Pepper, and satisfied her hunger while sitting in bed. She was so tired that she felt numb. All of her senses were dulled by exhaustion, including her sense of taste. She might as well have been eating Styrofoam and washing it down with mule sweat.

  As if the contact of head and pillow tripped a switch, she fell instantly asleep.

  During the night, she began to dream. It was an odd dream, for it took place in absolute darkness, with no images, just sounds and smells and tactile sensations, perhaps the way people dreamed when they had been blind since birth. She was in a dank cool place that smelled vaguely of lime. At first she was not afraid, just confused, carefully feeling her way along the walls of the chamber. They were constructed from blocks of stone with tight mortar joints. After a little exploration she realized there was actually just one wall, a single continuous sweep of stone, because the room was circular. The only sounds were those she made—and the background hiss and tick of rain drumming on a slate roof overhead.

  In the dream, she moved away from the wall, across a solid wood floor, hands held out in front of her. Although she encountered nothing, her curiosity suddenly began to turn to fear. She stopped moving, stood perfectly still, certain that she had heard something sinister.

  A subtle sound. Masked by the soft but insistent rattle of the rain. It came again. A squeak.

  For an instant she thought of a rat, fat and sleek, but the sound was too protracted and of too odd a character to have been made by a rat. More of a creak than a squeak, but not the creak of a floorboard underfoot, either. It faded ... came again a few seconds later ... faded ... came again ... rhythmically.

  When Holly realized that she was listening to the protest of an unoiled mechanism of some kind, she should have been relieved. Instead, standing in that tenebrous room, straining to imagine what machine it might be, she felt her heartbeat accelerate. The creaking grew only slightly louder, but it speeded up a lot; instead of one creak every five or six seconds, the sound came every three or four seconds, then every two or three, then once per second.

  Suddenly a strange rhythmic whoosh, whoosh, whoosh struck up, as well, in syncopation with the creaking. It was the sound of a wide flat object cutting the air.

  Whoosh.

  It was close. Yet she felt no draft.

  Whoosh.

  She had the crazy idea that it was a blade.

  Whoosh.

  A large blade. Sharp. Cutting the air. Enormous. Whoosh.

  She sensed that something terrible was approaching, an entity so strange that even light—and the full sight of the thing—would not provide understanding. Although she was aware that she was dreaming, she knew she had to get out of that dark and stony place quickly—or die. A nightmare couldn’t be escaped just by running from it, so she had to wake up, but she could not, she was too tired, unable to break the bonds of sleep. Then the lightless room seemed to be spinning, she had a sense of some great structure turning around and around (creak, whoosh), thrusting up into the rainy night (creak, whoosh) and turning (creak, whoosh), cutting the air (creak, whoosh), she was trying to scream (creak, whoosh), but she couldn’t force a sound from herself (whoosh, whoosh, whoosh), couldn’t awaken and couldn’t scream for help. WHOOSH!

  “No!”

  Jim sat up in bed as he shouted the one-word denial. He was clammy and trembling violently.

  He had fallen fast asleep with the lamp on, which he frequently did, usually not by accident but by design. For more than a year, his sleep had been troubled by nightmares with a variety of plots and a panoply of boogeymen, only some of which he could recall when he woke. The nameless, formless creature that he called “the enemy,” and of which he had dreamed while recuperating at Our Lady of the Desert rectory, was the most frightening figure in his dreamscapes, though not the only monster.

  This time, however, the focus of the terror had not been a person or creature. It was a place. The windmill.