Cold Fire, Page 2

  3

  Outside the terminal at Portland International Airport, Jim Ironheart got into a taxi operated by something called the New Rose City Cab Company, which sounded like a corporate stepchild of the long-forgotten hippie era, born in the age of love beads and flower power. But the cabbie—Frazier Tooley, according to his displayed license—explained that Portland was called the City of Roses, which bloomed there in multitudes and were meant to be symbols of renewal and growth. “The same way,” he said, “that street beggars are symbols of decay and collapse in New York,” displaying a curiously charming smugness that Jim sensed was shared by many Portlanders.

  Tooley, who looked like an Italian operatic tenor cast from the same mold as Luciano Pavarotti, was not sure he had understood Jim’s instructions. “You just want me to drive around for a while?”

  “Yeah. I’d like to see some of the city before I check into the hotel. I’ve never been here before.”

  The truth was, he didn’t know at which hotel he should stay or whether he would be required to do the job soon, tonight, or maybe tomorrow. He hoped that he would learn what was expected of him if he just tried to relax and waited for enlightenment.

  Tooley was happy to oblige—not with enlightenment but with a tour of Portland—because a large fare would tick up on the meter, but also because he clearly enjoyed showing off his city. In fact, it was exceptionally attractive. Historic brick structures and nineteenth-century cast-iron-front buildings were carefully preserved among modern glass high rises. Parks full of fountains and trees were so numerous that it sometimes seemed the city was in a forest, and roses were everywhere, not as many blooms as earlier in the summer but radiantly colorful.

  After less than half an hour, Jim suddenly was overcome by the feeling that time was running out. He sat forward on the rear seat and heard himself say: “Do you know the McAlbury School?”

  “Sure,” Tooley said.

  “What is it?”

  “The way you asked, I thought you knew. Private elementary school over on the west side.”

  Jim’s heart was beating hard and fast. “Take me there.”

  Frowning at him in the rearview mirror, Tooley said, “Something wrong?”

  “I have to be there.”

  Tooley braked at a red traffic light. He looked over his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just have to be there,” Jim said sharply, frustratedly.

  “Sure, no sweat.”

  Fear had rippled through Jim ever since he had spoken the words “life line” to the woman in the supermarket more than four hours ago. Now those ripples swelled into dark waves that carried him toward McAlbury School. With an overwhelming sense of urgency that he could not explain, he said, “I have to be there in fifteen minutes!”

  “Why didn’t you mention it earlier?”

  He wanted to say, I didn’t know earlier. Instead he said, “Can you get me there in time?”

  “It’ll be tight.”

  “I’ll pay triple the meter.”

  “Triple?”

  “If you make it in time,” he said, withdrawing his wallet from his pocket. He extracted a hundred-dollar bill and thrust it at Tooley. “Take this in advance.”

  “It’s that important?”

  “It’s life and death.”

  Tooley gave him a look that said: What—are you nuts?

  “The light just changed,” Jim told him. “Let’s move!”

  Although Tooley’s skeptical frown deepened, he faced front again, hung a left turn at the intersection, and tramped on the accelerator.

  Jim kept glancing at his watch all the way, and they arrived at the school with only three minutes to spare. He tossed another bill at Tooley, paying even more than three times the meter, pulled open the door, and scrambled out with his suitcase.

  Tooley leaned through his open window. “You want me to wait? ”

  Slamming the door, Jim said, “No. No, thanks. You can go.”

  He turned away and heard the taxi drive off as he anxiously studied the front of McAlbury School. The building was actually a rambling white Colonial house with a deep front porch, onto which had been added two single-story wings to provide more classrooms. It was shaded by Douglas firs and huge old sycamores. With its lawn and playground, it occupied the entire length of that short block.

  In the house part of the structure directly in front of him, kids were coming out of the double doors, onto the porch, and down the steps. Laughing and chattering, carrying books and large drawing tablets and bright lunchboxes decorated with cartoon characters, they approached him along the school walk, passed through the open gate in the spearpoint iron fence, and turned either uphill or down, moving away from him in both directions.

  Two minutes left. He didn’t have to look at his watch. His heart was pounding two beats for every second, and he knew the time as surely as if he had been a clock.

  Sunshine, filtered through the interstices of the arching trees, fell in delicate patterns across the scene and the people in it, as if everything had been draped over with an enormous piece of gossamer lacework stitched from golden thread. That netlike ornamental fabric of light seemed to shimmer in time to the rising and falling music of the children’s shouts and laughter, and the moment should have been peaceful, idyllic.

  But Death was coming.

  Suddenly he knew that Death was coming for one of the children, not for any of the three teachers standing on the porch, just for one child. Not a big catastrophe, not an explosion or fire or a falling airplane that would wipe out a dozen of them. Just one, a small tragedy. But which one?

  Jim refocused his attention from the scene to the players in it, studying the children as they approached him, seeking the mark of imminent death on one of their fresh young faces. But they all looked as if they would live forever.

  “Which one?” he said aloud, speaking neither to himself nor to the children but to.... Well, he supposed he was speaking to God. “Which one?”

  Some kids went uphill toward the crosswalks at that intersection, and others headed downhill toward the opposite end of the block. In both directions, women crossing guards in bright-orange safety vests, holding big red paddlelike “stop” signs, had begun to shepherd their charges across the streets in small groups. No moving cars or trucks were in sight, so even without the crossing guards there seemed to be little threat from traffic.

  One and a half minutes.

  Jim scrutinized two yellow vans parked at the curb downhill from him. For the most part, McAlbury seemed to be a neighborhood school, where kids walked to and from their homes, but a few were boarding the vans. The two drivers stood by the doors, smiling and joking with the ebullient, energetic passengers. None of the kids boarding the vans seemed doomed, and the cheery yellow vehicles did not strike him as morgue wagons in bright dress.

  But Death was nearer.

  It was almost among them.

  An ominous change had stolen over the scene, not in reality but in Jim’s perception of it. He was now less aware of the golden lacework of light than he was of the shadows within that bright filigree: small shadows the shape of leaves or bristling clusters of evergreen needles; larger shadows the shape of tree trunks or branches; geometric bars of shade from the iron rails of the spearpoint fence. Each blot of darkness seemed to be a potential doorway through which Death might arrive.

  One minute.

  Frantic, he hurried downhill several steps, among the children, drawing puzzled looks as he glanced at one then another of them, not sure what sort of sign he was searching for, the small suitcase banging against his leg.

  Fifty seconds.

  The shadows seemed to be growing, spreading, melting together all around Jim.

  He stopped, turned, and peered uphill toward the end of the block, where the crossing guard was standing in the intersection, holding up her red “stop” sign, using her free hand to motion the kids across. Five of them were in the street. Another half dozen were approaching
the corner and soon to cross.

  One of the drivers at the nearby school vans said, “Mister, is something wrong?”

  Forty seconds.

  Jim dropped the suitcase and ran uphill toward the intersection, still uncertain about what was going to happen and which child was at risk. He was pushed in that direction by the same invisible hand that had made him pack a suitcase and fly to Portland. Startled kids moved out of his way.

  At the periphery of his vision, everything had become ink-black. He was aware only of what lay directly ahead of him. From one curb to the other, the intersection appeared to be a scene revealed by a spotlight on an otherwise night-dark stage.

  Half a minute.

  Two women looked up in surprise and failed to get out of his way fast enough. He tried to dodge them, but he brushed against a blonde in a summery white dress, almost knocking her down. He kept going because he could feel Death among them now, a cold presence.

  He reached the intersection, stepped off the curb, and stopped. Four kids in the street. One was going to be a victim. But which of the four? And a victim of what?

  Twenty seconds.

  The crossing guard was staring at him.

  All but one of the kids were nearing the curb, and Jim sensed that the sidewalks were safe territory. The street would be the killing ground.

  He moved toward the dawdler, a little red-haired girl, who turned and blinked at him in surprise.

  Fifteen seconds.

  Not the girl. He looked into her jade-green eyes and knew she was safe. Just knew it somehow.

  All the other kids had reached the sidewalk.

  Fourteen seconds.

  Jim spun around and looked back toward the far curb. Four more children had entered the street behind him.

  Thirteen seconds.

  The four new kids started to arc around him, giving him wary sidelong looks. He knew he appeared to be a little deranged, standing in the street, wide-eyed, gaping at them, his face distorted by fear.

  Eleven seconds.

  No cars in sight. But the brow of the hill was little more than a hundred yards above the intersection, and maybe some reckless fool was rocketing up the far side with the accelerator jammed to the floorboard. As soon as that image flashed through his mind, Jim knew it was a prophetic glimpse of the instrument Death would use: a drunk driver.

  Eight seconds.

  He wanted to shout, tell them to run, but maybe he would only panic them and cause the marked child to bolt straight into danger rather than away from it.

  Seven seconds.

  He heard the muffled growl of an engine, which instantly changed to a loud roar, then a piston-shattering scream. A pickup truck shot over the brow of the hill. It actually took flight for an instant, afternoon sun flashing off its windshield and coruscating across its chromework, as if it were a flaming chariot descending from the heavens on judgment day. With a shrill bark of rubber against blacktop, the front tires met the pavement again, and the rear of the truck slammed down with a jarring crash.

  Five seconds.

  The kids in the street scattered—except for a sandy-haired boy with violet eyes the shade of faded rose petals. He just stood there, holding a lunchbox covered with brightly colored cartoon figures, one tennis shoe untied, watching the truck bear down on him, unable to move, as if he sensed that it wasn’t just a truck rushing to meet him but his destiny, inescapable. He was an eight- or nine-year-old boy with nowhere to go but to the grave.

  Two seconds.

  Leaping directly into the path of the oncoming pickup, Jim grabbed the kid. In what felt like a dream-slow swan dive off a high cliff, he carried the boy with him in a smooth arc to the pavement, rolling toward the leaf-littered gutter, feeling nothing from his impact with the street, his nerves so numbed by terror and adrenaline that he might as well have been tumbling across a field of lush grass and soft loam.

  The roar of the truck was the loudest thing he had ever heard, as if it were a thunder within him, and he felt something strike his left foot, hard as a hammer blow. In the same instant a terrible wrenching force seemed to wring his ankle as if it were a rag. A white-hot current of pain crackled up his leg, sizzling into his hip joint, exploding in that socket of bone like a Fourth of July bottle rocket bursting in a night sky.

  Holly started after the man who had collided with her, angry and intending to tell him off. But before she reached the intersection, a gray-and-red pickup erupted over the brow of the hill, as if fired out of a giant slingshot. She halted at the curb.

  The scream of the truck engine was a magic incantation that slowed the flow of time, stretching each second into what seemed to be a minute. From the curb, she saw the stranger sweep the boy out of the path of the pickup, executing the rescue with such singular agility and grace that he almost appeared to be performing a mad, slow-motion ballet in the street. She saw the bumper of the truck strike his left foot, and watched in horror as his shoe was torn off and tossed high into the air, tumbling end over end. Peripherally, she was aware of the man and boy rolling toward the gutter, the truck swerving sharply to the right, the startled crossing guard dropping the paddlelike “stop” sign, the truck ricocheting off’a parked car across the street, the man and boy coming to rest against the curb, the truck tipping onto its side and sliding downhill in cascades of yellow and blue sparks—but all the while her attention was focused primarily on that shoe tumbling up, up, into the air, silhouetted against the blue sky, hanging at the apex of its flight for what seemed like an hour, then tumbling slowly, slowly down again. She couldn’t look away from it, was mesmerized by it, because she had the macabre feeling that the foot was still in the shoe, torn off at the ankle, bristling with splinters of bone, trailing shorn ribbons of arteries and veins. Down it came, down, down, straight toward her, and she felt a scream swelling in the back of her throat.

  Down ... down ...

  The battered shoe—a Reebok—plopped into the gutter in front of her, and she lowered her eyes to it the way she always looked into the face of the monster in a nightmare, not wanting to see but unable to turn away, equally repelled by and attracted to the unthinkable. The shoe was empty. No severed foot. Not even any blood.

  She swallowed the unreleased scream. She tasted vomit in the back of her throat, and swallowed that too.

  As the pickup came to rest on its side more than half a block down the hill, Holly turned the other way and ran to the man and boy. She was the first to reach them as they started to sit up on the blacktop.

  Except for a scraped palm and a small abrasion on his chin, the child appeared to be unhurt. He was not even crying.

  She dropped to her knees in front of him. “Are you okay, honey?”

  Though dazed, the boy understood and nodded. “Yeah. My hand hurts a little, that’s all.”

  The man in the white slacks and blue T-shirt was sitting up. He had rolled his sock halfway off his foot and was gingerly kneading his left ankle. Though the ankle was swollen and already enflamed, Holly was still surprised by the absence of blood.

  The crossing guard, a couple of teachers, and other kids gathered around, and a babble of excited voices rose on all sides. The boy was helped up and drawn into a teacher’s arms.

  Wincing in pain as he continued to massage his ankle, the injured man raised his head and met Holly’s gaze. His eyes were searingly blue and, for an instant, appeared as cold as if they were not human eyes at all but the visual receptors of a machine.

  Then he smiled. In a blink, the initial impression of coldness was replaced by one of warmth. In fact Holly was overwhelmed by the clarity, morning-sky color, and beauty of his eyes; she felt as if she were peering through them into a gentle soul. She was a cynic who would equally distrust a nun and Mafia boss on first encounter, so her instant attraction to this man was jolting. Though words were her first love and her trade, she was at a loss for them.

  “Close call,” he said, and his smile elicited one from her.

  4

/>   Holly waited for Jim Ironheart in the school hallway, outside the boys’ restroom. All of the children and teachers had at last gone home. The building was silent, except for the periodic muffled hum of the maintenance man’s electric buffer as he polished the vinyl tile up on the second floor. The air was laced with a faint perfume of chalk dust, craft paste, and pine-scented disinfectant wax.

  Outside in the street, the police probably were still overseeing a couple of towing-company employees who were righting the overturned truck in order to haul it away. The driver had been drunk. At the moment he was in the hospital, where physicians were attending to his broken leg, lacerations, abrasions, and contusions.

  Holly had gotten nearly everything she required to write the story: background on the boy—Billy Jenkins—who had nearly been killed, the facts of the event, the reactions of the eye-witnesses, a response from the police, and slurred expressions of regret mixed with self-pity from the inebriated driver of the truck. She lacked only one element, but it was the most important—information about Jim Ironheart, the hero of the whole affair. Newspaper readers would want to know everything about him. But at the moment all she could have told them was the guy’s name and that he was from southern California.

  His brown suitcase stood against the wall beside her, and she kept eyeing it. She had the urge to pop the latches and explore the contents of the bag, though at first she didn’t know why. Then she realized it was unusual for a man to be carrying luggage through a residential neighborhood; a reporter was trained—if not genetically compelled—to be curious about anything out of the ordinary.

  When Ironheart came out of the restroom, Holly was still staring at the suitcase. She twitched guiltily, as if caught pawing through the contents of the bag.

  “How’re you feeling?” she asked.

  “Fine.” He was limping. “But I told you—I’d rather not be interviewed.”

  He had combed his thick brown hair and blotted the worst of the dirt off his white cotton pants. He was wearing both shoes again, although the left was torn in one spot and battered.

  She said, “I won’t take much of your time.”

  “Definitely;” he agreed, smiling.

  “Oh, come on, be a good guy.”

  “Sorry, but I’d make dull copy anyway.”

  “You just saved a child’s life!”

  “Other than that, I’m boring.”

  Something about him belied his claim to dullness, although at first Holly could not pinpoint the reason for his strong appeal. He was about thirty-five, an inch or two under six feet, lean but well-muscled. Though he was attractive enough, he didn’t have the looks that made her think of movie stars. His eyes were beautiful, yes, but she was never drawn to a man merely because of his looks and certainly not because of one exceptional feature.

  He picked up his suitcase and began to limp along the corridor.

  “You should see a doctor,” she said, falling in at his side.

  “At worst, it’s sprained.”

  “It still should be treated.”

  “Well, I’ll buy an Ace bandage at the airport, or when I get back home.”

  Maybe his manner was what she found so appealing. He spoke softly, smiled easily, rather like a Southern gentleman, though he had no accent. He also moved with unusual grace even when he was limping. She remembered how she had been reminded of ballet when, with the fluidity of a dancer, he had swept the little boy out of the path of the hurtling truck. Exceptional physical grace and an unforced gentility were appealing in a man. But neither of those qualities was what fascinated her. Something else. Something more elusive.

  As they reached the front door, she said, “If you’re really intent on going home again, I can give you a ride to the airport.”

  “Thank you. That’s very kind, but I don’t need a ride.”

  She followed him onto the porch. “It’s a damned long walk.”

  He stopped, and frowned. “Oh. Yeah. Well ... there’s got to be a phone here. I’ll call a cab.”