by Scott Blade
SCOTT BLADE
a Black Lion publication©
FIRE WATCH
a JACK WIDOW thriller
Also by Scott Blade
www.scottblade.com
The Jack Widow Series
Gone Forever
Winter Territory
A Reason to Kill
Once Quiet
Name Not Given
The Midnight Caller
Fire Watch
The Last Rainmaker
S. Lasher & Associates Series
The StoneCutter
Cut & Dry
Stand-Alone Novels
The Secret of Lions
Copyright © 2018 Scott Blade
All Rights Reserved
Visit the author website:
scottblade.com
The Jack Widow book series and Fire Watch are works of fiction, produced from the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination and/or are taken with permission from the source and/or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or fictitious characters, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This series is not officially associated or a part of any other book series that exists.
For more information on copyright and permissions visit scottblade.com.
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Published by Black Lion, LLC.
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
About Author
The Last Rainmaker
“It doesn’t take much in the way of mind and body to be a (fire) lookout. It’s mostly soul.”
-Norman Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It
CHAPTER 1
A PRESCRIBED FIRE IS A FIRE SET DELIBERATELY. The fire that burned Molly’s house to the ground had been started deliberately.
Right then, her husband burned up in it, and she watched it happen. And she couldn’t help but think about the raging California wildfires, happening right then, farther south.
From outside the two-story, dark coastal house, she saw it all. The engulfing red-hot flames. The dark backfire. The plums of white smoke. And the clouds of black. It fumed together. Killing off the oxygen in the air.
The smoke rose, blotting out the stars.
DeGorne’s husband had been there. In the house. When it all started. She heard his screams. But that had stopped. He was dead. She saw that part too.
She had packed a bag the night before. Two of them. One was the same bag she packed every April 31st, every year, for the last five years.
Every year she packed a bag with what she needed for the next six months. She packed two pairs of hiking shorts, five pairs of short-sleeved tops, three pairs of cargo pants, five pairs of socks, five pairs of underwear, two pairs of long-sleeved tops, one raincoat, one warm denim coat, two knit sweaters, her basic hygiene and feminine products, two knit caps, two baseball hats, and a foldable toothbrush. Everything that she needed.
She had packed them all in one canvas backpack. It was packed tightly, but it was filled just enough to close. After five years of packing it every April, she knew exactly how to do it. A man wouldn’t have been able to efficiently pack so much. She was much smaller than most men. Therefore, her clothes were smaller, more lightweight, and much easier to pack.
The second bag she had packed was a blue duffle, no bigger than her backpack, but a hell of a lot heavier. Heavy because it was packed with something else. Something that didn’t belong to her. Something that she had found just the day before. The contents were the reason why she had one black eye.
Neither packed bag was in the fire. They were stowed away safely in the back of her truck. It was parked in a disconnected garage. It was away from the fire, directly behind her.
DeGorne stood, shivering just off the gravel driveway. Out of sight. Off toward the woods. Out in front of the home that used to be hers half the year. She stood out and gazed upon the life that used to belong to her. She wore her single black eye like it had always been there. He had done it to her. She wasn’t going to deny it. Not anymore. No more telling the neighbors that she tripped. No more telling the nurses and the emergency room that she had fallen down the stairs. No more lying for him.
Luckily, she had not had to lie to her parents for a long time now. They were already dead. Her father would never have stood for the abuse if he had known about it.
He had been retired Army. Following in his footsteps, she had done four years herself. From eighteen to twenty-one. That had made him proud. Until she decided not to reenlist. Until she had decided to marry and start a family life instead. But the family life never came. She never had children. Something about infertile eggs. Something about irreversibility. Which was the news that started the abuse, the first time.
It was all around the same time when her father got sick, after her mother died, that she convinced her husband to transfer his job to Seattle. Part of which was to take care of her father. Part was to try again. A fresh start.
She threatened to leave her husband if he did not go with her. She threatened to expose his secrets if he did not transfer. Why? She couldn’t honestly say.
Everything was fine, for a while. She had managed to get a great job, which allowed her space away from everything. Which allowed her to run away from her husband once a year. It allowed her to literally run to the woods and hide.
Last year was
the hardest because that was when her father died. She had been away. Off in the forests of California for the summer. Doing her job. But missing her father’s last moments of life.
When she came back from her job, she had to deal with her father’s passing, his burial, and his estate. That was also when the abuse from her husband had started up again. Not as bad as before, but it was there.
Last night, it had gone on as it always had gone on. A drink too many. A push into a wall. A shove into a counter. Then a jab to the gut. And then a right hook to the face. Just like what he had done to her before. This time was not the first time, but it would be the last. This time she planned to do something about it.
However, last night turned out to be her husband’s last time to do anything.
This time had not been the worst that she had ever had before. She had no broken nose. No broken cheekbones. No fractured ribs. She didn’t need stitches to close torn eyelids. She didn’t need to reset her teeth.
There was no dentist appointment tomorrow. There was no emergency room visit. No paperwork to fill out. No lies to tell. She had had worse. He had given her worse. But no more.
Her toes sunk into the gravel. Thick blonde hair rooted out from her head. It drenched down and waved around her. It caressed her soot-covered body. She looked like she had woken up in the middle of the blaze. Her favorite t-shirt for sleeping hugged close to her small frame. She had no pants on. Just panties. Just the t-shirt, and the soot, and the ash.
She had barely escaped the fire.
Goosebumps scuttled across her skin. The night was cold. Not winter cold, but cold enough. Stony and callous winds blustered off the Puget Sound.
Ashes wafted out of the fire. She thought about her bags. She had only packed the two. And both packed full enough. Everything she needed and nothing she didn’t.
Then her mind shifted. She started to think about where she would go or what she would do or how she would get through this. She couldn’t go on to her job. Could she?
Her mind returned to nothingness and she watched in horror as the house she had called home for five years burned to the ground, along with the marriage that she had known inside it.
She hadn’t planned on burning her house to the ground. None of it was premeditated. None of it but the packed bags.
The flames rose into the night sky like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Fiery steeples jetted up and waved and sparked out like deadly solar flares rocketing off the surface of the sun. The heat was intense. She felt it on her face, even from fifty feet away. A three-thousand-square-foot house nestled in the woods twenty miles north of Seattle will do that.
The closest neighbors were miles away. They would be seeing the yellow-red torrents of blaze soon enough. They’d be calling the police and the fire department.
Within ten minutes the nearest firehouse would be receiving the distress call of someone reporting the fire. Two minutes later, they’d dispatch a truck. And twenty minutes after that the fire trucks would be barreling down the dirt road onto the gravel driveway that led to her house.
The police would be there sooner.
The nearest police were actually the county sheriff. A pudgy, older guy named Portman. She knew him well. He had been a friend of her family her whole life. But he and her husband had not been friends. He knew about the abuse. He and her husband were not friends. He suspected the abuse. He had gotten a few reports from the hospital. Nothing he could ever do about it because she always lied to him too.
DeGorne stepped back off the driveway and planted her toes into the cold grass, barefoot. She did nothing. She said nothing. She thought nothing. She just watched and listened.
Trees surrounded her. The wind swayed the leaves in the same direction of the waving flames. She stood there until thoughts returned to her.
She thought. Her husband had been in the house. He had been in the fire. He was dead. But she was not. She was still here. She was still alive.
She froze in place, asking herself one question.
Should I run?
CHAPTER 2
MORE THAN A THOUSAND MILES TO THE SOUTH, in East Hollywood, Jack Widow had not showered in two days. He had not changed his clothes. He needed a haircut and a shave—badly. And he knew it. Everyone who passed by him knew it.
He was not unclean and rumpled by accident. It was on purpose. It wasn’t because he was out of money. He could buy new clothes right now. He could pay for a haircut and a shave. No problem. He had the money to rent a motel room. Motel rooms had showers. That was a universal truth, in most cases. He could shower at any time he was ready to. There was no normal reason for him not to buy new, clean clothes or to get a haircut or to take a shower.
There were only two logical reasons why anyone would look the way he looked. The first was that that person was homeless. Which was what he appeared to be. But that was not the reason he looked homeless. He looked homeless because of the second reason. It was on purpose.
Widow sat next to a pile of cardboard and garbage bags, in a doorway to an abandoned electronic store. The kind of place that thrived on stereo equipment three decades ago. It probably sold cassette tapes and Walkmans and ghetto blasters. The store was old. The whole building was old. It was a dump, like most of the street.
The windows were barred. Half the streetlights were burned out. The doors behind him used to have thick glass. Now, they were cracked, water-damaged planks.
Widow looked homeless because he was playing a part. He even had a used paper coffee cup from McDonald’s out in front of him. Like a panhandler would have for spare change. Initially, he had purchased a coffee with the intent of drinking that coffee. That was until someone came along and tossed spare change into it. At which point, he had gone back to the same McDonald’s and bought a new one. The second coffee he actually got to drink before someone else walked along and dumped more change into it.
Widow did not spend his daytime lounging in the doorway of the abandoned electronic store. Homeless people don’t spend their entire days standing around the same place. They move around. They go places. They keep the blood circulating. And then they return to their nests.
He spent his days down the street, around the corner, and up another several blocks. In a much better, much cleaner, and more respected neighborhood. The people there stared at him. Gawked at him. And normally, they avoided him.
In the better part of town, he discovered an industrial plaza that had an actual Starbucks in it, not a closed-down one. The days were a little long and a lot boring, hanging around, waiting like he was. So, he found a used bookstore that might’ve been on its last legs. Widow liked books. He liked bookstores. The smell of the paper. The feeling of being around likeminded people. The organization of it all. It all made him feel at home in a small way.
Inside the store, he bought a John Grisham book, which he had read before, but had forgotten. He read it a second time that first day. Easy enough. He read it on a park bench, near an elementary school with two merry-go-rounds on the playground. One was old and boring. It was all metal, with no character. The second one was newer. Probably, had a story about a city councilman wanting to upgrade the playground. And all they ended up getting was a new merry-go-round.
Widow also bought a book called Fire Season. Which was an interesting read about fire lookouts, a job that Widow had known before. But like the Grisham book, he had forgotten the details.
Way back when Widow was in his early twenties, before he joined the NCIS and rejoined the Navy, he had just returned from Afghanistan. His tour of duty had ended and his time in the Navy was up. He didn’t know what to do next. He needed time to think things over. An understandable proposition. He needed a little quiet time to look inside himself and figure out what he wanted.
It was the end of spring. Widow moved east out of San Diego, following along the Rio Grande. He stayed in an interstate motel for a night and got a ride headed into New Mexico the next day. The guy who picked him up was a reporter
who worked with the Wall Street Journal. They got to talking. It turned out the guy spent half his year in New York City writing for the paper and the other half working a very peculiar job. A job that Widow knew, but couldn’t quite recall. And like a forgotten kiss, he felt a kind of familiarity to it, like déjà vu.
The job was fire lookout.
Widow rode on with the guy. Skipping his planned destination. Sitting in silence. The windows down. The scenery passing by like on a train. It took him a while, but he finally recalled where he had heard of a fire lookout before. It wasn’t just hearing about it. It was reading about it in Jack London books, when he was in the third grade. And then his memory brought back a long-lost fact. Jack Kerouac had spent sixty-three days as a fire lookout in the summer of 1956.
Widow thought, What was the name of the place? Desolation Peak?
Then he remembered a story that he had read before. There was a short tale of a fire lookout in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Thought It. Where the main character retold his experiences working as a fire watch one hot summer. Which, as it turned out, was loosely based on Maclean’s own life experiences.
The reporter was on his way to orientation to be a fire watch again, at a place called Black Range. The reporter had already put in his time at another forest to the north. He had taken on a more full-time role and was moving to New Mexico to begin. Widow rode along and listened to the guy tell him stories about the beauty and solitude of being a lookout. Which reminded Widow of being a Navy lookout, in a way. Once as a Navy lookout it had been his duty to watch for ships and land and weather and everything that did not belong on the ocean surface. The difference was a fire lookout watched for smoke.
Widow ended up taking a job as a lookout relief that June. He had sought it out.
June had been a great month. He moved from one lookout to the next, giving the usual lookout time off, like relieving a sentry from his post.
