Up in Smoke

by Charlene Weir

  The bright muzzle flash in her eyes was fading, and there was only blackness. At first she thought she was blind from powder burn or gases because the gun had been fired so close, then the dark outline of the barn appeared like a ship drifting into view and she realized she wasn’t blind. There were no lights—moon and stars were hidden behind the clouds dumping all this cold sleet down on her. She’d never realized how dark night was without the glow of light from somewhere. It was oppressive, claustrophobic.

  “Stand up.” He shook her again.

  Pain sizzled through her brain like lightning and he nearly upset her precarious balance. “This is standing,” she snapped. “Stop shaking me.”

  Anger and resignation were fighting it out as she shuffled forward, sniffling and rubbing mud and snot from her face with bound wrists. She had to remind herself she couldn’t let him get away with it. She had to make sure he paid for killing a little girl who called herself Moonbeam because she didn’t like her name. “Look, Todd. Just let me go. I’ll never tell anybody. I promise.”

  “Shut up.”

  If she were to yank her arm away, could she stay upright and run? With her wrists taped together, her balance wasn’t terrific.

  Left hand clamped around her arm, he gave a hard jerk and spun her around until she was facing him. He stuck the gun in her face. “One wrong move, one little wiggle and you’re dead.”

  She believed him. Her movements were awkward as she staggered over rocks and uneven ground toward the barn where she’d die. Mice and rats and other scavengers would feed on her dead flesh.

  He held her jacket so tight he was nearly choking her and he jerked her arm around so he had wrists and jacket collar in the same hand. Her left arm was yanked against her face and she struggled to pull air through wet nylon. The sense of suffocation had her breath coming in short gasps as she fought panic.

  Her jacket was soaked, her shoes were soaked, she was shaking with cold. Stumbling over the muddy, rocky ground, she edged toward the black hulking shape of the barn. Now that they were close to his destination, Todd relaxed his hold slightly.

  She drew in a welcome chestful of air. When they’d been in the car, she’d sensed he’d been near the edge. Any little nudge and he’d have shot her right then to get it over with. Now that he was totally in control, he seemed to have stepped back from that edge.

  “If Vince had just backed off,” he said.

  None of it was Todd’s fault, it was all the victim’s fault. The slight hill they were struggling up was slippery with icy mud. She went down on one knee. He nearly strangled her as he jerked her upright.

  Breath coming in little grunts from the climb uphill, he slipped and yanked her off balance as he recovered. She remembered a recurring dream. She and Ted were skiing. He, the faster and better skier, tore down the mountain. She tried to catch up. Her skis kept falling off. She hurriedly put them back on so she could follow the tracks he’d left in the snow, but falling snow slowly filled the tracks. Seeing Ted so clearly in her mind brought out a muffled whimper. Todd must have thought she was crying and loosened his hold slightly.

  Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. The meek shall inherit the earth. And unless she stopped being meek, she’d inherit her share of earth in the big barn just ahead. And the bastard would get away with making her out a killer. A killer of a little girl! Black night, black rain, black barn, she couldn’t even distinguish earth from sky. She was acutely aware of the slight sucking sound as she pulled her shoes from wet earth, patter of sleet against her jacket, slither of wet jeans across her thighs. Was she hypersensitive because she would die soon and never again see or feel or hope?

  Plead with him? Todd wasn’t about to be swayed by a pleading female, especially one who got in his way. No, unless the gods decided to give themselves some quirky entertainment, she would die in a very few minutes. And he would tell the world she was a homicidal lunatic who hanged herself. Maybe she should jerk her arm away and scratch him. Get some skin under her nails for DNA evidence when whatever was left of her after mice, rats, and creepy crawlies were through with her was found.

  He yanked her onto the gravel path that led to the two-story-high sliding doors on the old barn. Above the doors was the hayloft. Grunting, cursing, he pulled on a door and finally coaxed it open. He dragged her inside where the blackness was total.

  “Colder than a witch’s tit in here.” Todd swept the flashlight beam around.

  Shuffling, shivering, she moved at his prodding toward the wooden ladder leading to the hayloft. The third rung was slippery with ice where water had found its way through the leaky roof. Getting impatient, he shoved the barrel into her back.

  She screeched like the madwoman she was. The sound echoed round the barn, rousing the voices of long dead horses in the wind whistling through the cracks.

  Hurling herself backward, she twisted and raked his cheek with her fingernails. She smashed her head into his face and heard him cry out. He toppled back, instinctively throwing his arms out to regain his balance. A shot rattled the rafters as his finger reflexively tightened on the trigger. Roosting pigeons took off in a frantic flutter of wings.

  He fell and she fell with him. As he hit the floor, he howled with pain and outrage and cushioned her fall. She landed on his chest and belly and heard the air leave his lungs with a loud oomph. Through it all, he managed to hang on to the hood of her jacket and it cut into her throat choking her, but he dropped the flashlight. It rolled and fell from the loft to the floor below where it put out a muted glow.

  Gripped with a fierce desire to inflict as much damage as possible, she jammed her left elbow back into his face and with luck caught his nose. Screaming and spitting, she twisted away and felt her coat pull free. Shrieking all the while, she hit, she scratched, she bit, she kicked.

  He pushed at her to fend her off. On elbows and knees, she crawled off into darkness until she hit the barn wall. Turning, she sat with her back braced against the rough wood and tried to listen. The banging of her heart and her own fast panting rushed through her ears. Forcing herself to breathe slow and deep, she listened past her body’s joyous reveling at being alive to the constant patter of rain. A grunt. The scrape of a boot.

  Todd getting to his feet.

  She had no way of releasing her bound hands except to find the end of the tape and unwind it. In the dark, with cold numb fingers and her mind jangled with adrenaline, that was impossible. She wondered in all her rolling and tumbling whether the gun had fallen out. She patted her pocket. The hard lump reassured her. Hysterical laughter fizzled up in her throat. The gun she’d meant to kill herself with was going to save her life. Was that irony, or what?

  Awkwardly, she forced her taped hands in her pocket. Searching fingertips scraped against the grip. She pushed, reached, pushed harder, until she could hook a finger around the barrel and work the gun free. She heard scraping sounds and sensed rather than saw Todd coming toward her.

  “Stop!” she yelled. “It’s over.”

  A shot and muzzle flash. She dropped and rolled. Another shot. Not moving, hardly breathing for fear he’d hear her, she waited.

  “Make this easy,” he said.

  “I have a gun, Todd.”

  He laughed and she imagined his gun swinging toward the sound of her voice. Aiming way off toward the leaky roof, she squeezed the trigger.

  “You bitch!” Enraged that she hadn’t revealed she toted a gun in her pocket.

  Keeping a secret from him during her kidnapping and prior to her murder apparently wasn’t playing fair. Laughter bubbled up in her throat. “If you only knew!”

  The black bulk of his outline moved. “Go ahead,” he taunted. “Shoot me. Ever shot anybody before? It’s not so easy to pull the trigger. The mess it makes afterward is beyond belief. You won’t be able to do it.”

  She thought of Moonbeam. She thought of Laura.

  When he reached the open doorway, she could just make out his silhouette against the rain.

&
nbsp; Gun clutched in her right hand, she stretched out prone, rested her left elbow on the floor and aimed at chest height. She couldn’t avenge the death of her own child, but she could damn sure wreak vengeance on the death of someone else’s.

  She pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  In the distance, she heard sirens.

  47

  The highway patrolmen clustered outside Governor Garrett’s hospital room all but laughed in her face when Susan said she needed to speak with the governor. They wanted to hustle her right back into the elevator and she wanted to get in his room. No telling how long they’d have maintained their positions, squared off facing each other, if Bernie hadn’t come along. He told her to wait a minute while he asked if the governor felt like seeing her. A moment or two later Bernie told the troopers Governor Garrett wanted to talk with her and she zipped in before anyone could change his mind. This was her last chance. Later today he was due to be transported by ambulance to the governor’s mansion.

  Propped up in a hospital bed, wearing one of those shorty gowns with one string untied, Jack Garrett was reduced to ordinary mortal. Face pale, bristle of beard with glints of gray, IV attached to one arm, bandaged chest, monitors above the bed recording the inner workings of his body.

  “Good morning, sir. I’m sorry to bother you.”

  He smiled and it was all there—charisma, attraction, charm—whatever made him a man who could reach out and people would reach back. “Bother me and I can have twelve troopers in here in ten seconds.”

  She smiled back. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “I’m sure you would. Pull up a chair.”

  She tugged the armchair closer to the head of the bed and sat down.

  “A wisp of smoke,” he said, before she even got out her first question. “On a distant mountain in Montana. That’s how it started and it ended with thousands of acres burned and six people dead. A series of mistakes compounded by bad luck, missed opportunities and misunderstandings. There were eleven of us. Dispatched to take on Pale Horse Mountain.” So softly she could barely hear, he said, “‘And behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’”

  He shrugged off something. Memories? Regrets? “I’d been smoke jumping for five years. That summer was going to be my last. I was twenty-six years old, in my final year of law school. It looked like a routine fire and we thought we’d have it lined by morning.”

  “Lined?”

  “Smoke jumpers don’t beat out flames. They build a fire line around the beast using chain saws. They want to gouge a swath through the vegetation and remove the fuel. That way the fire burns itself out. Since we were such a small group and we just had limited equipment, we decided to start above the fire and build a fire line downhill, then hook up and around.”

  She nodded to show she was following.

  “Firefighters try to stay away from a downhill fire line. Heat and flames rise. A crew wants to stay beneath the blaze at all times. Oh man, we were right there above that fire, not leaving any margin for error if something went wrong.”

  “Wakely was one of the crew?”

  “He’d been fighting fires since he was a teenager and he didn’t like the look of this one. Fucking bad idea, he said. We shouldn’t be here. He was right. We were getting trapped with no escape routes. If the wind changed, the fire could move uphill faster than we could. That kind of fire makes you claustrophobic. It’s so dark you can’t see where you are, you can’t see what the clouds are doing, you can’t see what the fire is doing. You can hardly see the other crew members. To move quicker, we broke a hard and fast rule. We didn’t prepare any good black.”

  “Good black,” she repeated.

  “Safety zones. Already burned areas where we’d have shelter if the fire should switch and chase us up the mountain. We screwed up bad.” He shook his head. “We were really moving and thinking there’d be another place, another place, another place. Firefighters pride themselves on success no matter what the odds. Or the obstacles. We thought we could get the beast hooked. When we reached Horse’s Teeth Ridge, we saw the fire was traveling uphill. Somehow we got scattered to hell and gone all over that ridge. Wakely and I made our way down to see how far it had spread and how much farther down the mountain we’d have to cut the fire line.”

  He closed his eyes. The monitor above his head started making erratic lines and she got concerned, wondered if she should leave. This was obviously affecting him, maybe causing harm.

  Taking in a breath, he opened his eyes, not seeing her, but looking inward. “Increasingly heavy wind fanned the flames into an inferno so fierce even Wakely hadn’t ever seen anything like it. Fire exploded all around us. Flames swept up the mountainside like the devil had let loose his evil. The smoke jumper in charge radioed. ‘Get off the mountain! Now!’”

  Beads of sweat glistened on the governor’s forehead. “Stay away from the fire line, he told us. Go straight up Pale Horse Mountain. We’d find good black. We’d be safe.”

  He scrubbed a hand down his face. “Three men, including Vince Egelhoff, were on one end of the ridge, six were on the other end. We tried to radio, and got no response. We argued, Wakely and I. I wanted to start running. He said we had to find them. Tell them to go up instead of down the fire line. Going down is exactly what they’d try to do, if we didn’t tell them. You never go up, because fire could just sweep right over you. You always go down. Because of the trust we had in our chief, we knew we had to go up.”

  He took a sip of water. “Wakely took off and so did I. Fire everywhere. Walls of flame. Black as night. Two-thousand-degree heat, over sixty-mile-an-hour wind. So strong it blew off my hardhat. Dead stuff on the ground kept tripping me. Airborne embers, spot fires everywhere. I didn’t know where I was. Grass beneath my feet burst into flames. All thoughts of anybody else stopped. I started running to save myself. My legs ached. I was lugging a twenty-five-pound chainsaw, not really aware of it. You never abandon your tools. If you do, it means you’re in a situation where you’ll die. And that’s when I knew I wasn’t going to make it.”

  She could see he was in pain, but didn’t know if the pain was here in this hospital room or back all those years on the mountain.

  “A wall of flame was roaring up behind me, moving faster than I was, gaining with every step. I got five hundred feet from the top. Skin blistered, fire on all sides. Kept going. Fifty feet from the top, I was slapped to the ground by superheated gases. Like opening a blast furnace.” He stopped and took another sip of water.

  “I was on the ground and the beast was devouring me. Then Wakely appeared. He slung me over his shoulder and headed up. A burning tree fell on us. Somehow or other, I was underneath and he got the weight of a toppled oak. It crushed him. I thought he was dead. If I hadn’t found the damn chainsaw, I couldn’t have gotten him free. I barely managed to drag both of us over the top of that ridge.”

  “He came from where, the other end of the ridge?”

  “Yeah. After telling three people to run up the mountain.”

  “Why did he come back?”

  A sour smile. “I think to make sure I got out. He never was certain I wouldn’t trip over my own two feet.”

  “He ran miles, through burning trees, thick smoke, to warn three men at one end of a ridge and somehow he managed to run all that way back to check on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d he do that?”

  The governor placed his hands by his side and shifted his position. “The man was a bear. Six foot four. Two hundred and forty pounds. Strength of ten. Tireless. A machine.” Thin smile. “Came from sturdy pioneer stock.”

  She couldn’t fit the image of the crippled Wakely slumped in a wheelchair into a six-foot-four frame with the strength of ten.

  “He had all kinds of injuries and I don’t suppose dragging him up the mountain helped any. Spinal cord smashed, third degree burns, concussion, broken leg, broken shoulder
blade, cracked ribs. The man was a sack of broken pieces.”

  “And you were a hero.”

  “I was a coward,” he said.

  “Reporters and newscasters said you were a hero.”

  “Wakely was the hero.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the world that?”

  “Six people died in that fire because I didn’t warn them. Three were saved because Wakely did.”

  “Could you have saved those six?”

  “No,” he said. “I would have been number seven.”

  “You let the world think you saved those three.” Susan hadn’t meant to sound accusatory.

  The look of pain that crossed his face was so intense, she thought she’d better get a doctor in here.

  “I came out with some third-degree burns. Plus minor scrapes and knocks, broken arm, broken bones in one foot, concussion. I sank into a hospital bed and there I stayed for some days. I didn’t know what was being said. When I found out, I figured I’d let Wakely set the record straight. Give him some show time.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  “He was two steps from death’s door for weeks. When he finally rallied, he couldn’t remember any of it.”

  “And so you let it go.”

  “I never meant that to happen. At first, the doctors said Wakely’s memory would return. I wanted him to be the one. Stand up with all those reporters and newscasters and let the world know what a hero he was. But he didn’t remember. Even after some months he didn’t remember and time went by. A lot of time. So much I decided I’d hold a press conference and set the record straight. He said if I tried that, he’d tell them he’d suddenly remembered: He was the one who was supposed to tell the six guys on Horse’s Teeth Ridge. They died. I went the other way and saved three people.”

  “Why would he do that?” That sounded like truth to Susan, but this man was a politician, he was used to making whatever he said sound like truth.