Lani extended her hand across the table; Scott took it in his own.
“Thank you,” she said. “That might be it. You are similar in some ways. You did slash that cop’s tire together.”
“Well, that was my idea. That’s how he and I met.”
“I know. Let’s not share that story with too many people.”
Scott hadn’t picked a policeman randomly, but he hadn’t really planned the caper either. He’d been driving east along Route 66, on his way to pick up some things for Lani, his then-new girlfriend, when he was pulled over for speeding. Traffic was light after work hours, and his foot had probably been a little heavy on the gas pedal with nothing but open road ahead, so he’d bit his tongue when the officer walked up to his car window.
But he hadn’t been able to keep a slight grimace from tightening his lips, and that grimace set off a five-minute lecture about proper civilian decorum toward officers of the law.
Still smarting from that tongue-lashing an hour later, Scott spotted the same cop getting out of his patrol car on a residential street. Without really thinking, he pulled his pocketknife from his jeans—a semi-custom monster with a curved 5 1/2-inch blade and a push-button locking mechanism—crossed the street after a careful look in all directions, and stuck the blade deep into the rubber of the left front tire.
“Need a hand?”
Scott looked up to meet the cheerful eyes of a long-haired, middle-aged man toting an enormous backpack. Unless something had gone terribly wrong with the police department’s uniform budget, this wasn’t a cop.
“Sure. Pick a tire.”
Afterward, they’d gone for a drink.
But that was then. Now, the arrival of the lunch order briefly interrupted the couple’s conversation. Digging in to his meal, Scott paused with a full fork half way to his mouth.
“You don’t have to like Rollo, but don’t hate him because you think I’m going to join his barbarian tribe. You’re stuck with me.”
Lani stood to lean across the table and kissed Scott on the lips, jarring his hand in the process. They both laughed as his first sample of lunch landed in his lap.
“I don’t consider it ‘stuck,’” she said. “I’m happy we’re together. You have good qualities—a few, anyway.”
Chapter 11
Rollo was at Scott’s house when he heard a nearly word-for-word broadcast of Van Kamp’s press release about a new wildfire during a newsbreak on the local classic rock radio station. He was sitting grumpily on Scott’s sofa, nursing a beer and a grudge—partially because his music tastes were now archaic enough to be considered “classic.” He was afraid to venture back into town after the barroom near-brawl and the subsequent warning he’d received from his host.
Flagstaff was clogged with refugees from Williams. The refugees were at loose ends, wandering the streets, passing time in the bars and looking for somebody to blame for the charcoal pit that now occupied the one-time site of “the gateway to the Grand Canyon.”
The Forest Service claimed that a vagrant set the fire that destroyed Williams. Much to his disgust, Rollo, who thought of himself as a throwback to the bold days of Bill Williams and other early mountain men, found himself fitting the official description of the suspect.
So on Scott’s sofa Rollo slumped, his plaid shirt unbuttoned halfway to his navel, revealing a puff of graying hair and a slight paunch. He sank deeper into depression while the J. Geils Band’s Centerfold thumped from the stereo speakers.
Christ, I’m horny, he thought.
Two minutes later, he barged into Scott’s office.
“There’s beer in the fridge,” Scott said upon the rushed arrival of his friend. He didn’t even look up. Scott was seated at his desk with his nose buried in his checkbook and a legal pad covered with numbers and scratch marks under his right hand. A stack of paperback books, hemmed in by the last fax sent to Scott’s former employers and a lightweight rain jacket reduced to the size of a small submarine sandwich within a tightly stuffed small nylon bag, teetered on the desk’s edge. Sitting atop a collection of Terry Southern’s dope-and madness-fueled essays, Claire Wolfe’s 101 Things To Do ‘til The Revolution capped the stack, pinned in place by the .45-caliber paperweight.
“Don’t clean me out,” Scott continued. “There’s not much more on the way.”
Agitated, Rollo barked. “No, that’s not it.”
“Well, what then?”
“According to the radio news, there’s a new fire on the west side of town.”
Scott looked up from his financial labors.
“That sucks,” he said.
“You don’t get it,” answered Rollo, growing even more agitated. “If those khaki—”
“Khaki-shirted bastards?” Scott interrupted.
Rollo ignored him.
“If they can set a fire to burn out Williams, why wouldn’t they do the same thing to Flagstaff?”
Scott leaned back in his swiveling office chair, testing its hinges and posing a challenge to gravity. He ran the fingers of his right hand through the tightly cropped stubble atop his head.
“Because, maybe they didn’t do it to Williams.” he said. “At least, not deliberately. I mean, accidentally burning a town to the ground during an office cook-out is like the Forest Service. A carefully executed nefarious scheme really isn’t.”
Stretched tight over clenched teeth, Rollo’s thin lips turned white. He crossed his arms over his chest and huffed and snorted through his nose.
Scott sighed.
“All right, what do you want to do?”
Within half an hour, Rollo, Scott and an impressive assortment of backpacking gear were loaded into the stolen Chevy Blazer.
“Where did you get that license plate,” Scott asked.
“Off a truck in the City Hall parking lot. I figure anybody spending much time in that building is up to no good.”
“It’s a nice touch. It complements the new primer finish you slapped over the government-issue puke color.”
Thrust into a holster and firmly fastened with a Velcro strap to a backpack hipbelt, Scott’s large-caliber paperweight added its reassuring mass to the equipment list.
Upon Scott’s insistence, they invited Lani to join the expedition.
“You’re crazy,” she told them. “Why would I want to go barging with you into an area the Forest Service sealed off. Isn’t that illegal?”
“A misdemeanor, at least,” Scott answered. “But school is out, you’re bored, and I’ll be there. Don’t you want to keep me out of trouble.”
“Maybe.”
“Bring your backpacking gear.”
“What? Why?”
“Just in case.”
Before Lani formally consented, Champ had accepted his unspoken invitation. He sat at Scott’s feet, tail wagging and eyes wide, doggie backpack firmly clenched between his teeth. He knew when adventure was afoot.
Chapter 12
Had he known of Scott’s assessment of his employer’s scheming abilities, Jason might have grudgingly agreed. Assigned to start a fire in the forest near Flagstaff that would threaten to turn the city into a 63-square-mile weenie roast, he’d gathered his eager gang of rangers and volunteers, loaded two Forest Service trucks with personnel and gear, and headed out of town.
“Where are the drip torches?” Terry asked from behind one of the parked trucks along dusty, unpaved Forest Road 538. The warm vanilla smell of ponderosa pine trees brushed across the group, carried on a breeze that blew toward the San Francisco peaks. The mountains—really the shattered remnants of a huge, long-ago erupted volcano—towered above the treetops. The small city of Flagstaff, invisible from this perspective, nestled in assumed security at the base of promontories supposedly retired from the excesses of their explosive youth.
Aside from the sweet odor of the trees, the air rustled crystal-clear through branches and dry grass, untainted by dust or, more importantly, smoke.
Fire-resistant nomex coat draped over
one arm, shaggy brown hair poking out from under his red hardhat, Terry hoped to correct that lack of taint.
But that would be hard to do without the proper equipment.
“Drip torches?” Jason asked, stalling for time. Then he gave it up. “Shit, we forgot the drip torches.”
Standing side-by-side like crewcut bookends, compact Sig pistols dangling from their hips, Ray and Tim adopted simultaneous looks of disgust. Jason ignored them. He was less successful at brushing off Samantha’s look of blank-faced confusion.
“All right, everybody back in the trucks.”
“Back in the trucks,” Tim repeated in disbelief. “Why?”
“We’re going back to town for our equipment.”
And back they drove along FR538 toward FR231, which took a straight run past the arboretum, gained a layer of pavement and a name—Woody Mountain Road—and, after many miles eventually ran headlong into Route 66 on the west side of Flagstaff. But Jason grew more nervous the more ground disappeared beneath his truck’s wheels. Fire had been announced to the good people of Flagstaff, but fire was nowhere to be seen. The sky was entirely too clear to herald any sort of impending disaster.
Even before FR538 met FR231, Jason stood on his brakes and brought his truck to a sliding halt amidst a cloud of dust that flowed in through open windows and had his passengers coughing and gasping for breath. He jumped from the truck and ran back to the trailing vehicle.
“What?” screamed Tim, his face flushed and his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. A little high-strung at the best of times, the frustrated policer of campsites and sightseeing tours was clearly running out of patience.
“Um … we’re short on time, so I figure we should head back to the site and improvise.”
“Improvise, fucking improvise,” Tim fumed. Trapped in the vehicle with the fulminating ranger, Bob, Rena and Terry seemed to shrink in their seats.
The mini-convoy made an abrupt U-turn, and headed back along the forest road, leaving a plume of dust rising into the air.
Chapter 13
As dirt roads go, Woody Mountain Road is pretty well maintained—at least for the first few miles. The road is wide and relatively smooth. Curves are fairly gentle and the washboard and rock found further down the road is rare. This makes the road past the arboretum, then through ranch land and into national forest a tempting one to drive at high speed.
“Slow down,” Lani said.
“Why?” Rollo asked. He was fiddling with the radio while, perfunctorily, keeping an eye on the road. To his disgust, he discovered that the radio didn’t even deliver static, let alone music. He gave up on the tuning knob in time to give the steering wheel a vigorous spin and whiz by a pine tree with no less (and little more) than two fingernail-breadths to spare.
“Fucking radio,” Rollo said. “You pick up a new car, you expect everything to work.”
Sitting rigidly in the shotgun seat, right hand pressed stiffly against the dash, Scott grunted. “You did get the car at a substantial discount,” he added.
“Because,” Lani broke in, demanding attention for her concern, “you almost killed us, and we don’t know where we’re going or what we’re looking for.”
Rollo sighed.
“Well, there is that.”
The Blazer slowed and Scott and Lani both visibly relaxed.
“Funny how we haven’t seen any rangers on this road at all,” Scott said. “There was nobody at the barrier, and we haven’t seen any firefighting crews since.”
“So you actually thought we would run into rangers?” Lani asked. “You brought me back here expecting us to get arrested?”
“I knew rangers were a possibility,” Scott said. He cocked a thumb toward the cargo area of the truck. “The backpacks are our alibi. We were out for a couple of days and had no idea the area was closed off.”
“Wait, so we’re not going backpacking?”
Scott shrugged—a gesture mostly wasted in the tight confines of the truck.
“We’re off on an adventure. We may go backpacking. We may get chased around by forest rangers. At least we’re not sitting at my desk contemplating my new unemployment. And, if Rollo’s firebugs are out here somewhere, we’ll catch ‘em in action.”
Lani sighed. She stroked the fur around Champ’s throat, distracting the dog not a bit from his slobbering, open-mouthed delight at being in motion. Left ear held erect, right ear folded down in an arrangement like a cocky doggie beret, Champ clearly didn’t care where they were going—it was the trip that mattered.
“Speaking of which,” Lani said, holding on to the seat tightly over a prolonged stretch of washboard road. “Assuming that the firebugs are out here, how do we make sure we see them before they see us?”
“Assuming.” Rollo grumbled. “Assuming. They’re out here all right.” He turned his attention from the road to Scott and Lani; the woman silently pointed at the road with her right hand and rotated Rollo’s head to face forward with her left.
“I’ll tell you what,” Rollo continued. “If we don’t find those bastards torching the forest, I’ll fix that backdoor of yours for free.”
Scott slowly turned is head toward his friend. “You’ll fix that backdoor—that you broke—for free, all right. That is, unless you want to find someplace else to stay.”
Rollo chuckled, happy at getting a rise from Scott.
“I repeat,” Lani said. “How do we find the firebugs? If they exist.”
“Well, we’ll have to look for— Huh,” Scott answered. “What’s that?”
In the distance, rising above the trees, was a plume of dust of the sort tossed up by cars on dry, unpaved Arizona roads.
Chapter 14
Anxious over the delay in his official mission of arboreal arson, Jason once again stood on his brakes and brought his truck to a skidding halt. Fine Arizona soil, bone dry in the sun-drenched intermission between monsoon rains, rose up in a cloud and settled gently on Jason and his passengers.
Somebody coughed.
Jason heard a car door slam just a moment before Tim appeared at his window. Tim’s face was dust-encrusted, with the powdery dirt bizarrely blurring the line between skin and sunglasses.
“Jason, what the hell are you doing? We’re nowhere near the site we picked.”
Jason gaped, momentarily thrown by Tim’s appearance.
“Ummm.”
“What?”
“Ummm. I figured this was good enough. Why waste more time by heading down the road?”
Tim sighed, then turned to face back toward his own vehicle.
“All right! This is it! Everybody out!”
Jason hopped from the truck and stretched his legs.
Instructed to improvise, the crew set to ransacking the trucks and their own gear for anything that could be used to start a fire. Lighters and stove fuel containers were set in a small pile by the side of the road.
“Hey,” Samantha called from the truck’s tailgate. She held a short section of rubber hose in her hand. “I bet we could use this to siphon gas from the tanks.”
“Great idea! Are you up to giving it a try?”
Samantha nodded. “I have powerful lungs from all the bike-riding I do. I can suck as long and hard as you want.”
Jason smiled. He was in love.
Chapter 15
Scott had hoped to spot any backcountry road traffic by the dust clouds it inevitably raised, but the brown pall hovering over FR 538 not far from the intersection with Woody Mountain Road looked like the leavings of a dune buggy rally. It hung heavy in the sky and dimmed the sun.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “It looks like a convoy went through here.”
Rollo eyed the sky doubtfully.
“Not real sneaky, are they?”
“Maybe they have nothing to be sneaky about,” Lani offered.
Rollo snorted.
“Rollo, why don’t you pull off here,” Scott said. We’ll stick the truck back in the trees. If there’s some kind of a Forest
Service jamboree going on back here, we probably don’t want to barge in.”
Once under cover, the three retrieved their gear from the back of the truck, hauling out three backpacks of varying size and weight. Scott and Lani both shrugged into small, relatively new packs with plastic drinking tubes snapped smartly to shoulder straps. Scott’s pack also put his gun within easy reach once the hipbelt was buckled in place.
Rollo attached himself to a large, ancient external-frame pack held together with wire and duct tape. A canteen dangled from his shoulder and extra water bottles peeked from pockets on the pack bags.
Lani snapped a leash to Champ’s collar to keep him from bounding off through the trees and alerting whoever drove along on the road ahead. Unhappy at the restraint, Champ strained at the collar, leaning far forward and breathing roughly, while Lani leaned back, holding the dog in place.
“Damn it, Champ!”
Rollo shot a look at the battling pair.
“Maybe the dog ain’t such a good—”
“Cool it, Champ,” Scott hissed.
The dog relaxed.
Chapter 16
Retrieved from their semi-permanent stations under seats and in the back of the Forest Service trucks, a sizeable collection of empty soda cans and sports drink bottles stood in rank along the sides of the vehicles, ready for their infusions of gasoline.
“Don’t you people recycle?” Rena shrieked at the sight of the ancient containers. Her square-cut brown mop of hair shook with agitation.
“Well … sometimes,” Jason answered defensively. “Those aren’t all mine,” he added.
“The generic soda is definitely yours,” Terry said. Skinny to the point of deformity, the ranger was almost lost in his baggy uniform shirt, which flapped around him in the breeze. “Nobody else drinks that stuff.”
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