Burning Up

by Anne Marsh

  “We take it to law enforcement first,” he said, looking each man in the eye. “We give them the chance to deal with him.” He knew each of them heard the unspoken agreement: if the law failed to take care of business, Jack’s team would. If only for this summer, Lily Cortez and Strong were all his. His base. His territory. Whoever this arsonist was, his power trip was over as of this minute.

  The spotter moved to the door. Three thousand feet below, the local fire crew’s early responders had parked their trucks end-to-end along the roadside, turning the remote-access area into a parking lot worthy of a shopping mall on a Saturday. The road hugged the edge of a particularly virgin stretch of forest, where giant ponderosa pines punched their green tops up into the smoky sky. Usually a jump team wouldn’t have been called out for what was essentially a ground fight, but Strong was shorthanded this season, and right now they had a chance to dig a scratch line to hold the small fires before they chewed up the neighborhood.

  The fire’s head here was a hot run of flame burning up the slope where a thick cloud of white-gray smoke billowed up into the bright blue. Flames were clearing fifteen feet, so there was plenty of fuel. The line crew had made an initial attack, but, on the other side of the line, maybe a quarter mile back, were houses. If the wind had shifted the other way, there’d be nothing but ash there. Could still go that way, from what Jack saw.

  The situation report said the weather was only going to get worse, hotter and drier, so stopping these small fires now was key.

  Unfortunately, the trees in this area were big-ass, well over one hundred feet tall. That meant their first jump spot for today was a narrow sliver of space he could barely see through the thick carpet of the treetops.

  Next to him, the spotter cursed. “You’re going to have to jump right through there.” He jerked a thumb at the handful of openings in the canopy. “That’s going to be a bitch to steer through.”

  Where the trees ended, a steep slope began and ended in a small patch of clearing.

  As Spotted Dick brought the plane around, the spotter hooked his harness onto a restraining line tethered to the plane. If he fell out, the rest of the team shared the responsibility of hauling his ass back in. “Door’s opening,” he bellowed.

  Jack threw an arm over his reserve chute, because if the chute caught a blast of air from the door and blew your ass out, zero to sixty, it wouldn’t be pretty when you hit. Up ahead, the spotter grabbed the handles and pulled. The door slid free, fresh air exploding into the plane.

  The drift streamers flew out the door and down. Jack caught a flash of sky like a giant bruise through the open hatch, the bright blue of the California summer streaked with black smoke. Even as he watched, the red, yellow and blue streamers snapped open, weighted down to mimic the weight of a jumper. That was one hell of a party down there, however. No cake-and-candles affair.

  The spotter nodded and spoke into his headset. “Got us some drift. Two hundred yards.”

  Spotted Dick adjusted the plane, making a second pass as the spotter tossed out the streamers again, two hundred yards upwind of the jump spot. Dead-on hit. Good. The plane climbed higher to hit jump altitude.

  As soon as they hit three thousand feet, the spotter was barking out orders. “Get into the doorway, boys.”

  They’d jump two at a time today because there were four nearby fires to contain. First out the door were Joey and Zay, Joey jumping with his customary war whoop, while Zay dove silently beside him.

  The wind had either shifted on Joey as he cleared the plane or he’d a hit a downdraft, because he’d hung up maybe thirty feet from the ground. He flashed the plane the bird and then cut himself free. The next pair jumped better, and then it was Jack’s turn to go with Evan.

  Dropping into the open doorway, he hung his legs over the edge. He checked his release and lines, making sure the cutaway clutch was in plain sight. First man out had needed that clutch.

  “Ready,” the spotter roared. Jack sucked in air, coming up onto his feet. Arms and legs braced in the door. When the spotter’s hand smacked his shoulder, he launched himself into all that open, empty sky. Counting off the seconds as his body rolled through the air, fighting gravity and the gusts battering at him. He pulled the handle on the four-count.

  Over on his right, Evan whooped. Jack grabbed the steering toggles and banked, making for a small clearing below.

  The ground rushed up beneath his booted feet as he punched down through a hole in the canopy, the sides of his chute grazing the thick, leafy cover. He didn’t hang up, though, so he sent up a small prayer. Take that. Pulling hard on the toggle, he narrowly avoided one of the ponderosa’s smaller cousins, and then the ground was barreling toward him. Twenty feet. Ten. His feet hit hard, the shock of the impact sending him running forward as he fought to keep himself upright.

  Hell if he was ass-planting now.

  Twelve hours to cut line. Another hour to hike back down the ridge and join up with the local boys who’d come out to do a little firefighting themselves. Evening was coming on fast, and the shift in the humidity might just save all their asses. This was familiar ground: he was right at home with the whine of the chain saw and cheerful obscenities. Swiping a bottle of water from a box set out on the tailgate of a pickup, he moved in, assessing. “What have we got?”

  The four original fires had become one, and this close to the line, the furnace blast eating up the ponderosas had him sweating even though he wasn’t close enough yet to spot what else was on fire. A thick, smoky tang blanketed the air, coating his throat and skin. He’d smell like bad barbecue by the time he was done here. The heat and dust were already almost impossible. Should have been the end to another pretty summer day, and, from the looks of the sky, maybe it was somewhere. Most of the horizon was the kind of impossible blue and sunset reds that sent folks running on outside. To the north, however, was the familiar gray haze and the smoke that promised fire.

  After a second phone consult with Evan, he’d decided against sending his boys up in the plane again. That was overkill. They’d dug their line over the ridge, but there was still plenty of hard, dirty work down here on the ground, and he lost himself in it.

  Swinging the Pulaski, he drove its sharp claw end into the iron-hard dirt. Each blow reverberated through his body, ripping through the muscles in his arms and shoulders in a familiar rhythm. Up. Down. Through.

  This was where he belonged. Right here, right now, on this line with his team, carving a strip of safety out of the forest. No question about it. In town, he got that itch between his shoulders that signaled he needed to get the hell out of there, but Strong hadn’t been all bad. Not this time around. Maybe it was that little light his Nonna got in her eyes when she was going on about her plans for the place, or maybe it was Lily’s cussed stubbornness in hanging on to a lavender farm she didn’t know the first damned thing about running, but he hadn’t been bored.

  He’d felt welcome. Needed.

  And being needed for more than his back and a willingness to launch himself out of a cockpit and dead center into a fire zone was something altogether new. He’d sort it all out later, he decided. Not now. Not when he had work to do.

  His Pulaski broke the earth’s crusty surface and turned over rich, black soil. When he and the other men were finished, nothing would burn through the line here. Strong could keep right on going, reinventing itself as a tourist destination or whatever crazy scheme his Nonna had come up with this week. He wouldn’t, he reminded himself, be here to see that makeover project through to its conclusion.

  He’d spent longer in other places, strange places, during the five-odd fire seasons since he’d left his military days behind him. But leaving was always part of the drill, and Strong was just another tour of duty when you got down to it. Sure, he’d managed all right so far—hell, things had gone better than all right. Lily was a delicious challenge, and she sure made Strong a whole lot more interesting than other places. He’d make his two months, no problem.
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  “We know who spotted this sleeper’s smoke?” Rio loped up to him, looking like he’d just rolled out of bed and not spent the day cutting line up on that ridge with the rest of the team. His hair was ruffled as if he’d shoved a hand through it. Data points—that’s what Rio called their fires, plotting their sources of origin in his laptop. Jack didn’t know what Rio did with all those numbers, but he sure as shit enjoyed collecting them.

  Lifting a shoulder, he swiped his forehead on the soot-streaked cotton. “Flagger called it.” Man was about to get a grilling worthy of the IRS. Poor bastard wouldn’t know what hit him when Rio got his hands on him.

  Usually, spotting secondary fires was monotonous but important work. You sent a handful of guys to flag a route into a recent flare-up, taking a compass reading and then picking an object in their sight line. Once they had that lock, they made for it, checking over their shoulders for the last flag. Flag the new site. Rinse and repeat. The work wasn’t glamorous, but they’d find those sleeper fires fast, before they had a chance to grow into something bigger. Only other way to find them was to put a plane up and just keep on flying until you saw smoke.

  The access road that would take them to the ridge above the fire was rutted and muddy. Worse yet, the way was blocked by fallen trees the team would have to clear. The team was already breaking up the fallen trees with hand axes and firing up the chain saw. Evan was on lead; he might prefer jumping, but that man knew the chain saw better than any of them and could make it sing in his hands as it chewed through old wood.

  Mentally Jack marked snags. He’d send a team back later to clean up the hazardous trees on the side of the road—if they needed to use the fire road again, it would be clear. In one spot, the bole of a collapsed tree blocked the road and had the team limbing the fallen tree with a chain saw.

  “Town like this,” Jack muttered, “there shouldn’t be all that much to burn.”

  “Just Ma’s.” Rio flashed him a grin, his face streaked with soot and sweat. “Lose her place, and you can kiss your pool table good-bye for the rest of the summer.”

  “Not to mention any hope of a cold beer,” Evan grumbled.

  Rio’s good-natured curse was lost in a series of catcalls from a group of local firefighters. “You going to get your ass in gear, flyboy?” one of the ground crew called. “Because we’re putting this fire out single-handedly over here.”

  Grinning fiercely through the mask of soot and ash and sweat painting his face, Evan headed toward the new flare-up, driving his Pulaski into the ground. Some of the boys here would be in it for the money, the chance to score big and get out, spend big and play the rest of the year. Build up a nice nest egg that bought a man some freedom to live a little. Most men couldn’t do that with nine-to-five and a desk. Plus, this thrill of danger was the closest a man came to the battlefield without re-enlisting.

  On the other side of the access road was a slice of canyon—and a little development of ritzy homes. Most of them were summer places kept by the superwealthy who sometimes came up to Strong to play in the mountains. Fortunately, the houses were mostly empty right now. Jack’s mind ran the logistics while his hands kept right on shoveling. A few of those houses would belong to locals. That meant people living there. People who weren’t going to like an order to evac.

  He hotfooted it up to the ridge. The fire hadn’t climbed to the top yet, and another team was back-digging like mad, churning up the dirt to stop the fire’s slow creep.

  Clearing the top of the ridge, he got his first eyeful of what lay on the other side.

  Hell. A few of the homeowners had done the prudent thing and cleared back the brush. House nearest the ridge, however, was just the prettiest little disaster-in-waiting he’d laid eyes on recently. Mother Nature had decorated the roof with a thick layer of dry pine needles, and then the happy homeowner had made matters worse by planting a real nice border of flowering shrubs around the place. Maybe if the damned plants had gotten their daily dose of water, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but those bushes had dried up to a handful of brown twigs just begging to spark.

  One hundred percent pure tinder. The few sprinklers belatedly wheezing and spitting water onto the front lawn weren’t going to help much, either. Man of the house had now hauled himself up onto the rooftop, vigorously wielding a bright green garden hose. The anemic stream of water wet the roof and rained down on the dust-dry yard. The bright yellow plastic slide tucked up against the side of the house meant children inside.

  This wasn’t going to end well. “We need to evac the residents.”

  Rio nodded, doing a 180 on his work boot. “I’ll get the sheriff on the radio.”

  There wasn’t time for that. “They need to leave. Now.” There was a minivan parked in the driveway. He figured they could toss a few essentials inside and hightail it down to the town. If they were lucky, they’d come back to a house. Hell. He hated working on the ground. He needed to be up in the air, where he could see the big picture and get right to the heart of the fire.

  Ben already had his feet moving. “I’ll go down there. Let them know what’s up.”

  “You think they’re going to listen to you?” Ben didn’t have an evac order. No way he could force the homeowners to pick up and go.

  “They will,” Ben said grimly. “Folks around here still remember the last fire to hop that ridgeline. There’s a reason these homes don’t have more than twenty years on them. I’ll just point out the similarities and let them know there’s plenty of room for them down in Strong.”

  Jack nodded as Ben scrambled down the slope. If Ben said he could do it, he’d give the older man the benefit of the doubt.

  There was one other house, higher up and perched smack on the edge of the canyon. Probably had one hell of a view. Searching his memory, he came up with a name. That mansion-in-training was the Haverley place. Old man Haverley had made piles of money building some Silicon Valley company from the ground up. He’d retired early, then come on up here to sit and stare at the mountains. Jack had gone to school with the grandson.

  Wildfire didn’t respect your bank account any. “Haverley at home?”

  Rio shot him a surprised look. “Old man Haverley? He dropped dead maybe three years back. We all thought he’d go on forever, but we were wrong. His grandson has the place now. Edward.”

  Eddie Haverley had inherited himself a real nice place. He’d also clearly taken Fire Prevention 101, because he’d done all the right things to get that mansion ready for the dry season. The front yard was a nice piece of xeriscaping—all white gravel and drought-resistant plants. Brush was cleared and the trees cut right back around the edge of the property. The slope was clear, and there were well-positioned stone walls and a swimming pool, all ready to cut off a fire’s advance. Hell, even the trendy fire pit was ringed with slate. Downright professional. His eyes narrowed. That preparation could just be money talking, as Eddie Haverley clearly could afford to hire the best.

  Or not.

  Was fire season a little more personal for Eddie? Down below, people started hurrying out of the other house. A dog barked, and the minivan roared to life.

  “You think they’ll come back to a house?”

  Fire was always impossible to predict. The wind could shift or the fire find a hidden source of fuel. All it took was one good dry patch.

  “Let’s get a plane up,” he decided. “I want a load of retardant dumped here. Here. And here.” He jabbed a thumb into the map.

  “Not going to be cheap,” Rio warned. “You want to burn the cash for two homes? That one”—he jerked a thumb at Haverley’s place—“is sitting pretty sweet. He’ll probably ride out these flames with just a little scorching.”

  Jack followed the pointing finger, looking down at the home tucked at the bottom of the slope. He should let them take their chances. It was just one house. The fire line should give the structure a fighting chance, and Ben had cleared out the owners. Even as he watched, Ben began trudging back on up th
e slope as the minivan disappeared down the road.

  Those folks would be heartbroken if they couldn’t come back home.

  Hell. He’d be lucky to make it home tonight himself.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lily should have been planning the next steps for her farm. She’d thought about hosting a pick-your-own lavender weekend, despite the crazy-making potential of inviting hundreds of people to tramp around her fields. Opening her farm up to the public wasn’t something she was ready to do yet. Even though she knew it wasn’t fair to blame Jack Donovan for the fire tearing up the nearby ridge, she wasn’t feeling fair. No, what she was feeling was downright mean.

  When she looked north, she saw the smoke, a thick gray-black column rising up into the sky. That fire was damned big, and Jack was out there.

  Happy to be out there.

  Well, she was happy to be where she was, too. Drying lavender took about a week, and today she’d taken the first step, hanging the fresh-cut stems with paper clips to wire lines strung up inside the drying shed, where the warm darkness cocooned the flowers and kept the color from fading. Another year, and she’d add roses and hydrangeas, see if she couldn’t expand her line some. Only the dark blues and purples dried well. She’d planted Hidcote and Dutch lavenders, Royal Velvet and Provence. Scent clung fiercely to those stalks and to every inch of her skin. A dozen showers weren’t enough to wash away the thick, rich aroma, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way.

  She’d just dropped the latest load of lavender at her shipper, and those flowers would be in Seattle florist shops by morning. Now her arms felt empty without their usual load. She needed something to keep her mind off the man battling on the ridge. He could be getting himself killed up there.

  While she was strolling down Strong’s main street, pretending there was nothing wrong. No one missing.