Cold Fire (27 page)

She had thought she hated journalism. She didn’t. What she hated was her failure at it; and she had failed because journalism had never been the right thing for her.

To understand herself and break the bonds of habit, all she had needed was to meet a man who could work miracles, and survive a devastating airline tragedy.

“Such a
flexible
woman, Thorne,” she said aloud, mocking herself. “So insightful.”

Why, good heavens, if meeting Jim Ironheart and walking away from a plane crash hadn’t made her see the light, then surely she’d have figured it out just as soon as Jiminy Cricket rang her doorbell and sang a cleverly rhymed lesson-teaching song about the differences between wise and stupid choices in life.

She laughed. She pulled a blanket off the bed, wound it around her nude body, sat in one of the two armchairs, drew her legs up under her, and laughed as she had not laughed since she had been a giddy teenager.

No, that was where the problem began: she had never been giddy. She had been a serious-minded teenager, already hooked on current events, worried about World War III because they told her she was likely to die in a nuclear holocaust before she graduated from high school; worried about overpopulation because they told her that famine would claim one and a half billion lives by 1990, cutting the world population in half, decimating even the United States; worried because man-made pollution was causing the planet to cool down drastically, insuring another ice age that would destroy civilization
within her own lifetime!!!!,
which was front-page news in the late seventies, before the Greenhouse Effect and worries about planetary warming. She had spent her adolescence and early adulthood worrying too much and enjoying too little. Without joy, she had lost perspective and had allowed every news sensation—some based on genuine problems, some entirely fraudulent—to consume her.

Now she laughed like a kid. Until they hit puberty and a tide of hormones washed them into a new existence, kids knew that life was scary, yeah, dark and strange, but they also knew that it was silly, that it was meant to be fun, that it was an adventurous journey down a long road of time to an unknown destination in a far and wondrous place.

Holly Thorne, who suddenly liked her name, knew where she was going and why.

She knew what she hoped to get from Jim Ironheart—and it was not a good story, journalistic accolades, a Pulitzer. What she wanted from him was better than that, more rewarding and enduring, and she was eager to confront him with her request.

The funny thing was, if he agreed and gave her what she wanted, she might be buying into more than excitement, joy, and a meaningful existence. She knew there was danger in it, as well. If she got what she asked from him, she might be dead a year from now, a month from now—or next week. But for the moment, at least, she focused on the prospect of joy and was not deterred by the possibility of early death and endless darkness.

Holly changed planes in Denver, gained two time zones traveling west, and arrived at Los Angeles International at eleven o’clock Monday morning. Unencumbered by luggage, she retrieved her rental car from the parking garage, drove south along the coast to Laguna Niguel, and reached Jim Ironheart’s house by twelve-thirty.

She parked in front of his garage, followed the tile-trimmed walkway directly to his front door, and rang the bell. He did not answer. She rang it again. He still did not answer. She rang it repeatedly, until a reddish impression of the button marked the pad of her right thumb.

Stepping back, she studied the first- and second-floor windows. Plantation shutters were closed over all of them. She could see the wide slats through the glass.

“I know you’re in there,” she said quietly.

She returned to her car, put the windows down, and sat behind the steering wheel, waiting for him to come out. Sooner or later he would need food, or laundry detergent, or medical attention, or toilet paper,
something,
and then she would have him.

Unfortunately, the weather was not conducive to a long stakeout. The past few days had been warm but mild. Now the August heat had returned like a bad dragon in a storybook: scorching the land with its fiery breath. The palm trees drooped and the flowers began to wilt in the blistering sun. Behind all of the elaborate watering systems that maintained the lush landscaping, the dispossessed desert waited to reassert itself.

Baking as swiftly and evenly as a muffin in a convection oven, Holly finally put up the windows, started the car, and switched on the air conditioner. The cold draft was heavenly, but before long the car began to overheat; the needle rose swiftly toward the red section of the arc on the temperature gauge.

At one-fifteen, just three-quarters of an hour after she had arrived, Holly threw the car in reverse, backed out of the driveway, and returned to the Laguna Hills Motor Inn. She changed into tan shorts and a canary-yellow calypso blouse that left her belly bare. She put on her new running shoes, but without socks this time. At a nearby Sav-On drugstore, she bought a vinyl-strap folding lounge chair, beach towel, tube of tanning cream, picnic cooler, bag of ice, six-pack of diet soda, and a Travis McGee paperback by John D. MacDonald. She already had sunglasses.

She was back at Ironheart’s house on Bougainvillea Way before two-thirty. She tried the doorbell again. He refused to answer.

Somehow she knew he was in there. Maybe she was a little psychic.

She carried the ice chest, folding lounger, and other, items around the side of the house to the lawn in back. She set up the chair on the grass, just beyond the redwood-covered patio. In a few minutes, she was comfy.

In the MacDonald novel, Travis McGee was sweltering down there in Fort Lauderdale, where they were having a heatwave so intense it even took the bounce out of the beach bunnies. Holly had read the book before; she chose to reread it now because she had remembered that the plot unfolded against a background of tropical heat and humidity. Steamy Florida, rendered in MacDonald’s vivid prose, made the dry air of Laguna Niguel seem less torrid by comparison, even though it had to be well over ninety degrees.

After about half an hour, she glanced at the house and saw Jim Ironheart standing at the big kitchen window. He was watching her.

She waved.

He did not wave back at her.

He walked away from the window but did not come outside.

Opening a diet soda, returning to the novel, she relished the feel of the sun on her bare legs. She was not worried about a burn. She already had a little tan. Besides, though blond and fair-skinned, she had a tanning gene that insured against a burn as long as she didn’t indulge in marathon sunbathing.

After a while, when she got up to readjust the lounger so she could lie on her stomach, she saw Jim Ironheart standing on the patio, just outside the sliding glass door of his family room. He was in rumpled slacks and a wrinkled T-shirt, unshaven. His hair was lank and oily. He didn’t look well.

He was about fifteen feet away, so his voice carried easily to her: “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Bronzing up a little.”

“Please leave, Miss Thorne.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“We have nothing to talk about.”

“Hah!”

He went back inside and slid the door shut. She heard the latch click.

After lying on her stomach for almost an hour, dozing instead of reading, she decided she’d had enough sun. Besides, at three-thirty in the afternoon, the best tanning rays were past.

She moved the lounger, cooler, and the rest of her paraphernalia onto the shaded patio. She opened a second diet soda and picked up the MacDonald novel again.

At four o’clock she heard the family-room door sliding open again. His footsteps approached and stopped behind her. He stood there for a while, evidently looking down at her. Neither of them spoke, and she pretended to keep reading.

His continued silence was eerie. She began to think about his dark side—the eight shotgun rounds he had pumped into Norman Rink in Atlanta, for one thing—and she grew increasingly nervous until she decided that he was
trying
to spook her.

When Holly picked up her can of soda from the top of the cooler, took a sip, sighed with pleasure at the taste, and put the can down again all without letting her hand tremble even once, Ironheart at last came around the lounge chair and stood where she could see him. He was still slovenly and unshaven. Dark circles ringed his eyes. He had an unhealthy pallor.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“That’ll take a while to explain.”

“I don’t have a while.”

“How long do you have?”

“One minute,” he said.

She hesitated, then shook her head. “Can’t do it in a minute. I’ll just wait here till you’ve got more time.”

He stared at her intimidatingly.

She found her place in the novel.

He said, “I could call the police, have you put off my property.”

“Why don’t you do that?” she said.

He stood there a few seconds longer, impatient and uncertain, then reentered the house. Slid the door shut. Locked it.

“Don’t take forever,” Holly muttered. “In about another hour, I’m gonna have to use your bathroom.”

Around her, two hummingbirds drew nectar from the flowers, the shadows lengthened, and exploding bubbles made hollow ticking sounds inside her open can of soda.

Down in Florida, there were also hummingbirds and cool shadows, icy bottles of Dos Equis instead of diet cola, and Travis McGee was getting into deeper trouble by the paragraph.

Her stomach began to grumble. She had eaten breakfast at the airport in Dubuque, surprised that her appetite had not been suppressed forever by the macabre images burned into her mind at the crash scene. She had missed lunch, thanks to the stakeout; now she was famished. Life goes on.

Fifteen minutes ahead of Holly’s bathroom deadline, Ironheart returned. He had showered and shaved. He was dressed in a blue boatneck shirt, white cotton slacks, and white canvas Top-Siders.

She was flattered by his desire to make a better appearance.

“Okay,” he said, “what do you want?”

“I need to use your facilities first.”

A long-suffering look lengthened his face. “Okay, okay, but then we talk, get it over with, and you go.”

She followed him into the family room, which was adjacent to an open breakfast area, which was adjacent to an open kitchen. The mismatched furniture appeared to have been purchased on the cheap at a warehouse clearance sale immediately after he had graduated from college and taken his first teaching job. It was clean but well worn. Hundreds of paperback books filled free-standing cases. But there was no artwork of any kind on the walls, and no decor pieces such as vases or bowls or sculptures or potted plants lent warmth to the room.

He showed her the powder room off the main entrance foyer. No wallpaper, white paint. No designer soaps shaped like rosebuds, just a bar of Ivory. No colorful or embroidered handtowels, just a roll of Bounty standing on the counter.

As she closed the door, she looked back at him and said, “Maybe we could talk over an early supper. I’m starved.”

When she finished in the bathroom, she peeked in his living room. It was decorated—to use the word as loosely as the language police would allow—in a style best described as Early Garage Sale, though it was even more Spartan than the family room. His house was surprisingly modest for a man who had won six million in the state lottery, but his furniture made the house seem Rockefellerian by comparison.

She went out to the kitchen and found him waiting at the round breakfast table.

“I thought you’d be cooking something,” she said, pulling out a chair and sitting opposite him.

He was not amused. “What do you want?”

“Let me start by telling you what I don’t want,” she said. “I don’t want to write about you, I’ve given up reporting, I’ve had it with journalism. Now, you believe that or not, but it’s true. The good work you’re doing can only be hampered if you’re being hounded by media types, and lives will be lost that you might otherwise save. I see that now.”

“Good.” “And I don’t want to blackmail you. Anyway, judging by the unconscionably lavish style in which you live, I doubt you’ve got more than eighteen bucks left.”

He did not smile. He just stared at her with those gas flame-blue eyes.

She said, “I don’t want to inhibit your work or compromise it in any way. I don’t want to venerate you as the Second Coming, marry you, bear your children, or extract from you the meaning of life. Anyway, only Elvis Presley knows the meaning of life, and he’s in a state of suspended animation in an alien vault in a cave on Mars.”

His face remained as immobile as stone. He was tough.

“What I want,” Holly said, “is to satisfy my curiosity, learn how you do what you do, and why you do it.” She hesitated. She took a deep breath. Here came the big one: “And I want to be part of it all.”

“What do you mean?”

She spoke fast, running sentences together, afraid he would interrupt her before she got it all out, and never give her another chance to explain herself. “I want to work with you, help you, contribute to your mission, or whatever you call it, however you think of it, I want to save people, at least help
you
save them.”