Into The Inferno Part 28

Eight minutes later Stephanie came out of the house deep in conversation with Mary McCain, their sudden camaraderie odd, considering Stephanie was a doctor and Mary had always taken pride in the fact that she'd never visited a doctor in her life.

A few minutes later, Donovan and Carpenter were locked into a heated discussion in the Suburban, the windows rolled tight.

44. YOU HAVE FIVE SECONDS TO MEMORIZE THIS: 7540182418630846.

Positioning the vanity mirror so that I could watch the argument in the Suburban behind us, I missed all but the gist of what Stephanie was telling me, something about how much faith Mary had that her religion would bring Joel back to his old self. Despite what Mary thought, Joel was gone. He was an idiot and would be for the rest of eternity. Just as I would be.

The speed limit was thirty-five, but we were doing closer to forty-five; behind us, the Suburban quickly matched our speed.

Without warning, the Suburban swerved across the yellow line and nearly struck an oncoming vehicle, overcorrected, and went off the road on the right, a sheet of dust flaring up as it crossed the dirt.

"Achara had an accident!" shrieked Allyson, who'd been watching the Suburban with me.

"Stop," I said.

"What?" Stephanie glanced into her mirror and pulled onto the parking strip, reversing until we occupied the stretch of roadway directly opposite the accident. The Suburban had center-punched a small tree. The vehicle the Suburban had so narrowly missed was backing up, too.

"You girls stay inside," I said.

"Can't we go see?" Britney asked.

"No."

The tree, about five inches in diameter, had creased the front b.u.mper of the Suburban. Other than that, there wasn't much damage. The windshield was intact.

"Oh, G.o.d," said Donovan when I reached the vehicle. He was cupping his nose with both hands, blood leaking through his fingers. The deployed air bag had popped him good. I reached inside past Donovan and turned off the ignition.

As I moved around the vehicle to see how Achara was doing, one of our volunteers, Andre Stiles, climbed out of the pickup across the street, still wearing his uniform from the funeral.

He peered around the vehicle to see where I was headed, spotted Achara, and rolled his eyes. As a group, the guys in the department indulged in a lot of adolescent humor about my homing in on the best-looking woman at any accident scene-some of them even claimed I'd elbowed them aside to get to particularly pretty victims. I almost always let them run with their joke.

Achara was on the pa.s.senger side of the Suburban, hands on her knees, staring at the ground. "You all right?" I asked.

The ringing in my ears obscured her initial reply. When I asked her to repeat, she said, "Got a pencil? I'm going to give you some numbers. Don't tell Scott."

"Why not?"

"Write this down. I want you to have this before I tell you anything else."

"I don't have anything to write with."

"There's no time to get it. Just listen. Seventy-five, forty."

"Seventy-five, forty."

"That's the first part. The rest goes, eighteen, twenty-four, eighteen, sixty-three, oh-eight, forty-six. Write it down first chance you get. Don't let anyone see it until you need it."

"Need it for what?"

"Give it back to me. Do you remember it?"

"Seventy-five, forty. Eighteen, twenty-four, eighteen, sixty-three, oh-eight, forty-six."

"Not too many people could do that."

"Bible school."

She wasn't bleeding, but she would probably end up with a black eye from the impact of her air bag. "You sure you can remember that?"

"I can remember anything."

"Jesus Christ! You could have killed somebody," Donovan whined, rounding the rear of the Suburban holding a four-by-four inch gauze pad to his nose, his tieless shirt dappled with red.

"It was your your fault." fault."

"My fault? You grabbed the wheel. You don't ever ever grab the wheel when somebody else is driving." grab the wheel when somebody else is driving."

"You were in the wrong lane, Scott. You were going to kill somebody."

"The only person was going to kill anybody was you."

"Look who's talking. Mr. Ethical."

"Now don't get into that that."

"I'll get into it if I want to get into it."

"This is my last warning. Don't go there." His voice was surprisingly calm considering what they'd just been through.

They glowered at each other, and before anybody could react, Achara stepped forward and kicked Donovan in the shin. He stepped back and held his leg. The contrast in size between Achara and Donovan made the skirmish almost funny. I doubted she weighed a hundred pounds. At the least, Donovan weighed two-forty.

None of this kept her from kicking him a second time.

I stopped her before she could do anything else. "No, you don't. That's the end of it. It's over."

"Get out of my way. You don't even know what this is about."

"Sure I do. It's about somebody going to jail."

"Don't even make me tell you how many martial arts I know," Donovan warned, over my shoulder.

Donovan's jaw was clenched, his blue eyes glued to Achara. Yet, strangely, he seemed afraid of her. In a physical altercation he could take Achara, together with me and probably Stephanie and Stiles, all of us at once. Because of the calluses on Donovan's knuckles, I had no doubt his martial arts skills were impressive. Yet he hadn't made a move to defend himself.

Stiles picked up his aid kit and marched across the street to his pickup truck. Stephanie took Achara by the arm and led her behind the Suburban. I gestured for Donovan to step over to the Lexus.

"What's going on between you two?"

"You saw her. She caused that accident."

"What were you arguing about in the truck?"

"It's pretty simple. I'm in charge and she's not. She was in school so long, she never learned to take orders."

"You two better straighten this out."

"She'd better straighten herself out." Donovan looked off in the distance toward Snoqualmie Pa.s.s, where billows of black smoke from the state fire academy were rolling across the foothills. We'd all trained up there at Exit 38, everyone in the department, probably every firefighter in the state. "She just needs to stay on track. She gets out of the lab so infrequently, I don't think she knows how to behave in public."

"I have a feeling there's more to it."

"Hey, listen. She She a.s.saulted a.s.saulted me me."

"You drive back with Stephanie. I'll go with Achara."

"Not necessary. We'll be fine."

"You sure?"

"It's a lot of strain, you know?" Donovan's eyes held mine. I figured him for a real Lothario, a heartthrob with the ladies, or maybe the guys, the ones who liked that type, big, thick, muscular, the boyish haircut, the baby-blues behind the wire-rimmed spectacles. "Trying to figure this out and get the work done before we lose you. And now we have that other firefighter, what's her name?"

"Karrie."

"I know this is a lot of pressure on Carpenter. I tried this once before in Tennessee and we weren't successful, and you know what? It really b.u.mmed me out. I think the same thing's happening to Achara. You know what I'm talking about. You do emergency work all the time. We don't get out of the office. This is just a lot of strain."

"Yeah. Well."

Stephanie came around the vehicle and said, "I think she'll be okay now. Why don't we switch cars. You drive with Achara?"

Donovan said, "Forget it. We've got work to do. I'll go with Achara."

For a split second Achara looked at me, and I had the feeling she was afraid I might tell him about the numbers she'd given me. She stepped forward and put her talon of a hand out, and she and Donovan shook.

Moments later Donovan managed to extricate the Suburban from the ditch without the a.s.sistance of a wrecker. There was no telling what was going on between them, perhaps a tinge of professional envy, Donovan finding himself upstaged by the whiz kid from MIT, Achara rankling under the yoke of a boss she knew had lesser skills than she. Or maybe it was seeing Joel. Visiting him had shaken me up, too.

What bothered me even more than Achara's sudden show of temper was the numbers she'd given me. I had no idea what they meant or why she'd offered them. Or why she didn't want Donovan to know about them. I had the feeling they were part of a chemical formula, but what did I know? Sooner or later I'd get her alone and we would have an interesting conversation.

45. DON'T ASK ME WHAT I WAS DOING IN A MOTEL ROOM WITH STEPHANIE RIGGS.

Wracked with guilt for not being with my daughters, I thought about fleeing before she came out of the bathroom. I was stretched out on the bed, hands clasped behind my head, doing deep-breathing exercises, while the smartest, most attractive woman I'd ever met was taking her clothes off behind the bathroom door in a sleazy North Bend motel room.

Outside, it was nearly as dark as my heart.

My girls and Morgan had left a note. Although I'd given her the keys and told Morgan she could use my truck for whatever came up, I was surprised when she took me up on it. They'd gone to a movie I'd seen with them already, one they knew I didn't care to sit through again.

After we decided to go to the store to pick up groceries for supper, Stephanie, instead of turning left off Ballarat and heading toward the QFC, had turned west on North Bend Way, swinging into the parking lot at the Sunset Motel. When the motor stopped, she gave me a long look.

"What?" I said.

Without a word, she went into the office, got a key, and proceeded to a room off the second-floor balcony. Suspecting I was soon to become the recipient of what my army buddies used to call a mercy f.u.c.k, I followed with the aimless hankering of a stray dog trailing a garbage truck. Not that Stephanie was anything like a garbage truck, even if I was exactly like the stray dog.

It might have been my imagination, but I thought she'd been looking at me differently all day. It was even possible we'd had a few tender moments of the kind you get with someone you're beginning to fall in love with.

Despite my reputation as a womanizer, I was always confused when it came to women. I never knew what they were thinking, not unless they told me, and most of the time even then I didn't really really know. know.

As I followed her up the open stairs and along the walkway, she turned back and ambushed me with a kiss. Right out there for the birds to see, and the three Hispanic kids kicking a soccer ball against the wall of a nearby garage door. Ridiculous and dewy-eyed as it sounds, it was the kind of kiss you always want to be your first with a woman, the kind you never get except once in a blue moon, when one of you is just a tad drunk or a lot exhausted and you know the relationship is not going to extend past the exchange of phone numbers.

We weren't drunk, but we both knew the relationship had two days, three at the most, and that must have added spice to it.

Stephanie resumed her ardor as soon as we were in the room, her body small and slender and taut in my hands, her arms twined around my neck, her lithe stomach pressed against mine, as she stood on tiptoes clinging to me. Every part of her body felt hot against my cool skin. She kissed the tips of two fingers and pressed them to my nose, then turned and disappeared into the bathroom.

I closed the door with my foot and reached out and flicked on a dim light. The drapes were already closed. The room had a queen-size bed, a vanity, one chair, and a cheesy painting of a moose in a swamp.

I lay on the bed without a thought in my head except . . .

Mercy f.u.c.k.

I was about to get one.

Joel McCain once told me my crimes against women were a control issue, that I needed to be in control of every little aspect of every relationship. I only half wondered how he knew that about me. He hadn't endeared himself to me by calling my relationships with women crimes. I'd bridled at the thought. h.e.l.l, I was still friends with all of my ex-girlfriends.

But he was right about control. As a child I'd had zero control over my life or even the hours in my day. At Six Points every waking minute was accounted for, booked in advance by the church, by my father, by William P. Markham, and by the Lord Jesus Christ. If you were a kid, there was no time for riding a bike or flying a kite or painting by numbers. n.o.body played cards or read fiction. These activities were all blueprints offered up by the devil to take your mind off G.o.d's work. Since birth I'd had the principles of austerity and compliance pounded into my brain. Okay. So I had control issues.

I suppose I must have been a control freak with Lorie as well, though specific examples escape me. Lord. Maybe I had driven her away! Maybe her parents were right about me. Maybe I'd turned my ex-wife into a lesbian.

Now I was in a motel with Stephanie Riggs.

And she was in control.

And you know what?

I kind of liked it.

My life had been taken out of my hands, my days orchestrated by our panicky quest to track down the origins of the syndrome. If she wanted to come out of the bathroom and make love, fine. If she wanted to come out and tell me to scram, that was fine, too. At this point I refused to let anything bother me.

When I heard the shower running, I knew I was in for a wait.

The funeral had been h.e.l.l. Sitting between Karrie and Ben Arden's wife, Cherie, I could only wonder why I hadn't believed Stan Beebe's story back when there'd been a chance to save him.

The world had mobilized to save my b.u.t.t, but without lifting a finger I'd let Stan drown in a sea of desperation.

The visit to Joel McCain's house and the bizarre interactions between the chemists from Canyon View had been puzzling at best. Achara's quiet conference with me and desperate anger at Donovan had been even more puzzling. Thinking to catch her alone, I'd been on the lookout for her all day, but it hadn't happened.

Back to the station after the accident, I was standing outside in the sunshine dialing various media outlets on a cell phone when the black Suburban pulled into the gravel lot across the street from the firehouse, Donovan and Carpenter peering out the open driver's window like an old married couple out for a Sunday afternoon drive, the issues between them seemingly resolved.

Side by side, they walked across the street just as Stephanie came out of the station. After eavesdropping on my phone conversation for a moment, Donovan said, "You're not calling a television station, are you?"