Cold Fire (12 page)

She was beginning to worry that she would come up empty-handed by the bottom of the stack, but the sixth article, from the
Houston Chronicle,
opened her eyes wider than the vile coffee had. WOMAN SAVED FROM VENGEFUL HUSBAND. On July 14, after winning both financial and child-custody issues in a bitter divorce suit, Amanda Cutter had nearly been shot by her enraged husband, Cosmo, outside her home in the wealthy River Oaks district of the city. After Cosmo missed her with the first two shots, she had been saved by a man who “appeared out of nowhere,” wrestled her maddened spouse to the ground, and disarmed him. Her savior had identified himself only as “Jim,” and had walked off into the humid Houston afternoon before the police arrived. The thirty-year-old divorcée had clearly been smitten, for she described him as “handsome, sort of muscular, like a superhero right out of a movie, with the dreamiest blue eyes.”

Holly could still picture Jim Ironheart’s intensely blue eyes. She was not the kind of woman who would refer to them as “dreamy,” although they were certainly the clearest and most arresting eyes she’d ever ... Oh, hell, yes, they were dreamy. She was reluctant to admit to the adolescent reaction that he had inspired in her, but she was not any better at deceiving herself than she was at deceiving other people. She recalled an initial eerie impression of inhuman coldness, upon first meeting his gaze, but that passed and never returned from the moment he smiled.

The seventh article was about another modest Jim who had not hung around to accept thanks and praise—or media attention—after rescuing Carmen Diaz, thirty, from a burning apartment house in Miami on the fifth of July. He had blue eyes.

Poring through the remaining twenty-two articles, Holly found two more about Ironheart, though only his first name was mentioned. On June 21, Thaddeus Johnson, twelve, had almost been pitched off the roof of an eight-story Harlem tenement by four members of a neighborhood youth gang who had not responded well to his disdainful rejection of an invitation to join their drug-peddling fraternity. He was rescued by a blue-eyed man who incapacitated the four thugs with a dazzling series of Tae Kwon Do kicks, chops, thrusts, and throws. “He was like Batman without the funny clothes,” Thaddeus had told the
Daily News
reporter. Two weeks prior to that, on June 7, another blue-eyed Jim “just seemed to materialize” on the property of Louis Andretti, twenty-eight, of Corona, California, in time to warn the homeowner not to enter a crawlspace under his house to repair a plumbing leak. “He told me a family of rattlers had settled in there,” Andretti told the reporter. Later, when agents from the county’s Vector Control inspected the crawlspace from the perimeter, with the aid of a halogen lamp, they saw not just a nest but “something out of a nightmare,” and eventually extracted forty-one snakes from beneath the structure. “What I don’t understand,” Andretti said, “is how that guy knew the rattlers were there, when I
live
in the house and never had a clue.”

Now Holly had four linked incidents to add to the rescue of Nicky O’Conner in Boston and Billy Jenkins in Portland, all since the first of June. She typed in new instructions to Newsweb, asking for the same search to be made for the months of March, April, and May.

She needed more coffee, and when she got up to go to the vending room, she saw that George Fintel had evidently awakened and staggered home. She hadn’t heard him leave. Tommy was gone, as well. She was alone.

She got another cup of coffee, and it didn’t taste as bad as it had before. The brew hadn’t improved; her sense of taste had just been temporarily damaged by the first two cups.

Eventually Newsweb located eleven stories in March through May that fit her parameters. After examining the printouts, Holly found only one of them of interest.

On May 15, in Atlanta, Georgia, a blue-eyed Jim had entered a convenience store during an armed robbery. He shot and killed the perpetrator, Norman Rink, who had been about to kill two customers—Sam Newsome, twenty-five, and his five-year-old daughter Emily. Flying high on a cocaine, Ice, and methamphetamine cocktail—Rink had already killed the clerk and two other customers merely for the fun of it. After wasting Rink and assuring himself that the Newsomes were unhurt, Jim had slipped away before the police arrived.

The store security camera had provided a blurry photograph of the heroic intruder. It was only the second photo Holly had found in all the articles. The image was poor. But she immediately recognized Jim Ironheart.

Some details of the incident unnerved her. If Ironheart had an amazing ability—psychic power, whatever—to foresee fatal moments in the lives of strangers and arrive in time to thwart fate, why hadn’t he gotten to that convenience store a few minutes sooner, early enough to prevent the deaths of the clerk and other customers? Why had he saved the Newsomes and let the rest die?

She was further chilled by the description of his attack on Rink. He had pumped four rounds from a 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun into the madman. Then, although Rink was indisputably dead, Jim reloaded and fired another four rounds. “He was in such a rage,” Sam Newsome said, “his face red, and he was sweating, you could see the arteries pounding in his temples, across his forehead. He was crying a little, too, but the tears ... they didn’t make him seem any less angry.” When done, Jim had expressed regret for cutting Rink down so violently in front of little Emily. He’d explained that men like Rink, who killed innocent people, brought out “a little madness of my own.” Newsome told the reporter, “He saved our lives, yeah, but I gotta say the guy was
scary,
almost as scary as Rink.”

Realizing that Ironheart might not have revealed even his first name on some occasions, Holly instructed Newsweb to search the past six months for stories in which “rescue” and “saved the life” were within ten words of “blue.” She had noticed that some witnesses were vague about his physical description, but that most remembered his singularly blue eyes.

She went to the john, got more coffee, then stood by the printer. As each find was transferred to hard copy, she snatched it up, scanned it, tossed it in the wastecan if it was of no interest or read it with excitement if it was about another nick-of-time rescue. Newsweb turned up four more cases that indisputably belonged in the Ironheart file, even though neither his first nor last name was used.

At her desk again, she instructed Newsweb to search the past six months for the name “Ironheart” in the national media.

While she waited for a response, she put the pertinent printouts in order, then made a chronological list of the people whose lives Jim Ironheart had saved, incorporating the four new cases. She included their names, ages, the location of each incident, and the type of death from which each person had been spared.

She studied that compilation, noting some patterns with interest. But she put it aside when Newsweb completed its latest task.

As she rose from her chair to go to the laser printer, she froze, surprised to discover she was no longer alone in the newsroom. Three reporters and an editor were at their desks, all guys with reputations as early birds, including Hank Hawkins, editor of the business pages, who liked to be at work when the financial markets opened on the East Coast. She hadn’t been aware of them coming in. Two of them were sharing a joke, laughing loudly, and Hawkins was talking on the phone, but Holly hadn’t heard them until after she’d seen them. She looked at the clock: 6:10. Opalescent early-morning light played at the windows, though she had not realized that the tide of night had been receding. She glanced down at her desk and saw two more paper coffee cups than she remembered getting from the vending machine.

She realized that she was no longer wallowing in despair. She felt better than she had felt in days. Weeks. Years. She was a reporter again, for real.

She went to the laser printer, emptied the receiving tray, and returned with the pages to her desk. Ironhearts evidently were not newsmakers. There were only five stories involving people with that surname in the past six months.

Kevin Ironheart—Buffalo, New York. State senator. Announced his intention to run for governor.

Anna Denise Ironheart—Boca Raton, Florida. Found a live alligator in her family room.

Lori Ironheart—Los Angeles, California. Songwriter. Nominated for the Academy Award for best song of the year.

Valerie Ironheart—Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Gave birth to healthy quadruplets.

The last of the five was James Ironheart.

She looked at the heading. The story came from the Orange County
Register,
April 10, and was one of scores of pieces on the same story that had been published state-wide. Because of her instructions, the computer had printed out only this single instance, sparing her sheafs of similar articles on the same event.

She checked the dateline. Laguna Niguel. California.
Southern
California. The Southland.

The piece was not accompanied by a photograph, but the reporter’s description of the man included a reference to blue eyes and thick brown hair. She was sure he was
her
James Ironheart.

She was not surprised to have found him. She had known that with determined effort she would locate him sooner or later. What surprised her was the subject of the piece in which his full name appeared at last. She expected it to be yet one more story about snatching someone out of death’s grasp, and she was not prepared for the headline: LAGUNA NIGUEL MAN WINS SIX MILLION LOTTO JACKPOT.

Having followed the rescue of Nicholas O’Conner with his first untroubled night of sleep in the last four, Jim departed Boston on Friday afternoon, August 24. Gaining three hours on the cross-country trip, he arrived at John Wayne Airport by 3:10 P.M. and was home half an hour later.

He went straight into his den and lifted the flap of carpet that revealed the safe built into the floor of the closet. He dialed the combination, opened the lid, and removed five thousand dollars, ten percent of the cash he kept there.

At his desk, he packed the hundred-dollar bills into a padded Jiffy envelope and stapled it shut. He typed a label to Father Leo Geary at Our Lady of the Desert, and affixed sufficient postage. He would mail it first thing in the morning.

He went into the family room and switched on the TV. He tried several movies on cable, but none held his interest. He watched the news for a while, but his mind wandered. After he heated a microwave pizza and popped open a beer, he settled down with a good book—which bored him. He paged through a stack of unread magazines, but none of the articles was intriguing.

Near twilight he went outside with another beer and sat on the patio. The palm fronds rustled in a light breeze. A sweet fragrance rose from the star jasmine along the property wall. Red, purple, and pink impatiens shone with almost Day-Glo radiance in the dwindling light; and as the sun finished setting, they faded as if they were hundreds of small lightbulbs on a rheostat. Night floated down like a great tossed cape of almost weightless black silk.

Although the scene was peaceful, he was restless. Day by day, week by week, since he had saved the lives of Sam Newsome and his daughter Emily on May 15, Jim had found it increasingly difficult to involve himself in the ordinary routines and pleasures of life. He was unable to relax. He kept thinking of all the good he could do, all the lives he could save, the destinies he could alter, if only the call would come again: “Life line.” Other endeavors seemed frivolous by comparison.

Having been the instrument of a higher power, he now found it difficult to settle for being anything less.

After spending the day collecting what information she could find on James Madison Ironheart, with only a two-hour nap to compensate for the night of sleep she had lost, Holly launched her long-anticipated vacation with a flight to Orange County. On arrival, she drove her rental car south from the airport to the Laguna Hills Motor Inn, where she had reserved a motel room.

Laguna Hills was inland, and not a resort area. But in Laguna Beach, Laguna Niguel, and other coastal towns during the summer, rooms had been booked far in advance. She didn’t intend to swim or sunbathe anyway. Ordinarily, she was as enthusiastic a pursuer of skin cancer as anyone, but this had become a working vacation.

By the time she arrived at the motel, she felt as if her eyes were full of sand. When she carried her suitcase into her room, gravity played a cruel trick, pulling her down with five times the usual force.

The room was simple and clean, with enough air-conditioning to re-create the environment of Alaska, in case it was ever occupied by an Eskimo who got homesick.

From vending machines in the breezeway, she purchased a packet of peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers and a can of diet Dr Pepper, and satisfied her hunger while sitting in bed. She was so tired that she felt numb. All of her senses were dulled by exhaustion, including her sense of taste. She might as well have been eating Styrofoam and washing it down with mule sweat.

As if the contact of head and pillow tripped a switch, she fell instantly asleep.

During the night, she began to dream. It was an odd dream, for it took place in absolute darkness, with no images, just sounds and smells and tactile sensations, perhaps the way people dreamed when they had been blind since birth. She was in a dank cool place that smelled vaguely of lime. At first she was not afraid, just confused, carefully feeling her way along the walls of the chamber. They were constructed from blocks of stone with tight mortar joints. After a little exploration she realized there was actually just one wall, a single continuous sweep of stone, because the room was circular. The only sounds were those she made—and the background hiss and tick of rain drumming on a slate roof overhead.

In the dream, she moved away from the wall, across a solid wood floor, hands held out in front of her. Although she encountered nothing, her curiosity suddenly began to turn to fear. She stopped moving, stood perfectly still, certain that she had heard something sinister.