Cold Fire (28 page)

“There’s nothing you could do.”

“There must be something,” she insisted.

“You’d only be in the way.”

“Listen, I’m intelligent—”

“So what?”

“—well-educated—”

“So am I.”

“—gutsy—”

“But I don’t need you.”

“—competent, efficient—”

“Sorry.”

“Damn it!” she said, more frustrated than angry. “Let me be your secretary, even if you don’t need one. Let me be your girl Friday, your good right hand—at least your
friend.
”

He seemed unmoved by her plea. He stared at her for so long that she became uncomfortable, but she would not look away from him. She sensed that he used his singularly penetrating gaze as an instrument of control and intimidation, but she was not easily manipulated. She was determined not to let him shape this encounter before it had begun.

At last he said, “So you want to be my Lois Lane.”

For a moment she had no idea what he was talking about. Then she remembered: Metropolis, the Daily Planet, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Lois Lane, Clark Kent, Superman.

Holly knew he was trying to irritate her. Making her angry was another way of manipulating her; if she became abrasive, he would have an excuse to turn her away. She was determined to remain calm and reasonably congenial in order to keep the door open between them.

But she could not sit still and control her temper at the same time. She needed to work off some of the energy of anger that was overcharging her batteries. She pushed her chair back, got up, and paced as she responded to him: “No, that’s exactly what I
don’t
want to be. I don’t want to be your chronicler, intrepid girl reporter. I’m sick of journalism.” Succinctly, she told him why. “I don’t want to be your swooning admirer, either, or that well-meaning but bumbling gal who gets herself in trouble all the time and has to rely on you to save her from the evil clutches of Lex Luthor. Something amazing is happening here, and I want to be part of it. It’s also dangerous, yeah, but I still want to be a part of it, because what you’re doing is so ... so meaningful. I want to contribute any way I can, do something more worthwhile with my life than I’ve done so far.”

“Do-gooders are usually so full of themselves, so unconsciously arrogant, they do more damage than good,” he said.

“I’m not a do-gooder. That’s not how I see myself. I’m not at all interested in being praised for my generosity and self-sacrifice. I don’t need to feel morally superior. Just
useful.
”

“The world is full of do-gooders,” he said, refusing to relent. “If I needed an assistant, which I don’t, why would I choose you over all the other do-gooders out there?”

He was an impossible man. She wanted to smack him.

Instead she kept moving back and forth as she said, “Yesterday, when I crawled back into the plane for that little boy, for Norby, I just ... well, I amazed myself. I didn’t know I had anything like that in me. I wasn’t brave, I was scared to death the whole time, but I got him out of there, and I never felt better about myself.”

“You like the way people look at you when they know you’re a hero,” he said flatly.

She shook her head. “No, that’s not it. Aside from one rescue worker, no one knew I’d pulled Norby out of there. I liked the way
I
looked at me after I’d done it, that’s all.”

“So you’re hooked on risk, heroism, you’re a courage junkie.”

Now she wanted to smack him twice. In the face. Crack, crack. Hard enough to set his eyes spinning. It would make her feel so good.

She restrained herself. “Okay, fine, if that’s the way you want to see it, then I’m a courage junkie.”

He did not apologize. He just stared at her.

She said, “But that’s better than inhaling a pound of cocaine up my nose every day, don’t you think?”

He did not respond.

Getting desperate but trying not to show it, Holly said, “When it was all over yesterday, after I handed Norby to that rescue worker, you know what I felt? More than anything else? Not elation at saving him—that too, but not mainly that. And not pride or the thrill of defeating death myself. Mostly I felt rage. It surprised me, even scared me. I was so furious that a little boy almost died, that his uncle had died beside him, that he’d been trapped under those seats with corpses, that all of his innocence had been blown away and that he couldn’t ever again just enjoy life the way a kid ought to be able to. I wanted to punch somebody, wanted to make somebody apologize to him for what he’d been through. But fate isn’t a sleazeball in a cheap suit, you can’t put the arm on fate and make it say it’s sorry, all you can do is stew in your anger.”

Her voice was not rising, but it was increasingly intense. She paced faster, more agitatedly. She was getting passionate instead of angry, which was even more certain to reveal the degree of her desperation. But she couldn’t stop herself:

“Just stew in anger. Unless you’re Jim Ironheart.
You
can do something about it, make a difference in a way nobody ever made a difference before. And now that I know about you, I can’t just get on with my life, can’t just shrug my shoulders and walk away, because you’ve given me a chance to find a strength in myself I didn’t know I had, you’ve given me hope when I didn’t even realize I was longing for it, you’ve shown me a way to satisfy a need that, until yesterday, I didn’t even know I had, a need to fight back, to spit in Death’s face. Damn it, you can’t just close the door now and leave me standing out in the cold!”

He stared at her.

Congratulations, Thorne, she told herself scornfully. You were a monument to composure and restraint, a towering example of self-control.

He just stared at her.

She had met his cool demeanor with heat, had answered his highly effective silences with an ever greater cascade of words. One chance, that was all she’d had, and she’d blown it.

Miserable, suddenly drained of energy instead of overflowing with it, she sat down again. She propped her elbows on the table and put her face in her hands, not sure if she was going to cry or scream. She didn’t do either. She just sighed wearily.

“Want a beer?” he asked.

“God, yes.”

Like a brush of flame, the westering sun slanted through the tilted plantation shutters on the breakfast-nook window, slathering bands of copper-gold fire on the ceiling. Holly slumped in her chair, and Jim leaned forward in his. She stared at him while he stared at his half-finished bottle of Corona.

“Like I told you on the plane, I’m not a psychic,” he insisted. “I can’t foresee things just because I want to. I don’t have visions. It’s a higher power working through me.”

“You want to define that a little?”

He shrugged. “God.”

“God’s talking to you?”

“Not talking. I don’t hear voices, His or anybody else’s. Now and then I’m compelled to be in a certain place at a certain time...”

As best he could, he tried to explain how he had ended up at the McAlbury School in Portland and at the sites of the other miraculous rescues he had performed. He also told her about Father Geary finding him on the floor of the church, by the sanctuary railing, with the stigmata of Christ marking his brow, hands, and side.

It was off-the-wall stuff, a weird brand of mysticism that might have been concocted by an heretical Catholic and peyote-inspired Indian medicine man in association with a no-nonsense, Clint Eastwood-style cop. Holly was fascinated. But she said, “I can’t honestly tell you I see God’s big hand in this.”

“I do,” he said quietly, making it clear that his conviction was solid and in no need of her approval.

Nevertheless she said, “Sometimes you’ve had to be pretty damned violent, like with those guys who kidnapped Susie and her mother in the desert.”

“They got what they deserved,” he said flatly. “There’s too much darkness in some people, corruption that could never be cleaned out in five lifetimes of rehabilitation. Evil is real, it walks the earth. Sometimes the devil works by persuasion. Sometimes he just sets loose these sociopaths who don’t have a gene for empathy or one for compassion.”

“I’m not saying you didn’t have to be violent in some of these situations. Far as I can see, you had no choice. I just meant—it’s hard to see God encouraging his messenger to pick up a shotgun.”

He drank some beer. “You ever read the Bible?”

“Sure.”

“Says in there that God wiped out the evil people in Sodom and Gomorrah with volcanoes, earthquakes, rains of fire. Flooded the whole world once, didn’t He? Made the Red Sea wash over the pharaoh’s soldiers, drowned them all. I don’t think He’s going to be skittish about a little old shotgun.”

“I guess I was thinking about the God of the New Testament. Maybe you heard about Him—understanding, compassionate, merciful.”

He fixed her with those eyes again, which could be so appealing that they made her knees weak or so cold they made her shiver. A moment ago they had been warm; now they were icy. If she’d had any doubt, she knew from his frigid response that he had not yet decided to welcome her into his life. “I’ve met up with some people who’re such walking scum, it’d be an insult to animals to call them animals. If I thought God always dealt mercifully with their kind, I wouldn’t want anything to do with God.”

Holly stood at the kitchen sink, cleaning mushrooms and slicing tomatoes, while Jim separated egg whites from yolks to make a pair of comparatively low-calorie omelettes.

“All the time, people are dying conveniently, right in your own backyard. But often you go clear across the country to save them.”

“Once to France,” he said, confirming her suspicion that he had ventured out of the country on his missions. “Once to Germany, twice to Japan, once to England.”

“Why doesn’t this higher power give you only local work?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you ever wondered what’s so special about the people you save? I mean—why them and not others?”

“Yeah. I’ve wondered about it. I see stories on the news every week about innocent people being murdered or dying in accidents right here in southern California, and I wonder why He didn’t choose to save them instead of some boy in Boston. I just figure the boy in Boston—the devil was conspiring to take him before his time, and God used me to prevent that.”

“So many of them are young.”

“I’ve noticed that.”

“But you don’t know why?”

“Not a clue.”

The kitchen was redolent of cooking eggs, onions, mushrooms, and green peppers. Jim made one big omelette in a single pan, planning to cut it in half when it was done.

While Holly monitored the progress of the whole-wheat bread in the toaster, she said, “Why would God want you to save Susie and her mother out there in the desert—but not the girl’s father?”

“I don’t know.”

“The father wasn’t a bad man, was he?”

“No. Didn’t seem to be.”

“So why not save them all?”

“If He wants me to know, He’ll tell me.”

Jim’s certainty about being in God’s good grace and under His guidance, and his easy acceptance that God wanted some people to die and not others, made Holly uneasy.

On the other hand, how could he react to his extraordinary experience in any other way? No point in arguing with God.

She recalled an old saying, a real chestnut that had become a cliché in the hands of the pop psych crowd: God grant me the courage to change those things I can’t accept, to accept those things I can’t change, and the wisdom to know the difference. Cliché or not, that was an eminently sane attitude.

When the two pieces of bread popped up, she plucked them from the toaster. As she toasted two more, she said, “If God wanted to save Nicholas O’Conner from being fried when that power-company vault went up, why didn’t He just prevent it from exploding in the first place?”

“I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t it seem odd to you that God has to use you, run you clear across the country, throw you at the O’Conner boy an instant before that 17,000-volt line blows up? Why couldn’t He just ... oh, I don’t know ... just spit on the cable or something, fix it up with a little divine saliva before it went blooey? Or instead of sending you all the way to Atlanta to kill Norman Rink in that convenience store, why didn’t God just tweak Norman’s brain a little, give him a timely stroke?”

Jim artfully tilted the pan to turn over the omelette. “Why did He make mice to torment people and cats to kill the mice? Why did He create aphids that kill plants, then ladybugs to eat the aphids? And why didn’t He give us eyes in the back of our head—when He gave us so many reasons to need them there?”

She finished lightly buttering the first two slices of toast. “I see what you’re saying. God works in mysterious ways.”

“Very.”

They ate at the breakfast table. In addition to toast, they had sliced tomatoes and cold bottles of Corona with the omelettes.

The purple cloth of twilight slid across the world outside, and the undraped form of night began to reveal itself.

Holly said, “You aren’t entirely a puppet in these situations.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You have some power to determine the outcome.”

“None.”

“Well, God sent you on Flight Two forty-six to save just the Dubroveks.”

“That’s right.”

“But then you took matters into your own hands and saved more than just Christine and Casey. How many were supposed to die?”

“A hundred and fifty-one.”

“And how many actually died?”

“Forty-seven.”

“Okay, so you saved a hundred and two more lives than He sent you to save.”

“A hundred and three, counting yours—but only because He allowed me to do it, helped me to do it.”

“What—you’re saying God wanted you to save just the Dubroveks, but then He changed His mind?”