Fire and ice (8 page)

"Please," she said, and he had no defense against that. His legs offered no guarantee they were going to hold him up, but he managed, staggering a little. He got his jeans back on all right, though it took his shaking hands two tries to get his fly fastened.

She put herself to rights more swiftly, and was in the cab of the truck once more, reaching to close the door. He smacked his palm against the edge just in time. "Don't do this, Wy. Don't walk away from this. Not again. I don't think I can live through it a second time."

In that moment he would have gone down on his knees, and something in his voice told her so. Her hand slid from the keys. Her head drooped forward, to rest against the steering wheel. Her hair, that glorious mane, fell forward to hide her face, and her voice was so muffled he had to strain to hear. "I can't do this, Liam."

"Yes you can," he said, terrified now. "You have to. I need you. I need you, Wy." His voice deepened. "And you need me, too. Hell," he said, with a gesture that included the bench seat, "you may even need me more."

She was silent for a moment, before raising her head and brushing the hair back from her face so she could look at him. In the single floodlight of the terminal building, her face looked bloodless. "It's been almost three years--"

"It's been nothing. It was yesterday." He took a deep breath, fighting for control, fighting for his life now. "It was this morning, goddammit."

She was silent again. He waited. At last she said, her voice low, "Liam, my life has changed. I have--"

"What? What have you got that you can't fit me in around, us in around? What?"

She met his anger with her own, and it was kind of a relief to be fighting again. "I didn't lay down and die when I left, Liam. I moved on, and along the way, I acquired--" She hesitated, and then said firmly, "I acquired some new obligations."

"Obligations? What the hell does that mean?" he demanded, and then added cruelly, "If what just happened in the cab of this truck means anything, it sure as hell doesn't mean another man." She shook her head, and he grabbed her arm. "You were with me every step of the way. You haven't been with anyone else either, have you?" She didn't answer, and he gave her a rough shake. "Have you!"

She slid out of the cab and gave him enough of a shove so that he fell back a step. "No I haven't! So what! It doesn't mean I'm ready to fall at your feet!"

"I didn't ask you to fall at my feet! Share my home, yes! Sleep in my bed, yes! Live with me for the rest of my life, yes!"

She drew herself up to her full height and looked him straight in the eye. "How's Jennifer?"

The breath caught in his throat. When he could speak he said, with difficulty, "Low blow, Wy."

She knew it was, too. Conflicting emotions chased themselves across her face, and it was an obvious struggle before she could settle on sympathy. "I'm so sorry, Liam. When I heard, I almost--but there was nothing I could say that would help then, either." She swallowed hard. "Your boy, Charlie. I know how much you loved him."

"Yes." Liam leaned up against the truck and closed his eyes. Rain fell on his face, cool, clean, oddly comforting. Charlie had loved the rain, laughing out loud as his little wobbly baby legs, unsteady but determined, would stamp through puddles, his tiny baby's grasp hanging on to Liam's for support. Those first few horrible weeks after Charlie's death, Liam had run from the pain of such memories. Now, he welcomed them. For eighteen precious months, Charlie had been a part of him, and beyond that, a part of his life's blood, his promise of immortality.

His hostage to fortune.

No, he wouldn't trade his memories for anything in the world. Not even for the love of the woman standing next to him now.

She swiped at her face with an impatient hand, mixing rain and more tears. "Do you ever think about fate, Liam?"

"Fate?" he said.

"Yes, fate. I give you back to your son, and then fate takes him away. It's almost ..."

"What?"

"It's almost like punishment," she whispered.

He turned his head to look at her. "No, Wy. Been there, done that. We didn't kill Charlie. A guy name of Rick Dyson got drunk, climbed in his car, and ran a stop sign at seventy miles an hour. He killed them. We didn't."

Another pause. "How is she, Liam?"

It was his turn for the fight to drain out of him, and he slumped back against the truck. "The same. Day in, day out. Nothing ever changes. She just lies there."

"Did you--how often did--"

"All the time. I drove down to Anchorage every Friday to spend the weekend with her. I read to her. She never was much for reading, but I kept thinking, she's going to hear my voice, she's going to hear me calling to her, she's going to wake up. It's happened before, to other people, why not Jenny?" All the old familiar frustration and guilt and rage welled up inside him and he balled his hand up into a fist and struck the side of the truck, once, twice, three times, hard enough to hurt his hand. "No. Nothing has changed."

"How could you let them--" She stopped, and bit her lip.

"How could I let them transfer me here? I didn't have much choice, Wy. Barton was pretty clear; it was take the posting in Newenham or take a hike." He wiped a hand across his face and it came away wet, mostly from the rain. "I didn't have much left but the job, Wy. I took the transfer. I'll get back as often as I can."

Her voice was a ghost of sound. "I'm sorry, Liam. I'm so sorry."

"So am I."

"Do you ever sometimes wonder ..."

He looked at her. "If she won't come back because she knew about us?"

It had been like that from the start, the instantaneous communication, the link between them, one beginning a sentence only to have the other finish it. "Yes," she whispered.

"She didn't know," he said strongly, willing himself to believe it. "She didn't know; she never knew. We were always careful. No one knew."

A stifled sob made him turn. A tear slid down her cheek. "It's the worst thing I've ever done in my life," she whispered. "Sleeping with you when I knew you were married."

He couldn't answer, because he knew she was right. And besides, it was the worst thing he'd ever done, too. He thought of Jenny, laughing, loving Jenny with the light brown hair. She had deserved better.

"I have to go," she said. "It's so late, there's --I have to--" She couldn't or wouldn't finish the thought.

Again, he caught the pickup's door before it could close. "You have to come down tomorrow, and make out a statement."

She stared at him, uncomprehending. "What?"

"You were Bob DeCreft's pilot, Wy. He was your spotter. You would have all the opportunity in the world to sabotage your own plane. Shit, you're probably my prime suspect."

Her voice distant, she said, "You think I killed him, then?"

He wanted to slap the stony expression right off her face. "No," he said through his teeth, "no, I don't think you killed him. I don't think you've got it in you to kill anyone. But I still have to find out who did, and you're an eyewitness to some of his last moments alive."

Her face relaxed. "All right. I'll come down in the morning."

"You don't have to fly?" he said, in belated concern.

"I don't know. I won't know until I check the schedule, see what Fish and Game has decided." She reached again for the ignition.

"We're not done, Wy," he warned her.

She stared out the windshield, delicate profile silhouetted against the merciless rays of the halogen light. "I know," she said finally.

It was enough for now. He closed her door. She turned the keys, the engine rolled over, and she drove away.

Liam, light-headed with a mixture of emotions he could neither separate nor quantify, was in the Blazer with his hand on the shift when he realized he had no place to sleep. Oh well, it wouldn't be the first time he'd slept in an office chair. Of course, first he'd have to find the post again before the sun came up.

Sighing, he started the Blazer and put it into gear. As he started along the tarmac, tires hissing through the returning rain, a figure detached itself from the shadow of the terminal and moved down the runway toward the small plane tiedowns. Liam let up on the gas, watching. It was a hulking figure, ogre-like in shape and size, but that could have been the magnifying effect of the dim light. It was moving stealthily, ducking from shadow to shadow, working its way steadily forward.

Liam gave the Blazer enough gas to keep moving, drove around the terminal out of sight and sound of the figure, parked, and hotfooted it to the other side. The figure had vanished into the gloom. Liam walked forward, threading his way between parked planes, ears pricked, eyes roving from side to side. The planes all looked alike to him so he tried not to look at them, tried instead to register what was out of place in his peripheral vision.

He heard a sound like the ripping of fabric. He stopped, the better to hear it. It stopped, too. He waited. There it was again, and he walked toward it. It stopped again, and he stopped again. Footsteps then; careful, quiet footsteps, soles slapping gently against pavement, then crunching against gravel, then pavement again, then a repeat of the ripping sound.

It was coming from very near to where Wy's Cub was parked. Liam moved forward to crouch behind a plane on wheel-floats. He peered around the rudder.

He recognized the little red and white plane as 78 Zulu, but now it looked like the wing closest to him had been through a Cuisinart. Their fabric coverings had been shredded, so that the Dacron hung in thin, ragged strips, exposing the steel tubes beneath. On the far side, a large figure worked at the second wing with what looked like a crowbar, shredding it as well.

As an act of malicious, wanton waste it was enough to take Liam's breath away. It brought him involuntarily to his feet, his head smartly smacking into his hiding place's fuselage with a clang that reverberated down his spine and for a hundred feet in every direction.

All sounds from the Cub stopped.

His scalp had caught some sharp edge. Warm fluid seeped down the side of his face and into his left eye. "Ouch!" He clapped one hand to his head and the other to his holster. "Dammit! Hey! State trooper! Knock that shit off right now!"

The big figure, caught with his crowbar raised over his head, froze in place. And I picked tonight to forget the goddamn flashlight, Liam thought as he stepped unsteadily into the open. "Just hold it right there, mister. Just--shit! Halt, goddammit!"

The figure, moving with alarming speed for something of its bulk, had turned to run. Liam ran after him. "State trooper, I say again; stop or I will shoot!" Which would have been a neat trick with his gun still holstered. Liam unsnapped the cover as he ran, the rain in his face, running into wingtips, tripping over tie-down lines and tie-downs and just generally blundering around like a drunken elephant.

He thudded full tilt around the tail of a plane so yellow it nearly glowed in the dark and caught the merest glimpse of a tall dark monster looming up on his left before the sky fell on him with a thump that caved in the left side of his face. He had a brief flash of jumbled images that included the monster stooping over him, an upraised arm, the claw end of a crowbar; and then things got really weird--the beat of wings, feathered this time, sharp talons and a razor beak, a challenging, inhuman scream answered by a very human shriek of pain, as the menacing hulk looming over Liam was enveloped in darkness.

The rain woke him, a few minutes or a few hours later, beating against his face, soaking his clothes, and forming puddles around his body. He opened his eyes, and found himself staring up at the underside of the yellow plane's right wing. A wind had come up and was driving the rain sideways, causing it to tippety-tap against the aluminum side of the plane.

So far as he could tell, he was alone in the airplane parking lot.

Or not. There was a kind of scraping sound overhead that he first mistook for more rain, but a movement caught his eye and he looked up again, squinting against the rain, to see the head of a raven peering over the side of the wing, its black head gleaming wetly. It looked irritated. It sounded it, too, when it croaked at Liam.

Liam blinked back. The raven gave a sour-sounding caw and launched itself into the air. A second later, it had vanished, black shape into rainy night.

Head wounds were tricky things, he knew. They bled worse than any other injury, and anyone suffering a head injury was entitled to a hallucination or two.

It was either that or he'd wound up in the middle of a science fiction remake of The Maltese Falcon.

The thought surprised him into a laugh, which made his head ache but also propelled him to his feet. He had to lean up against the plane until the wave of dizziness had passed.

He should go the hospital, he thought, have himself checked out.

He should report this incident to the Newenham police.

He should call Wy, tell her about her plane.

Instead he staggered back to the Blazer, fell in, and drove himself to his office, by a miracle finding it on the first try. It looked like the end of the rainbow that night, the one dry place in Newenham he had a key to.

Bad news keeps.