Page 17 of Into the Fire

The base carried on around me, offensively normal. Somebody rolled a cargo cart across the concrete apron with one squealing wheel. The smell of lunch cooking drifted over—browned meat and onions. A truck came through the gate, trailing road dust.

Nobody stopped long enough to announce that Dante Vega and Boone Hatcher had finally had the fight they’d owed each other since the fall Dutch died. Everybody just kept working.

Shep materialized at the edge of the rack line. “You need help?”

“With what?”

He surveyed the area. Everything was complete with the pit freshly raked.

“I’m still developing the plan,” he said.

“Think about it over lunch,” I suggested.

He turned and headed toward the kitchen.

Hollis came from the opposite direction. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I’ve never seen him stop anybody that fast.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel special?”

“No, but people talk about what Silvertip was like before Carson Ridge,” he said. “Boone, too.”

I didn’t want the conversation. Hollis was quiet long enough that I thought he might have finished. Then, “I never knew the pre-Carson Boone. I got here two years later, but the ones who were here say the same thing. He laughed more and made fewer checks. Now, he re-inspects gear I inspected an hour before, and I’m good at my job. I don’t take it personally. It’s not about my work.”

He pulled off his gloves, stuck them in his pockets, and headed for the kitchen.

Chapter five

Boone

My house was eleven minutes from the base, up a gravel spur that the county had stopped pretending to maintain. I’d bought it the second winter after Carson Ridge from a retired outfitter. He’d built it himself, solid plumbing and electrical, and left me a woodshed stacked with more larch than one man could burn in three years.

I always took my boots off on the screened-in porch. My keys lived in a dish by the door, a chipped enamel bowl that came with the house.

I turned on the radio out of habit and started Friday dinner. Sunday I’d browned four pounds of elk from Hollis’s tag last fall, and the rest of the week was a matter of deciding what to put it in. The last of it was going over rice with end-of-season peppers from the farm stand outside Kessler.

A light breeze drifted down off the ridge through open windows, dry and smelling faintly of cut grass from the strip I’d mown along the drive. Somewhere down the spur, Wallen’s sprinkler was ticking through its rotation.

I ate at a small table on the porch. After the meal, I brought a mug of coffee out and sat in my favorite old rocker. A stack of paperbacks sat on an old trunk. I was working through them at the rate of about one a month. McMurtry, mostly, with a couple of James Lee Burke novels mixed in.

The night before, I watched half a romcom. Dante would have hated it. The entire plot could be solved with one conversation.

I’d set a pair of cube speakers in one window, angled onto the porch. While “Blue Monday” played softly in the background, I opened one of the paperbacks.

It was a comfortable life. I designed it for me.

After sundown, I cleaned up the kitchen. I was drying a skillet when I thought about Dante.

It wasn’t a past version. It was the man in the pit earlier today, telling me to get my hand off him. I saw him as he was at mile two, sweating through his shirt and hauling his pack back onto his hips with one pull.

The years of planting fence posts had filled his body out more. I thought about the heat coming off his chest when I adjusted the harness strap. He’d stood dead still and let me, watching my face the entire time.

I hung the skillet on its hook and exhaled.

Wanting him wasn’t new. I’d wanted him for two seasons before I ever did anything about it, and the years since hadn’t cured me of that.

I poured the coffee dregs down the sink and set the mug in the rack.

Headlights came up the spur a little after eight. I knew the truck by the sound of the engine. It was Marty. He stood at my door holding a paper grocery sack against his chest.