Page 45 of Into the Fire

“So you volunteered me,” Dante said.

“I facilitated.”

Dante looked at me. We had the map and questions sitting on the table. Teller was seventy feet away in trouble with a rope.

Dante pushed his chair back. “Nobody solve anything without me.”

He left, and Nash stood. Without saying a word, he folded the incident map, and I put it back in the box.

I followed Nash to the loft. He walked over to the pack table.

“You already knew Teller was scared of you.”

“He’s not scared of me. He’s scared of being wrong in front of me. That’s different.” He ran a hand over the surface of the table. “You didn’t walk over here to talk about Teller.”

“No. I didn’t. This morning you gave us positions. I want the last part. Dutch after the turnaround. You were the closest thing to eyes on him, and your statement’s four sentences long.”

His hand kept moving for a few seconds more. “You’ve read it.”

“More than four sentences happened. I’m asking about that.”

Nash glanced at the open door and then looked back at me. “We came over the saddle into the black,” he said. “The ground was cooked, ash over rock. Smoke lay low over everything. Mendoza was ahead of me, and Dante was ahead of him. I caught my boot on a rock and went down. When I got up, I was pointed in the wrong direction. Downhill. Back the way we’d come.”

“Did you know?”

“I didn’t, and I started moving. I thought I was a man getting out of the fire, but I was walking back into it.”

“And Dutch came back.”

“He came back for me.” Nash stared into my face. “He came back through the smoke, and he got hold of my harness and turned me around, like a man turning a piece of furniture. He pointed me at Mendoza’s back and gave me a shove.” Nash’s jaw worked once. “He could’ve kept going.”

“Nash—”

“He could’ve kept going. Everybody ahead of him made it. The math isn’t hard, Boone. He spent what he had left on me. You found him the next morning below the saddle. Every time I work out the timing, it ends the same. Without me, he was over the top with time in his pocket.”

The loft was quiet. Outside, across the gravel, Shep was talking to Teller.

“Dutch decided,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t make it for him.”

“Okay,” Nash said. “Now you know where everyone was.”

I should have left it there. “One more thing,” I said.

Nash waited.

“The statements. Walk me through how they got to the final packet.”

He answered it as a records question. “Debriefs were taken at the base. They got typed up, and the paper sat in Operations until Regional collected it. The loft kept copies of anything touching equipment. Half of Silvertip had access to them if they wanted it.”

“Who specifically?”

“Marty had Operations, obviously. You and Dutch as supervisors. Back then, the loft office had a records key on the ring, so count me in. Why?”

“I wanted to know who could get to Dante’s original interview before the packet went out.”