Page 81 of Into the Fire

“The loft is closed,” I said. “Lock it. Nobody is in it for any reason, and nobody touches the racks. Call the clinic in Kessler. Tell them I’m bringing Vega in for a full check.”

“Copy on all of it. The clinic will hold a spot for him. Anything else?”

“No.”

Dante was sitting on the tailgate, listening to every word. “I’m fine,” he said.

“You’re getting looked at.”

“Boone—”

“You cut away at eleven hundred feet and landed a reserve in rock. You’re getting looked at, and it’s going in the file with everything else, because in a week somebody official is going to want a medical record that says what today did to you. I’m making sure it exists.”

Dante didn’t argue. He eased off the tailgate and into the cab, breathing carefully, and pulled the door shut himself.

I climbed into the truck to drive. Dante had his head back against the headrest and his eyes shut. The scrape on his jaw had dried dark. The road to Kessler ran west, straight past the base, and I pulled out of the meadow with the long view down the valley: tin roofs, the tower inside its cones, and the Otter parked on the ramp. All of it was small and orderly in the morning light.

Somebody inside that fence had put a line where it didn’t belong.

Chapter twenty

Dante

The Kessler Clinic kept me for two hours and found what I already knew was there: bruises, hip and ribs, deep enough to ache when I breathed.

They cleaned a jaw scrape with something that burned. I passed the concussion screening for the nurse practitioner. Boone watched from the corner with his arms crossed, apparently conducting one of his own.

I left with a printed discharge summary and instructions about icing the bruises. Boone folded the summary into his chest pocket, where the fire pages rode.

He drove east past the base without slowing. Hollis was where we’d left him, sitting on a rock at the edge of the stubble with the main laid out forty feet away, the stakes at its corners throwing long shadows. He’d been there four hours. He stood when we parked and didn’t ask about the clinic.

“Anybody?” Boone asked.

“A hawk,” Hollis said. “I ran him off.”

Boone brought a folded tarp and two pairs of gloves from behind the seat. I reached for a pair and he handed them to Hollis.

“You’re looking,” he said to me. “Not touching.”

They gathered the main onto the tarp in the order it lay, lines untouched, and folded the tarp over it like closing a book. Boone carried it to the truck bed himself.

At the base, the loft was still locked, untouched since Marty turned the key. Boone and Hollis placed the main canopy onto the packing table on its tarp.

Nobody touched the racks. Nobody cleaned anything.

Boone had dirt ground into both knees of his jeans from kneeling in the stubble. There was a rust-colored smear on his cuff, my blood.

Hollis stood at the end of the table with a legal pad. “Walk me through possession,” he said. “When did you last have your hands on it?”

“Eight last night, when I finished packing it. Boone watched. It was here overnight, behind a locked door. I picked it up at seven and wore it to the plane.”

Hollis wrote it down. So did Boone.

“So the window is the packed chute overnight,” Boone said.

“It was locked overnight,” Hollis said.

“Who has the loft keys?”