Page 104 of Into the Fire

A flame caught. It sat there a second, small, almost nothing. Then the wind pouring down off the crest fanned it into a fire.

Dante didn’t go directly to Marty. He climbed above him, along a band of firm rock, and dropped onto the stone at its far end where the line of markers ran out the west side. Marty turned in that direction and stopped. The route he’d been burning all afternoon now went through Dante.

He backed off a step, holding the torch out level in front of him. That left him with only one way out. I’d seen it before he had—a break in the rock east of the stand. I knew where it went. It bellied out into the narrow draw Dante had refused an hour ago.

I crossed the head of the break and stood in it.

“Marty.”

He turned, and for a moment nobody moved. Smoke came through the stand in a slow gray cloud. Below us the new fire widened, working away downhill. Dante held the west. I cut off the east. The rock blocked the top.

Marty came at me.

He swung the torch as he closed and drove into the gap with his shoulder. He was heavier than he looked, and he wasn’t weak. For a second, we were chest to chest with the torch between us and the heat of it against my forearm.

Then Dante hit him from the side, both hands in his jacket, and the torch went down. It rang off the stone and rolled, still burning, dribbling flame across bare rock where there was nothing to light. I kicked it hard, and it went clattering down the granite away from the trees and lay there burning itself out on stone.

Marty tore loose from both of us. He went off the edge of the break onto the loose stuff beside it, a ramp of rubble and old ash. It moved the moment he landed.

His feet slipped out from under him. Marty rode the slide down, grabbing at everything. He landed against a lip of solid rock and stopped.

He ended up on a ledge about the size of a kitchen table. Under the ledge, the duff fire he’d lit thirty seconds ago was spreading, and the smoke off it was already climbing back up the rock past his boots.

Marty looked up at me through the smoke.

“Stop moving,” I said.

The rubble under him shifted, a thread of it rattling down into the smoke. Marty froze.

“Dante. That horn of rock, above him and left. Anchor there.”

Dante moved to it. I pulled the rope off my pack, tied a loop into the end of it while I talked, and kept my voice at the pitch I used for retrieving rookies from trees.

“Marty, look at me, not down. This rope’s coming to you. It goes over your head and under both arms. You don’t grab it. You wear it.”

I lowered the loop down the rock face. He got it over his shoulders on the second try, hands shaking, and cinched it against his chest. When it was snug, he started talking.

“I was going to make them disappear. The markers. That’s all this was. You were supposed to jump the fire, put it out, and go home. You weren’t supposed to find the route—”

“Right foot on the flake below your knee,” I said.

“—and if Dante had stayed gone, none of this would have happened. You understand that? Five years and nothing would have happened, nobody would get hurt, but he drove through the gate—”

“Left hand to the crack above the flake. Don’t look for it. Feel it.”

Marty wasn’t a good climber, but he followed my instructions. He didn’t have far to go.

“I typed your statement,” he said to Dante, who was hauling him toward the lip by the rope. “Five years ago. There was no interview team the first night. It was just me and a legal pad in the infirmary. It all went through me first.”

“Knee over the lip,” I said. “Now, the other one.”

He came over the edge onto the solid rock and sat down hard, chest heaving, as he looked up at the two of us.

“Curt Wray asked me to clean it up. He said Dante was concussed. He said the account was a mess, and if it went forward the way it was, it’d drag an innocent man into a fatality investigation for no reason. If I cleaned it up, I’d save him from that.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and left ash across it.

“What did he want the statement to say?” I asked.

“The man on the ridge. And the fire—the way Dante said it moved. Keep the concussion. Keep the gaps.” His breath was shallow and quick. “Every sentence I typed was true, Boone.”