Page 42 of Into the Fire

“Well, if a number exists, it can be found. I’ll pull what Operations kept from that year. It’s a headache, but I know the right shelf.” He set his stack on the desk. “Give me a day or two. And if you’re going to keep working, work somewhere with better light. You both look like the day drove you here in a trailer.”

Chapter eleven

Boone

Igot to my office early and had slept little. I’d been up since four-thirty going through what we’d photographed at the cabin. By the time daylight streamed through the windows, the coffee I’d made at five sat cold at my elbow.

It all needed to fit in order. In early June, Dutch wrote three words in a notebook. Four days later he stood partway down the North Fork with a camera. In July we jumped, and he died in the same fork that he had marked with a pencil line.

In between, he ran a training rotation, fought with Regional about the fall budget, and spent a lunch hour fixing the screen door because it squeaked. He asked somebody whose ribbon it was, but he didn’t ask me.

For the past five years, I’d been operating using what Dutch taught me. Check the gear. Know where your people are. Notice the small thing before it becomes a big thing. He’d left a complete set of instructions.

At Carson Ridge, he’d noticed a small thing and then kept it to himself.

His shoulder was the same. I’d told that story last night like it was a story about his pride. It wasn’t. It was a story about his system. Dutch handled things himself until he understood them, and the flagging was the same.

The drawer worked fine as long as nothing killed him first.

I heard Dante’s boots on the gravel at ten to seven. He came in with two cups from the ready room, mine black, his the color of caramel, and stopped inside the door.

“How long have you been here?”

“Not long.”

He looked at the legal pad.

“You filled two pages.”

“I write fast.”

He set my coffee on the desk and sat. I turned the pad around so that he could read it.

It had two columns in block letters.

Under KNOWN: the flagging was in the fork before the fire. Dutch found it in June. No job number then, and none found since. Dante saw a man in that area and called it in at fourteen-twenty. My statement included that call.

Under NOT KNOWN: the source of the ribbon. What the line marked. Whether the man Dante saw had anything to do with it. Whether any of it had anything to do with how the fire moved. What Dutch was shouting.

Dante read both columns twice.

“It’s the wrong list, or it’s the right list, and we’re reading it wrong,” he said. “We talk about Carson Ridge as if it were one fire and everybody watched it.”

“Nobody watched all of it,” I said.

“Nobody watched THE Carson Ridge fire, period. You got a piece. I got a piece. Nash got a piece. Dutch got a piece and took it with him. Five years ago they stacked all the pieces up, called the pile a fire, and anything that didn’t fit the pile was assigned to my concussion.” He tapped the pad. “We need to take the pile apart.”

I stood up to look for the incident map. It was still in the Carson Ridge box. We carried it to the ready room, which had the only table long enough to spread it out completely. It was the official map from the investigation, printed contours with the fire’s progression overlaid in gray hatching and the incident command symbols stamped where somebody in an office decided they belonged.

“Deployment first,” I said. “Times and positions. Then we argue.”

“You brought me to a second location to do an after-action review.”

“Yes.”

“Five years late.”

“Apparently, that’s my specialty.”