Page 64 of Into the Fire

“Dutch was yelling at me,” I said, low. “At me. Not at the crew or at the fire. He called my name.”

Boone was quiet for a second. “Do you remember what he said?”

“My name.”

“Anything after that?”

I ran the memory back—the shackle, Shep’s voice.

“No. Just the one word, Boone.”

“It’s one more than you had yesterday.”

He swallowed a mouthful of water and looked out at the yard.

Around eleven I carried a coil of retired letdown line past Operations on its way to condemnation. Boone and Marty were on the steps.

“—not a request form,” Boone was saying. “I want it in writing that nothing from that incident gets moved, re-boxed, or consolidated. Not by us, a retention audit, or anybody Regional sends with a label maker.”

“Then you want a litigation hold, or the agency cousin of one.” Marty had his glasses down, writing on the back of a form. “You need the records officer, not the district. It’s a woman named Prentiss. I’ll get you the number, and I’ll give you the magic words. If you say ‘preservation’ to the wrong office, they’ll transfer you four times, and you’ll end up ordering baseboard for Teddy Roosevelt’s hunting camp.”

“Today, Marty.”

“You’ll have it in an hour. Give me the incident number and the dates on—” He saw me passing with the coil, and lifted his chin at me the same as always. “—the dates, and I’ll type the memo. You just sign it.”

I dumped the coil and walked back to Boone. He was alone, holding a legal pad.

“What are you doing?”

“Preserving what we’ve got.”

“Officially?”

“Yes. The box in the records room is getting sealed and logged. And I’m putting on paper what we took out of the cabin, when, and why, with photographs, so the day somebody official wants it, they’ll know exactly what happened to it after we found it.”

“That tells whoever’s been moving things that we’re not stopping.”

“Yeah.”

“When does it go out?” I asked.

“Today. Marty’s drafting the memo now. He’s getting me the records officer’s number so I can call her.”

I walked over to Nash’s loft office, needing new pins for the tower. I heard him before I got to the door.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“Something bad?” I asked.

“Boone. He’s demanding sign-out sheets.” Nash held the request at arm’s length. “From the loft records. My records. Anything from 2021, the lists where I wrote my name, the date, the time, and the reason.” He set it on the desk and squared it with the edge. “He’ll make me pull up records of every breath I took next.”

“Pins,” I said. “For the tower.”

He pulled the bin, counted six into my palm, and wrote the count on a card.

I didn’t leave immediately. I hesitated.

“You want to ask me something, Vega?”