Free Fire - C. J. Box [97]
She nodded but didn’t want to talk about it.
“I’ve been where you are,” Joe said. “You’re doing the right thing. But I have to confess that it usually gets me into trouble.”
She laughed. “Like I could get into any more trouble.”
As he opened the car door, she reached out and gripped his arm.
“Here,” she said, handing him a set of keys.
“What’s this?”
“Keys to Lars’s pickup. You’ll need a vehicle. How do you expect to get around?”
“I can’t take these,” Joe said, remembering Lars’s obvious pride in his tricked-up 4x4.
“Take them,” she insisted. “He likes you.”
“I’m hard on cars,” Joe said.
“Yeah,” she said, dismissing him. “I’m kind of worried about that, I admit.”
It was easier than Joe thought it would be, despite the suspiciouslooks the gate rangers gave him when he pulled up in the jacked-up pickup with the loud glasspack mufflers and got out. He found they were lonely in the last days of the season and didn’t mind taking the time to show him how to plug into the video units in their gatehouses and download three days’ worth of taped entrances and exits. Only at the Northeast gate did he have to show his badge.
He hoped Demming would have the same good fortune.
On the way back to Mammoth, Joe turned off at Biscuit Basin. Although yellow crime-scene tape was stretched from tree trunk to tree trunk across the pathway to Sunburst, no rangers had been left to guard it. He looked around to make sure no one was watching and ducked under the tape.
The trail had been trampled into muddy goo by dozens of rangers and investigators from the day before. The runoff stream ran clear. As he approached Sunburst and felt an almost imperceptible increase in temperature and humidity from the pool, he noted the pink microbes waving in the water and the driftwood where the thermister was still hidden.
Now that he thought about it, he recalled the tickle of air on his ankle the first time he came to the pool with Cutler. Moving step-by-step, he backed around the thermal until he felt it again.
It came from a mouth-sized hole in the ground. He knelt down and put his palm out. The gas emitting from it was odorlessand made no sound. But he could feel it licking his hand.
He stepped back and lit a match, held it out.
With a muffled whump, flame raced up the stream of gas and danced on the tip as if waving. He felt heat on his face and hands. It burned cleanly and nearly six feet into the air before dissipating.
He found another mouth and lit it too. And another. The three flamers undulated slightly as they burned. He imagined how they’d look at night, illuminating the trees surrounding the thermal. “Way cool” was how Samantha had described them.
He agreed.
He found four more holes that marched in a line toward the timber but stopped short of the loam and lit them all. There was now a wall of flame, each spout of fire licking silently in the air. It looked strangely tropical, Joe thought. And there was something else. The holes ran parallel to the dark line in the ground that Cutlerhad said was one of the few exposed coal seams in the park.
After watching them for a half-hour, he soaked his fleece vest in the hot pot and extinguished them.
“Way cool,” he said aloud.
Joe returned to the Mammoth Hotel to wait for Demmingand to make arrangements at the front desk for a cabin for Marybeth and the girls the next night. He didn’t want to subject them to rooms in the empty hotel that even he found lonely. He used his credit card, knowing the state would likely not reimbursethe cost, and wondered as Simon ran it when exactly his first new paycheck would arrive.
When Simon returned his card and said he could pick up the keys in the morning, he said, “There have been a couple of older gentlemen asking for you. I hope you don’t mind, but I asked them to wait outside the lobby for you to return.”
“Wait outside? Why?”
Simon looked apologetic.
Joe got it. “They were stinking drunk, right?” he said with despair.
“Beyond stinking,” Simon said. “They reeked. And one of them had a little accident on the couch. He dropped