Page 76 of Into the Fire

“You followed him?”

“I was investigating.”

“That’s a yes.”

“It was surveillance,” I said.

“By you.”

“To be honest, I’m bad at it. Shep knew I was following within two miles.”

Boone didn’t laugh, but he leaned back, and it stopped being an interview. “You should have told me.”

“You’d have stopped me. Or worse, come along, and then it’s the base manager tailing his own jumper down the county road. Bad look.” I sat on the corner of the desk. “His story checks out as far as we can check it,” I said. “It’s not an alibi, but it accounts for more of the time.”

Boone pulled the pad over and looked at the ninth line for a while. He didn’t cross it off. He wrote something small beside it instead.

“Shep hid a dog,” I said. “Nash spent five years hiding what Dutch dying did to him. I spent five years hiding in three states.” Boone looked at me. “Everybody on this base has rooms you’ve never been in. You’ve got a poster on your wall that has more story behind it. That’s how people are.”

“I know that.”

“You know the shape of it, but it’s harder to understand it now.” I put my hand over his. “Ramirez doesn’t say where he goes on Saturday nights. Hollis takes phone calls at the fence line. Marty closes his door. A week ago, none of that was anything. Now every ordinary secret on this base looks like it might have a saw in it, and we’re going to be wrong about more of them before we’re right about one.”

***

The evening rotation sheet went up at five, and under it, in Boone’s handwriting, tomorrow’s schedule: proficiency jumps, morning, in the meadow east of the base. My name was on it. Every jumper on the base cycled through them. I was due.

Boone found me at the racks at six.

“I want tomorrow delayed,” he said. “Yours. A proficiency jump has no operational urgency. It can wait a week or even a month.”

“No,” I said.

“That wasn’t a question.”

“But this is my answer.” I was jumping.

“The link was on your station, Dante. The ride was yours until a phone rang.”

“We don’t know that. You said it yourself in the loft. It’s possible that it was meant for Nash. Break the man who inspects everything, and the base spends a month looking inward. Or maybe it wasn’t for anyone in particular. Break something, hurt whoever draws the ride, and Carson Ridge gets a month older while we investigate.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

He’d have put me in the gun safe next to Dutch’s notebook if the shelf were bigger. There was no version of loving a smokejumper where he got that.

I hadn’t come back to Silvertip to prove I wasn’t scared. I’d come back because I still wanted to jump. Whoever cut that link didn’t get a vote on whether I belonged here.

Boone breathed out. “You want me to check your chute?”

“No.”

I watched him take that in. “I want you to watch me check it.”

He looked at me. “Loft,” he said. “Now, while it’s empty.”

We crossed the yard together in the last of the light. Near the gear shed, Shep stood at the corner of the lean-to, looking at a folded blanket and two bowls he hadn’t picked up yet. He was only there a second. Hollis called something from the racks, and Shep went.

Chapter nineteen