Page 82 of Into the Fire

“Nash. You. Operations keeps one.”

“Who’s been through the loft the last three days with a reason?”

Hollis started listing. Himself, twice, for cargo rigging. Shep, daily, as part of his job. Teller, for the letdown rope lesson. Ramirez, returning hardware. Nash, obviously, before the tower accident. Me. Boone. It was practically the entire base.

“Who else?” Boone asked.

“Everybody else,” Hollis said. “It’s the loft, Boone. It’s where our gear is stored.”

Nash should have been standing at that table. He could have looked at the rack, the table, the bag, and told us what was possible and what wasn’t. Instead, he was in the bunkhouse with orders to stay off the ankle.

The tarp gave off a thin plastic smell, new off the roll. I kept catching it every time I turned my head.

Marty came over from Operations with the gate log and the phone log under one arm, glasses up. He laid them on the end of the table.

“Gate’s the same story as the tower day,” he said. “Our trucks, nobody else. If you want the last week, I’ll pull the last week, but it’ll read the same. The only recent outside visitor was Shep’s dog woman. I can give you who signed hardware out, and I can probably tell you who was where better than they can, because people lie to themselves about time and my logs don’t.” He tapped the phone log. “You’ll want to initial these if they’re going in a file. Chain of custody starts with somebody’s initials, and Regional loves initials.”

“Leave them,” Boone said. “Thanks, Marty.”

I stopped listening to the words after a while and started watching the people saying them.

Hollis kept glancing at me while he worked the list, and I noticed that too.

Marty was helpful. That was him. Marty was helpful, the way the ready room coffee was bad.

Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, I thought about the question Boone never asked.

He asked when I’d pulled the rig from the rack, and he asked what order I’d packed it in. He asked what I’d checked and when.

He never once asked if I was sure about everything.

Five years ago, that was the key to the entire conversation.

***

Teller had been lobbying Ramirez for spaghetti for a week and finally wore him down.

“—doesn’t mean somebody did it,” I heard Teller say as I opened the door.

I entered the kitchen at six-thirty and the room changed pitch.

“You finally happy?” Ramirez asked him.

Teller looked at the spaghetti. “Ask me after I taste it.”

Nobody stopped talking. That would have been too obvious. The conversation just shifted its weight.

More fragments found me sideways over the next day. Not accusations. Nothing anybody could be asked to repeat.

Teller, at the racks, honestly curious: “How long since you’d packed one? Before this season.”

“Five years,” I said and watched him do the math.

Ramirez, passing me at the wash rack: “Reserve worked, though. Rig did its job.”

And somewhere behind me in the ready room, a voice I didn’t turn around to identify: “Mains go. It happens.”

Nobody said I’d packed a line over my own canopy. Nobody had to. It was the easiest conclusion: rusty jumper, first season back, packed his own rig. Five years is five years. Gear fails. Men miss things.