Margin of Error Page 19

  “Don’t know what I’m thinking yet. Something went wrong here. This was reckless, unnecessary, irresponsible. The city looks like crap for permitting it. I’ll be glad when this crowd gets outa town. We’ve got enough going on here. Listen to that out there.” He gestured to the rows of desks, mostly unmanned, outside his door. “Every phone in this office is ringing. We didn’t need this. We’ve got no civilian personnel in on the weekend, we’re short-staffed, and the press has gone crazy. We’ve got ‘em calling from London, Australia, Spain. First news flash reported a fatality during a scene involving Westfell. Apparently rumors spread that it was him.”

  “Thank God it wasn’t.”

  He looked at me sharply.

  “Yeah,” he said, unenthusiastically.

  “If not for Lance and Niko, his bodyguard, that cameraman would have been more seriously burned, or worse. They acted like heroes.”

  McDonald looked skeptical. “‘Acted’ being the operative word. Firefighters were already at the scene. But I’m sure what they did is good publicity for them.”

  No point in arguing. “My understanding,” I said coldly, “was that Trent checked out all the details of the stunt several times himself. He was a pro. The fire department consultant who worked with Fisher approved the stunt, monitored the setup in the warehouse, and examined all the wiring.”

  McDonald nodded. “We’re talking to him now.”

  I rose to leave. “You okay?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  He gazed up at me with those silvery blues that always knocked my socks off. “Let’s get together soon, for that dinner.”

  “I’m kind of busy right now,” I said, and walked out of his office.

  I went back to the paper to write the story.

  Lance called just before eight. “Finished yet?”

  I said I was.

  “I’ll pick you up.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  He was alone, driving the Porsche, or one just like it.

  I slid into the car and kissed him. He took his hands off the wheel and kissed me back, hard.

  He had ointment on his hands, still wore the clothes he had been wearing on the set, but had washed off his “injuries.”

  The air felt thin, as though only a wispy hard-to-breathe layer of night protected the city from something infinitely bigger and darker above.

  We didn’t talk; he just drove. The sports car swayed in windy blasts out on the open road. On the radio Selena sweetly sang “I Could Fall in Love.” For the first time, I listened to the words.

  The road grew darker and more deserted as he drove west. About fifty miles out on the Tamiami Trail in the ‘Glades, he let go of my hand to downshift, turned off, and drove a half mile into the wilderness. I knew where we were when I recognized the old jet-port. The project had been designed to relieve the overload of commercial traffic at Miami International Airport. Embattled environmentalists fought to block the intrusion into the ‘Glades. They eventually won, but not until the main runway had been built.

  Novice pilots now practice touch-and-go landings at the deserted site. Our headlights picked up several parked trailers and vehicles used by the movie company.

  “Want to see the nuclear reactor?” Lance asked. “They finally got it stabilized.”

  “Sure.”

  Far from city lights, the sky was darker than dark, the moon huge, and the stars hung bright and low. The song sung now came from a chorus of frogs, night birds, and critters that live in the saw grass. I was grateful this was not mosquito season, and that tonight’s strong winds had blown away the few in residence, probably to Miami Beach.

  The headlights of the Porsche lit the way as we walked to a parked jeep. Lance found the keys stashed atop a front tire. As we drove down a rutted trail, the Porsche’s automatic lights went out behind us. “Sure you can find it in the dark?”

  “Absolutely.” He lit a cigarette.

  “Be careful,” I cautioned with some urgency. “This is the dry season out here. Drop a match and the whole place could go up.” I remembered the trooper who had stopped a motorist on the Trail. As he wrote the speeding ticket, he smelled smoke. His cruiser’s hot muffler had ignited the dry roadside grass, and he lost his car to the flames.

  The jeep’s headlights picked up an eerie sight. The reactor towered, alone in the wilderness, like an apparition.

  “It looks real, like Three Mile Island,” I whispered in awe.

  “The whole set is built from disposable material painted to look like concrete, steel, and plastic. Come on. Nobody’s here now.” I noticed the blanket he had brought from the Porsche as he helped me out of the jeep.

  A wooden platform circled the base of the reactor. He helped me find the three steps in the dark and we stood together, next to the nuclear plant’s fake entrance, a movable aluminum door, lying on its side.

  “Alone at last,” he said. The night was so dark I could barely see him.

  My hands found their way into his hair. Our lips found each other. He spread the blanket out on the deck and we sat on it, our legs over the side, my head on his shoulder.

  The setting was like being marooned together on a small island in an inky sea of night. He sighed and smoked. “This is a good place to think.”

  “Or not to think.”

  We sat for a long time, listening to the wind sweep across the saw grass, watching Venus, the brilliant evening star, climb the western sky and the seven sisters lead the dazzling parade of winter constellations across the eastern horizon.

  “I guess we should go,” he finally said. “It’s a long drive back.”

  We got stiffly to our feet. He kissed me, gently this time, his hands around my waist. I pulled away, trying to see his eyes in the dark.

  “I won’t bite you,” he said, with a hands-off gesture, “unless, of course, you wanna be bit.”

  The moon emerged between two star clusters, breaking free from indigo clouds, and I saw his eyes.

  “Bite me.” I opened my arms with a sense of absolute freedom, as though we were lost in space and nothing else mattered.

  He sighed. “My pleasure.”

  We eased back down onto the blanket, entangled in a sweet, slow embrace. That was when I heard it: an engine.

  “What was that?” I sat up, a premonition of fear overtaking me in a shudder.

  “I heard it too.” He sat up as well. “Could be a ranger.”

  “Maybe he saw the jeep and wants to check it out, to make sure everything’s all right.” Forestry officials had been monitoring the site. I tried to reassure myself, without success. “Do you have a gun?”

  “No. Why do you keep asking me that?”

  There is something to be said for dating a police officer. A mate who is always armed provides one with a sense of security—unless, of course, he turns the gun on you. There was also something to be said, I thought, for Niko, Dave, Al, Frank, and Pauli. I promised myself to never again resent their presence.

  A car door closed quietly but unmistakably, somewhere upwind, near the jeep. “Think somebody’s stealing it?” I whispered fearfully.

  Lance touched his pocket. “Got the keys right here.” He stood up. “Yo, anybody out there?”

  I wished he had not done that. Whoever it was now knew exactly where we were. No answer.

  I stood up and took Lance’s arm, straining my eyes into the darkness. The night sounds had stopped.

  “Listen,” I whispered.

  “It’s the wind,” he said.

  “No, hear it?” Something or somebody was moving quickly, thrashing though the waist-high saw grass, in an arc, the sounds of water splashing.

  “Yeah, I hear it.”

  Was somebody dumping something out here? If only it wasn’t so damn dark.

  Then I smelled it and knew what was happening.

  “Gasoline!” I screamed. “No!”

  “What the he
ll…?” Lance said.

  The night lit up with a roar. In a split second a hundred-foot-long arc of fire sprang to life.

  “Let’s get out of here.” Lance gripped my arm.

  “We’ll never outrun it,” I said. Tongues of leaping flame had already cut us off from the jeep. Beyond, I heard an engine start up and pull away.

  Twenty- to twenty-five-mile-an-hour winds propelled the blowing grass fire into a fast-burning inferno that rolled at us like an avalanche.

  Lance turned, his classic body silhouetted in the light from the flames, and hit the deck. Hell, I thought, we are about to die and we never even had decent sex. He grunted, straining, ripping boards from the platform beneath us. What was he doing? I was about to run for it anyway when he caught me, pulled me down, and shoved me into the dark crawl space beneath the platform. There had to be snakes, bugs, rats. I hesitated. He pushed me hard, forcing his body in after me as he yanked the sheet of metal, the false door, down over the opening with a clatter.

  “Move,” he demanded, as we crawled forward.

  “They’ll never find us here.” I fought panic. “They’ll never know what happened to us.” The fire roared like something alive as it rolled over us, crackling, snapping, shooting sparks, an incendiary circus, leaping and dancing. Hot embers fell between cracks, stinging our flesh. I couldn’t breathe. The weight of Lance’s hand came down on the back of my neck, pushing my face down into what felt like wet mulch. It seemed like forever

  Resigned, limp, lungs filled with smoke, I opened my eyes to the dark. The light of the fire had passed, but I still heard the roar in my ears.

  Lance was alive. Dizzy and nauseous, I felt his heartbeat. He was breathing, or was that me?

  “Britt?” His voice was a raspy croak.

  “Yeah?”

  He squeezed my shoulder. “Was it as bad for you as it was for me?”

  “Just about.”

  We crept out onto the scorched earth.

  “Good God,” I murmured. Flames swept across the ‘Glades like waves across the ocean. The entire horizon seemed ablaze. I heard an alarm, from some distant ranger station. The flames moved like wildfire. For the first time I completely understood the term.

  The nuclear reactor had melted like a marshmallow, sinking in on itself.

  Whoever set the blaze had slashed the tires on the jeep. Stephanie’s MO. We drove it anyway, fearing if we stayed on foot the wind would change, putting us in the path of the fire again.

  “We almost got killed,” Lance said, his voice painfully hoarse.

  “Tell me about it,” I said, throat scratchy, my head aching from the smoke. “For you, it was the second time today.”

  He looked as though the thought had not occurred to him, then said, ‘“The third time may prove fatal, when I tell Hodges, Van Ness, and Wendy what happened to the reactor.”

  We flagged down firefighters on the Trail. They wanted to know if we had lit a campfire or tossed out a lighted cigarette.

  We gave them Stephanie’s description and that of the car we last saw her driving, the red Taurus, probably a rental. They did not pass it on the road, but she could be driving anything by now. They seemed skeptical of our story that a shadowy someone we hadn’t seen was responsible. The crumpled pack of Marlboros in Lance’s shirt pocket did nothing to enhance our credibility.

  He dropped me back at the paper and went to break the news to Hodges and the producers. My clothes were filthy and I was a mess. I washed up in the ladies’ room, then peeled off my blouse and opened my locker to change into the extra set of clothes I kept there. I took out the hanger with a skirt, blouse, and fresh underwear attached, and gasped. The garments were shredded, slashed by some razor-sharp instrument Inside, my makeup had been opened, spilled, scattered, the toothpaste squeezed out.

  “Oh, no,” I moaned, then whimpered. Miserable, head throbbing, sinuses closed, still shaky from all that had happened, I tried to think. How? I had the only key. When was the last time I had opened the locker? The night the film crew was shooting here, before the flowers came. I had left it open, was in a stall, heard footsteps. She was here! She had invaded this safe, familiar, mirrored room. Rage overwhelmed me. I could kill Stephanie, I thought, if I could just get my hands on her.

  I slammed the locker door, tried to tidy my clothes, and went back out to check with fire central. The department was saying only that a ‘Glades fire had erupted, origin still undetermined, and that firefighters from Metro-Dade, the Division of Forestry, and Everglades National Park were battling the blaze.

  I drove home watching my rearview mirror, checking the shadows as I unlocked the door. I fed the animals, squeezed Murine into my red, itchy eyes, and tried to wash the smoke out of my hair. As I prepared for bed, I monitored Metro’s fire frequencies on the scanner. Flames had jumped across the trail, and the road was being closed. Reinforcements were being called in to a command post set up at Forty Mile Bend. More than a hundred firefighters had fanned out to fight the flames.

  The phone rang at 2 A.M.

  “Did they put it out?” Lance asked wearily.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, groggy. I turned the scanner back on and listened. “No. It’s worse.” Firefighters and equipment from other jurisdictions were en route to help, under the emergency mutual aid pact. The fire, wreathing the treetops of towering Australian pines, had leaped a drainage canal and the road west of Sweetwater. The duff, a thick mix of crisp foliage and dried pine needles matted on the ground, was burning and blowing in fiery clouds across the south side of the trail toward the Miccosukee Indian Village.

  “Jesus Christ, hope nobody gets hurt.”

  “You’ve been with Van Ness and company all this time? How did they take it?”

  “Not well.”

  I told him about my locker.

  “The woman’s out of control.” He gave a short, angry sigh. “Niko’s arranging to have one of our lawyers meet with the police chief first thing in the morning. She’s gotta be stopped before she kills somebody. This is insane. I can’t believe I once worried that she was suicidal. Now I wish she still was. I liked her better that way.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “You sound terrible,” he said.

  “So do you. Where are you?”

  “In bed.”

  “Me too.”

  “You know, I want to come over there and bite you.” He sounded exhausted.

  “Good,” I said, smiling. “But we both better get some sleep.”

  “Yeah, it’s been a long day. And I think Niko’s got me locked in.”

  “Good for him.”

  “Good night.”

  “‘Night.”

  “Say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “What you said last time you put me to bed.”

  “Pleasant dreams?”

  “Yeah.”

  I said it.

  The morning news was bad. This was the driest time of year and the blaze, fanned by stiff winds from a gusty cold front, was racing south, toward populated areas. Reinforcements had been marshaled but were unable to contain the fire. No rain was forecast.

  “Oh, no,” I murmured, as I stepped out to scoop up my newspaper. The unmistakable smell of smoke was in the air, carried on the wind from hundreds of scorched and burning acres.

  The horizon was hazy, and a smoky shroud hung over the city as I drove to the office.

  Metro fire issued a press release at 10 A.M. Listed among the damage was the movie set, where the blaze had apparently erupted. The next logical question from reporters was whether anyone had been present at the time. The affirmative answer, that the star and a News reporter had been on the scene, set off a flurry of inquiries.

  During a news conference at noon, the battalion chief ruled out lightning as a cause. The ranger stations, on alert during the dry season, had reported no strikes. Seven hundred families directly in the fire’s path, an eight-and
-a-half-square-mile area of rural South Central Dade, were being evacuated. Firefighters from the Florida Division of Forestry’s Everglades District were waging an all-out battle to save the residential area. Helicopters equipped with “Ping-Pong-ball machines” were flying low, a hundred feet off the ground, dropping the balls in straight lines. Forty-five seconds later, the chemically treated balls burst into flames, creating an instant wall, a counter fire designed to consume everything in its path so the approaching wildfire would be curbed, starved for lack of fuel. Firefighters from Collier and Monroe counties were gearing up to join the operation. Smoke was causing problems as far south as Homestead and Florida City, and campgrounds were being evacuated fifteen miles west of Interstate 95.

  Then the chief opened it to questions. Yes, he said, Westfell did appear to be a smoker. No, smoking had not been ruled out as the cause. No, he did not know what the two of us had been doing out there alone in the dark. And no, he had no idea how the film crew had gained permission to build their set in the federally protected Everglades National Park.

  Our publisher and Fred, my editor, and Mark Seybold, the paper’s lawyer, asked me the same questions.

  “He was upset, stressed out after the accident,” I told them. “He wanted to be alone. I had never seen the reactor set before, and we drove out there.”

  “After dark?” the publisher said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it possible that anything you or he did accidentally started the fire?” the lawyer asked.

  I explained again exactly what had happened.

  Since no eyewitness could place Stephanie at the scene, we could not identify her in print as a suspect. Our story would simply state that we heard noises, smelled gasoline, and then “flames erupted.”

  “Who the hell gave them permission to build that thing out there in the first place?” the publisher asked angrily.

  “We’re damn sure gonna find out,” Fred said.

  “Has to be illegal as shit,” Seybold said, looking grim.

  “Do they still have any shooting to finish here in the building?” The publisher chewed his lower lip.

  I nodded.

  “How the hell did we get mixed up with these people in the first place?” Fred asked indignantly.