Cold Fire

“Why don't you do that?” she said.

He stood there a few seconds longer, impatient and uncertain, then reentered the house. Slid the door shut. Locked it.

“Don't take forever,” Holly muttered. “In about another hour, I'm gonna have to use your bathroom.”

Around her, two hummingbirds drew nectar from the flowers, the shadows lengthened, and exploding bubbles made hollow ticking sounds inside her open can of soda.

Down in Florida, there were also hummingbirds and cool shadows, icy bottles of Dos Equis instead of diet cola, and Travis McGee was getting into deeper trouble by the paragraph.

Her stomach began to grumble. She had eaten breakfast at the airport in Dubuque, surprised that her appetite had not been suppressed forever by the macabre images burned into her mind at the crash scene. She had missed lunch, thanks to the stakeout; now she was famished. Life goes on.

Fifteen minutes ahead of Holly's bathroom deadline, Ironheart returned. He had showered and shaved. He was dressed in a blue boatneck shirt, white cotton slacks, and white canvas Top-Siders.

She was flattered by his desire to make a better appearance.

“Okay,” he said, “what do you want?”

“I need to use your facilities first.”

A long-suffering look lengthened his face. “Okay, okay, but then we talk, get it over with, and you go.”

She followed him into the family room, which was adjacent to an open breakfast area, which was adjacent to an open kitchen. The mismatched furniture appeared to have been purchased on the cheap at a warehouse clearance sale immediately after he had graduated from college and taken his first teaching job. It was clean but well worn. Hundreds of paperback books filled free-standing cases. But there was no artwork of any kind on the walls, and no decor pieces such as vases or bowls or sculptures or potted plants lent warmth to the room.

He showed her the powder room off the main entrance foyer. No wallpaper, white paint. No designer soaps shaped like rosebuds, just a bar of Ivory. No colorful or embroidered handtowels, just a roll of Bounty standing on the counter.

As she closed the door, she looked back at him and said, “Maybe we could talk over an early supper. I'm starved.”

When she finished in the bathroom, she peeked in his living room. It was decorated — to use the word as loosely as the language police would allow — in a style best described as Early Garage Sale, though it was even more Spartan than the family room. His house was surprisingly modest for a man who had won six million in the state lottery, but his furniture made the house seem Rockefellerian by comparison.

She went out to the kitchen and found him waiting at the round breakfast table.

“I thought you'd be cooking something,” she said, pulling out a chair and sitting opposite him.

He was not amused. “What do you want?”

“Let me start by telling you what I don't want,” she said. “I don't want to write about you, I've given up reporting, I've had it with journalism. Now, you believe that or not, but it's true. The good work you're doing can only be hampered if you're being hounded by media types, and lives will be lost that you might otherwise save. I see that now.”

“Good.”

“And I don't want to blackmail you. Anyway, judging by the unconscionably lavish style in which you live, I doubt you've got more than eighteen bucks left.”

He did not smile. He just stared at her with those gas flame-blue eyes.

She said, “I don't want to inhibit your work or compromise it in any way. I don't want to venerate you as the Second Coming, marry you, bear your children, or extract from you the meaning of life. Anyway, only Elvis Presley knows the meaning of life, and he's in a state of suspended animation in an alien vault in a cave on Mars.”

His face remained as immobile as stone. He was tough.

“What I want,” Holly said, “is to satisfy my curiosity, learn how you do what you do, and why you do it.” She hesitated. She took a deep breath. Here came the big one: “And I want to be part of it all.”

“What do you mean?”

She spoke fast, running sentences together, afraid he would interrupt her before she got it all out, and never give her another chance to explain herself. “I want to work with you, help you, contribute to your mission, or whatever you call it, however you think of it, I want to save people, at least help you save them.”

“There's nothing you could do.”

“There must be something,” she insisted.

“You'd only be in the way.”

“Listen, I'm intelligent—”

“So what?”

“—well-educated—”

“So am I.”

“—gutsy—”

“But I don't need you.”

“—competent, efficient—”

“Sorry.”

“Damn it!” she said, more frustrated than angry. “Let me be your secretary, even if you don't need one. Let me be your girl Friday, your good right hand — at least your friend.”

He seemed unmoved by her plea. He stared at her for so long that she became uncomfortable, but she would not look away from him. She sensed that he used his singularly penetrating gaze as an instrument of control and intimidation, but she was not easily manipulated. She was determined not to let him shape this encounter before it had begun.

At last he said, “So you want to be my Lois Lane.”

For a moment she had no idea what he was talking about. Then she remembered: Metropolis, the Daily Planet, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Lois Lane, Clark Kent, Superman.

Holly knew he was trying to irritate her. Making her angry was another way of manipulating her; if she became abrasive, he would have an excuse to turn her away. She was determined to remain calm and reasonably congenial in order to keep the door open between them.

But she could not sit still and control her temper at the same time. She needed to work off some of the energy of anger that was overcharging her batteries. She pushed her chair back, got up, and paced as she responded to him: “No, that's exactly what I don't want to be. I don't want to be your chronicler, intrepid girl reporter. I'm sick of journalism.” Succinctly, she told him why. “I don't want to be your swooning admirer, either, or that well-meaning but bumbling gal who gets herself in trouble all the time and has to rely on you to save her from the evil clutches of Lex Luthor. Something amazing is happening here, and I want to be part of it. It's also dangerous, yeah, but I still want to be a part of it, because what you're doing is so … so meaningful. I want to contribute any way I can, do something more worthwhile with my life than I've done so far.”

“Do-gooders are usually so full of themselves, so unconsciously arrogant, they do more damage than good,” he said.

“I'm not a do-gooder. That's not how I see myself. I'm not at all interested in being praised for my generosity and self-sacrifice. I don't need to feel morally superior. Just useful.”

“The world is full of do-gooders,” he said, refusing to relent. “If I needed an assistant, which I don't, why would I choose you over all the other do-gooders out there?”

He was an impossible man. She wanted to smack him.

Instead she kept moving back and forth as she said, “Yesterday, when I crawled back into the plane for that little boy, for Norby, I just … well, I amazed myself. I didn't know I had anything like that in me. I wasn't brave, I was scared to death the whole time, but I got him out of there, and I never felt better about myself.”

“You like the way people look at you when they know you're a hero,” he said flatly.

She shook her head. “No, that's not it. Aside from one rescue worker, no one knew I'd pulled Norby out of there. I liked the way I looked at me after I'd done it, that's all.”