Cold Fire

“Sure,” Tooley said.

“What is it?” '

“The way you asked, I thought you knew. Private elementary school over on the west side.”

Jim's heart was beating hard and fast. “Take me there.”

Frowning at him in the rearview mirror, Tooley said, “Something wrong?”

“I have to be there.”

Tooley braked at a red traffic light. He looked over his shoulder. “What's wrong?”

“I just have to be there,” Jim said sharply, frustratedly.

“Sure, no sweat.”

Fear had rippled through Jim ever since he had spoken the words “life line” to the woman in the supermarket more than four hours ago. Now those ripples swelled into dark waves that carried him toward McAlbury School. With an overwhelming sense of urgency that he could not explain, he said, “I have to be there in fifteen minutes!”

“Why didn't you mention it earlier?”

He wanted to say, I didn't know earlier. Instead he said, “Can you get me there in time?”

“It'll be tight.”

“I'll pay triple the meter.”

“Triple?”

“If you make it in time,” he said, withdrawing his wallet from his pocket. He extracted a hundred-dollar bill and thrust it at Tooley. “Take this in advance.”

“It's that important?”

“It's life and death.”

Tooley gave him a look that said: What — are you nuts?

“The light just changed,” Jim told him. “Let's move!”

Although Tooley's skeptical frown deepened, he faced front again, hung a left turn at the intersection, and tramped on the accelerator.

Jim kept glancing at his watch all the way, and they arrived at the school with only three minutes to spare. He tossed another bill at Tooley, paying even more than three times the meter, pulled open the door, and scrambled out with his suitcase.

Tooley leaned through his open window. “You want me to wait? ”

Slamming the door, Jim said, “No. No, thanks. You can go.”

He turned away and heard the taxi drive off as he anxiously studied the front of McAlbury School. The building was actually a rambling white Colonial house with a deep front porch, onto which had been added two single-story wings to provide more classrooms. It was shaded by Douglas firs and huge old sycamores. With its lawn and playground, it occupied the entire length of that short block.

In the house part of the structure directly in front of him, kids were coming out of the double doors, onto the porch, and down the steps. Laughing and chattering, carrying books and large drawing tablets and bright lunchboxes decorated with cartoon characters, they approached him along the school walk, passed through the open gate in the spearpoint iron fence, and turned either uphill or down, moving away from him in both directions.

Two minutes left. He didn't have to look at his watch. His heart was pounding two beats for every second, and he knew the time as surely as if he had been a clock.

Sunshine, filtered through the interstices of the arching trees, fell in delicate patterns across the scene and the people in it, as if everything had been draped over with an enormous piece of gossamer lacework stitched from golden thread. That netlike ornamental fabric of light seemed to shimmer in time to the rising and falling music of the children's shouts and laughter, and the moment should have been peaceful, idyllic.

But Death was coming.

Suddenly he knew that Death was coming for one of the children, not for any of the three teachers standing on the porch, just for one child. Not a big catastrophe, not an explosion or fire or a falling airplane that would wipe out a dozen of them. Just one, a small tragedy. But which one?

Jim refocused his attention from the scene to the players in it, studying the children as they approached him, seeking the mark of imminent death on one of their fresh young faces. But they all looked as if they would live forever.

“Which one?” he said aloud, speaking neither to himself nor to the children but to…. Well, he supposed he was speaking to God. “Which one?”

Some kids went uphill toward the crosswalks at that intersection, and others headed downhill toward the opposite end of the block. In both directions, women crossing guards in bright-orange safety vests, holding big red paddlelike “stop” signs, had begun to shepherd their charges across the streets in small groups. No moving cars or trucks were in sight, so even without the crossing guards there seemed to be little threat from traffic.

One and a half minutes.

Jim scrutinized two yellow vans parked at the curb downhill from him. For the most part, McAlbury seemed to be a neighborhood school, where kids walked to and from their homes, but a few were boarding the vans. The two drivers stood by the doors, smiling and joking with the ebullient, energetic passengers. None of the kids boarding the vans seemed doomed, and the cheery yellow vehicles did not strike him as morgue wagons in bright dress.

But Death was nearer.

It was almost among them.

An ominous change had stolen over the scene, not in reality but in Jim's perception of it. He was now less aware of the golden lacework of light than he was of the shadows within that bright filigree: small shadows the shape of leaves or bristling clusters of evergreen needles; larger shadows the shape of tree trunks or branches; geometric bars of shade from the iron rails of the spearpoint fence. Each blot of darkness seemed to be a potential doorway through which Death might arrive.

One minute.

Frantic, he hurried downhill several steps, among the children, drawing puzzled looks as he glanced at one then another of them, not sure what sort of sign he was searching for, the small suitcase banging against his leg.

Fifty seconds.

The shadows seemed to be growing, spreading, melting together all around Jim.

He stopped, turned, and peered uphill toward the end of the block, where the crossing guard was standing in the intersection, holding up her red “stop” sign, using her free hand to motion the kids across. Five of them were in the street. Another half dozen were approaching the corner and soon to cross.

One of the drivers at the nearby school vans said, “Mister, is something wrong?”

Forty seconds.

Jim dropped the suitcase and ran uphill toward the intersection, still uncertain about what was going to happen and which child was at risk. He was pushed in that direction by the same invisible hand that had made him pack a suitcase and fly to Portland. Startled kids moved out of his way.

At the periphery of his vision, everything had become ink-black. He was aware only of what lay directly ahead of him. From one curb to the other, the intersection appeared to be a scene revealed by a spotlight on an otherwise night-dark stage.

Half a minute.

Two women looked up in surprise and failed to get out of his way fast enough. He tried to dodge them, but he brushed against a blonde in a summery white dress, almost knocking her down. He kept going because he could feel Death among them now, a cold presence.

He reached the intersection, stepped off the curb, and stopped. Four kids in the street. One was going to be a victim. But which of the four? And a victim of what?

Twenty seconds.

The crossing guard was staring at him.

All but one of the kids were nearing the curb, and Jim sensed that the sidewalks were safe territory. The