Firestarter

expanse of green lawn and manicured flowerbeds believed that the thunderheads were telling the truth-not the groundsmen astride their Lawnboys, not the woman who was in charge of computer subsections A-E (as well as the computer-room coffee-maker), who took one of the horses and cantered it lovingly along the well-kept bridle paths during her lunch hour, certainly not Cap, who ate a hero sandwich in his air-conditioned office and went right on working on next year’s budget, oblivious of the heat and humidity outside.

Perhaps the only person in the Shop compound at Longmont that day who thought it really would rain was the man who had been named for the rain. The big Indian drove in at twelve-thirty, prefatory to clocking in at one. His bones, and the shredded hollow where his left eye had been, ached when rain was on the way.

He was driving a very old and rusty Thunderbird with a D parking sticker on the windshield. He was dressed in orderly’s whites. Before he got out of the car, he put on an embroidered eyepatch. He wore it when he was on the job, because of the girl, but only then. It bothered him. It was only the patch that made him think about the lost eye.

There were four parking lots inside the Shop enclave. Rainbird’s personal car, a new yellow Cadillac that ran on diesel fuel, bore an A sticker. A was the VIP parking lot, located beneath the southernmost of the two plantation houses: An underground tunnel-and-elevator system connected the VIP lot directly with the computer room, the situation rooms, the extensive Shop library and newsrooms, and, of course, the Visitors” Quarters-a nondescript name for the complex of laboratories and nearby apartments where Charlie McGee and her father were being kept.

The B lot was for second-echelon employees; it was farther away. C parking lot was for secretaries, mechanics, electricians, and the like; it was farther away still. D lot was for unskilled employees-spear carriers, in Rainbird’s own terms. It was almost half a mile from anything, and always filled with a sad and motley collection of Detroit rolling iron only a step and a half away from the weekly demo derby at Jackson Plains, the nearby stock-car track.

The bureaucratic pecking order, Rainbird thought, locking his wreck of a T-bird and tilting his head up to look at the thunderheads. The storm was coming. It would arrive around four o'clock, he reckoned.

He began to walk toward the small Quonset but set tastefully back in a grove of sugarpines where low-level employees, Class Vs and VIs, punched in. His whites flapped around him. A gardener putted by him on one of the Groundskeeping Department’s dozen or so riding lawnmowers. A gaily colored sun parasol floated above the seat. The gardener took no notice of Rainbird; that was also part of the bureaucratic pecking order. If you were a Class IV, a Class V became invisible. Not even Rainbird’s half-destroyed face caused much comment; like every other government agency, the Shop hired enough vets to look good. Max Factor had little to teach the U.S. government about good cosmetics. And it went without saying that a vet with some visible disability-a prosthetic arm, a motorized wheelchair, a scrambled face-was worth any three vets who looked “normal.” Rainbird knew men who had had their minds and spirits mauled as badly as his own face had been in the Vietnam traveling house party, men who would have been happy to find a job clerking in a Piggly Wiggly. But they just didn’t look right. Not that Rainbird had any sympathy for them. In fact, he found the whole thing rather funny.

Nor was he recognized by any of the people he now worked with as a former Shop agent and hatchet man; he would have sworn to that. Until seventeen weeks ago, he had been only a shadow shape behind his yellow Cadillac’s polarized windshield, just someone else with an A clearance.

“Don’t you think you’re going overboard with this a bit?” Cap had asked. “The girl has no connection with the gardeners or the steno pool. You’re only onstage with her.”

Rainbird shook his head. “All it would take is a single slip. One person to mention, just casually, that the friendly orderly with the messed-up face parks his car in the VIP lot and changes to his whites in the executive washroom. What I am trying to build here is a sense of trust, that trust to be based on the idea that we’re both outsiders-both freaks, if you will- buried in the bowels of the KGB’s American branch.”

Cap hadn’t liked that; he didn’t like anyone taking cheap shots at the Shop’s methods, particularly in this case, where the methods were admittedly extreme. “Well, you’re sure doing one hell of a job,” Cap had answered.

And to that there was no satisfactory answer, because in fact, he wasn’t doing a hell of a job. The girl had not done so much as light a match in all the time she had been here. And the same could be said for her father, who had demonstrated not the slightest sign of any mental-domination ability, if the ability still existed within him. More and more they were coming to doubt that it did.

The girl fascinated Rainbird. The first year he had been with the Shop, he had taken a series of courses not to be found in any college curriculum wiretapping, car theft, unobtrusive search, a dozen others. The only one that had engaged Rainbird’s attention fully was the course in safecracking, taught by an aging burglar named G. M. Rammaden. Rammaden had been sprung from an institution in Atlanta for the specific purpose of teaching this craft to new Shop agents. He was supposed to be the best in the business, and Rainbird would not have doubted that, although he believed that by now he was almost Rammaden’s equal.

Rammaden, who had died three years ago (Rainbird had sent flowers to his funeral-what a comedy life could sometimes be!), had taught him about Skidmore locks, about square-door boxes, about secondary locking devices that can permanently freeze a safe’s tumblers if the combination dial is knocked off with a hammer and chisel; he had taught them about barrel boxes, and niggerheads, and cutting keys; the many uses of graphite; how you could take a key impression with a Brillo pad and how to make bathtub nitroglycerine and how to peel a box from the back, one layer at a time.

Rainbird had responded to G. M. Rammaden with a cold and cynical enthusiasm.

Rammaden had said once that safes were like women: given the tools and the time, any box could be opened. There were, he said, tough cracks and easy cracks, but no impossible cracks.

This girl was tough.

At first they had had to feed Charlie intravenously just to keep her from starving herself to death. After a while she began to understand that not eating was gaining her nothing but a lot of bruises on the insides of her elbows, and she began to eat, not with any enthusiasm but simply because using her mouth was less painful.

She read some of the books that were given her-leafed through them, at any rate-and would sometimes turn on the color TV in her room only to turn it off” again a few minutes later. She had watched a local movie presentation of Black Beauty all the way through in June, and she had sat through The Wonderful World of Disney once or twice. That was all. On her weekly reports the phrase “sporadic aphasia” had begun to crop up more and more often.

Rainbird had looked the term up in a medical dictionary and understood it at once-because of his own experiences as Indian and warrior, he understood it perhaps better than the doctors themselves. Sometimes the girl ran out of words. She would simply stand there, not a bit upset, her mouth working soundlessly. And sometimes she would use a totally out- of-context word, apparently without realizing it at all. “I don’t like this dress, I’d rather have the hay one.'. Sometimes she would correct herself absently-I mean the green one”-but more often it would simply pass unnoticed.

According to the dictionary, aphasia was forgetfulness caused by some cerebral disorder. The doctors had immediately begun monkeying with her medication. Orasin was changed to Valium with no appreciable change for the better. Valium and Orasin were tried together, but an unforseen interaction between the two had caused her to cry steadily and monotonously until the dose wore off: A brand-new drug, a combination of tranquilizer and light hallucinogenic, was tried and seemed to help for a while. Then she had begun to stutter and broke out in a light rash. Currently she was back on Orasin, but she was being monitored closely in case the aphasia got worse.

Reams had been written about the girl’s delicate psychological condition and about what the shrinks called her “basic fire conflict,” a fancy way of saying that her father had told her not to and the Shop people were telling her to go ahead… all of it complicated by her guilt over the incident at the Manders farm.

Rainbird bought none of it. It wasn’t the drugs, it wasn’t being locked up and watched constantly, it wasn’t being separated from her father.

She was just tough, that was all.

She had made up her mind somewhere along the line that she wasn’t going to cooperate, no matter what. The end. Toot finnee. The psychiatrists could run around showing her inkblots until the moon was blue, the doctors could play with her medication and mutter in their beards about the difficulty of successfully drugging an eight-year-old girl. The papers could pile up and Cap could rave on.

And Charlie McGee would simply go on toughing it out.

Rainbird sensed it as surely as he sensed the coming of rain this afternoon. And he admired her for it. She had the whole bunch of them chasing their tails, and if it was left up to them they would still be chasing their tails when Thanksgiving and then Christmas rolled around. But they wouldn’t chase their tails forever, and this more than anything worried John Rainbird.

Rammaden, the safecracker, had told an amusing story about two thieves who had broken into a supermarket one Friday night when they knew a snowstorm had kept the Wells Fargo truck from arriving and taking the heavy end-of-the-week receipts to the bank. The safe was a barrel box. They tried to drill out the combination dial with no success. They had tried to peel it but had been totally unable to bend back a corner and get a start. Finally they had blown it. That was a total success. They blew that barrel wide open, so wide open in fact that all the money inside had been totally destroyed. What was left had looked like the shredded money you sometimes see in those novelty pens…

“The point is,” Rammaden had said in his dry and wheezing voice, “those two thieves didn’t beat the safe. The whole game is beating the safe. You don’t beat the safe unless you can take away what was in it in usable condition, you get my point? They overloaded it with soup. They killed the money. They were assholes and the safe beat them.”

Rainbird had got the point.

There were better than sixty college degrees in on this, but it still came down to safecracking. They had tried to drill the girl’s combination with their drugs; they had enough shrinks to field a softball team, and these shrinks were all doing their best to resolve the “basic fire conflict'; and all that particular pile of horseapples boiled down to was that they were trying to peel her from the back.

Rainbird entered the small Quonset hut, took his time card from the rack, and punched in. T. B. Norton, the shift supervisor, looked up from the paperback he was reading.

“No overtime for punching in early, Injun.”

“Yeah?” Rainbird said.

“Yeah.” Norton stared at him challengingly, full of the grim, almost holy assurance that so often goes with petty authority.

Rainbird dropped his eyes and went over to look at the bulletin board. The orderlies” bowling team had won last night. Someone wanted to sell “2 good used washing machines.” An official notice proclaimed that ALL W-I THROUGH W-6 WORKERS MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE LEAVING THIS OFFICE.

“Looks like rain,” he said over his shoulder to Norton.

“Never happen, Injun,” Norton said. “Why don’t you blow? You’re stinking the place up.”

“Sure, boss,” Rainbird said. “Just clockin in.”

“Well next time clock in when you’re spozed to.”

“Sure, boss,” Rainbird said again, going out, sparing one glance at the side of Norton’s pink neck, the soft spot just below the jawbone. Would you have time to scream, boss? Would you have time to scream if I stuck my forefinger through your throat at that spot? Just like a skewer through a piece of steak… boss.

He went back out into the muggy heat. The thunderheads were closer now, moving slowly, bowed down with their weight of rain. It was going to be a hard storm. Thunder muttered, still distant.

The house was close now. Rainbird would go around to the side entrance, what had once been the pantry, and take C elevator down four levels. Today he was supposed to wash and wax all the floors in the girl’s quarters; it would give him a good shot. And it wasn’t that she was unwilling to talk with him; it wasn’t that. It was just that she was always so damned distant. He was trying to peel the box in his own way, and if he could get her to laugh, just once get her to laugh, to share a joke with him at the Shop’s expense, it