Smoke Season

CHAPTER 24

True turned off the highway onto the river road, flashing the rapid tag at the surprised search-and-rescue volunteer assigned as gatekeeper at the junction. Not waiting for his official permission to proceed—probably a relief to them both—she now strained through the windshield in an attempt to make out the elbow-bend turn that indicated she was within yards of her own long driveway. The usually familiar route swam before her eyes like a moonscape today; she could barely make out her neighbors’ properties, the familiar sight of the Joneses’ weathered barn completely obscured, the Juarezes’ horse pasture a flat gray expanse. As anticipated, the river road was barred entirely to traffic beyond, and as she made the turn toward her property instead, she tried Mel on her phone while she still had a signal. She doubted she’d pick up while in the field, but the sat phone was a luxury True only had on the river, and once she passed the final cell tower near Buck Peak, service would be nonexistent. When her call went to voicemail after the first ring, she told herself she’d worry about trying to rendezvous with Mel after getting to the Outsider .

The first raindrops hit her windshield just as she made her way up her drive, and the sound of them on the glass left her suddenly giddy with relief. By the time she was in sight of the canvas-dome rooftop of her yurt, however, the rain had already ceased, and a much less welcome sound boomed in the distance: thunder.

Why couldn’t they catch a break? She was closer to the base of Flatiron than she’d been in two days, and the smoke mushroomed here, just over the ridgeline, below which a ring of flame glowed orange. Gone was the murky ambiguity of a hazy sky or even thick-as-soup smoke. True was now treated to a clarity she’d never asked for.

She wrenched open her truck door and leaped into forward motion, any intention to check out the situation at the Fallows property taking a back seat to preserving her own place. Douse the roof, she told herself. Mow the field. She wouldn’t waste time attempting the latter, not if she hoped to somehow connect with Mel, but she made her way blindly to the only spigot she’d already installed next to her herb and vegetable garden and cranked the water on. Squinting into the bright demarcation between flame and cloud, she directed the hose onto her roof and sprayed full blast.

Lightning.

Just as Mel had feared. And only two seconds later came the answering rumble of thunder. She craned her neck to scan the sky, but where she should have seen the quick, telltale flash, she glimpsed only a brief, dull glow of white light.

Which meant one thing.

“Shit,” Lewis said, confirming her fears. He threw his gloves to the ground in frustration and fear and probably half a dozen other emotions he couldn’t name. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?” he asked in the direction of the sky.

“What?” Ryan asked hollowly from the water station, his Dixie cup pausing halfway to his lips.

Sly answered him. “We’re in for that firestorm, kid.”

Ryan’s jaw dropped, though Deklan didn’t even lift his head from where he’d been sitting, uncharacteristically quiet, in the background. Mel waved him over, offering him a wet Buff for his head.

“Because of those pyro-whatever clouds?” Ryan asked. “What does that mean?”

“It means this motherfucker has just created its own wind system,” Lewis said, bending and swiping his gloves back out of the dirt.

“Which will produce more lightning, which in turn could set additional fires,” Mel added flatly. The desperate roller coaster of events in the Wonderland pocket, followed by the sharp drop of horror upon realizing just how close she’d come to losing a crew member, let alone her professional reputation, left her every bit as wrung out, emotionally and physically, as Deklan.

And the hits just kept coming. This weather system would almost certainly generate stronger winds, which would only fan the fires and make them hotter, though she saw no point in saying so. But because Ryan still looked lost, she added, “Nature hates a vacuum.” She looked out over the untouched forest to the northeast. “Empty spaces don’t stay empty for long.”

They all seemed to take a moment of silence as if by mutual agreement, or simply shell-shocked numbness, and more than one of them jumped when one of the vehicle radios crackled to life. “Trailblazers to Carbon Rural 1, come in.”

One of the hand crews. Lewis answered, but they were all privy to the update transferred over the airwaves.

The horrible pop Mel had heard over an hour ago from the road? It had been the sound of a back swell. The fire that had been steadily consuming its way west down the river corridor had doubled back on itself in a sudden shift of wind, and like a sucking tide, it now gained volume as it licked its way right back in the direction it had come.

“Could this shitty day get any worse?” Lewis growled.

It seemed it could. Lacking fuel in the acreage it had just consumed, the hotshot crew reported, the fire slowed briefly where the blackened forest floor still glowed orange, but had quickly found new ground, where it now threatened, impossible though it seemed, the Outlaw’s southern bank. Closer to all the crisscrossing Forest Service roads and homesteads in the Wild and Scenic section between here and town. Home to True. Please, Mel thought again. Don’t let her be at the Outsider.

It was already her fault Deklan had been placed in danger, and it would be her fault if True was out here somewhere, exposed to this fire that was now out of control. Mel longed to confirm her location, but there was no time to dig her personal cell phone out of her pack. No time to process what she should do next, no time for anything.

“We’re at mayday level here in the Wild and Scenic,” the Trailblazer rep told them.

In other words, give up the ghost. The various interagency and independent ground-pounder crews loaded up all around Mel in a mad scramble, sirens on a low pulse, lights already flashing. Their orders: beat the blaze back to town to join the hand crews in holding the line. So much for going on the offense. Everyone was behind the curve now. It wasn’t just Mel chasing the tail end of an agenda that had run away from her.

The orders for her own Carbon Rural team came in from White, though on the shared radio line instead of to Mel’s walkie directly: retreat and oversee search and rescue in doubling the efforts on evacs and traffic control.

Such as it was. Mel knew firsthand: the sight of flames plus an all-out evac order almost always equaled large-scale panic, even in a community used to brushing ash off their cars every morning of every August. She rallied to carry out the order, only to see Deklan still by the water dispenser, trying to refill his bottle. His movements were at half speed, his fingers clumsy. Still in shock.

“Hey, Lew?” she called out, startling when he answered from directly behind her. “We need to assign Deklan a ride out of the field to be checked out by a medic.”

Lewis nodded. “He can come with us.”

“Us? What do you mean?” Mel had been partnered with Sly on the way out. Lewis had his own vehicle.

Lewis shifted uncomfortably, clearly anxious to get moving and to not have this confrontation, but he looked her in the eye as he said, “White is taking you off active duty.”

“What? Right now?”

Lewis looked apologetic, but also resolute. “Effective immediately.”

Panic seized Mel. She expected fallout following her rogue actions; she deserved nothing less. She knew she would be made accountable, and even welcomed the chance to do so, with an incident report back at the station. Hell, with a full investigation if Hernandez ordered it, when this was all over. But now ?

She still needed to be out here. She needed to be sure True was safe.

“I had to report what happened,” Lewis told her. “You heard Hernandez. White’s field lead, even if he’s remote.”

Mel nodded numbly. This explained White’s use of the shared line. Technically, Lewis was her inferior, but Mel had flipped the script on them both back at Wonderland. He held out his hand for the keys to her rig, and she handed them over on autopilot, amazed at how, even when everything around her was falling utterly apart, small muscle memory remained intact.

Because what recourse remained to her now?

The shame of her actions at Wonderland had soured her stomach for any further attempts at an ammo-can grab, but it didn’t protect her from the full impact of the blow of her defeat at Temple Bar. Without their cut of that cash, Annie’s prescription would run out before her surgery, compromising her eligibility. And of even more imminent concern, Fallows could become violent. She’d failed her daughter, and now she’d fail True. Mel gripped her middle, sure she was about to be sick again.

Lewis drove fast, trying to paint the lines between the shoulders of the road while squinting through the gloom. Mel rode shotgun, trying not to count the continual—if intermittent—flares of lightning or the number of misguided choices she’d made today. Hell, all summer.

She had no cell service right now, but back in town, Mel would head directly up the hill to Highline, just about the only place this fire still wasn’t , and connect with True to warn her off her property. Once she was safely out of the river corridor, they’d make a new plan, Plan C, if they had to. And Plan D after that. She’d tell Sam to pack the SUV, power everything up, and drive Annie all the way up to Seattle, if needed.

She formed her plans without interruption, Lewis’s mouth set in stony determination to carry out his directive to deliver Mel to Carbon. And in a last-minute changeup, Deklan had departed with a hotshot with an ankle injury headed directly for the closest health clinic in Eagle Valley. They passed first one Forest Service road, then another, the silence in the cab unbroken until they passed near the cell tower by Buck Peak and both reached for their phones. Mel didn’t dare try True, not with an audience, and her call to Sam failed. She reminded herself the connection was always spotty on Highline, swallowing a fresh wave of nerves.

Lewis’s call to his family went through on his second try, and the relief in his voice was palpable. The conversation was short.

“Susan okay?” Mel asked, when it ended.

“She made it to her sister’s house in Eugene,” he said curtly. “Jacob will meet her there.”

Their college-aged son. Mel nodded. “Good. Good.”

They were still a good ten miles from town and achingly, frustratingly close to the turn to True’s place when something caught their eye: a solid form emerging from the smoke. Lewis hit the brakes and let loose an expletive: a woman ran along the side of the road, waving at them to stop in a frantic sweep of her arms. Lewis yanked the wheel to skid out into the gravel of the shoulder.

Mel’s seat belt bit into her clavicle at the sudden stop, and the woman was at her window before she could even roll it down. “What’s happening?” the woman shouted. “Is it close?”

“Level 3,” Lewis shouted at her. “Didn’t you get the alerts?”

The woman shook her head and said, “Not out here. Just have a landline.”

“Do you have a vehicle ready to go?” Lewis asked her, and the woman nodded. “Follow behind then!”

“But my neighbors,” she shouted back. “They’re trying to round up their horses. And the farms further back ... I don’t even know if they realize ...” She trailed off, her face contorted in a show of anxiety.

“We’ll get ’em,” Lewis told her, already on his radio. He waved down a Forest Service truck that had splintered off from the rest of the fire convoy, directing the driver to hang back to guide the woman and her car out. She ran back up the long driveway she’d emerged from, barreling down the road a minute later, her Subaru loaded to the gills, a frantically barking Chihuahua making itself known in the back seat.

Lewis waited until the truck had swung out ahead of the Subaru, lights now flashing at top visibility, then nosed down the dirt road to warn the woman’s neighbors. Mel leaned forward in her seat, not daring to voice her approval for fear that Lewis would second-guess himself and resume their direct course for Carbon.

They crossed paths with two additional families already evacuating, and Lewis gave each a short blip on the siren, an auditory thumbs-up. A third neighbor refused to leave his home—or even open his front door to “the Feds” to discuss the matter when Mel ran up the steps—and a fourth needed help coaxing a wild-eyed mare into a stock trailer before departing in a cloud of dust and smoke.

When they eased back out onto the road, Lewis paused, then swung into the next Forest Service road over with a muttered, “We can’t just not help.”

They swept the road, then the next one over as well, continuing until the occasional rows of mailboxes—sure signs of inhabitance—became fewer and farther between; this deep into the wilderness, the maintained Forest Service roads faded into overgrown logging roads that spiderwebbed into the trees. Before Mel quite realized it, they were just yards from the back acre of True’s place, somewhere through the haze.

“One more detour,” Mel said as they approached an unmarked Y in the road that she recognized. “Please, Lew. It’s my friend’s place. I just need to make sure she’s not there.”

He looked like he might argue, but he swung the wheel anyway, and they lurched to the right, bumping over potholes the size of small boulders. A moment later, the forest opened up onto a small clearing, True’s yurt in the forefront flanked by carefully fenced-in gardens and her pretty stone walkway. As Mel feared it might be, True’s truck idled beside the road, and True herself wielded a hose aimed at the canvas stretched tight over her dwelling. She cursed under her breath, then called out to her.

“True!”

When she turned, the relief on her face slid right into Mel’s soul, washing away her frustration. “I’ve been trying to call your cell!” True said. “Do you have the—” She shut her mouth midsentence, spotting Lewis in the driver’s seat of Mel’s rig. Only the heavy smoke in the air saved her from telegraphing far too much.

“C’mon,” Mel yelled. “Leave the place. It’s time to go!”

True hesitated only a moment more, then cranked off the water. She made to follow them in her truck, but Lewis objected.

“Just jump in with us! Too many evacuees on the road as it is.”

She turned off the engine and pocketed the keys, and they took True’s private drive back to the Y, where Lewis turned back toward the river road and Carbon. Apparently, he was done delaying the inevitable. But before he could make the turn, True stopped him.

“I’m worried there may be some seasonal workers stranded at Fallows’s place,” she said, pointing, as Lewis made a noise of protest. “You know how he can be.”

She looked at Mel, as if still trying to glean the information she needed from her. Mel shook her head, trying to convey that there was no longer any point in trying to connect with Fallows or anyone on his payroll. Now that she’d found True, all she wanted was to get back to Carbon to her family.

But Lewis knew how the Fallowses could be, too; everyone associated with emergency services in Carbon did. “One last sweep,” he decided with a low curse before Mel could argue.

They bumped down the dirt drive to the Fallows property, a drive Mel had never taken. She knew True had been warned away as well. It narrowed rapidly, the overgrown branches of pines and madrones brushing against the truck’s windows as they drove. Brittle leaves made a whooshing noise against the glass. Clearly, the inhabited part of Fallows’s place lay elsewhere on his acreage. She was about to instruct Lewis to execute an awkward three-point-turn just past a dilapidated barn when a flash of metal caught her eye through the grime of the windshield.

Sweat beaded and dripped under the N95 mask she’d yanked on about five miles back as she strained to look closer. It flashed again, and her eye followed the movement to a loose line of barbed wire lifting in the wind. A tangle of blackberry bushes mostly obscured it, and Mel would have dismissed the fence line as abandoned if it wasn’t for the roll of green camouflage netting—the type sold at an Army Navy surplus store—half covering the wire, half in a heap on the ground at its base, clearly blown off by the gusts of hot wind.

“See that?” She pointed, and Lewis nodded.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

They all knew what that camo netting meant: concealment. And concealment could only mean one thing this deep in the Oregon woods: an illegal grow. They’d found the heart of Fallows’s operation.

True hopped out of the truck, so Mel followed her, peering over the half-obscured fence to make out the row of hoop-style greenhouses behind it. Had the smell of smoke not been nearly permanently embedded in her nostrils, she knew that this close to harvest time, the telltale skunky scent of weed would have led her here, if nothing else.

They both paused, surveying the property as thunder continued to rumble in the background of their consciousness. A sagging double-wide trailer sat at the far end of the acreage, at least a couple hundred yards away. Closer, cheap plastic sheeting billowed in the hot wind, and the tromped grass path between them and a dilapidated toolshed suggested frequent use.

“Doubt anyone’s around though,” Lewis said, eyeing the trailer skeptically. He hit the sirens anyway. Grabbing the bullhorn mounted on the passenger side, he bellowed, “Helllooo! Carbon Rural Fire Department! We have evac orders for this residence!”

Nothing.

“Helllooo!” Lewis called again. “Anyone need assistance?”

Only the rush of wind and the routine pop and snap of fire, still just over the ridge, answered his call. “Should we hit the road, then?” he asked.

“I’m just going to check the outbuildings,” True said, already ducking gingerly through the barbed wire, never one to wait for group consensus.

“Hold up!” Mel called. Because what if the property line was booby-trapped? The characters who worked these grows were known for it.

But True was already making her way to the shed, and Lewis still waited by the rig, and so Mel followed with a small wail of frustration, picking each step with care. The outbuilding was closed tight, but one swift kick from Mel’s boot pulled the simple hook-and-eye lock loose from the aging boards of the door with a sharp crack.

“Impressive,” True muttered, blinking into the gloom of the interior.

Mel smelled weed first, the potency in the closed-in space practically knocking her on her ass. It hung from the rafters, out to dry, in large clumps, not yet trimmed. Her first thought: This is a shit ton of dope. Even more than she’d suspected Fallows grew here.

Her second: no one would leave this stash voluntarily.

“Hello?” she called out, as loudly as she could in the smoky air.

True echoed her. “Anyone still here?”

Silence greeted them. Hopefully, whoever had been tasked with guarding this grow had decided their life was worth more than the thousands of cannabis plants the rows of greenhouses must contain, in addition to the endless rows drying in this shed.

Mel turned to leave, only to practically fall on her face as her boot came down hard on a loose floorboard.

True reached for her immediately. “You all right?”

“Yeah, the floor’s just seen better days.” She crouched down, investigating further. “Actually, this board’s not loose. It’s completely unattached.” She tugged.

There was a space below about the size of a manhole. What if someone was hiding down here, afraid to be caught on this acreage? Mel remembered a case just last year when an undocumented immigrant suffocated in a trimming shed not unlike this one when a gas leak brought the fire department to a grow site in the next county over.

True returned to her side, fumbling with her flashlight and pointing it into the darkness below. “Hello!” she called out again.

Silence. But something else, too. A metallic glint in the darkness, revealing the steely gray of a gun shaft. Double shit. Mel sank to her knees, pulling out a 12-gauge, a .22, and a Smith & Wesson rifle ... she wasn’t sure what caliber. Sweeping the light across the dirt below the floor, she checked for anything else and, easing to her belly to reach the floor of the hole, yanked an REI duffel out next. Its navy-blue canvas looked almost new.

“Isn’t that just like the duffel Kim described? That her nephew Zack got caught with by that state trooper?” True’s breath tickled the back of Mel’s neck, shallow and a bit panicked, raising goose bumps on Mel’s sweaty skin.

Fuck, it did remind her of that duffel. And along with that reminder came another: Fallows could pin all of this on them just as he had on Zack, if they weren’t careful.

“Mel?” Lewis’s voice cut through her racing thoughts, sending them scattering and bringing both her and True scrambling back to their feet.

“Coming!” Mel yelled.

“Find anything?”

She looked down at the duffel, then at True, then back at the duffel, her gaze narrowing through the smoke until it seemed all she saw was the zipper pull, inviting her to tug it.

She did.

No glint of metal this time. No guns. Just stacks and stacks of green.

And not of the herbal variety.

Cold, hard cash. And far more of it than she and True ever ran on the river.

Mel actually stumbled back from it, like the currency might leap out of the duffel and bite her.

“Oh my God,” True said beside her. “Grab it!” she whispered, then, just as quickly: “No! Don’t touch it! Shit, I don’t know! What should we do?”

Mel had no fucking idea. But she thought of the ammo box still waiting for retrieval at Temple Bar, a lost cause. She thought of Annie, coughing in the smoke. She thought of her best friend, still half hyperventilating beside her, and what it could cost them if they came back to Carbon empty-handed for the second time in two days.

“We’ll bring it to Fallows,” she said.

“As what?” True shook her head emphatically. “Penance or something? We can’t replace what we’ve lost with his own damned stash!”

Shit. That was true. Fuck.

“Hey, guys?” Lewis called again. “Let’s roll out!” He still sounded distant. Hopefully he’d been unwilling to break protocol and leave the fire vehicle.

“We can’t come back empty-handed, either,” Mel whispered to True. Annie couldn’t afford it.

True nodded.

They both looked back down at that money, just sitting there in the open duffel bag.

Fallows’s money, which could very easily replace what they’d lost on the river, becoming presurgical-prescription money in a serendipitous act of alchemy.

“What should we do?”

Once, during fire-science training, Mel’s supervisor had said there would come a time in every firefighter’s career when training protocols took a back seat to good old-fashioned survival instinct.

“We do what we have to do,” she decided, reaching into the duffel and stuffing two thick stacks of bills into her go bag, and tossing the duffel back into the hole. True looked like she might have more to say, but after just a moment’s beat of hesitation, she nodded, kicking the floorboard back into place.

They slid back out between the shed doors and hurried past the greenhouses, trying to see through the sudden onslaught of tears at the backs of their eyes. Mel’s stomach was in knots, her brain blaring a warning of Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea . Had she learned nothing in the past twenty-four hours? She already faced disciplinary review for lives she had put at stake. How many more laws was she going to break, trying to cover her own mistakes?

But another, more visceral voice drowned out the litany of these thoughts.

Woman up, she told herself harshly.

This was for Annie.