LITMIR.BIZ

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She stumbled down the steps, staggering into the front yard, where neatly groomed flower beds were beginning to wither and fry. She waved her arms and tried to call out for help, but her lungs seized up into a harsh paroxysm of coughing. She could hear screaming over the roar of the blaze, knowing it was the sound of her cousin, her best friend, roasting alive.

      “Down here! Help me! There are people inside! Help me!”

      One of the smoke wreathed figures on the roof began to turn.

      Melody’s legs buckled. She went down on hands and knees, dizzy, gasping, sobbing. Through the grit filming her vision, she could see the forest on fire. As she swayed, fighting to stay conscious, she noticed something moving toward her from the back of the heavily timbered hillside, up between the evenly spaced tree trunks. It whirled to the edge of the trees and there it stopped, a ball of fire that took on a humanlike form with arms and head above the swirl of flames. It made a sound that raised the singed hair on the back of her neck, a sound like a woman screaming. The fire devil danced wildly before her horrified gaze, a frenzied dervish, then fell apart among the flames.

      And that was the last thing Melody Parrish remembered.

      Chapter 1

      “What the hell was that? Mel, what’s going on up there?”

      “Nothing. Be down in ten. Everything’s under control.”

      Five minutes ago she wouldn’t have been lying.

      Jimmy Doolittle once supposedly said there was no good reason to be flying near thunderstorms in peacetime. But then Jimmy had never fought against a lightning storm in a helicopter by dropping water from a Bambi Bucket.

      She’d been in the air for five straight hours, swooping down through a double rainbow only once to take on fifty gallons of Jet A fuel. Thunderheads continued to gather mass in the surrounding quadrants, making it harder to dodge around the clouds. Rain battered against her windshield as the ride grew bumpy. When the call came to pull back, she ignored it, shifting her headphones from her ears to ring about her neck. And she kept working, beating back the flames one hundred gallons at a time. Wind swirled around the Long Ranger, hitting her from every possible direction as she went down for another dip. She’d taken the front door off for the water drop and leaves were blowing around in the cockpit. After putting in some big power changes to maintain altitude, she had started to worry. But she didn’t secondguess her decision to stay. There was no way she’d let the fire beat her.

      She’d stayed in the air as darkness gathered. Knowing she had to be on the ground by 8:55 p.m. or face the wrath of the Bureau of Land Management safety gods, again, she dismissed the terse order to call it a night. She had until thirty minutes past sunset to make every second count. Then it was Miller time, not before. With position and instrument lights on, she followed her GPS heading. She was on the radio to her crew chief when halfway up the canyon, a thousand feet above the ground, at seventy-five-percent torque and ninety knots, she smacked into a solid wall of air.

      The impact threw her into her shoulder straps. She heard a loud thump followed by the whine of rotor RPM decaying. Thinking it was engine failure, she lowered the collective while a million things ran through her mind. Should she turn the routine call into one of distress? Start emergency procedures? Was she going down? But then the rotor RPM came back and with a gust of relief, she realized she was still in control. Elated to get through what left too many aircraft looking like confetti, she sped on to Lake View, where the ground had never felt better.

      With the blades still making a lazy circle overhead, she hopped out of the cockpit to toss her helmet to the older man waiting there.

      “That was close,” she told her uncle as they both ducked low to trot out of the rotor wind. “I must have hit a micro burst or wind sheer. Bam. Like a brick wall. Make sure you give her a good once-over before we go up again to see that nothing was rattled loose.”

      “I can tell you what’s rattled loose,” came another angry voice. “Your brain, that’s what. What the hell were you doing up there, Mel?”

      Taking a breath to maintain her calm, Mel turned to face Quinn Naylor, her boss and long-ago, one-night lover, with a disarming smile. “I call it flying, Quinn.”

      “By the seat of your tight pants,” he shouted back at her, not in the least appeased by her levity. “I call it reckless. I thought I made myself clear when I brought you in on this gig. There’s no room in the air for any John or Jane Wayne heroics. That’s not how I run my show.”

      “I was getting the job done,” she yelled back at him, giving up on civility to go toe-to-toe on the tarmac. She was an impressive five-ten in her La Sportiva boots, but he had a good five inches of tightly compacted fury on her.

      “Not with my crew. Not anymore. Go home, Mel. I’m pulling your ticket.”

      Too angry to feel shock or distress, she pushed into his face with an aggressive snarl. “Take your crew and shove it. I’ll catch another ride.”

      “No, you won’t.”

      The flat, brutal way he said that finally cut through her arrogant pose. She knew a moment of reassessing regret, but it was seconds too late to stop the rest of his decree.

      “No one’s going to call you up, not even when the only thing they have left to throw at the fire is spit. You’re a menace up there, Mel. You’re dangerous and you’re unreliable, just like your old man.”

      Then, in a soft voice that was somehow so much worse than his screaming of minutes ago, he repeated, “Go home, Mel. There’s nothing for you here.”

      She turned away from him, furious, frightened and too prideful to let him, of all people, see it. “Thanks for nothing, Quinn.” She didn’t need charity from the likes of Quinn Naylor. And she didn’t need to invest heart and soul where she wasn’t appreciated. She gripped her uncle’s arm and tugged hard. “Come on, Charley. Let’s go.”

      As she stalked away, her reluctant crew chief uncle in tow, Quinn yelled after them, “Tell Karen hello for me.”

      “I’ll do that, Quinn,” Charley agreed affably and was almost pulled off his feet for his troubles.

      As she stuffed her few belongings into her duffel, the magnitude of what had just happened settled in deep and dire. She paused, leaning on her palms on the edge of the bed, panic swelling inside until her head ached with it. Until her eyes swam with it. What if he was true to his word? What if he got her blackballed from doing contract work in this, the height of fire season? When she was counting so desperately on the money to keep their business afloat? To keep them afloat.

      What had she done?

      “Don’t worry, Mellie.” Her uncle’s big hand fell warm and comforting on her shoulder. “You and Quinn just always seem to rub each other the wrong way, but I can’t believe he’d turn his back on our friendship.”

      “I hope you’re right, Charley.” For all their sakes.

      But he wasn’t. The next morning proved Quinn Naylor a man of his word. There was no work to be found, no crew that would have her, even with pilots scarce and long hours looming. She had every door politely but firmly closed in her face until all that was left was a disgraced retreat. She wouldn’t go begging. No matter how bad things got. If that was what Naylor was hoping for, he could wait until this particular hell froze over.

      “We’ll get by,” Charley vowed with his eternal optimism. But he wasn’t the one paying the bills. He wasn’t the one writing the checks, hoping the bank would clear them. He wasn’t the one looking over the long list of debts owed, dividing them into piles of can-wait, not-yet, and last-call. They needed to make repairs. They needed to pay their insurance premium. And it would be nice to have something in the refrigerator other than beer and tortillas.

      “We’ll find a way,” she assured him with a confidence she was far from feeling.

      She wasn’t one for belief in miracles. Especially when she opened the door

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