Hotshots Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m not going back on the line anyway. I’d be too cautious now to be any good.”
    â€œWhat are you going to do?”
    â€œGo back to school.” I could see the appeal of academia to someone who’d been through what he had.
    â€œComputers?” He had the mind for it.
    â€œEngineering.”
    â€œRamona gave me Joni’s boots and some pictures of the hotshots. She asked me to pass them on to the Barkers,” I said.
    â€œIs the picture with the snakes in there?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œI’d give them the other stuff but not that picture. It makes people uneasy. We were on a trail crew that day. Joni saw the snakes and waded in. A lot of guys on the crew wouldn’t have done that. She was a strong woman. I would have trusted my life with her. I did trust my life to her, and to Ramona, too.” His hand was sliding across the page, filling in the blanks, maybe, of what he’d already done.
    â€œNancy Barker seems to want to avoid Ramona. Do you know why?”
    He shrugged. “It could be because Ramona survived the fire and Joni didn’t. Maybe she’s blaming Ramona, but she shouldn’t.”
    â€œDo you want the picture of Joni?” I asked. “If you don’t, I might like to keep it until this case is settled.”
    â€œKeep it,” he said. “I’ve got plenty of pictures of Joni.”
    â€œWhat was she like?”
    â€œJoni? She was full of life, full of fun. She loved fire fighting.”
    â€œWhat did she love about it?”
    â€œThe excitement, the danger, the adrenaline rush. Firefighters are basically adrenaline junkies. Joni was very strong and athletic. We were mogul skiers in the winter. Did you know that?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI’ve got a video here of us skiing last winter at Breckenridge. Would you like to see it? It’ll give you a feeling for the kind of person Joni was.”
    â€œOkay,” I said.
    He got up and pulled the curtains tighter, blocking out the rogue ray of sunshine that had annoyed him. He inserted the video and the TV turned the brilliant blue of a western sky until the screen filled with the whiteness of snow. After I stared at it for a minute, bumps took shape and I could see that it was a field of moguls. Mike would probably know the exact pitch of the slope; all I knew was that it was elevator-shaft steep. The video was being shot from the chairlift. Two specks showed up at the top of the screen and began maneuvering their way down the mountain while the camera moved toward them. Mike plowed through the moguls with his head down and his shoulders hunched, strong, steady, determined as a buffalo. Joni was an antelope: light, graceful, joy in motion. She careened off the moguls and got to the bottom a few seconds ahead of Mike.
    A camera at the bottom of the hill closed in on them. Mike had bent over and was adjusting something on his boot. Joni took off her helmet, shook her blond hair loose, and smiled triumphantly for the world and the camera. They were far from the grubbiness of fire, but not that far from the spirit of fire fighting. Adrenaline is adrenaline. Power is power. The younger and more promising the person, the sadder the death, but some deaths go beyond sadness into the tragedy realm. Joni must have had faults. She might have been mean, irritable, or arrogant, but she’d had the kind of radiance that could turn her life into legend and her death into myth. People would be remembering Joni Barker and the Duke City Hotshots for a long, long time.
    Mike was staring at his pad and tears were watering his scorched hands. I got up, took the remote from the table, and snapped the video off. When I reached over his shoulder to grab the remote, I saw that the pad he’d been drawing on contained graph paper. On a page divided into tiny squares, he’d been drawing trees: deciduous trees, evergreen trees, standing trees, fallen trees. His voice became