Cold Fire

Quonset hut perched on a cement-block foundation, in front of which stood two dusty cars. Though the building had been painted several times during its history, no brush had touched it in many years. Its numerous coats of paint were worn in a random patchwork and marked by liberal encrustations of rust, which created an unintended camouflage finish. The cracked blacktop in front of the place was pitted with potholes that had been filled with loose gravel, and the surrounding lot bristled with dry grass and weeds.
    “I went to school with Ned Zacca,” Jim said. “His dad, Vernon, had the garage then. It was never a business to make a man rich, but it looked better than it does now.”
    The big airplane hangar-style roll-aside doors were open, and the interior was clotted with shadows. The rear bumper of an old Chevy gleamed dully in the gloom. Although the garage was seedy, nothing about it suggested danger. Yet the queerest chill came over Holly as she peered through the hangar doors into the murky depths of the place.
    “Ned was one mean sonofabitch, the school bully,” Jim said. “He could sure make a kid's life hell when he wanted to. I lived in fear of him.”
    “Too bad you didn't know Tae Kwon Do then, you could've kicked his ass.”
    He did not smile, just stared past her at the garage. His expression was odd and unsettling. “Yeah. Too bad.”
    When she glanced at the building again, she saw a man in jeans and a T-shirt step out of the deepest darkness into gray half-light, moving slowly past the back of the Chevy, wiping his hands on a rag. He was just beyond the infall of sunshine, so she could not see what he looked like. In a few steps he rounded the car, fading into the gloom again, hardly more material than a specter glimpsed in a moonlit graveyard.
    Somehow, she knew the ghostly presence in the Quonset was Ned Zacca. Curiously, though he had been a menacing figure to Jim, not to her, Holly felt her stomach twist and her palms turn damp.
    Then Jim touched the accelerator, and they were past the garage, heading back into town.
    “What did Zacca do to you exactly?”
    “Anything he could think of. He was a regular little sadist. He's been in prison a couple of times since those days. But I figured he was back.”
    “Figured? How?”
    He shrugged. “I just sensed it. Besides, he's one of those guys who never gets caught at the big stuff. Devil's luck. He might do a fall every great once in a while, but always for something small-time. He's dumb but he's clever.”
    “Why'd you want to go there?”
    “Memories.”
    “Most people, when they want a little nostalgia, they're only interested in good memories.”
    Jim did not reply to that. Even before they arrived in Svenborg, he had settled into himself like a turtle gradually withdrawing into its shell. Now he was almost back into that brooding, distant mood in which she had found him yesterday afternoon.
    The brief tour had given her not a comfortable feeling of small-town security and friendliness, but a sense of being cut off at the back end of nowhere. She was still in California, the most populous state in the union, not much farther than sixty miles from the city of Santa Barbara. Svenborg had almost two thousand people of its own, which made it bigger than a lot of gas-and-graze stops along the interstate highways. The sense of isolation was more psychological than real, but it hovered over her.
    Jim stopped at The Central, a prospering operation that included a service station selling generic gasoline, a small sporting-goods outlet peddling supplies to fishermen and campers, and a well-stocked convenience store with groceries, beer, and wine. Holly filled the Ford's tank at the self-service pump, then joined Jim in the sporting-goods shop.
    The store was cluttered with merchandise, which overflowed the shelves, hung from the ceiling, and was stacked on the linoleum floor. Wall-eyed fishing lures dangled on a rack near the door. The air smelled of rubber boots.
    At the check-out counter, Jim already had piled up a pair of high-quality summerweight sleeping bags with air-mattress liners, a Coleman lantern with a can of fuel, a sizable Thermos ice chest, two big flashlights, packages of batteries for the flashes, and a few other items. At the cash register, farther along the counter from Jim, a bearded man in spectacles as thick as bottle glass was ringing up the sale, and Jim was waiting with an open wallet.
    “I thought we were going to