Cold Fire

Sons edition/January 1991
    Published simultaneously in Canada
    Berkley edition/December 1991
     
    All rights reserved.
    Copyright © 1991 by Nkui, Inc.
    Cover illustration © 1991 by Don Brautigam.
    This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by
    mimeograph or any other means, without permission.
    For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
    200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
     
    ISBN: 0-425-13071-1
     
    A BERKLEY BOOK® TM 757,375
    Berkley Books are published by
    The Berkley Publishing Group,
    200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
    The name "BERKLEY" and the "B" logo are trademarks belonging to Berkley Publishing Corporation.
     
    PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
    10 987654321

 
     
     
     
     
    To Nick and Vicky Page,
who know how to be
good neighbors and friends
—if they would only try.
&
Dick and Pat Karlan, who are among the few
in "Hollywood"
who own their souls
—and always will.
     
    My life is better for
having known you all.
Weirder, but better!

Part One
THE FRIEND
    In the real world
as in dreams,
nothing is quite
what it seems.
    —THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS
     
    Life without meaning
cannot be borne.
We find a mission
to which we're sworn
—or answer the call
of Death's dark horn.
Without a gleaning
of purpose in life,
we have no vision,
we live in strife,
—or let blood fall
on a suicide knife.
    —THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS

AUGUST 12
1
    Even before the events in the supermarket, Jim Ironheart should have known trouble was coming. During the night he dreamed of being pursued across a field by a flock of large blackbirds that shrieked around him in a turbulent flapping of wings and tore at him with hooked beaks as precision-honed as surgical scalpels. When he woke and was unable to breathe, he shuffled onto the balcony in his pajama bottoms to get some fresh air. But at nine-thirty in the morning, the temperature, already ninety degrees, only contributed to the sense of suffocation with which he had awakened.
    A long shower and a shave refreshed him.
    The refrigerator contained only part of a moldering Sara Lee cake. It resembled a laboratory culture of some new, exquisitely virulent strain of botulinus. He could either starve or go out into the furnace heat.
    The August day was so torrid that birds, beyond the boundaries of bad dreams, preferred the bowers of the trees to the sun-scorched open spaces of the southern California sky; they sat silently in their leafy shelters, chirruping rarely and without enthusiasm. Dogs padded cat-quick along sidewalks as hot as griddles. No man, woman or child paused to see if an egg would fry on the concrete, taking it as a matter of faith.
    After eating a light breakfast at an umbrella-shaded table on the patio of a seaside cafe in Laguna Beach, he was enervated again and sheathed in a dew of perspiration. It was one of those rare occasions when the Pacific could not produce even a dependable mild breeze.
    From there he went to the supermarket, which at first seemed to be a sanctuary. He was wearing only white cotton slacks and a blue T-shirt, so the air-conditioning and the chill currents rising off the refrigerated display cases were refreshing.
    He was in the cookie department, comparing the ingredients in fudge macaroons to those in pineapple-coconut-almond bars, trying to decide which was the lesser dietary sin, when the fit hit him. On the scale of such things, it was not much of a fit—no convulsions, no violent muscle contractions, no sudden rivers of sweat, no speaking in strange tongues. He just abruptly turned to a woman shopper next to him and said, “Life line.”
    She was about thirty, wearing shorts and a halter top, good-looking enough to have experienced a wearying array of come-ons from men, so perhaps she thought he was making a pass at her. She gave him a guarded look. “Excuse me?”
    Flow with it, he told himself. Don't be afraid.
    He began to shudder, not because of the air-conditioning but because a series of inner chills swam through him, like a wriggling school of eels. All the strength went out of his hands, and he dropped the packages of cookies.
    Embarrassed but unable to control himself, he repeated: “Life line.”
    “I don't understand,” the woman said.
    Although this had happened to him nine times before, he said, “Neither do I.”
    She clutched a box of vanilla wafers as though she might throw it in his face and run if she decided he was a walking headline (BERSERK