Cold Fire

“He was like Batman without the funny clothes,” Thaddeus had told the Daily News reporter. Two weeks prior to that, on June 7, another blue-eyed Jim “just seemed to materialize” on the property of Louis Andretti, twenty-eight, of Corona, California, in time to warn the homeowner not to enter a crawlspace under his house to repair a plumbing leak. “He told me a family of rattlers had settled in there,” Andretti told the reporter. Later, when agents from the county's Vector Control inspected the crawlspace from the perimeter, with the aid of a halogen lamp, they saw not just a nest but “something out of a nightmare,” and eventually extracted forty-one snakes from beneath the structure. “What I don't understand,” Andretti said, “is how that guy knew the rattlers were there, when I live in the house and never had a clue.”
    Now Holly had four linked incidents to add to the rescue of Nicky O'Conner in Boston and Billy Jenkins in Portland, all since the first of June. She typed in new instructions to Newsweb, asking for the same search to be made for the months of March, April, and May.
    She needed more coffee, and when she got up to go to the vending room, she saw that George Fintel had evidently awakened and staggered home. She hadn't heard him leave. Tommy was gone, as well. She was alone.
    She got another cup of coffee, and it didn't taste as bad as it had before. The brew hadn't improved; her sense of taste had just been temporarily damaged by the first two cups.
    Eventually Newsweb located eleven stories in March through May that fit her parameters. After examining the printouts, Holly found only one of them of interest.
    On May 15, in Atlanta, Georgia, a blue-eyed Jim had entered a convenience store during an armed robbery. He shot and killed the perpetrator, Norman Rink, who had been about to kill two customers—Sam Newsome, twenty-five, and his five-year-old daughter Emily. Flying high on a cocaine, Ice, and methamphetamine cocktail—Rink had already killed the clerk and two other customers merely for the fun of it. After wasting Rink and assuring himself that the Newsomes were unhurt, Jim had slipped away before the police arrived.
    The store security camera had provided a blurry photograph of the heroic intruder. It was only the second photo Holly had found in all the articles. The image was poor. But she immediately recognized Jim Ironheart.
    Some details of the incident unnerved her. If Ironheart had an amazing ability—psychic power, whatever—to foresee fatal moments in the lives of strangers and arrive in time to thwart fate, why hadn't he gotten to that convenience store a few minutes sooner, early enough to prevent the deaths of the clerk and other customers? Why had he saved the Newsomes and let the rest die?
    She was further chilled by the description of his attack on Rink. He had pumped four rounds from a 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun into the madman. Then, although Rink was indisputably dead, Jim reloaded and fired another four rounds. “He was in such a rage,” Sam Newsome said, “his face red, and he was sweating, you could see the arteries pounding in his temples, across his forehead. He was crying a little, too, but the tears… they didn't make him seem any less angry.” When done, Jim had expressed regret for cutting Rink down so violently in front of little Emily. He'd explained that men like Rink, who killed innocent people, brought out “a little madness of my own.” Newsome told the reporter, “He saved our lives, yeah, but I gotta say the guy was scary, almost as scary as Rink.”
    Realizing that Ironheart might not have revealed even his first name on some occasions, Holly instructed Newsweb to search the past six months for stories in which “rescue” and “saved the life” were within ten words of “blue.” She had noticed that some witnesses were vague about his physical description, but that most remembered his singularly blue eyes.
    She went to the John, got more coffee, then stood by the printer. As each find was transferred to hard copy, she snatched it up, scanned it, tossed it in the wastecan if it was of no interest or read it with excitement if it was about another nick-of-time rescue. Newsweb turned up four more cases that indisputably belonged in the Ironheart file, even though neither his first nor last name was used.
    At her desk again, she instructed Newsweb to search the past six months for the name “Ironheart” in the national