Cold Fire

waking her, Holly Thorne slept peacefully for the rest of the night, as still as a stone on the floor of the sea.

3
    Saturday morning, Holly ate breakfast in a booth at the motel coffeeshop. Most of the other customers were obviously vacationers: families dressed almost as if in uniforms of shorts or white slacks and brightly colored shirts. Some of the kids wore caps and T-shirts that advertised Sea World or Disneyland or Knott's Berry Farm. Parents huddled over maps and brochures while they ate, planning routes that would take them to one of the tourist attractions that California offered in such plenitude. There were so many colorful Polo shirts or Polo-shirt knockoffs in the restaurant that a visitor from another planet might have assumed that Ralph Lauren was either the deity of a major religion or dictator of the world.
    As she ate blueberry pancakes, Holly studied her list of people who had been spared from death by Jim Ironheart's timely intervention:
MAY 15
Sam (25) and Emily (5) Newsome—Atlanta, Georgia (murder)
JUNE 7
Louis Andretti (28)—Corona, California (snakebite)
JUNE 21
Thaddeus Johnson (12)—New York, New York (murder)
JUNE 30
Rachael Steinberg (23)—San Francisco, California (murder)
JULY 5
Carmen Diaz (30)—Miami, Florida (fire)
JULY 14
Amanda Cutter (30)—Houston, Texas (murder)
JULY 20
Steven Aimes (57)—Birmingham, Alabama (murder)
AUGUST 1
Laura Lenaskian (28)—Seattle, Washington (drowning)
AUGUST 8
Doogie Burkette (11)—Peoria, Illinois (drowning)
AUGUST 12
Billy Jenkins (8)—Portland, Oregon (traffic fatality)
AUGUST 20
Lisa (30) and Susan (10) Jawolski—Mojave desert (murder)
AUGUST 23
Nicholas O'Conner (6)—Boston, Massachusetts (explosion)
    Certain patterns were obvious. Of the fourteen people saved, six were children. Seven others were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty. Only one was older—Steven Aimes, who was fifty-seven. Ironheart favored the young. And there was some evidence that his activities were increasing in frequency: one episode in May; three in June; three in July; and now five already in August with a full week of the month remaining.
    Holly was particularly intrigued by the number of people on the list who would have been murdered without Ironheart's intervention. Far more people died each year in accidents than at the hands of others. Traffic fatalities alone were more numerous than murders. Yet Jim Ironheart intervened in a considerably greater number of homicides than accidents: eight of the fourteen people on the list had been spared from the malevolent intentions of murderers, over sixty percent.
    Perhaps his premonitions more often related to murder than to other forms of death because human violence generated stronger psychic vibrations than accidents …
    Holly stopped chewing and her hand froze halfway to her mouth with another forkful of blueberry pancake, as she realized just how strange this story was. She had been operating at a breathless pace, driven by reportorial ambition and curiosity. Her excitement, then her exhaustion, had prevented her from fully considering all of the implications and ramifications of Ironheart's activities. She put down her fork and stared at her plate, as if she could glean answers and explanations from the crumb patterns and smears in the same way that gypsies read tea leaves and palms.
    What the hell was Jim Ironheart? A psychic?
    She'd never had much interest in extrasensory perception and strange mental powers. She knew there were people who claimed to be able to “see” a murderer just by touching the clothes his victim wore, who sometimes helped police find the bodies of missing persons, who were paid well by the National Enquirer to foresee world events and forthcoming developments in the lives of celebrities, who said they could channel the voices of the dead to the living. But her interest in the supernatural was so minimal that she had never really formed an opinion of the validity of such claims. She didn't necessarily believe that all those people were frauds; the whole subject had bored her too much to bother thinking about it at all.
    She supposed that her dogged rationality—and cynicism—could bend far enough to encompass the idea that now and then a psychic actually possessed real power, but she wasn't sure that “psychic” was an adequate description of Jim Ironheart. This guy wasn't just going out on a limb in some cheap tabloid to predict that Steven Spielberg would make another