Cold Fire

floor are you on?”
    “Tenth,” Eddie said, the word distorted as he spoke it on a deep exhalation. The next time he breathed out, he also issued a whoop of pleasure along with his wind. “Jesus, I have legs of stone, fuckin' granite, I think I could get a man in a scissor hold, crack him in half with my legs. You put that in your article, okay? I could crack a guy clean in half.”
    Holly left, closing the door softly behind her.
    In the main room, the martial-arts class was even more active than when she had entered. The current exercise involved a group attempt to gang up on their Korean instructor, but he was blocking and throwing and whirling and leaping like a dervish, dealing with them as fast as they came at him.
    The brunette had removed her silvery jewelry. She had changed into Reeboks, looser shorts, a different T-shirt, and a bra. Now she was doing stretching exercises in front of the reception counter.
    “One o'clock,” she explained to Holly. “My lunch hour. I always run four or five miles instead of eating. Bye.” She jogged to the door, pushed through it into the warm August day, and sprinted out of sight along the front of the shopping center.
    Holly went outside, too, and stood for a moment in the lovely sunshine, newly aware of how many of the shoppers, coming to and going from their cars, were in good physical shape. Having moved to the northwest almost a year and a half ago, she had forgotten how health conscious many southern Californians were—and how aware of their appearance. Per capita, Orange County had a lot fewer jowls, love handles, spare tires, pot guts, and pear-shaped bottoms than Portland.
    Looking good and feeling good were imperatives of the southern-California lifestyle. It was one of the things she loved about the place. It was also one of the things she hated about it.
    She went nextdoor to the bakery for lunch. From the display cases, she selected a chocolate eclair, a creme brulee tart with kiwi on top, a piece of white-chocolate macadamia-nut cheesecake with Oreo-crumb crust, a cinnamon wheel, and a slice of orange roulade. “And a diet Coke,” she told the clerk.
    She carried her tray to a table near a window, where she could watch the passing parade of taut, tanned bodies in summer gear. The pastries were wonderful. She ate a little of this, now a little of that, savoring each bite, intending to polish off every crumb.
    After a while she realized someone was watching her. Two tables away, a heavyset woman, about thirty-five, was staring with a mixture of disbelief and envy; she only had one miserable fruit tart, a bakery junkie's equivalent of a Nutri/System multi-grain cracker.
    Feeling both a need to explain herself and a certain sympathy, Holly said, “I wish I wasn't doing this, but I can't help it. If I can't do anything else, then I always binge when I'm horny.”
    The heavyset woman nodded. “Me, too.”
     

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    She drove to Ironheart's place on Bougainvillea Way. She knew enough about him now to risk approaching him, and that was what she intended to do. But instead of pulling into his driveway, she cruised slowly past the house again.
    Instinct told her that the time was not right. The portrait of him that she had constructed only seemed to be complete. There was a hole in it somewhere. She sensed that it would be dangerous to proceed before that hole had been painted in.
    She returned to the motel and spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening sitting by the window in her room, drinking Alka-Seltzer, then diet 7-Up, staring out at the jewel-blue pool in the middle of the lushly landscaped courtyard, and thinking. Thinking.
    Okay, she told herself, the story to date. Ironheart is a man with a sadness at his core, probably because of being orphaned when he was only ten. Let's say he's spent a lot of his life brooding about death, especially about the injustice of premature death. He dedicates his life to teaching and helping kids, maybe because no one was there for him when he was a boy and had to cope with the deaths of his mother and father. Then Larry Kakonis commits suicide. Ironheart is shattered, feels he should have been able to prevent it. The boy's death brings to the surface all of Ironheart's buried rage: rage at fate, destiny, the biological fragility of the human species—rage at God. In a state of severe mental distress bordering on outright imbalance, he decides to make himself over into Rambo and do something to fight