Volcano Watch

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I was going up the stairwell from the parking garage to the hospital when I ran into Mike Kittleman, on his way down. The stairwell was lit like a sunrise with sodium bulbs and the concrete steps had a wet-dog smell.

Mike sidestepped to go around me.

“Hang on,” I said.

His face was sickly in the yellowish light.

I said, “It was an accident. People know that.”

“Yeah, right.”

We stared at each other. The fundamental and unchangeable connection between us was enmity. I thought, Mike wouldn’t take my hand if he were drowning. He wouldn’t offer me his. If I were drowning alongside his cat, he’d save the cat and then think twice about me. It came back — as it always does with Mike and me — to the gondola station, loading mountain bikes. He was fifteen and I was fourteen, and he always bossed me around and I always took it. I could feel the heat of that summer day when Eric dropped by, when the gondola stalled. Smell the hot oil odor of the machinery Mike was fruitlessly trying to fix. Hear myself telling Mike to stop before he broke something. I could see myself sashaying over to Eric like a cat with her tail in the air, telling Mike, you better let Eric fix it. And Mike leapt, face grimed with oil and red with heat, and he got me by the hair and put a screwdriver to my neck, screaming shut up, shut up, shut up until Eric took him down. In the aftermath, it became Eric’s and my problem.

I regarded Mike, now, and the man on the stairs called up the same image the kid had called up: that of a guy with a need to make the world like him better than it did. With a temper to reciprocate.

I said, “Everybody saw it was an accident.” Everybody didn’t see it that way, really. Plenty of people blamed Mike, although officially it was indeed declared an accident and no charges were being filed. Plenty of people, actually, blamed Krom for letting things get out of hand. A few people were even muttering about asking the Council to replace Krom. A few people were saying a surprise drill was just what we needed to keep us on our toes. Nobody seemed to notice that Krom had turned Lake Mary into a battleground, and that Lindsay had come out the loser.

Mike started down the stairs.

I said, “I know how you feel.”

“You don’t know anything.”

Oh yes I do, I know how it feels to blame yourself for something that happens by accident. Doesn’t matter that you didn’t intend something awful to happen. Death by inattention. Doesn’t hurt any less. I said, “You pull yourself to pieces.”

He kept moving.

All right, I thought, you stubborn shit, don’t take my hand. And I’ll feel no qualms asking you the question I couldn’t ask Jimbo. “Can you help me with something, Mike? How many kinds of biathlon powder are there?”

That stopped him.

It was the question heavy in my mind when Walter and I dragged back to the house yesterday, but one look at Jimbo and I’d held my tongue. In the parking lot, after the race — after the drill — I’d thought Walter was wrong to keep us there. All I’d wanted to do was go somewhere and kick something. But he’d been right. Kicking through snow and digging like a dog had been right. And it worked, for awhile. And it paid off. We’d done a field test right there, sorting under the hand lens with a pocket knife. Dimples was there all right — no surprise — but there were also four other makes. And none of those four matched any of the mystery makes of gunpowder in the evidence, whose silver faces were burned into my memory. It made no sense. Just like it made no sense for Jimbo to lie about having a cartridge.

Mike turned. “What’s this about?”

“Biathlon powder.” I didn’t add ‘in the evidence’ but he was smart enough to make that leap. I didn’t want to risk adding that I was asking him because he used to be on the team. “Mike, is there more than one make?”

“Why do you wanna know?”

“I can ask somebody else if you don’t know.”

“I know.” His coarse skin bloomed with sweat. “O-kigh, there’s half a dozen makes. But only three I think perform when the temp gets down in the teens and I think Fiocchi and Lapua are the best of those and my personal choice was Fiocchi.” He glared. “And your brother thinks so too, I happen to know.”

Dimples.

My confusion deepened. So there are several makes of biathlon powder, and none but dimples matches my evidence. Therefore the unidentified gunpowder is not biathlon powder. Then what is that stuff and where did Georgia pick it up?

Mike was moving down the stairs.

“Wait a minute,” I said. A knot like a fist sat under my breastbone. “How’s Stobie?”

“Coma.” The word echoed up the stairwell.