the place. It was also one of the things she hated about it.
She went next door 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 hinge when I’m horny.”
The heavyset woman nodded. “Me, too.”
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 the
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 t
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 back at fate,
which is a weird response at best, absolutely nuts at worst. With
weight lifting, aerobic endurance training, and Tae Kwon Do, he turns
himself into a fighting machine. He learns to drive like a stuntman. He
becomes knowledgeable in the use of all manner of guns. He’s ready.
Just one more thing. He teaches himself to be a clairvoyant, so he can
win the lottery and be independently wealthy, making it possible to
devote himself to his crusade-and so he can know just when a premature
death is about to occur.
That was where it all fell apart. You could go to a place like Dojo to
learn martial arts, but the Yellow Pages had no listing for schools of
clairvoyance. Where the hell had he gotten his psychic power?
She considered the question from every imaginable angle. She wasn’t
trying to brainstorm an answer, only figure out an approach to
researching possible explanations. But magic was magic. There was no
way to research it.
She began to feel as though she was employed by a sleazy tabloid, not as
a reporter but as a concocter of pieces about space aliens living under
Cleveland, half gorilla and half human babies born to amoral female zoo
keepers, and inexplicable rains of frogs and chickens in Tajikistan.
But, damn it, the hard facts were that Jim Ironheart had saved fourteen