dually repelled by and attracted to the unthinkable. The shoe was
empty.
No severed foot. Not even any blood.
She swallowed the unreleased scream. She tasted vomit in the back of
her throat, and swallowed that too.
As the pickup came to rest on its side more than half a block down the
hill, Holly turned the other way and ran to the man and boy. She was
the first to reach them as they started to sit up on the blacktop.
Except for a scraped palm and a small abrasion on his chin, the child
appeared to be unhurt. He was not even crying.
She dropped to her knees in front of him. “Are you okay, honey?”
Though dazed, the boy understood and nodded. “Yeah. My hand hurts
little, that’s all.”
The man in the white slacks and blue T-shirt was sitting up. He had
pulled his sock halfway off his foot and was gingerly kneading his left
ankle. Though the ankle was swollen and already inflamed, Holly was
still surprised by the absence of blood.
The crossing guard, a couple of teachers, and other kids gathered
around, and a babble of excited voices rose on all sides. The boy was
helped up and drawn into a teacher’s arms.
Wincing in pain as he continued to massage his ankle, the injured man
raised his head and met Holly’s gaze. His eyes were searingly blue and,
for an instant, appeared as cold as if they were not human eyes at all
but the visual receptors of a machine.
Then he smiled. In a blink, the initial impression of coldness was
replaced by one of warmth. In fact Holly was overwhelmed by the
clarity, morning-sky color, and beauty of his eyes; she felt as if she
were peering through them into a gentle soul. She was a cynic who would
equally distrust a nun and Mafia boss on first encounter, so her instant
attraction to this man was jolting. Though words were her first love
and her trade, she was at a loss for them.
“Close call,” he said, and his smile elicited one from her.
Holly waited for Jim Ironheart in the school hallway, outside the boys’
restroom. All of the children and teachers had at last gone home. The
building was silent, except for the periodic muted hum of the
maintenance man’s electric buffer as he polished the vinyl tile up on
the second floor. The air was laced with a faint perfume of chalk dust,
craft paste, and pine-scented disinfectant wax.
Outside in the street, the police probably were still overseeing a
couple of towing-company employees who were righting the overturned
truck in order to haul it away. The driver had been drunk. At the
moment he was in the hospital, where physicians were attending to his
broken leg, lacerations, abrasions, and contusions.
Holly had gotten nearly everything she required to write the story:
background on the boy-Billy Jenkins-who had nearly been killed, the feel
of the event, the reactions of the eye-witnesses, a response from the
police and slurred expressions of regret mixed with self pity from the
inebriated driver of the truck. She lacked only one element, but it was
the most important-information about Jim Ironheart, the hero of the
whole affair Newspaper readers would want to know everything about him.
But at the moment all she could have told them was the guy’s name and
that he was from southern California.
His brown suitcase stood against the wall beside her, and she kept eying
it. She had the urge to pop the latches and explore the contents of the
bag, though at first she didn’t know why. Then she realized it was
unusual for a man to be carrying luggage through a residential
neighborhood; reporter was trained-if not genetically compelled-to be
curious about anything out of the ordinary.
When Ironheart came out of the restroom, Holly was still staring at the
suitcase. She twitched guiltily, as if caught pawing through the
contents of the bag.
“How’re you feeling?” she asked.
“Fine.” He was limping. “But I told you-I’d rather not be
interviewed.”
He had combed his thick brown hair and blotted the worst of the dirt off