Smoke Eaters: A Thriller

By Christine Andreae

Mattie McCullough, as the first woman to command a major fire site, has all of the above on her plate, not to mention political constraints, a band of nudists militias determined not to budge from their endangered land, and an only child stationed at the most perilous part of the conflagration.

Andreae, whose first book was nominated for an Edgar, has taken a giant step and produced a stunning story of a woman and a fire and an unexpected love. Smoke Eaters is without any doubt one of the most suspenseful novels to be published this year. It is a story that has everything for the reader, and one that will not easily be forgotten.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 9, 2000
• ISBN: 9780312273750

Christine Andreae

Christine Andreae lives with her husband in Bentonville, Virginia. She is the author of the thriller Smoke Eaters, When Evening Comes: The Education of a Hospice Volunteer, and a highly praised mystery series.

Book preview

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Part I

THE DRAGON

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1

06 June 9:32p  Directory C:\*.*

It started last September, after the Fletcher Canyon Fire. The last crews had been demobed, I had folded up our tent, the caterer did a Last Supper thing, surf and turf at three o’clock in the afternoon. We happy few. We band of brothers. We were all supposed to stand up and sing Hail to Logistics. Going out I got stuck behind a U.S. West communications rig, ate its dust for twenty miles with a rubber string of langouste stuck in my top molar, hit hardtop and stopped off at the first place I came to: a dive in the middle of nowhere. Log front, broken neon sign, cabins out back under the pines, inside packed with groundpounders making up for lost time. The road was lined with vehicles on both sides.

She was with a hotshot crew, four or five of them, in red T-shirts. Red with a dragon that looked like a squirrel on the back. If every other jerk in this business thinks he’s got the Great American Novel waiting up his ass, every tenth jerk thinks he’s some kind of Rembrandt. She wasn’t wearing the artwork. She was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and no bra. You could tell right off she was no groupie. The undershirt was white cotton with tiny little ribs in it and on the back it was stained pink where she’d taken a hit from retardant. You could see it made her cocky, not that she didn’t have the right. Her Nomex jeans were baggy, bunched around her waist with a web belt, like, don’t give me no shit, bud. Her body had a hard little strut to it. She had the shirt stretched down into her jeans and the front of it was wet, and so was her hair, one of her pals had slopped beer all over her, and you could see her nipples, small and dark through the wet white cotton. Her tits were nothing to write home about, but she acted like they were. Her eyes were beer-blurry, someone said they’d been demobed that morning.

Well, I got in there at eighteen hundred. I lost count of the beers, but after a while, the place began to thin out. She stayed. She did an arm-wrestling number at the end of the bar with a college kid from Minnesota. You could see tufts of dark hair under her arms. She won. She was stronger than she looked and the kid was slobbering. He passed out and she came over and took the stool next to me. Hey, she said, her voice slightly hoarse.

Hey, I said back. I lifted my bottle. Join me?

Who are you? she said. She squinted, then said, Don’t tell me. You’re a camp slug.

I raised an eyebrow. I wasn’t wearing anything she could ID. No badge, no cap, I’d changed into a polo shirt. I hadn’t bothered to change out of the olive-drab jeans, but there was no way she could have known I was overhead.

She reached over and with two firm fingers drew a slow line along the top of my thigh. Your Nomex is unsullied, she said. Diction like a queen. You like it, don’t you? she said.

I’m thinking, oh shit. Like what? I said, casual.

Wearing your Nomex. She grinned and the sinking feeling stopped, just was gone, and then, Christ! I felt a stab, a jolt—like long time no feel! I couldn’t believe it!

She looks at me amused and cocky at the same time, like she knows exactly what’s happening with me.

You like fire, she says.

I respect fire, I tell her.

Hey, we all got respect for the Dragon, she says. But with you it’s more than that. With you, it’s different.

You can tell.

I can tell, she says. I’m a witch.

As in Wicked Witch of the West?

She corrects me: As in Fire Witch.

I’m wondering how drunk she is, how reliable my resurrection is. I ask her if she wants a beer. She says she doesn’t think so. I drain mine and put the empty on the bartop between us. I say, You got a name, Fire Witch?

Cat.

Sounds familiar. Not wonderful, but she gets it. She peers at me, checking to see if it was intentional. So to speak, I say.

She laughs, then chokes and coughs up black shit into a blue Kleenex. She looks at it. Fucking smoke. Then she laughs again.

I was feeling dry. I nod at the bartender and he plunks down another cold brown bottle streaming icy water. I close my hand around it and she touches me again, presses two fingers just above my knee, presses hard. Don’t drink it, she says and she pulls a book of matches out of her jeans, holds them up like a magician about to perform. I’m still feeling where she pressed her fingers into my knee. She swivels around so the bartender’s at her back, straightens her spine, opens up her knees, there I am, sitting pretty.

Watch, she says. She lights a match, meets my eyes and moves the flame under her chin. Yellow light flickering on her throat. She stretches her neck like a dancer, then elegantly draws the match down and circles her right breast with it. She holds it against her nipple, smiles, then with a quick flourish, shakes out the flame, drops the match in my fucking beer. She flashes the book of matches at me.

How about you light the next one? she says.

I got the key to one of the cabins from the bartender. I ask him how much.

No charge, he says. You guys worked hard, you deserve a good night’s sleep. He winks. Jesus! I was so turned on, I was embarrassed to walk to the door. Outside, it was still light, only eight o’clock, and the acrid smell of ash, pushed down the mountain by cooling air, hung over the cabins. There was one narrow little window over the bed. Abracadabra time. We went through her book of matches, shiny maroon cover, from a bar off Higgins Avenue. Small world, she was from Missoula too, but the coincidence wasn’t a big deal, it just felt normal, like it was meant to be and I don’t mean like in some cheap little song. It was as if something had shifted and we were moving on another plane of existence, everything was meshing, it all worked, I had this clarity. Margaret’s inept fumblings, her pathetic attempts, all that discreet maneuvering to get me to see someone, it didn’t matter, none of it mattered at all. Tires crunched outside on the gravel and she worked her magic. She was a witch! I was six years old and forty-six at the same time. We ran out of matches and I had to get dressed and go back to the bar and bum a pack off the locals who were celebrating their pathetic windfalls, some guy with a dozer making megabucks off us, another bragging about three thousand ham sandwiches he’d sold us at five bucks each.

Matches worked best. We tried her Bic, yellow mini number she had, disposable, but it wasn’t the same. Matches

06 June 10:04p  Directory C:\*.*

Shit. Margaret came in. I exited so fast I almost lost this. Next time I’ll just switch screens. Saved this under CAT, got to come up with something safer. I imagine Margaret squinting at the menu. CAT?

I can’t believe she’s doing this to me! The bitch lit a fire in my head all right, but I’m not plucking any silver apples of the moon or golden apples either. Road apples is more like it. Here I am sinking in shit and Margaret comes in and puts her hand on my shoulder. What are you working on, hon?

Go to bed, I tell her, I’ll be up in a bit. She wouldn’t leave. Maybe her estrogen was kicking in. What, I say, you want me to come up and diddle you?

She didn’t. Where was I? Matches. Strips of cardboard dipped in sulfur. They consume themselves, a one-of-a-kind event that leaves only a residue of ash. Matches equalize. Both the one worshiped and the worshiper feel the sting of flame. The match releases its wave of heat, the flame bites her skin, my fingers. We’re connected by a line of fire, a sacred radius. The radius may move, like the needle of a compass, but it’s indelible. She is still connected to me. She doesn’t know it, but she is.

We drew a magic circle. A square in a circle, futon on the floor under the windows. The floor had just been refinished after the last tenant, so we put mayonnaise lids under the candles. A magic circle of fire. We had two whole days together, candles burning the whole time. Shit came out that I’d forgotten. We were both crying. You’re healing, she said. She sucked on a jay, sucked on me. You’re incredible, she said. You really are a fire god.

07 June 8:45a  Directory C:\*.*

Never made it upstairs last night. Crashed in the den, woke up on the carpet—no hangover! But on the way into work, I’m seeing the needle of a compass. A fire-licked needle against the darkness, something out of William Blake, but if’s moving, gently swinging back and forth. A radius isn’t static. I got her on my car phone. Male voice answers: Hang on. Real casual. Maybe if’s one of her brothers-in-fire, a warrior pal fucking her brains out, thinks he’s something else. Then she comes on. Cat? I tell her about how we’re a moving radius. I can hear myself telling her. She says, Are you stoned?

Listen carefully, she says. Call me again and I won’t call your wife, I’ll call this geek I know at the paper and give him a Pulitzer on sexual harassment and Smokey Bear. You’ll make our president look like a saint. She hangs up. I almost rear-ended a fucking Volvo in front of me, had to stop at MacD’s to get it together. Went into the men’s, locked myself in a stall, started blubbering, talk about your head in your underpants, Jesus Christ, I had them stuffed in my mouth trying to keep it down. She’s not going to get away with this. I can tell you that. I can tell you that right now.

10 July 2.19a  Directory C:\*.*

What’s amazing is, no one notices. They say, Looking good, lost your love handles, ha-ha. This afternoon, tried it with this whore, big blond girl. Bought a bunch of wintergreen candles, it was that or carnation, they were out of unscented, and took her to the Twilite Motel out Fourth Street. She was game. Problem was, her bush was blond and kind of scraggly and without glasses it was hard to see where it was and she got a little singed and freaked out about it and I let her have it. She claimed I’d broken her nose and I had to give her two extra bills to shut her up. All that winter-green, the place stank like a locker room. No way she’s going to report it. It was an accident. What’s she going to say, this trick burned my bush? I’d like to see the cops’ faces! Besides, she hasn’t got a clue who I am.

2

Mattie McCulloch caught her first glimpse of the Justice Peak Fire as she sped over the crest of the Continental Divide and rolled down toward the Sophia River Valley. On either side of the highway, naked hills lay brown and sere under a sharp blue Montana sky, but in the distance ahead, a soft afternoon haze hung over the valley. Through the windshield of her Forest Service–issue Jeep Cherokee, she scanned a pale blue wall of mountains and picked out four—no, five—slender ribbons of smoke. Another driver might have missed them. The ribbons were thin and white, randomly spaced but slanted at the same oblique angle. Like multiple offerings of incense, they streamed dreamily up out of the ridges’ folds into a smudge of cinnamon-colored sky. The Justice Peak Fire. Her fire. A bright blade of anticipation pierced the brown tangle of her nervousness. Finally, three years after she had qualified for high command, the boys in Boise had let her off the bench. The call had come that morning. They were giving her the Justice. One of the big ones. Seventeen hundred troops. A million dollars a day. When she hung up, tears of relief had welled in her eyes. It was as if an eighty-pound pack had been lifted off her shoulders. She had not realized the daily weight of her frustration. She felt light, flooded with a rush of sunlit warmth. She had done it. She had wriggled through a crack in the Forest Service’s famous glass ceiling—not without lacerations and splinters, but the miraculous balm of victory had eased the puckering and festering. She had not been prepared for the sensuousness of success, the lazy opulence of it: a kind of glowing golden ball she could evoke and bathe in at will. She was in the club, a brand-new fire general rolling to the rescue, windows open, a hot road-wind batting her face. She wished her mother were still alive. She wished her tough, beautiful, wise-cracking mother could see her now.

Mattie had come out of her mother’s womb fighting, her tiny fists quivering, her flailing arms and legs hard as sticks. When the wet strands across her scalp dried, Kate McCullough saw that the wisps were bright orange. A redhead! she exclaimed in maternal delight. Where did that come from? But no one on either side of the family could remember red hair. My little foundling, Kate used to coo.

Growing up, Mattie had enjoyed the distinction of her hair, a striking red-gold color that drew compliments from strangers in stores. What she did not enjoy was the general assumption that a volatile temper came with her hair. As far as she could see, her temper was no worse than any of her friends’ and was measurably better than her older sister Harriet’s. Harrie flew into fits for no reason at all.

By the time Mattie was a teenager, she had squashed all signs of temper. Stoic by nature, she had learned that a blank stare could be as effective as a punch in the mouth—and got her into less trouble. Her hair, however, remained untamed. She wore it long and unbraided. At track meets (she had a shelf full of trophies for the 880) her hair would stream out behind her like a fiery mane. She was tall, but not willowy. Her shoulders were broad, her torso sturdy, her white thighs solid and muscular, but when she ran, her body almost seemed to float. The sight of her moving up through the pack for her final sprint home would bring spectators to their feet. Chin leading, face frighteningly pale, she looked like a goddess flying to her fate. Her mother, who attended every race, would feel a lump rise in her throat and have to stop cheering.

She married young, against her parents’ better judgment. Her husband was a smoke jumper, one of the glamour boys of the business, and when he left her not long after the birth of their baby, she cut off the shining treasure of her long hair. From time to time, she would think seriously about letting it grow, but then would lose patience. Now, in her forties, it was still efficiently short and still bright enough to turn heads. She glanced in the rearview mirror of her Cherokee and wished there had been time for a trim.

Her assignment was to take over command of the Justice from an old-school, seat-of-the-pants warrior named Owen Kingman, who spat out words like consensus and diversity as if they were poison. Mattie was not surprised to learn that he had badly bungled the aftermath of a racial incident at base camp. There had been a nasty fight. A white crew, a hotshot team from Kentucky called the Dixie Dogs, had burned a six-foot-high cross—All in fun, they claimed later. An Afro-American crew out of L.A. had responded with knives. Three of the white hotshots had been cut. Kingman sent the black team packing. The black team’s supervisor called in the NAACP and the ACLU, who immediately held a press conference. Since it was August, a time when politics go on hold and news editors across the country resort to shots of children playing with hoses, the rumble at the Justice (the very name of the fire was a headline writer’s dream) suddenly hit the national news. Forty-eight hours after the story broke, the Forest Service removed both the Dixie Dogs and Incident Commander Owen Kingman from the fire. As a public act of contrition, they designated Matilda Mary McCulloch as Kingman’s replacement.

She had no problem with being launched off a penitential springboard. What rankled was the administrator’s cluelessness. One of the new breed of politically correct bureaucrats, he paid lip service to equal rights without getting it. Feelings are still running pretty high, he had said. It’s right up your alley. We want you to go in there, pour oil on the waters, unruffle the feathers. His voice was plummy, confidential, as if he were bestowing a secret gift. In point of fact, conflict resolution was not one of her strengths. She had worked under a number of commanders who were far better feather smoothers than she was—men who actually enjoyed exploring the nooks and crannies of disputes. But she had held her tongue. I appreciate the opportunity, she had said evenly and sensed his disappointment. Clearly he had wanted her to jump up and down.

How could the man be so dim? Forget his sexist assumption that she, as a woman, was a natural peacemaker. Simply in terms of strategy, assigning her to the Justice was far more likely to stimulate conflict than resolve it. Educating the troops about racial tolerance was one thing. Taking over an interagency command team was another. Kingman’s chieftains had battled fires together all over the country, season after season. Like any command team, they would have bonded, not only with one another, but with their leader. Whatever Kingman’s faults and failings, they would hardly welcome a politically correct outsider—male or female. Being female, and a female with a reputation for being a stickler, made it even trickier.

She felt as if she were driving into a lions’ den. On either side of her, the tawny hills with their long curves and drought-starved hollows had the look of haunches ready to pounce. She accelerated past a lone pickup and glanced at the driver. Under a spanking-new straw cowboy hat, his face was old. She remembered the appointment she had made with her chiropractor for her father. She had made it without telling him—he was hostile to doctors in general—and she had been planning to take him herself that afternoon. She flipped open her cell phone and punched the self-dial number for home.

She was surprised to get through. The phone had been ringing off the hook ever since the news of his daughter’s appointment had broken and Jack McCulloch, relishing his own fifteen minutes of fame, had invited everyone who called, friends and reporters alike, over to the house, where he plied them with cold beer and stories unprintable in a family newspaper.

The phone rang six times.

Finally Jack picked up. Yeah? he barked.

Dad?

Oh, it’s you. You there?

Not yet. I’m still under way.

So how’s it feel to make Forest Service history?

I feel like throwing up. Since you asked.

For a minute he said nothing, as if gauging the seriousness of her answer. You can handle it.

Do you know Ned Voyle?

No. I don’t think so.

Government engineer. Based in Missoula. She was always surprised by the number of people her father knew, but this time there was no match.

He’s on the team at the Justice, she went on. Head of Plans. Planning was the section responsible for developing attack strategies. She had crossed paths with Ned Voyle at previous fires—though she doubted he would remember her. A tall, lean man with the narrow face of a Norman lord and the arrogance to match, Voyle had been more into building his own fiefdom than teamwork. He qualified as a Type One IC the year before I did, she told her father. He was the logical one to take over from Kingman.

She could hear Jack digesting the situation. Impatient, she burst out, Voyle’s not exactly going to see my arrival as ‘relief.’

You can handle it, her father repeated firmly.

It was what he always said. And for some unknown reason, she had always believed him. Suddenly she was moved. I never could have done it without you, Dad. All those years you supported us, Jimmy and me—

He called, Jack announced abruptly.

Jimmy called? She perked up. She had not seen her son since the beginning of the summer. It was his second season with the Millville Hotshots—her old outfit—and thanks to the drought that had parched the mountain states, he and his crew had been on the go since May. His calls home were few and far between.

He left a message on the machine, Jack informed her. I had to make a run down to the store.

What did he say?

He says he’s at the Justice.

The Justice? They’re at my fire?

That’s what he said. Wait a sec. She heard a series of clicks. Her father swore at the answering machine.

Push rewind, Dad.

Hold your horses. She heard a long whir and some more clicks. On the machine, a pleasant female voice said: "Mr. McCulloch? I’m with Cosmopolitan magazine and we’re working on a feature on men who—" Click.

"Men who what?"

You want to hear the boy or not?

Then Jimmy’s voice crackled in her ear. Hey, Mom, Jack. Sorry I haven’t called in sooner—

Can you hear it okay? interrupted her father.

Not when you’re talking!

It’s as loud as it goes.

Jimmy was saying, . . . finished mopping up in the Sawtooth and then they sent us over to the Frontiers. The Justice. A real bear. We’ve been busting our hump for a week and she’s still only sixty percent contained. He hesitated. I hear Mom’s got her heart’s desire. Way to go, Mom.

Was there a grudging note in his voice? Her relationship with Jimmy was not a cozy one. Ever since his adolescence, she had the sense of not being able to get it right. Every other thing she said seemed to irritate him—though she had no idea why. A psychologist friend had suggested that Jim blamed her for the breakup of her marriage, for depriving him of a father. But that struck her as too facile. She suspected their discomfort with each other went deeper than a circumstance of his childhood; a clash of individual genes, perhaps, or some primordial constraint between mothers and sons.

So, Jimmy concluded lamely, maybe I’ll see you here.

She caught the fatigue in his voice. Was his lack of enthusiasm at the attainment of her heart’s desire nothing more than exhaustion? She wondered how long his crew had been without a break. Federal work/rest ratios specified one hour off for every two hours on, but when things heated up, the regulations tended to get pushed aside. She pictured her son in his Nomex—the fire fighter’s uniform of flame-resistant fabric—egg-yolk yellow shirt, olive-drab jeans. Back on her desk at her office she had a snapshot of him taken out on the fire line, and now, as she heard his voice played back, the image hit her with the force of a punch: soot-streaked shirt, sweat-soaked bandanna around his neck, a manly stubble on his nineteen-year-old jaw, a proud grin. She felt her heart buckle with love. He was all right. He was strong and healthy, liked by his friends, cherished by his family. She had not failed. She simply couldn’t talk to him.

Jack clicked off the machine. Is that it? she asked.

You want me to play it again?

No, that’s okay, she decided, moving on. Listen, I made an appointment for you with my chiropractor at five-thirty this evening. I was planning to come home early and take you over there.

He said nothing.

Dad, you can hardly walk. At least give it a try. Doris can take X rays, she’s got great hands; maybe she can do something for you.

Doris?

Dr. Doris. She gave her father directions to the office. It sounded as if he was paying attention. She felt encouraged. You’ll go?

I’ll have my secretary check my calendar.

It was a joke. She let it go. At least he hadn’t flat out refused. "Did your secretary schedule the Cosmo woman?" she bantered.

That’s not till tomorrow.

You’re kidding.

No.

She blinked. He wasn’t kidding?

She said she wanted to explore the sex appeal of men who nurture outstanding women, her father volunteered.

Explore the what?

Maybe she said virility.

You’re going to let her interview you?

For a start, he said lecherously.

She took a breath. Another reason to see Dr. Doris, Dad. It might smooth out your moves.

3

Jack McCulloch replaced the receiver on his desk, erased his grandson’s message, then gingerly lowered himself into the swivel chair. Whatever was wrong with his lower back, it wasn’t getting any better. He had barely made it to the phone in time to pick up his daughter’s call. He remembered the beer he had left out on the porch. To hell with it. He rummaged through the rolltop’s cubbyholes for his bottle of extrastrength over-the-counter painkillers, shook out four tablets and swallowed them dry. The house felt suddenly empty. The last of his visitors had left just before Mattie’s call.

Jack was seventy-four, a retired independent contractor. In the early fifties, he had purchased twenty acres of Douglas fir in one of the canyons south of Missoula and built a low-slung log house out of timber he and his wife had felled themselves. Since then, their road had been developed: a miniature golf course marked the turnoff from the highway, and along the creek, cul-de-sacs of boxy new Colonials sat looking inward, like wagons in a defensive circle. The McCulloch house, however, was protected by the old fir trees. The wide window in Jack’s den looked across a lawn to trees now grown giant. Despite the lawn’s drought-brittle grass and the gray road dust on the trees’ lower boughs, the property had a secluded, alpine feel. Although downtown was only ten minutes away, the view from his den made it easy to indulge in the illusion that his world had not changed.

But of course it had. Earlier that day, he had pulled out his albums for a reporter. Gazing at his old Kodaks, he had to fight the urge to describe his long-ago fires as gifts from paradise. The brittle, ivory-bordered snapshots showed smoothfaced, firm-chested young men posing in dungarees and felt hats. There were crosscut saws in the pictures and walk-in canvas tents and tiny prop planes fixed in a glossy sepia sky. Fifty years ago, there had been no fire-resistant clothes, no chain saws, no computers to model fire behavior, no cell phones and pagers, no drug deals and undercover cops in the camps—and no women.

He reached to the stack of Missoulians he had bought that morning, picked up the top copy, and read the front-page feature yet another time. The piece ran under a color file photo of Mattie in her hard hat and a headline that read:

FIRE GENERAL SMASHES GLASS CEILING.

AP—As wildfires rage across the West destroying thousands of acres of pristine forests and threatening private vacation homes, firefighter Matilda M. McCulloch has blazed the way to the top of the Forest Service’s chain of command. McCulloch is the first woman to be designated Incident Commander of a federally fielded fire team.

She will take over the management of the Justice Peak Fire which was ignited by a lightning strike in the mountains of southwestern Montana. After smoke jumpers failed to control the blaze, they were evacuated by helicopter and ground troops were deployed. The fire has been marked by racial strife and cross-burnings.

McCulloch underwent command training at Marana, the Forest Service’s elite leadership college outside Tucson. The school’s rigorous curriculum is taught by a faculty of veteran firefighters. The top course, known in the trade as Generalship, has a failure rate of close to forty percent. Three years ago, McCulloch graduated second from the top of the Generalship course.

Born into a family of firefighters, McCulloch began her career with the Forest Service clearing brush with a seasonal crew. At that time, women crew members were not allowed near a fire line unless they were delivering lunch sacks.

After receiving a BA in Forestry from the University of Montana, Missoula, she went to work for the Forest Service as a clerk-typist. In 1978, she spent her first summer on the fire line with a BLM crew in Oregon. She joined the Millville (Montana) Hotshots in 1982. After completing her MA in Forestry, McCulloch was appointed Fire Management Officer for the Lolo Ranger District.

Her ground-level firefighting experience includes stints as a strike-team leader and division supervisor. To qualify as a Type 1 Incident Commander, McCulloch spent eight fire seasons on Type 1 command teams working in two different capacities, Chief of Operations and Chief of Planning.

McCulloch has been the recipient of ten Forest Service awards for outstanding performance.

The story, Jack reflected, was more accurate than most. Only one cross had been burned, and the protests had come from outside organizations, not from the ranks, but at least this time the reporter had gotten his daughter’s credentials straight.

Marana. An old army facility in the middle of a desert. In the fifties and sixties, the CIA had used it as a base for secret air operations in Indochina. Then the Forest Service had captured a piece of it. Jack remembered how Mattie had come home shaken after her final session in the course. A classmate—a big burly guy, she’d said—had dropped dead of a heart attack during a computer-simulated fire. It was one of the few times he could remember that she’d accepted a beer from him. She’d become softer, sleepy before she half finished it, but no more forthcoming. A month later he heard the details from one of the trainers, an old-timer named Hal

Reviews for Smoke Eaters

[smithfieldjones · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent read but the lunitics soloques could be shorter--they are interesting and important to the story, but sometimes their length makes them intrusive.