Page 1 of Too Much Heat

Prologue

“May Day, May Day, clear the building.” Lieutenant Joe Romano’s voice was strong and calm, even though his twin brother Jimmy was inside the structure.

“Copy that,” DeLuca responded.

“Got it, Lieutenant.”

Connors said, “Me, too.”

Joe waited for his brother to respond.

Finally, he heard, “No can do, Cap. I’m already upstairs. There’re two kids trapped in the last room. They’re screaming their heads off.”

“This is an order, Romano. May Day.”

Nothing.

“Goddamn it, Jimmy. I’m your officer. Get out.”

No answer.

“The hell with this!” Joe threw down his clipboard, pulled on his facemask, grabbed the thermal camera and stalked to the structure. He looked through the lens at the layout of the upstairs.

Joe hurried through the door, found the staircase off the foyer and climbed the steps carefully, but fast. The house was hotter and the acrid scent of the smoke was almost overwhelming.

At the top he went left. By-passed the three main bedrooms. Sure enough, there was another room in the back that didn’t show up on the camera. He could see three heat signatures through it. That damned kid went in instead of evacuating. Joe hurried further down the hall.

Three feet from the room, the timbers in the old house cracked and fell in front of him with the force of a volcano. Joe was slammed back on his ass.

Into the radio he said, “Jimmy, you okay?”

Nothing.

“Romano, answer me.” He practically shrieked out the order.

Nothing. He managed to stand and pick up the camera from where it had fallen. He held it up.

Now, there were zero heat signatures in the room.

Chapter 1

3 years later

What the hell was happening to the women who populated his life? Frustrated, Joe Romano sat in his office watching Firefighter Lara Swanson melt down, much as he’d seen his sister-in-law lose it yesterday at Sunday dinner.

“I’m not going to stand for this, Captain. You have to tell them to stop.”

He leaned back in his chair and crossed his ankles over each other. Something about this woman needled him. “Swanson, you’re the rookie. It’s common practice to pull pranks on the new guy. Or in this case girl.” She’d been placed at Engine 1 because the chief thought he could handle a woman on the squad.

“I’ve been here a month. How long are you going to shirk your duties and refuse to get your men in line?”

“There are four other female firefighters in Westwood,” Joe said calmly. “Talk to them. See how they handled this kind of thing.”

She lifted that chin. Man, he hated when women did that. He took it personally, like they were flipping the bird at him. “For your information, I already did that.Theircaptains did their jobs and put a halt to the hazing in a timely manner.”

“Really?” He had her on this. “I talked to Mia Colton the other day at the academy. She said the guys badgered her for a month, then they got tired of it.”

Swanson plopped her hands on her waist. “Your guys still pick on me about the call where you said I didn’t turn off the gas.”

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