Page 22 of His Reward
“We are,” Troy’s young voice sounded from below as I walked over to the stairs.
“I brought in two dozen and there are only six of you here today,” I said as I descended the tight, spiral stairs. “They can’t be gone already.”
When I reached the ground floor and walked around the corner to the lounge, I was met by the sight of the Double Ds tossing a football back and forth on the other side of the sofa, which was littered with muffin wrappers.
“Seriously?” I asked, marching over and picking up one of the wrappers. “You ate all of them?”
Danny at least had the grace to look sheepish as he caught the football, then looked at me and said, “They were really good.”
“Yes, they were,” I said, picking up another wrapper. “Which was why I got enough so that everyone could have some, even the guys on the next shift.”
“Oh,” Danny said, face flushing.
“I can go get some more,” Chuck, one of the old-timers who was on duty that morning, said.
I shrugged. “With what money? I bought those ones with my own cash.”
“Now I feel really bad,” Dakota said, tossing the football back to Danny, then helping me clean up the mess he’d been part of making.
“Still having trouble getting enough funding?” Roscoe asked, joining in with the clean-up efforts.
“The city would rather pay for new equipment and things that make for good news stories instead of shelling out for everyday essentials,” I said, moving around to get the trash can for the others. “And now I’m getting notices that they don’t even have enough for that and so-called drastic measures will need to be taken. Things like muffins we have to pay for on our own.”
“Calendar,” Troy said, then struck a pose with his thick biceps raised. “I still say that the way to go is a hunky fireman calendar.”
The others had a lot to say about that, both good and bad. The lounge was suddenly wall-to-wall noise as the younger guys teased each other and the older guys made snide comments. Dakota started throwing balled-up cupcake wrappers at Troy, which did nothing to help our cleaning efforts at all.
I was about to lose my mind and shout at them all to be serious for once when the piercing alarm that indicated an emergency call was incoming. We all snapped to attention and turned toward the intercom speaker on the wall past the trucks. Even the Double D’s grew serious as the alert sound gave way to the dispatcher’s clear voice.
“Engine Fifty-Five, Engine Fifty-Five. We have a Red Level Four, I repeat, a Red Level Four at One-Two-Two East Handleman Drive. Red Level Four at One-Two-Two East Handleman Drive.”
Adrenaline pumped through me in an instant. Red Level Four was about as bad as it got. That meant a large-scale fire at a public building. This wasn’t some dryer that had been left to overheat and spark a blaze that any one of us could put out. This was the big one.
“Roscoe, Chuck, get the engines ready. The rest of you, suit up. I’m calling in everyone. Ernie can watch the station whilewe’re gone,” I said, already in motion. Everyone else scrambled as well.
Barrington’s fire department worked mostly on a volunteer basis, but all volunteers for any given company lived within a few blocks’ radius of the station. All my guys had apps on their phones, and when I tapped a few things on my own phone, they would get a notification that they were required immediately. Volunteering as a firefighter meant they could leave their day jobs without consequences if they were needed.
Having enough men didn’t worry me. What jolted me to the point where the hair stood up on the back of my neck was the location of the fire. I called up One-Two-Two East Handleman Drive on my phone and nearly lost my lunch when I saw it was the Davidson Memorial Ice Arena.
I hadn’t asked Lucien about his training regimen or anything like that when we were together, but in the five days since the auction event, I’d spent way more time looking Lucien up on social media than I probably should have. I’d been tickled to discover that he trained just a few blocks from the fire station.
Now I wasn’t so happy about that.
“Go! Go! Go!” I urged my guys as I kitted up myself. “We need to be at the site ten minutes ago.”
To their credit, as much as they goofed around while waiting to go on a call, my guys were on top of their game once things turned serious. Roscoe, the guys who were on duty, and I were suited up and ready to go in less than ten minutes. We drove out of the station as the others rushed in to prep and man the second truck. I didn’t want to wait for them to get to the scene. I had a bad, bad feeling about what I would find there.
That bad feeling turned out not to be bad enough. I could see the smoke and flames licking up from the rink complex before we were a hundred yards from the place. Engines and equipmentfrom other stations had beat us to the arena, but it didn’t look like anything was even close to being under control yet.
“What’s the situation?” I demanded from my buddy Isaac, who was the chief of Engine Seventy-Three, the closest station to my own.
“It’s serious,” Isaac said, filling me in as my guys joined forces with his to pull out the hoses and attach them to the nearest hydrants. “Near as we can tell, it started with an electrical fire. The wiring in there is outdated and was in the process of being replaced. It takes a lot of juice to keep the ice solid, and a lot of old insulation in the walls to keep the rest of the building warm.”
I nodded, grasping the situation instantly. It was the perfect storm of bad conditions.
My gut tightened as I asked the next question that I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to, “Did everybody make it out? Anyone in there still?” I didn’t see how anyone who might still be inside the smoking structure could be safe.
“Most people made it out,” Isaac reported. “One or two are still unaccounted for.”
