Page 72 of Reckless
Well, shit. So much for that. Might as well come out with it, because once they got back to the house after this call, everybody and their mother was going to hear the sonic boom coming from the captain’s office. “Westin caught me kissing Zoe.”
Cole’s expression triple-timed intoson of a bitchterritory. “When?”
“About twelve minutes ago.”
“You’re freaking kidding me,” Cole said, and Alex plastered his expression with as muchI wishas he could work up. Cole pulled on his hood, then his gloves, waiting for Alex to do the same before asking the inevitable. “Did he lose his shit?”
“Scale of one to ten?” Alex’s stomach twisted, his unease multiplying at the scent of bitter-black smoke filtering in through the window. Cole nodded, and Alex let himself linger on the acidic aftertaste of the confrontation for one last second before mashing his dread all the way down to the bottom of his rib cage.
“It was about a forty.”
Engine Eight jolted to a stop with an overloud groan of the brakes, and Alex forced himself to switch gears and focus. Popping the door handle at his hip, he jumped down to the pavement, scanning from left to right, then back again as he methodically took in the scene from the middle of the narrow street.
Stretches of white clapboard-covered row homes lined the asphalt on either side, most of them six units long with barely a ten-foot break in between buildings. Steady rolls of smoke funneled from the windows of the three attached units in front of them, although between the quickly growing haze and the limited visibility from the tight confines of the street, pinpointing actual flames was essentially a million to one. But with the walls and attics these homes always shared, it was a solid bet that if the flames had reached the roofline of one of them, they’d all be on fire in a matter of minutes, not hours.Ifthey weren’t all burning already.
Talk about getting tossed out of the frying pan. But after five solid weeks of not fighting fires, Alex was so ready to shake the rust off, it was damn near painful. The radio on his shoulder crackled to life, and he stood between Cole and Jones, his adrenaline taking a potshot at his pulse as he waited for the directive to put his pent-up energy to good use.
“Osborne, you and Andersen get up on that roof for a vent and get the rest of squad inside for search and rescue. Two residents made their way out of the far right unit on their own, but let’s not waste any time in case any others are occupied.” Westin clipped out orders from his spot on the street between the engine and the ambo, dividing up the remaining members of the rescue squad for search and rescue before turning his attention to Engine. “Everett, you’re on the nozzle. Donovan, put Jones on your hip and back him up. I want water in this building starting yesterday. Go.”
Alex sucked in a breath, turning toward Jones as everyone fell into action with precise yet urgent movements. “You catch any fires like this while I was gone?” he asked, and the recruit shook his head.
“Not in a row home, no.”
Alex’s shoulders burned with exertion as they readied the heavy lengths of hose from the engine, and damn, he needed to keep himself on the level. “It’s the same deal you learned in the tower at the academy,” he said to Jones, slowing the tempo of his inhale-exhale so his freaking pulse might get the memo. “Nozzle man goes up with the officer to start running water. But these places have tight, pain in the ass stairwells, kind of like a high rise. Because of that, the nozzle man usually has a hell of a time advancing the line, so someone always backs him up to keep it from getting tangled or caught on corners. Today that someone is me and you. You got it?”
Jones nodded, his brows bent in concentration beneath the brim of his helmet. “I think so.”
“Don’t think so, rookie.Knowso, because there’s no dress rehearsal and we’re up.”
Cole cut a path across the swath of grass serving as the row home’s collective front yard, and Alex fell into step behind him with Jones at his six. He had to give the kid credit—he’d been a quick study in finding the right distance at which to follow along, and Alex wasn’t about to sneeze at the extra assistance with the hose, since his muscles were already halfway to Jell-O and the damn thing felt like it weighed a metric ton. But someone could still be trapped inside one of these houses, so Alex didn’t give a shit if the line weighed six metric tons and he had to haul it solo. He had a job to do, and after a month of not going on a single active fire call, he was damn well going to get to doing it.
The group moved forward toward the center of the row home, but their boots had no sooner hit the bottom porch board than one of the guys on squad shouldered his way out of the unit directly to their left, yanking his mask from his face.
“Search is clear in here, and neighbors are reporting they haven’t seen the guy who lives in that one since he left for work this morning,” he barked over the rush of flames and the steady roll of heat. “From what Oz can see from up top, he said the Charlie side of the third floor is pretty heavily involved, and if these units are all alike, you’ve got your fucking work cut out for you with that line. The stairs over here were a bitch and a half.”
Anything else he might’ve added was cut off by the radio request for an immediate search in the end unit, and Cole jerked his chin at the unit in front of them with nobody home.
“Go. We’ve got this.” He nodded as the guy fell out with the rest of squad to search the end unit. He paused at the front door just long enough to force the wood from the hinges with his Halligan bar, angling past the threshold with steely purpose. Smoke clung to the air in a curtainlike haze, and Alex reached up to pull his mask over his face, motioning for Jones to do the same before they elbowed their way after Cole.
“I’m going up to floor three. We’ve got to keep this fire from walking,” Cole hollered from just inside the entryway, motioning toward the set of thinly carpeted stairs in front of them. “I’ll knock this thing down before it spreads any further and work my way down to you.”
They maneuvered their way up the first set of steps single file, waves of soot and ash clogging the visibility in the windowless space and hampering any quick progress Alex had hoped to make. The second-floor landing was little more than a series of boxy angles and tight turns leading up or down, all with potential roadblocks and range of motion that amounted to Alex’s new best friend, Jack Shit.
“God damn it.” Cole surveyed the situation, his frown evident even behind his mask. “There have to be seventy different recipes for disaster with a layout like this.”
But Alex motioned his best friend upward with a brisk back and forth of one hand, while giving Jones the signal to hold steady where he stood with the other. “Go,” he said to Cole. “Jones and I will keep this from becoming a cluster fuck.” His kept hismaybeto himself as Everett hauled ass toward the third floor. At least they could radio if things got hairy.
Alex swiveled a calculating gaze in a quick three-sixty, turning on one booted heel to scan as much of the second floor as he could. Strains of daylight did their damnedest to poke in from the trio of open-doored bedrooms just off the stretch of the hallway leading toward the rear of the house, and Alex measured three—no four sites of active fire in his line of sight alone.
“Okay, Jones. Stay right there between floors one and two. Make sure you?—”
Out of the corner of his eye, Alex caught the barely there outline of a figure hunched in the doorway of the far bedroom.
“Jesus!” His pulse went ballistic, and he cursed fluently as he whipped his hand up toward the radio on his shoulder. “Donovan to command. We need a search on the second floor, likenow.”
“That’s a negative, Donovan.” Westin’s voice crackled over the two-way. “Everett is reporting that the third floor is a goddamn train wreck. I need those lines clear.”
“Yeah, well I’ve got…” Alex squinted back down the hallway, sweat dripping into his eyes and fogging his mask.
