Page 30 of Second Alarm
"Mmhmm," Ty says.
Derek leans in. Derek, two beers deep, is on the scent of something without knowing what.
"Hey, Larsen."
"Yeah."
"You were at that academy. You were a class behind us. You were there in the second semester, right?"
"I was."
"Were you there that night?"
My whiskey glass is in my hand. My whiskey glass doesn't move. My face doesn't move. I breathe with my face, in and out, and I look Derek in the eye with the calm of a woman defusing a bomb with all the time in the world.
"Which night," I say.
Derek opens his mouth. Derek closes his mouth. Derek, I realize, with a certain delight, doesn't remember what year he's talking about. Derek has told this story so many times that the story has become its own chronology and no longer attaches to a specific night. Derek wants it to have been a class's worth of cadets in a specific event, and he wants it all to be one great incident, when, in fact, it was three separate drills across four months, one of which was mine.
"Which night, Derek."
"The — the sprinkler — "
"Which one."
"The — the main one."
"I wasn't there for the main one. I was in a class a year behind. You think I got sprinkler-drilled with Ty and Cal? I wasn't even in the same dormitory."
"Right. Right, right."
"I do know about it, though."
"Well, yeah, anyone who's been to this bar knows about it."
"Mm."
"You're not slick, Derek."
Derek laughs. It's good. It's a clean save. I used to be better at this, and it turns out I'm still better at this. I'm a woman who can walk through a loaded room of firefighters with the composure of a trained paramedic at a pileup, because I'm a trained paramedic at a pileup, and also because I didn't bury ten years of personal history just to surface it at the Watershed at the urging of Derek Kowalski in front of a jukebox currently playing Bruno Mars.
"To the only cadet in Oregon history," Derek announces, lifting his glass, "to successfully hide from a drill instructor inside a supply closet."
Ty chokes on his beer.
It's a subtle choke. An almost silent choke. The kind of choke that only I'd catch, because only I'd be tracking the specific muscles at the specific angle.
Rivera, at the jukebox, looks over his shoulder. Rivera's eyebrow goes up exactly a quarter of an inch. Rivera's eyebrow goes back down. Rivera was probably at the academy too and has probably been watching this whole thing with the slow-burn interest of a man who makes bets with Big Jim about other people's love lives.
Across the booth, Riley, whom I've met now for about twenty minutes, is looking at me in a way I don't like. Riley is an arson investigator. She is someone whose entire working life is figuring out where the heat came from. Riley's eyes go from me,to Ty, and back to me, and her eyebrows do one tiny calibration, and then she picks up her water glass and drinks it, like nothing happened.
Riley knows.
Riley has known since approximately the second I sat down. In a town this size, I should've expected it — information in Copper Ridge doesn't travel, it teleports. But Riley is an arson investigator. She doesn't even need the town. She reads burn patterns.
"I'm going to the bathroom," I say.
"I'm going too," Ty says, at the exact same second.
