Page 32 of Second Alarm
"You want to grab coffee next week?" Riley tosses the paper towel and leans against the sink. "I have a lot of opinions about this station, and I've been waiting for a woman I could share them with. Gemma's wonderful, but she's in love. I need someone bitter."
"I'm not bitter."
"Please. You're so bitter."
"Fine. Yes. I'll get coffee."
"Excellent."
She pats me on the shoulder, the same way mom pats cheeks, with the easy confidence of a woman who's already made up her mind. She leaves.
I stand in the bathroom for another ten seconds.
I come back to the booth. I smile at Derek and order another whiskey. Derek tries to make me laugh, twice, in the next twenty minutes, by means of a napkin puppet. I don't laugh. Derek losesten dollars to Rivera, right there at the table. Rivera doesn't look up from his phone.
"Your control," Rivera says, as I leave at eleven, "is art."
"Thank you, Rivera."
"I don't say that to many people."
"I know."
"I respect it."
"Thank you."
He nods and goes back to his phone. He's, I'm sure, updating the ledger he keeps for Big Jim. I walk out of the Watershed into the cold parking lot. Ty is in his truck, two spaces down, engine off, not looking at me. He's waiting for me to leave first so Cal doesn't make a comment. I walk to my car, get in, start the engine, back out, and drive home to my mother's house. I don't let myself think about a single thing until I'm under the covers in my old bedroom with the cat on my feet, at which point I allow myself to think about exactly one thing, which is the way Ty's mouth went flat around his beer when Derek saidsupply closet, and I think about that for longer than I should, and I fall asleep, eventually, with my face pressed into the pillow I had as a teenager, and I dream about water.
Chapter 6
Ty
She's still in the parking lot of my head when the tones drop for a working fire at the end of Maple, two kids reported inside, mom in the yard.
I'm already in the apparatus bay pulling my boots on when Cal flies past me, bed hair, jacket over a hoodie. "Kids."
"I heard."
"Go," Rivera says.
We go.
I don't think about the bathroom hallway at the Watershed for the entire length of the ride, which is three minutes and forty seconds. I think about the house on Maple. I think about the layout of those houses — bungalows from 1955, front door in the middle, living room left, kitchen and bedrooms right, two up, two down, detached garage. I think about the roof pitch. I think about the wind. I think about the call, and I let everything else drain out of the front of my head, because that's what you're trained to do, and that's what I do, and nothing else is going to exist until this fire it is out and those kids are safe.
Hanna's rig is behind us. I see it in the side mirror. It isn't a thought. It's information.
We pull up. Mom's in the yard. She's in a bathrobe and bare feet and she's screaming toward the house. The house is smoking. Gray smoke, lazy, not yet hot. Attic. Top of the roof is blackened. The fire is on the second floor, possibly in the walls, and we have minutes, because it hasn't broken out of the walls yet.
"TWO KIDS!" the mom screams. "MY TWO KIDS INSIDE — they were in the bed, they were — "
"Ma'am, how old — "
"Five and seven — "
"Bedroom where — "
"Back left, back left — "
