Take My Breath (The Medic 6 #1)

Chapter 1

Dead Air

The call was a pronouncement, which meant there was nothing to do but the paperwork.

Elderly male, floor of his own kitchen, gone long enough that the coffee he'd set to brew was cold in the pot and the cat had started to complain about it.

Nobody left to save. Just a form to fill and a neighbor to sit with and the slow business of turning a person into a case number.

Dom did the form in the back of the rig with the dome light off, working by the wash of a streetlight through the rear windows, because he'd stopped needing to see the boxes to check them a long time ago.

Time of death. Presumed cause. Next of kin, unknown, pending.

The neighbor's name, which he spelled twice, because she'd cried through the first spelling and he hadn't had the heart to make her do it again.

Twenty years on the box, and the job had distilled down to this. A clipboard, a cooling pot of coffee, and a man who wasn't anywhere anymore.

He didn't feel much about it. That was the part he'd stopped mentioning to people, back when people still asked.

You did enough of these and the feeling wore down to a nub, like a tire gone to the belts, and one day you noticed you were doing eighty on it and hadn't thought about the road in miles.

The neighbor had wept into a dish towel and Dom had said the right things in the right order — take your time, there's no rush, is there someone we can call for you — and had meant approximately none of them, and had hated himself the exact correct amount, which was to say a little, in the background, like a sound you stop hearing.

Dispatch crackled at his belt. He let it. Whatever it was could wait the length of a signature.

Across the bay a diesel turned over, and the sound went through the floor of the rig and up into the soles of his boots, familiar as a heartbeat.

Station 12 at four in the morning had its own frequency — the trucks idling, the coffee maker abusing its third pot of the night, the HVAC that had been dying since before half the current crew were hired.

Dom knew all of it. He could've told you which bay door stuck, and how far, and which fluorescent tube over the app bay had a flicker you only caught from the corner of your eye.

He'd spent more of his life inside this building than inside any apartment he'd ever put his name on a lease for.

He capped the pen. Slid the clipboard home in its slot.

Sat a second in the dark with the last hour still on him — the ammonia bite of the disinfectant, and under it the sweetish thing a body did once it had been down a while, which no amount of Level 3 hazmat training ever fully talked you out of smelling.

Home sweet home.

He climbed out and went to find coffee he didn't want.

Von was waiting by the machine, which was never good.

Field supervisors did not drive to Station 12 at four a.m. to talk about the weather.

She had a manila folder tucked under one arm and the specific expression she wore when she'd already decided a thing and was extending you the courtesy of watching you catch up to it.

"No," Dom said.

"You don't even know what I'm going to ask."

"I know it's four in the morning and you drove out here to ask it in person." He reached past her for the pot. The coffee had cooked down to something with the color and body of roofing tar. He poured it anyway. "That's a favor. And it's one I'm going to hate. So. No."

"When's the last time you took a day, Dom?"

"That's not a favor. That's a lecture with a running start."

Von didn't smile. She set the folder on the counter between them and opened it, and Dom looked down at it the way he'd look at a wound he already knew was going to need packing.

A face on a personnel sheet. Young. Too young — the kind of young that photographed like a high school yearbook, the kind that was going to spend the next decade getting carded at the ER when he tried to buy a vending-machine Gatorade.

Fair, some freckles the camera had mostly washed out, overgrown hair shoved up under a ballcap for the photo like that would fool anybody.

Rask, Jonah T. A certification date recent enough that the ink was, functionally, still wet.

"No," Dom said again, quieter now, because he understood.

"Top of his medic cohort. Clinical evaluations off the top of the scale. He needs a field training officer to run his probationary cycle, and I have exactly one FTO on this shift whose signature the medical director will sign off on without a second phone call." She let that sit. "That's you."

"Give him to Falk."

"I'm not handing a brand-new medic to Grant Falk and neither would you, if you were being honest, which you're not, because it's four in the morning and you'd rather fight me than agree with me.

" She said it without heat. "You want to do that kid a genuine disservice, sure.

Give him to a man who treats the job like it personally insulted his family. "

Dom drank the tar. It was, by any objective measure, a war crime. He drank it anyway, because it gave his hands something to do that was not handing the folder back to her.

"I ride alone," he said.

And there it was. The thing under the words.

The thing they both heard land, because they both knew what the passenger seat of Medic 6 had been for the last eighteen months, which was empty, which was a specific and deliberate kind of empty that everybody at the Twelve had learned to route around like a hole in the floor.

He rode alone now. Everybody knew why he rode alone now.

Von had been at the funeral. Von had been the one who'd found him afterward in the parking lot, sitting in his truck not going anywhere, and she hadn't said a word, just stood by the door with her hand flat on the roof until he was able to turn the key.

She didn't flinch from it now, either. That was the thing about Von. Twenty years, and she had never once let him climb inside Ray's name and pull it shut behind him.

"Eighteen months," she said. "You've ridden alone eighteen months, and I've let you, because I owed you that and because losing a partner like Ray isn't the kind of thing you set a clock on.

But it's not a personality, Dom. It's a hole, and you've been living down in it, and I can't keep staffing a shift around your grief like it's a standing appointment.

" She closed the folder, and pushed it a half-inch across the counter toward him, which was about as tender as Von got in a break room.

"He starts your next shift. Tonight, technically.

Six weeks. Sign him off, wash him out, I genuinely do not care which.

But he learns it from you. Because you are the best medic I have got, and the worst company, and only one of those is a thing this kid can't get somewhere else. "

Dom set the mug down. It clicked against the counter, too loud in the dead hour.

"Which one," he said.

Von picked up her folder — the original; she'd left him the copy, which meant she'd printed two before she ever got in the car, which meant this had never been a conversation, it had been a delivery — and she headed for the door.

"Figure it out," she said, over her shoulder. "That's the whole job."

***

The kid was early.

Dom clocked that before the face, before anything.

Medic 6 wasn't due to relieve the off-going crew until 1800, and it was 1730, and there was already somebody standing at the app bay door in a uniform so new it still had the fold lines pressed into the sleeves — a duffel over one shoulder, and a to-go coffee in each hand.

Two coffees. Dom filed that away without deciding yet what it meant.

"Cassar?" The kid came across the bay fast, the way the young ones moved, like the floor might close up if they didn't get across it in time.

Up close he was every bit as young as the photo had threatened and then somehow a little more — all quick pale eyes and raw untapped voltage, a thin scar cut through one eyebrow that he'd have a story for and Dom would never once ask about.

He held out one of the coffees. "I didn't know how you take it.

So — one's black, one's got everything in it. You pick. I drink the loser."

Dom looked at the coffee. Looked at the kid. Did not take the coffee.

"Rask," he said.

"Jonah's fine. Or Rask. People call me both, I answer to either, I've answered to worse.

" When Dom said nothing, the kid solved the standoff himself — set the black coffee down on the workbench near Dom's elbow, easy, unbothered, like that had been the plan the whole time and no reasonable person could think otherwise.

Dom watched him do it, and understood that Jonah Rask read a room fast and covered the read even faster.

The covering was the interesting part. Anybody could be eager. The talent was in how smoothly he'd turned a rejection into a non-event, no wound showing, already moving on to the next thing. Dom filed that away too, in the growing folder in his head marked do not get invested.

"Rig check," Dom said. "You run it, I watch. Anything you can't find, you find out where it lives, and you never ask me the same question twice."

"Copy that."

The kid was already moving toward the ambulance, and there it was — the first real thing.

Not the coffee. Not the voltage. The way Jonah Rask went still for half a second at the rear doors before he opened them.

A breath, taken on purpose, like a man steadying himself at the top of a dive.

Then the brightness snapped back on, and he hauled the doors wide and started calling out the inventory like he'd been doing it a decade.