Just Too Hot (Black Timber Peak Firehawks #1)

PROLOGUE

Trav

I know because I’ve watched it happen every night for the last umpteenth months and honestly? It never gets old. Back in Malibu I’d watch the sun hit the Pacific and think nothing could top it. I was wrong. Montana wins. Don’t tell my mom.

I set my binoculars on the shelf below the window and roll my left shoulder twice.

My PT in Billings calls it a mobility exercise.

I call it my daily reminder that people are the most unpredictable hazard on this mountain.

The trees don’t shoot you. The ridge doesn’t shoot you.

People though— people will absolutely shoot you and I’ve got the sore shoulder to prove it.

Thirty-two years old and I sound like a screen door in a beach house. Sick.

The eastern ridge is holding a deep amber that means the air’s dry and the humidity’s tanking.

I don’t need the instruments to tell me that.

I can feel it in the way the tower settles under my boots, the way the trees below go quiet and tighten up like they’re bracing.

The forest knows what’s coming before any gauge does.

I figured that out fast up here. You stop fighting the instinct and start trusting it, same as reading a wave.

You don’t think your way onto a wave. You feel it and you go.

I pull out my log.

1847. Eastern ridge, smoke-free. Wind NNE at approximately 8 mph. Humidity dropping. No activity. Tower three secure.

Same as yesterday. That’s a good day up here.

Nothing to report. Which yeah, I get how that sounds coming from a guy who spent four years as a Black Timber Peak Hotshot running toward fire for a living.

I was built for the charge, for the chaos, for the kind of work that wrecks your body so completely that your brain just taps out by nine p.m. I loved every gnarly second of it.

And then someone put a bullet in my shoulder on peak eight and the whole vibe shifted.

I don’t dwell on it. Dwelling’s for people with too much time and not enough to look at and I’ve got a hundred and twenty feet of the best view in Montana. So I log the wind, I watch the ridge, I make the call when the call needs making and I let the rest of it ride.

It’s worked out fine.

I heat water on the propane burner. Tuesday means rice and black beans and before you come at me, I’ve eaten worse with less of a view.

Resupply helicopter comes Friday. I’ve got enough.

I eat standing at the north window because the north view absolutely slaps.

A dark rolling sea of pines that just goes and goes until the treeline quits and the bare rock takes over and you remember fast that this mountain doesn’t care about you one bit.

It was here before you and it’ll be here long after. I respect the hell out of that.

The radio crackles. Nash checking in from tower five. I respond when my turn comes. We keep it short. That’s just how it goes up here. We don’t waste words.

I wash my bowl, dry it, put it back on the shelf.

I’m reaching for my field journal when something at the base of the tower stops me cold.

In eleven months I’ve had exactly two unannounced visitors.

The first was a bow hunter in October who smelled like elk spray and regret.

The second was a bear I respectfully named Marshmallow who spent forty-five minutes trying to puzzle out the ladder before waddling off south with more dignity than most people I know.

This is neither of those.

This is a person. On foot. Pack on their back, field case over one shoulder, moving through the undergrowth at the base of my tower like they know exactly what they’re doing. Not stumbling. Not scared. Just moving. Like they’ve got somewhere to be.

Like that somewhere is here.

I watch for a few seconds with my hand on the radio without keying it. Alone and unhurried, they stop at the base of the ladder and tip their head all the way back looking straight up at my window like they’ve already decided something.

I step back from the glass.

Then I feel like a total kook for stepping back because I’m a hundred and twenty feet up and there’s zero chance they can clock me from down there. That’s the whole point of being up here. I see everything and nobody sees me.

Best setup on the mountain.

But something about the way they’re looking up —steady, direct, no hesitation— makes me feel seen anyway.

I grab my binoculars.

The last light catches dark auburn hair escaping from under a field cap and a jaw set with the kind of quiet determination that I recognize because I’ve worn it myself. It’s not reckless. Definitely not lost.

Decided. A hundred percent invested in what they’re going to do.

They grab the first rung of the ladder.

I set the binoculars down. Pick up the radio. Put it back.

Then I go to open the door.