Chapter 1 #2
He hadn't. Dom could hear the newness in the seams of it — the over-thoroughness, the way the kid narrated himself out loud to stay a half-step ahead of his own nerves.
Airway roll, present. Oxygen, main reads full, spare reads full, that's good.
But the hands. The hands were better than good.
They went through the drug box like they already trusted themselves, and Jonah caught the short-dated epi the off-going crew had left in the tray — pulled it, held it up to the light, "This is expiring, I'll swap it out" — before Dom had opened his mouth to see if he would.
Dom leaned against the workbench and drank the black coffee he had not asked for and had zero intention of admitting he'd wanted.
Well. Hell.
That was the whole problem, right there.
A bad rookie, you washed out and never thought about again.
A bad rookie was a kindness to everybody, the rookie included, who got to go be bad at something with a lower body count and a better night's sleep.
But a good one you had to teach. And to teach one you had to watch him — really watch him, the whole animal, the hands and the eyes and the half-second breath at the back doors — and Dom had promised himself in a hospital parking lot eighteen months ago that he was done watching people that closely.
You did it anyway and you missed things anyway.
You could sit across a rig cab from a man five nights a week for twelve years and still miss the one thing that turned out to matter.
"You gonna tell me why you're staring at the ceiling," Jonah said, from inside the box, not looking up from the airway kit, "or is that a standard FTO move I should start getting used to?"
Dom brought his eyes down off the flickering tube.
"Finish the check," he said.
***
They had two hours before the tones dropped, and Station 12 filled them the way it always did — badly.
The day crew hadn't fully cleared out before the night crew's usual congregated in the app bay, and Jonah got introduced around, and Dom watched him do the thing again, the fast read, adjusting himself a click for each new person like a man tuning a radio.
Warmer for the medic off Engine 4, who was warm back.
Careful for the two EMTs who ran the BLS truck and were sizing the new guy up out of boredom.
And then Falk came through, and Dom watched the kid try to tune to Falk and get nothing but static.
"This the fresh meat?" Falk didn't offer a hand. He was Dom's age and wore it worse, a man who'd let the job hollow him and then decorated the hollow with grievance. "Cassar's your FTO, huh. Good luck. He's a laugh riot. You'll be doing standup up front all shift, the two of you."
"I brought a coffee for everybody," Jonah said, which was a lie, and a good one, deflecting the meanness by pretending not to have heard it. "Oh, wait, no. I brought two, and Cassar took one, so now the math's real bad. This is a whole situation."
Falk looked at him a beat too long, deciding whether to be insulted, then snorted and moved off toward the day room, and Jonah's grin held right up until the man's back was turned and then dropped about ten percent, and Dom saw the drop, because Dom saw everything, it was his curse and his one remaining skill.
"He hates you specifically or just generally?" Jonah asked, low, when Falk was gone.
"Yes," Dom said.
The kid huffed a laugh — a real one, surprised out of him, brief. Then he did the thing Dom least wanted, which was try to build on it.
"So how long you been at the Twelve?" Sliding down onto the bench beside the rig, close enough that Dom could smell the newness of him, laundry soap and nerves and cheap coffee.
"Somebody said twenty years. That's — I mean, that's the whole thing, right?
That's the entire career. You must've seen the whole city change out from under you. "
"Finish your coffee."
"I'm just saying, that's a lot of nights. That's a lot of—"
"Rask." Dom didn't raise his voice. He never had to. He'd learned a long time ago that the quiet did more work than the volume ever could. "You don't have to fill it. The quiet. It's going to be a long six weeks if you think you've got to fill every quiet minute with your voice."
He watched that land. Watched the kid absorb it, and — this was the part Dom hadn't braced for — watched Jonah decide not to be hurt by it.
The brightness didn't flinch out this time.
It just gentled, went thoughtful, and the kid leaned back against the rig and let the quiet be there between them, and after a second he said, easy, "Okay. Yeah. That's fair."
And then he did it. Sat in the quiet. Didn't fill it.
Let a full minute go by with nothing but the HVAC dying and the trucks ticking as they cooled, and it turned out to be worse than the talking, because it meant the kid could learn, meant he'd take a hard thing and turn it into something useful in real time, and that was rare, and rare was exactly what Dom did not need sitting eighteen inches off his left shoulder for the next six weeks.
This is going to be a problem, Dom thought, and drank his stolen coffee, and did not say another word until the tones dropped.
***
They dropped at 2114.
Dom had the wheel — first shift, the FTO drove, the kid could earn the front seat later if he earned anything at all — and they ran hot through the wet dark toward an address on the east side, the strobes throwing red and white across shuttered storefronts and off the slick of the road, and Jonah in the passenger seat had gone quiet again, the wrong kind of quiet, the kind Dom already knew didn't mean calm.
He had the tablet up, reading the notes.
"Unresponsive male, gas station bathroom. Clerk called it in. Possible overdose."
"Possible." Dom took the corner without lifting off the accelerator. "Clerk finds a guy who won't wake up locked in a bathroom. It's not possible. It's a Tuesday."
The station was one of the ones that stayed open all night more out of habit than hope — fluorescent-flooded, empty, a clerk behind bulletproof glass who buzzed them toward the back and then made it real clear he wanted no further part of whatever this became.
The bathroom door was propped with a yellow mop bucket.
Inside, wedged into the gap between the toilet and the wall, a man in his twenties, skin gone the wrong gray, lips the wrong dusk-blue, and that specific stillness Dom had learned to read across a dark room from twenty feet.
Not breathing. Or close enough that the distinction was academic.
Dom dropped the bag and was already reaching — but the kid.
The kid was faster.
Jonah was down on the filthy tile with his knees in God knew what before Dom had the airway roll unzipped, two fingers at the man's jaw, tilting the head, ear to the mouth, eyes running the chest. "Agonal.
Barely moving air." His voice had gone somewhere else completely — flat, fast, stripped clean, not a trace of the app-bay brightness left in it.
He was already digging the naloxone out.
"Pupils are pinpoint, I've got track marks in the AC, this is an OD, I'm going intranasal — bag him for me. "
"Doing it."