Chapter Three – Holt
Two weeks into the new station rotation, I stop pretending my body knows what time it is. That part gives up fast.
The shifts run twenty-four hours while the department finds its footing, which means some mornings, I wake in my own bed, and some nights, I wake on a narrow bunk with my boots half laced and the taste of station coffee still sitting stale at the back of my throat.
We rotate through days and overnights and whatever else Mac needs to fill the board without grinding all of us into dust before the department has a chance to become something steady.
It makes sense, but it still ruins your internal clock.
The bright side is that after long enough, everybody starts looking equally tired, so no one can judge anyone else for drinking coffee at ten at night or eating reheated leftovers at two in the morning like it’s a perfectly normal human choice.
Tonight is mine. Me. Ray. Beckett. Mac. A Thursday overnight that starts slow and stays that way long enough for me to think maybe we’ll get lucky. Then again, there’s no such thing as lucky in a building like this. Only quiet. Only waiting. Only the understanding that none of it lasts.
I stand at the sink in the station kitchen, a plate in one hand and a sponge in the other, staring down at a streak of barbecue sauce that has somehow hardened into something stronger.
The fluorescent lights overhead hum softly. The old refrigerator clicks on beside me. The coffee pot on the back counter holds what has to be the fourth batch of the day, and it smells exactly like poor judgment and necessity.
Beckett drifts into the kitchen while I’m still scrubbing.
“Explain to me,” he says, grabbing a soda from the fridge, “why you’re washing dishes like they personally insulted your family.”
I don’t look up. “Explain to me why you microwaved wings like a man who wants to be humbled in front of my granny.”
“That was innovation.”
“That was smoke.”
Ray, seated at the table with a stack of incident forms in front of him, doesn’t glance up. “That was nearly a problem.”
Beckett pops the soda tab and leans against the counter. “I refuse to work in this environment if my art won’t be respected.”
I rinse the plate and set it in the drying rack. “Call county. See if they care.”
He grins. “You’re cranky tonight.”
“I’m on a twenty-four-hour shift.”
“So am I.”
“You’re always like this. I don’t get the same excuse.”
That almost gets a laugh out of Ray. Almost. With him, the closest you usually get is a twitch at the corner of his mouth and the distinct feeling you’ve somehow won something.
I dry my hands on a dish towel and glance toward the bay doors at the far end of the station.
Closed now. The glass windows in them reflect the inside lights back at us, making the building feel smaller after dark than during the day.
More contained. More cut off from town and water and whatever else is happening outside.
You can hear the wind hit the side of the building now and then if everything inside goes still enough.
I like that part. Or maybe like isn’t the right word.
I understand it. The station feels more honest at night.
Less like an idea people are excited about and more like what it actually is—four men inside a converted old building with a truck, equipment, too much coffee, not enough sleep, and a town trusting that if something goes wrong, we’ll get there in time.
That’s the part that never stops landing hard.
“We still pretending you’re not joining the Wendigos?” Beckett asks.
I give him a look. “I never agreed to anything.”
He takes a slow drink of soda and smiles over the can. “Jenna already put you on the roster.”
“That sounds like Jenna’s problem.”
“That sounds like denial.”
Ray flips a page on his clipboard. “He’ll show.”
“I absolutely will not.”
Beckett points at me. “You said that with no conviction.”
I open my mouth to answer and stop when Mac steps into the doorway. He doesn’t need to say anything for the room to shift.
It’s subtle. It always is with him. He isn’t loud enough to dominate a space by force, but he doesn’t have to be. He carries command the same way some men carry height or money or old family name. Easily. Without performance.
He looks at me first.
“Wright.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sit down for a minute.”
“I’m good.”
“That wasn’t a discussion.”
Beckett makes a soft, deeply unhelpful noise into his soda. I turn my head slowly toward him.
He immediately straightens. “I said nothing.”
Mac doesn’t wait for the rest of it. He steps farther into the kitchen, reading glasses hooked in one hand, clipboard under the other arm, gaze moving from one of us to the next in a way that tells me he has already taken the whole measure of the room and found it just this side of acceptable.
“Phones are charged,” he says. “Gear reset. Reports filed before midnight. I’m not chasing any of you down for paperwork after a call.”
“Yes, sir,” Ray says.
Beckett salutes with his soda. “You got it, Cap.”
Mac’s eyes flick to the can. “You spill that in my bay, you’re mopping until dawn.”
Beckett lowers it slowly. “Understood.”
Mac’s gaze lands on me again. I hold it. Some men know how to ask a question without using one. Mac has perfected it. You good. You here. You ready if this night stops being quiet.
I nod once. He does too, and just like that, the moment passes. He moves back toward his office.
Beckett watches him go, then exhales. “One day I want to have that effect on people.”
I grab my coffee and head for the dayroom. “You’d need discipline for that.”
He calls after me, “I have presence.”
“Like mold has presence,” Ray says.
This time, Beckett actually laughs.
I leave them to it and drop onto the couch in the dayroom with my mug in one hand and my phone in the other.
The room is dimmer than the kitchen, lit mostly by a lamp in the corner and the weak wash from the hall.
One of the recliners has a split seam in the arm that nobody has fixed because there’s always something more important.
The television is off. The station settles around me in layers—pipes creaking somewhere overhead, a door closing down the hall, the low murmur of Beckett and Ray still talking in the kitchen.
I look at the time.
10:17 p.m.
That weird stretch of the night where it’s too early to feel dead tired and too late to feel fully useful if no one needs anything from you.
My phone buzzes.
Mom: are you eating enough protein to sustain all that heroism?
I huff out a quiet laugh and type back.
Me: define heroism
The answer comes almost immediately.
Mom: I knew it.
Mom: what did you eat?
I glance down at the half-finished coffee in my hand and the plate I already scrubbed.
Me: wings.
A beat.
Mom: microwaved?
I stare at the screen.
The woman has some kind of supernatural surveillance network. That’s the only explanation.
Before I can answer, another text comes through.
Hadley: mom says drink water or she’s coming down there
I text back.
Me: tell mom I am a grown man
Hadley: no one believes that when you’re with Beckett
That one gets me. A real smile. Small, but there. Maybe that’s the part of me I keep feeling shift these past couple of weeks. Not gone. Just quieter. Like I’ve taken the louder pieces of myself and moved them farther back so they don’t get in the way of the rest.
The goofball still exists. He just doesn’t get first pick of the room anymore.
That should feel sadder than it does. Instead, it feels like growing up in a way nobody warns you about.
Not the version where you become serious all at once and leave everything easy behind.
The version where you realize you can still joke, still laugh, still be the one who makes my nephew snort milk out his nose and Hadley threaten to disown you over dinner, but parts of life now require steadier hands than that.
My phone buzzes again.
Mom: Holt Benjamin Wright, if you answer this one with “they’re just wings” I’m bringing you chicken and rice myself.
I laugh under my breath and type back.
Me: I’ll survive
Her reply is immediate.
Mom: that’s not the standard.
I put the phone down on my chest and close my eyes just long enough to listen to the station breathe around me.
The first two weeks of the department have taught me a few things.
That twenty-four-hour shifts feel longer in the middle than they do at either end.
That Beckett somehow gets louder after dark.
That Ray’s version of concern sounds almost exactly like criticism unless you know better.
That Mac misses very little and says even less.
That my mother will absolutely text me through a structure fire if she thinks I haven’t eaten a vegetable.
That every time the tones drop, something in my chest locks hard for half a second before everything in me goes still.
That part surprised me. Not the adrenaline. Not the focus after. The clean, cold slice right before movement. The flash of awareness that says this could be anything, this could be everything, then disappears the second there’s something to do.
I hear Beckett coming down the hall before I open my eyes. He stops in the doorway, framed in the dim light.
“You’re either meditating or dying.”
“Neither.”
“You looked reflective. It was disgusting.”
I crack one eye open. “Go away.”
He leans one shoulder against the frame and folds his arms. “Can’t. Ray says if I sit in the kitchen any longer, he’s filing a harassment complaint.”
“That’s fair.”
Beckett’s expression shifts, the grin easing just enough for something more honest to show through. “You are good, right?”
I sit up a little straighter and look at him. He asks it casually. He always does. Like he’s throwing a line out and hoping sincerity can hide under the joke.
“Yeah,” I say.
He studies me for one beat. “You sure?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”