Chapter 3
MAX
My feet start running. My head hasn't caught up and my feet are running.
I sprint for the truck. Not the house. I know the house and I know fire and going through the front door in a henley and jeans isn't a rescue, it's just another body for Kessler to sign off on.
I cover the quarter mile up the service drive in under two minutes.
The truck is where I left it, black under the pines, the tailgate cool under my hands.
I yank the duffel out. I pull on turnout pants over my jeans, my fire boots, turnout coat over the henley, fire hood on.
Mask off the peg. SCBA tank off the side clip, twenty minutes of bottled air if I don't waste it.
Halligan. Flashlight. Helmet. Radio in my coat pocket, off, because I do not want this call logged.
The gear goes on the way it's gone on a thousand times. I move faster than I've ever moved. My hands know the straps. My head is somewhere behind my hands.
Fuck you, Val.
I run.
Back down the service drive. The house is fully lit up now, orange through the trees, and the draft has found it.
I can hear the roar and feel the heat from fifty yards out.
The east wing is venting through the roof, flame rolling up in a column as tall as a building.
The west wing is still dark outside, only smoke at the seams of the windows, but the guest room where I saw her is on the second floor and the fire has been working on the stairwell for six minutes and I know what six minutes looks like.
I know exactly what six minutes looks like.
I might be too late.
I turn my air on and pull my face mask on. A deep breath full of clean air. Delicious. I go to work.
I hit the front door and it's still cool at the top. The fire hasn't come forward yet. The fire is eating the east wing and climbing. I try the handle. Locked. I swing the halligan into the strike plate twice and the door splits.
Heat comes out at me but it's bearable. The foyer is standing. The east wing is roaring past an archway to my right, orange down the length of that hallway, beams down in it already. The west stairs are to my left. I go left.
I go up.
Smoke is down to my shoulders at the top of the stairs.
I drop to a crouch. Mask on, I breathe my own air and it tastes like steel.
The west hallway is still intact. Three doors on the right, two on the left, a hall table with a broken lamp on it, a runner on fire at the far end where it meets the east cross-corridor.
I go door to door. First door, open, ensuite, empty.
Second door, open, sitting room, empty. Third door.
Third door. Closed. Warm but not hot. I feel the frame with the back of my glove the way I was taught at nineteen in a concrete tower in the valley, and the frame gives a tolerable read, and I turn the knob.
She's under the window.
She's on the floor under the window in a white silk nightgown with a wet towel across her face and a wool throw around her shoulders and her eyes are closed.
Her left hand is bleeding. There is blood on the silk of her nightgown in a thin line from wrist to knee.
She doesn't move when I come in and the animal in me makes a sound I don't know I'm making until I hear it come back off the walls.
I cross the room in three strides and I go to my knees beside her and I press two fingers to her throat. Pulse. Fast and thready, but a pulse. She's breathing. Shallow. Smoke inhalation bad, dying no, not yet. I pull the wet towel off her face.
The cotton comes off and her face is under it, streaked with soot, wet where the towel sat against her skin. Her eyes don't open. Her mouth is open a quarter inch. A vein in her temple moves. She is alive the way a candle is alive when the flame has gone to a thread. One breath wrong and she's out.
I take my mask and put it over her mouth and nose. I took a deep breath off my own tank before sharing it, the kind of breath you learn not to waste. Ten seconds of clean air into her lungs. Fifteen. My own chest starts to burn before I take the mask back and let myself breathe again.
"Mrs. Clark." My voice is muffled through the mask. I say it anyway. "Mrs. Clark, I've got you."
She doesn't answer. Her eyelids flutter.
She is thirty-six years old and she weighs nothing.
I get one arm under her knees and one under her shoulders and I lift her and the wool throw comes with her, draped over my forearm.
The nightgown is cold-wet where the towel leaked onto her collarbone.
Her head falls against my chest, her pale hair against the turnout coat.
Smoke. Under it, faint, a shampoo I have no business knowing.
I have a thought I do not have time for.
Mine.
The thought comes whole. I shove it down a hole with the other thing I don't have time for. I turn and I go.
The hallway is worse in the thirty seconds I was in the room.
The runner has climbed the wall at the east end and the cross-corridor is a solid wall of light.
The stairs are still holding. I take them two at a time with her in my arms and her face against my neck and the mask back on her mouth, and my radio is banging against my ribs off, off, off, and I think about the many houses I've cleared with this same halligan and how usually I walk out alone.
The foyer is hotter than it was two minutes ago.
The east archway is down to the header. I kick through the split front door without slowing and the night hits us, cold autumn dark, the smell of pine and smoke and wet leaves.
I carry her fifty yards across the gravel drive before I let myself stop.
I go to a knee under an oak at the edge of the lawn.
I set her down on the wool throw. I check her pulse again.
I check her breathing. I count her respirations with my glove off against her sternum.
Twelve per minute. Low. Survivable. I look at the cut on her palm and it's shallow.
I put her head on my knee so her airway stays open and I put the mask on her properly and I keep the tank seated between us.
I look back at the house. The west roof is starting to go. If I had left her where she was, she would have had another three minutes, maybe four. Maybe less. The frame of the guest room is in the smoke now.
In my coat pocket the radio is still off.
I have not called dispatch. Val's contractor hasn't called either, not from the way the drive is still empty behind me.
The call was supposed to go in five minutes ago and it didn't, because Val told her contractor to wait, because Val wanted to know what I would do.
There is nobody coming. If I turn my radio on and report this fire from my own handle, I have three minutes before the first engine rolls and four before Val is on my earpiece asking why.
I turn the radio on. I turn the radio off.
Move.
I lift her again. Fifty more yards across the lawn to the gate.
The gate is still closed. I punch in the code and walk through.
Gravel of the service drive. Pines on both sides.
My truck is around the first bend. I put her across the bench seat on the passenger side and I tuck the wool throw over her shoulders and I take the SCBA off her face because in the cab she doesn't need it anymore.
She makes a small sound when I move her head.
Her eyes stay closed. I wedge the wool throw under her cheek so she doesn't knock her temple against the door pillar.
I close the passenger door. I go around.
I am behind the wheel with the engine on and the heater up and the radio off before I admit to myself what I have done.
I have stolen a target.
I drive.
I stay under the speed limit. I keep the headlights dim.
I take the back road through Millard and then the ridge cut up past the reservoir, routes I use for hunting in November and no other time of year.
No cameras on any of them. No houses. A county sheriff I don't know by name but who won't be on the ridge tonight.
At the reservoir the phone on the seat lights up once.
Text from Val, one word. Done? I look at the screen and I let it go dark without answering.
I put my free hand on the wool throw over Evangeline's shoulder the way you put a hand on a dog sleeping in the back of a truck, not to wake it, only to know it's there.
My hand stays on her for a mile and I take it off at the junction because my hand is a thing I cannot trust tonight.
---
The cabin is forty miles northwest, not east. The county road winds up into the hills where the forest gets dense and the houses get rare and the nearest neighbor is four miles through pine.
I have owned this cabin for nine years. Val does not know the address.
She knows I have a place and she has never asked where.
The road up is a fire service road that turns to dirt at the last mile and my truck knows every pothole.
Evangeline Clark does not wake up on the drive.
I check her every two or three minutes. Pulse.
Breathing. Color. Her color comes back slow.
Her lips pink up by the time we're twenty miles out.
Her respiration evens, then thickens into something closer to sleep than shock.
I roll her onto her side when I stop at the county road junction, the way you put a drunk friend in the recovery position.
I put my hand on her back. I keep it there through the light.
Her hair smells like smoke.
Under the smoke it smells like something else.
Some kind of shampoo. Something expensive, light, a little floral.
Not a perfume. A shampoo. I cannot tell you the last time I noticed what a woman's hair smelled like.
I cannot tell you the last time I had a woman aside from the chief in my truck. I take my hand off her back.
I drive.