20. Chapter 14
Dashiell
Two Days Later—Sunday
Sadly, there’s no playbook for how to return to work after you’ve been assaulted and almost kidnapped by the mob.
Trust me, I’ve checked.
Not, like, literally. I haven’t gone digging through the SFFD’s employee handbook for a section called So Your Fake Boyfriend’s Bodyguards Had to Hogtie a Guy Who Tried to Drag You Into an Alley, but I’ve spent the past two days waiting for some kind of internal manual to kick in, for my instincts to take over the way they do on a call. But nothing comes.
Instead, I spend my time reorganizing my sock drawer at Lorenzo’s apartment, reading more mafia erotica (what? It’s addictive!), and generally feeling like I’m recovering from some sort of near-death experience.
Which, maybe I am.
I believe in therapy, and I know that it’s a privilege that through the department I have access to free counseling, but I can’t go to the department shrink about this. What would I say? Would her doctor-patient confidentiality even cover things related to the mob?
Instead, I do the next best (and probably way-less-wise) thing, looking up my symptoms online:
Jumpy at small noises
Hands won’t stop shaking
Nightmares about a bad thing that happened
Not wanting to talk or think about a traumatic event
I’m having uncontrollable memories about a bad thing that happened to me, what do I do?
And, doc, the results are in.
Either I’m dying, or I have PTSD.
I suppose I could talk to Lorenzo about it, but he mostly avoids me during the next few days.
We don’t have any arguments about me leaving the apartment, because I don’t want to leave the apartment.
I don’t text my friends, I ignore the voicemail Mom leaves me about when Lorenzo and I can come to dinner, and instead watch as much Love Island as I can.
The cut on my forearm scabs over, thin and dark red. Every time I catch sight of it, I remember the solid strike of my body against my attacker’s, of the cold grip of his gun in my hands as I gave it to Lorenzo.
When it comes time for my next shift at Station 27, muscle memory kicks in. I get up before my alarm, drink the coffee that Lorenzo started, make myself breakfast in silence, and wait quietly for Wolfe to come pick me up.
In the car ride to the station, I don’t say anything, and Wolfe doesn’t press me to talk.
I want to ask him where he took my attacker. Is he even alive? Are they threatening him? Torturing him?
Have they gotten any answers?
“I’ll pick you up here tomorrow,” Wolfe says when he drops me off, directly in front of the station. “Don’t go anywhere else.”
“I won’t,” I mutter, and shut the car door.
Any dreams of rebellious freedom are gone.
I’m early today. Nick and Vinnie are the only ones from my shift also at the station, and the crews from the shift before us are wrapping up their final details. I go to the kitchen to brew myself another cup of coffee, hoping to keep my head low and not have to talk to Nick or Vinnie.
Unfortunately, Vinnie finds me there while I’m stirring creamer into my mug. He sets a box of donuts on the table, takes one out, and squints at me.
“You look like hell.”
I snort. “Thanks. Good morning to you too.”
“No, I mean it. You look like you didn’t sleep, and it’s not in a ‘I’m getting the best sex of my life’ type of way. It’s more of a ‘something’s actually wrong’ way.”
“Everything’s fine. I promise.”
Vinnie rounds the kitchen table until he’s standing in front of me, and gives me a once-over. His gaze lands on my forearm, on the scabbed-over cut.
“What’s this?” His voice is sharp and worried.
“I fell after leaving breakfast the other day.”
True enough, just missing some key details.
“Hm.” Clearly, he doesn’t believe me, and in that moment, I want to tell him everything, but I just can’t. How can I explain what’s going on without making him worry? Though, I suppose, someone probably ought to be worried about me right now. I sure as hell am.
He steps closer, his look of concern deepening. “Lorenzo didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“No,” I say with enough vehemence that I hope Vinnie believes me.
“Okay.” His reply is hesitant. “Because, if he did, mobster or not, I’ll end him, and everyone else who works here will help me.”
I reach up to squeeze his shoulder. “I know. I promise, I just fell on the sidewalk. Actually, Lorenzo patched me up. He took good care of me.”
“He better.”
I pat his shoulder, take my coffee, and go to wait for Nick for the crew’s morning debrief.
Around midday, we respond to a fire. The address that dispatch gives us puts us in Dogpatch, in an area of converted warehouses that developers have turned into “artistic live-work lofts.” The kind of places with exposed brick, big steel-framed windows—charming unless there’s a fire, when all that brick and all those open floor plans turn the place into a very attractive oven.
By the time Charlie parks the truck, the flames already show through two second-floor windows of one of the buildings. The flames are thick and confident, billowing with dark smoke. A knot of residents huddles across the street, some of them on their phones.
The building manager, a man in a pink vest and skinny jeans, runs up to us.
“Occupants?” Nick asks, his eyes tracking the building as he does a silent size-up.
“Everyone’s out, I think,” the manager answers, fiddling with his vest. “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”
Fast. Interesting. Fires like this don’t usually happen fast. They build, smoldering, giving you time to smell that something is wrong before the flames rear their flickering heads.
A fast fire? That usually means something was giving it some help. An accelerant, or a hand in the flames that wanted it to hurry up and get to work.
I glance at Nick, and I can see those same wheels turning in his head.
“Ladder truck, we’re going up,” he says. “Charlie, vent the roof and work the second floor. Engine, hit the exterior until we know it’s safe to advance. Azul, Haden, check the crowd. See if anyone needs medical.”
We spring into action.
Everything after this is routine. My body runs through all the practiced motions that are purely routine at this point. We enter the building, hit the fires, knock it down.
The ritual of the work is calming in its own way. For twenty minutes, I’m not thinking about Lorenzo or what happened the other day. Not thinking about any existential danger I may or may not be in.
Instead, all I think about is heat, fuel, water, fire.
I think about the structure around me, about the way that the floors groan, about the way my light sweeps through the smoke, about how this is what I’m trained for.
I haven’t trained to fight mobsters and assassins and kidnappers, but I have trained to fight fires.
And fight them I will.
We knock the fire down in just over half an hour, and then overhaul starts. The fire began in a unit on the second floor. The apartment is completely wrecked, everything charred and black and reeking of smoke.
I am kneeling by the remnants of one of the closets when my gaze snags on something on the floor, and my stomach goes cold.
There is a long, branching burn trail scarring the old hardwood floorboards.
Holy shit.
The lines of the burn trail are too deliberate, too clean, to point to anything except someone’s intentional action. What I’m looking at is the mark of an accelerant poured in a pattern and then lit, the blackened wood branching out in specific, purposeful angles.
Holy shit holy shit holy shit.
I trace one of the lines, and I know that I’ve seen this before. Not in a training video, not in a memo, but…somewhere.
Where?
It’s in my memory, I know it, but I can’t place it immediately.
Fragments of smoky, smelly stone. A note of chemicals in the air. A hallway with broken, burnt doors.
A voice screaming Father.
A note: You saw nothing that night.
I stagger to my feet, the memory hitting me. I did see something that night at the Diamante house. Something just like this, a burn pattern hidden on the floor amidst the soot and the rubble. But I didn’t know that I had seen it.
But someone knows I saw it, I think.
Suddenly paranoid, I look around the apartment at my fellow firefighters.
Surely it wasn’t one of them. There were plenty of other people at the Diamante house during overhaul.
Police officers, fire marshals, news anchors, civilians.
So many witnesses, so many eyes. Which one of them noticed me seeing something I didn’t yet understand? Which one of them threatened me?
And…is this fire somehow connected?
Fear makes me want to keep my mouth shut. I’ve been threatened for seeing one burn pattern and not even noticing it. Will the threats return if I notice and report this one?
It would be simple to ignore it, to not say anything. The pattern is subtle enough that the others might not see it. I could direct them away from it, say that I already checked this area and didn’t see anything. Or maybe one of them will notice it and then it’ll be their problem.
My body tenses with visceral flashbacks of the man on the street grabbing me, trying to force me into an alley.
Something bad, something evil, is going on, and I can’t let that continue.
I grab my radio. “Nick. You need to come take a look at this.”
Minutes later, Nick kneels with me beside the burn pattern.
“You see what I see?” I ask.
He nods grimly. “I see it. This isn’t the first one.”
Again, I think of the Diamante fire. “Not the first?”
“Well, first we’ve responded to,” he amends. “But I’ve heard talk of two others in the last month with a burn pattern that looked like this.”
First we’ve responded to. So he doesn’t know of the burn pattern at the Diamante fire.
“I’ll have to call the fire marshal,” he says.
“Don’t bother,” says a voice from behind us. “Already here.”
We turn around and find a woman in a Bureau of Fire Investigation jacket picking her way through the wreckage of the apartment, her flashlight already trained on the burn pattern in front of me.
“Mila!” Nick says, jumping to his feet and grinning. “Good to see you.”
“Nick!” She gives him a sooty hug. “They didn’t tell me it was the old Station 27 family here.”
“The one and only,” he says.
She smiles at me. “I’m Mila Chaudhary, Deputy Fire Marshal.”
“Dashiell Novak.”
“Your replacement,” Nick tells Mila. “He joined the crew after you left us.”
“Big shoes to fill,” Mila says with a wink.
“Doing my best, ma’am.”
Her eyes widen. “Jesus, kid. Don’t call me that. I’m not even forty.” Then she crouches by the burn pattern. “So, it was y’all who responded to the Diamante fire the other week, right?”
“We did,” Nick says.
Mila glances between us. “I was there afterwards. This look familiar to you?”
Nick hesitates, and I jump in. “I think so. I didn’t notice it then, but after seeing it today, I do recognize it. I think I saw something like this at the Diamante house.”
I don’t tell her about the threatening note.
She nods. “I thought I did, too, but it looked like someone had gotten in there and obscured it a bit. Tampering with the scene. I can’t be sure.
You’re right, Nick. There are two other confirmed fires with this specific burn pattern in the last month.
If we confirm this, that’s three. Diamante house makes four. ”
Sweat trickles down my back beneath my gear. “Are we talking…?”
“A suspected serial arsonist,” Mila finishes grimly. She stands and hands cards to both Nick and me. “If anything else about that night at the Diamante fire comes back to you, or if you see any other fires with similar patterns, call me directly.”
“You got it, Mila,” Nick says. When she’s gone, he turns to me. “You good, Dash?”
“Yeah.” I tuck the card into a pocket. “I’m good. I think.”
I’m definitely not good.
“Good eye, catching that at the Diamante house, and then here.”
“It would’ve been better if I’d known what I’d seen when I saw it.”
“The rest of us missed it,” he says, looking rueful. “Don’t feel too bad.”
I shrug. “Fair. Thanks.”
“Is there something else going on?” he asks while we start packing up.
“No, why?”
“You just seem a little on edge today. Are things…are things okay with Lorenzo? You know, if you ever need to talk about things that aren’t fire related, I’m here for you.”
I follow him out of the burned apartment and into the hallway. “Thanks, Captain. Things are pretty new with Lorenzo, but…they’re good.”
“He’s treating you okay?”
“He is.”
And I wish he weren’t. I wish he were taking me, claiming me, using me.
Nick claps my shoulder as we reach the truck. “You let me know if that ever changes. I just want you to be happy.”