Chapter Three Mateo #2
I halt in my tracks, scanning the fairly ordinary, if not rough around the edges, city block. There’s no way she was kidnapped, right?
“—ah, gracias, Se?ora. Eres una salvavidas.”
I turn around at the voice, surprised to find Noelle marching up the steps of the apartment building next to the shelter, arms laden with grocery bags. There’s an older lady hovering behind her, hand gripping a cane.
“No hay problema,” Noelle replies with an unexpectedly soft smile as the woman fumbles with arthritic hands to open the door.
I stand there, unnoticed by both of them, as Noelle disappears briefly inside to carry the old woman’s groceries the rest of the way to her apartment. I wait only a couple of minutes, and then she reemerges. That gentle smile is still on her lips as she hops down the steps.
But then it disappears the second she sees me standing beside the truck, smirking at her.
“What?” she grumbles, stalking past me.
“Looks like someone got bit by the Christmas spirit bug,” I croon, opening up the passenger door for her.
She climbs up. “Nope. I’m just a good person regardless of what season it is.”
“And you speak Spanish.”
“What? Like it’s hard?”
I snort. “Ay, no. Es mi primera lengua.”
Noelle shrugs, flopping down onto the seat. “Okay. Good for you.”
I burst out laughing. And, like a fucking holiday miracle, her determined pout finally cracks into a stubborn smile.
Still grinning, I make my way around to the driver’s side and hop up. I start the engine and turn to her, about to ask if she wants to take the scenic route back to the station, when the radio on my belt crackles to life.
Noelle frowns down at it as a load of information spills out, most of it garbled and muted by static, but I can understand it just as easily as any other language at this point.
“Alright,” I say, hitting the button to flick on the sirens. “Let’s rock and roll!”
“What? What’s going on?” she shouts, definitely much louder than necessary to be heard over the sirens.
“Apartment fire,” I tell her. “Possible occupants trapped inside.”
I tap the screen on the dashboard and pull up the address, which is thankfully only about ten blocks away.
“What?” she almost shrieks. “You’re responding to a call? Now? With me? You don’t even have your gear on!”
I smack the bundle of gear folded up neatly in the space between our seats.
“Duty calls, Noelle,” I tell her.
When I sneak a glance at her expression, though, she still looks horrified.
Scared, maybe.
But something much more pressing requires my focus right now, so I lock in and head to the scene.
When we arrive, Cap and a load of the crew in another engine whip around the corner of the block approximately seventeen seconds after us.
“Fuck, they’re fast,” Noelle gasps.
“Yep. Stay in here.”
It’s all I say before I’m throwing on my gear and hurling myself out of the engine, jogging toward the building where smoke is gushing from a fourth-floor window.
Cap spots me and gives me an amicable shove in Wes’s direction, silently indicating that I’m with him. All part of the usual routine, of course, but I appreciate the friendly greeting.
And then adrenaline takes over. Wes and I lead the way up the stairs. Outside, the sirens continue wailing. People are gawking from the sidewalk, but hopefully NYPD will arrive in a few seconds to provide crowd control.
The crew moves with practiced precision. Radios explode with information and instructions. I fall into it like I’m dipping into warm water, easily slipping into the part of me that responds on instinct, trusts in my captain’s orders, and never hesitates to put myself on the line to save a civilian.
Before we even reach the apartment, a man carrying a little girl comes bursting out of it.
Wes meets them first, communicating with them quickly and then signaling to me that they were the only ones inside.
He breaks off to help the man and his child back downstairs, so I head up with Danny and our rookie Callum.
Inside the apartment, it’s not a major disaster scene.
Just a kitchen fire that got out of control and is well on its way to chewing up the outdated cabinetry.
I rush to a window, throw it open and signal that we don’t need the hose lines deployed.
By the time I turn around, the fire has already been mostly contained with extinguishers.
Easy-peasy.
But then my radio crackles again.
“First floor. We’re getting a second blaze.”
All three of us lock eyes in a mutual, What?
What are the chances that a kitchen fire on the fourth floor would happen at the same time as another fire on the first floor?
“Electrical. ConEd override requested.”
Callum gives me another separate look that’s more like, The fuck?
But there’s no time to puzzle it out. Danny wordlessly signals that he’ll hang back to secure this scene, so we rush back downstairs.
And we barely make it down there before a wall of flame threatens to engulf the mouth of the stairwell.
“Kowalski, your exit’s blocked down here,” I say into the radio as I rush toward the fire with my extinguisher aimed high.
“All good. I’ll take the window,” comes his reply.
It’s no time for laughing, but I let out an amused huff at the old man’s casual response to needing to clamber down the fire escape in his bulky gear. Unless he’s in the mood to walk through hell. Which, sometimes, you never know.
The first floor fire is flooded with crew members, a dozen of us beating back flames that didn’t exist a few minutes ago. I work with mindless determination between Cap and Wes, too focused on preventing damage to think about what could have possibly caused this.
And even though it looked intimidating at first glance, it only takes us about twenty minutes to turn a raging inferno into nothing but smoke, ashes, and melted wires protruding from a disturbing gape in the wall of the apartment where the fire originated.
“Contained,” Cap says into the radio.
With a grunt, I flip up the visor of my helmet. The linoleum tile underfoot is scorched and curled up at the edges from the heat, and half of the tiny living room has transformed into a gaping maw of exposed wiring and burnt-through flooring.
I glance over at Cap. His expression is thoughtful as he surveys the damage, smoke and flame-retardant residue still curling off every surface. There would be steam, too, if this wasn’t an electrical fire and we were able to use water.
On my way back outside, I spot her at the perimeter.
Noelle hasn’t moved from the tape line since we pulled up.
She’s standing with her arms crossed, jaw set, watching the crew cycle in and out of the building.
Not filming anything. Not on her phone. Just watching, with the kind of focused, cataloging attention that I’ve noticed she applies to everything.
I’ve never actually thought about what we look like from the outside.
We’re just doing what we always do. But watching her watch us — Cap directing from the sidewalk, Wes coordinating with ConEd at the pole, Callum hauling equipment without being told, Danny reappearing from the fire escape without a scratch and without complaint — I try to see it the way she’s seeing it.
Twenty people. No wasted motion. No one asking what to do next.
I don’t know what she expected from a crew she obviously doesn’t trust. But I don’t think it was this.
Then she ducks under the tape.
She moves quickly and deliberately. She’s tracking something along the base of the exterior wall. She crouches near the edge of the first-floor apartment, pulls an evidence bag from inside her jacket, and gets to work.
I stop walking.
She brought her kit to a toy run.
I almost laugh. Almost.
Cap reaches her before I do. I can’t hear what he says from where I’m standing, but I can read his posture well enough: the set of his shoulders that means he’s furious and refusing to show it, because showing it would mean losing ground.
She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t look up from what she’s collecting.
She just talks, low and even, and then holds something up for him to look at.
He goes still.
Not the kind of still he gets when he’s controlling his temper. Something different. Something that looks a lot like the floor just shifted under him and he hasn’t decided yet whether to say so.
He crouches down beside her. I get close enough to see what she’s pointing to along the base of the wall — the burn pattern, the accelerant residue sitting wrong against the concrete in a trail that doesn’t happen by accident.
Then she looks up at him and asks him something.
I’m close enough now to hear it.
“Have you seen a burn pattern like this before?”
Grant Hale has been a firefighter for over twenty years. He has seen things that would fold most people in half. He does not rattle.
He says nothing.
But the look on his face says everything.