Three Alarm Tenant

by Christa Maurice

  “No. I know him.” Katherine watched Kevin’s eyes shift from her to Jessica and back. “If you don’t mind. I’m parked out front.”

  “If I minded, I wouldn’t have offered.” Kevin grumbled, following her out the front doors. “Where are you?”

  “Over there.” She pointed. By this time, her car sat nearly alone in the lot.

  “Go stand by your car. I’ll get mine.” He left her standing on the sidewalk.

  She leaned on the back bumper looking through the darkened windows of the computer store until he drove up behind her. “Lucky for me you were here.”

  “Open your hood.”

  Swallowing nerves, she moved to obey. She didn’t recall much from the two times she’d met him, but she didn’t remember him being so angry. At the station he’d kissed her hand quite cheerfully, but maybe firefighters were like cops. Almost all the cops she’d encountered were happier working. They tended to view off duty hours as standing between them and their next shift.

  “I saw you sitting in the coffee shop,” he announced, hooking up the cables.

  “I’m surprised you recognized me. We only met briefly. ” She folded her arms.

  “Oh, I recognize you.”

  Katherine swallowed hard and wondered if she shouldn’t have asked Jessica for that escort. Kevin didn’t seem at all happy, and his unhappiness seemed to be directed at her.

  He walked over to her. “It has to charge.” Standing in front of her with his ropy arms folded across his chest, he glared at her. “You know he’s planning on quitting the department.”

  Katherine opened her mouth to speak and then closed it. Jack wanted to quit the department even though she told him not to, and Kevin blamed her.

  “I never asked him to,” she said.

  “You didn’t have to. You had to be afraid he was going to die like your fiancé did. Even though your fiancé died in an accident.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “I can read. The library has all the papers on file. The other officer was acquitted, you know. According to the paper it was an accident. A freak accident.”

  “I know.” Katherine looked at the ground. She hadn’t wanted to see Joe Mazoli convicted any more than anyone else. “Still, it’s a logical fear.”

  “Is it?” Kevin unfolded his arms and reached into his back pocket. “Do you know what this is?”

  Squinting, she tried to focus on the paper he held out for her, but the letters and figures blurred together.

  “Occupational Fatality Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.” Kevin pushed it into her hands to read, but she couldn’t make out much in the low orange parking lot lights. “That’s the 1990 report. I couldn’t find anything newer. Take it. Jack wouldn’t.”

  She stared at the paper. On the left side of the paper was a list of occupations and a ragged column of numbers.

  “In 1990, thirty-nine firefighters died on the job. Sixty roofers died.” He pointed at the paper, and Katherine assumed he pointed to the roofer line. “He talked to Mike Tomms about working with him regular.”

  “Mike Tomms?” Katherine's mouth went dry.

  “Cap’s brother-in-law. Jack worked with his crew today. Jack also said something about driving a truck. Look how many of them died in 1990. It makes burning buildings look safe.”

  Katherine tried to make out the number, but couldn’t. She could see it was three digits and the first digit was a seven. It seemed both high and realistic.

  “We know how dangerous the job is, Katherine. We’re very careful all the time. We’re rigged to the teeth with protective gear, and we’re constantly training. We pay attention. I’ll be willing to bet most of those roofers died because they weren’t paying attention and fell. Or because one of their co-workers wasn’t paying attention and left something where it didn’t belong.”

  Katherine had a flash of Randy walking across the garage roof too casually and nearly falling when she yelled his name.

  Kevin paused for a minute and ground his teeth as if this conversation wasn’t going quite the way he planned. When he spoke again he was calmer, less threatening. “If he quits the department to get a safe job, he’s going to be at a higher risk.”

  “I don’t want him to quit,” she whispered.

  “Try your car.” Kevin walked away.

  She opened the door and the dome light came on full and bright. In its light she could see all the statistics. Truck drivers, seven hundred forty-nine. Police, one hundred seventy-four. The car started right up when she turned the key. Leaving it running, she stepped out. Kevin disconnected the cables and wound them around his arm.

  “I don’t want him to quit the department,” she said with a stronger voice.

  “Then maybe you need to explain that to him without using any big words, because he doesn’t understand yet.” Kevin dropped the cables in his trunk. “Katherine, I’ve known him a long time, and he’s never been like this. Isn’t it enough that he’s willing to quit?”

  “I don’t want him to quit. I didn’t ask him to quit.”

  “Then you’re going to have to get over being afraid. He loves you, and it sounds as if you love him. You have to learn to love him as a firefighter, and believe he’s going to come home every shift. You know when she opened Pandora’s Box and let out fear and despair and misery, all that stuff. The last thing in the box was hope. That was the thing she shut the box on.”

  Kevin got into his car and drove away. Katherine stood for a long time in the parking lot listening to her car run and looking at the paper she couldn’t read for the tears in her eyes, wondering why Kevin had mentioned Pandora’s Box.

  * * * *

  Katherine sat bolt upright in bed before she even knew the siren woke her. The room was dark and her alarm clock said 3:56. Everything hurt because she’d been playing over energetically with Archer yesterday, which she wouldn’t have been if she’d been able to summon the courage to talk to Jack that morning. She’d been up half the night poring over the fatality report Kevin had given her, preparing her speech, but when the time came she hadn’t been able to make herself go down and give it.

  So instead, she spent the entire day lavishing attention on his dog as penance. She had even considered walking to the station to talk to him in the afternoon, but decided she didn’t want to have that particular conversation with an audience.

  But what if he got hurt tonight? What if he got hurt on this run, and she never had the chance? She could end up a widow without ever having been a wife. Again. That thought paralyzed her for a moment. Kevin, in his garbled way, had been right. The last thing in Pandora’s Box had been hope.

  Katherine scrambled out of bed, pulled on the first clothes she found and ran out of the house. As she locked the door Archer started barking.

  “You can’t go,” she shouted at him. She winced as her voice rang off the neighbor’s house, reminding her it was the middle of the night.

  She had sprinted down the driveway and halfway to the corner before she realized not only was it the middle of the night, but they could be out for hours. Until they returned, she would be waiting alone. Deciding she'd be better off with the company of a big dog, she doubled back to the house for Archer. Before she could take the dog, she had to get keys to Jack’s from her apartment so she could get Archer’s leash out of the back room, and then she had to search for the leash in the dark because she didn’t want to waste time turning on the light. About ten minutes later, she headed up the road with the dog at a more sedate pace.

  * * * *

  “Hey Conley, why is your landlady here with your dog?” Lew asked. He’d been twisted around in his jumpseat looking out the windshield.

  “What?” Jack turned, jostling Lew out of the way.

  Katherine crouched against the telephone pole across the street with Archer curled around her feet. Her hair was loose and wild but he couldn’t make out much else because the rising sun had left her in shadow. He shrugged off his turnout c
oat which, ten minutes ago, he'd been too tired to remove. As Kevin stopped the engine to back it into the bay, Jack jumped out and crossed the street.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked before he reached the center of the lane.

  “I heard you go out.” She stood up using the pole for support. “I was worried.”

  “So you got out of bed and walked up here in the middle of the night?” Stepping up on the curb he looked down at her. She looked as if she might have been crying earlier, but she'd stopped. A few stray dog hairs stuck to her cheek. He longed to brush them off, but knew he wouldn’t stop there. One little touch would lead to him burying his hands in her hair and tasting her lips. Smelling her shampoo and her skin. His turnout pants didn’t have pockets so he put his hands behind his back.

  “I wanted to talk to you, and I chickened out this morning…yesterday morning.”

  Jack felt a chill creeping down his back. It couldn’t be good news if she’d walked up here in the middle of the night to tell him and waited two hours for him to get back. “Yeah?”

  She fidgeted. “What does Kevin know about Pandora’s Box?”

  Jack flushed. He’d asked Kevin about the reference after she’d mentioned it. Kevin had loaned him a tattered book of Greek mythology with the story marked, but Jack had read the book from cover to cover. “I don’t know. You want me to ask him?”

  “No, that’s—never mind.” She waved her hand. “You can’t quit the department.”

  Jack stepped back a pace. It wasn’t the bad news he’d feared, but he didn’t like the direction anyway. “I thought we’d had this conversation.”

  “No, this is different.” She reached for him and caught one of his suspenders. “I talked to your friend, Kevin. He gave me some information.”

  “When did you talk to Kevin?” Jack wanted to take another step back. To put some distance between himself and her, but she had hold of him and he had nowhere to go. Archer walked behind him, trapping his legs with the leash. She had the dog on her side.

  “At the bookstore.”

  “I got the magazine you left me,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “I thought you’d like it.” She frowned. “You probably were a terrible student.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re trying to get me off the subject.”

  Guilty as charged, but willing to give it another go. “Don’t you wear that sweatshirt the other way? I thought the seams went on the inside.” He plucked at her exposed shoulder seam.

  Katherine looked down and back up. “Stop that. I didn’t walk up here at four in the morning and stand around in the cold for two hours waiting to have a silly conversation with you.” Then she bit her lip. “Jack, you know I’m afraid of you getting hurt on the job.”

  “You have every right to be. It’s dangerous.”

  “Less dangerous than roofing.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Jack looked over his shoulder at the station. He couldn’t see the faces watching them, but he guessed the whole gang was out by now, even Dan and Mark Davis, the other paramedic. Both of them had probably been asleep until somebody woke them up and told them about the show outside.

  “Look.” She placed her palms on his chest, garnering all of his attention. “I got engaged to a self-centered guy who worked in a dangerous profession, and it isn’t fair for me to punish you for him. I was trying to avoid being in a relationship with you, and I ended up in one. I tangled myself up in an emotional bond and in trying to escape from the intimacy I needed, I became aware of how much I needed it.”

  Jack felt pretty sure she meant the word intimacy in a different way than he thought, but it made his temperature rise anyway. Even without that distraction, he doubted he would have understood a word she had said anyway.

  “Wow, you want to say that again? I’m just a dumb firefighter.”

  She sighed. “You are not dumb. Stubborn, maybe. I’m trying to say I love you and I’ll either learn to sleep through the siren, or we’ll move. Besides, I think the dog wants us to stay together.”

  Jack looked down. Archer had wrapped the leash around both of them and when Jack stepped forward, Archer pulled it tight. She seemed unsteady, but he could put that down to leaning on a telephone pole for two hours on very little sleep. When he stroked his thumb along her jaw, she leaned into his touch. Her eyes drifted half closed as if she wanted to focus on their contact. The steady burn he’d felt since yesterday when he found the gift she’d left for him, flared up threatening to consume him. “So does this mean you're not going to evict me?”

  “Goodness no, I was planning on extending your lease so I could torture myself by eavesdropping on you through the heating ducts.” She smiled her secret smile that never failed to shorten his breath.

  “Is that what you do up there? It seemed quiet.” He touched his lips to hers and she rose up on her toes, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. Her body melted against his, her pulse throbbing in time with his. When her fingers dug into his back, he curled his arms around her waist. She gasped as he lifted her off the ground.

  “What are you trying to do?” she asked.

  “Knock your shoes off again. It was fun the first time.”

  “They’re tied on this time.”

  He smiled. “I’ll have to try harder then.”

  She giggled. “I thought we were friends.”

  “We are friends. Very good friends.” He kissed her again.

  She slipped her tongue between his lips, tasting sweet as always. Her hair brushed over his hands. Heat spread through his body when she moaned against his mouth. He slipped one hand down her back, feeling her respond to him and wanting more of it.

  “Jack,” she said, dropping back to her feet and pulling back. “We have an audience.”

  “I don’t care.” He kissed the corner of her left eye. There was soot on her face, and he remembered that he hadn’t had a chance to wash yet. It felt as if hours had passed since the last run, but the sun was still barely over the horizon and his world had changed again. Hopefully the change would stick this time.

  “You will when it becomes the subject of humor.” She planted her hand on his chest, gaining a little space. “We’ll talk more at home.”

  “Anything you want.”

  Kate raised an eyebrow at him. “Anything?”

  He smiled and watched her eyes go dark and soft. “I don’t think you’re thinking about talking.”

  “Maybe not. Does that bother you? We can have a nice long conversation if that’s all you want.” She traced her fingertip in circles against the base of his skull.

  “Well, I don’t get off duty for a couple of hours yet so why don’t you let me consider my options?” Two weeks ago, he’d barely been able to stop her long enough to say hello. Two days ago, she’d seduced him and then run out hysterical at the sound of a siren. In two hours, when he got off duty and got home, would she still be this willing?

  “You’re not going to change your mind are you?”

  “Change my mind?”

  “Katherine, I love you, and I don’t want to see you hurt. Are you sure this is what you want? You’re not going to change your mind like you did the other day?”

  “The other—oh.” She shook her head. “No, Jack. I had a long time to sit here in the dark waiting for you to come back. If I were going to change my mind I would have done it sometime before sunrise when a police car went screaming down the block.”

  Jack pulled her tight again and pressed his cheek to the top of her head. He wanted to believe her, but he didn’t think he would until he had some kind of commitment out of her. Something permanent and binding. He stood holding her, considering the future. The question came so easily to mind, but would she say yes?

  Behind them the alarm tone rang. Katherine stiffened in his arms, and Jack growled. “I have to go.”

  Slipping out of his arms, she lifted her chin. “Be careful.”

  He kissed her nose as he stepped out of the leash. Then
he jogged across the street. Kevin was already pulling out by the time he reached the truck, Lew popped open the door when Kevin came onto the street. Jack watched her as they pulled out. She stood by the telephone pole, unwrapping Archer’s leash from her legs and seemingly not paying attention to the engine, but when they slowed again at the corner he saw her look up. Her face looked as serene as it had been in the newspaper photo of Gary's funeral, so he knew what her mind was doing.

  * * * *

  Katherine watched the engine disappear around the corner and sucked in a deep breath. She had stopped breathing about the time the tone sounded. The dizziness passed with the second breath. “Come on. Archer, let’s go home.”

  Forcing herself to walk down Worcester, she returned the way she’d come. The other route would have followed the path of the engine, but by doing that she would be going out of her way to no good purpose. Following him to the fire wouldn’t help. She’d told him she would learn to sleep through the siren, so following the engine was off limits too.

  People were waking up and going about their morning routines. Making breakfast. Getting the paper. Letting the dog out or the cat in. She ducked under the arching rose vines near the corner, pausing to inspect for buds. Maybe over the summer she would make a habit of walking Jack to work. The entire path always looked pretty. She turned on Washington and followed the crook in the road to Judge. A woman stood on the porch of the brick house on the corner watering her plants. She called a cheery hello, which Katherine returned. The short block of Judge she needed to follow to get to Jefferson was tree shrouded and quiet, but a police cruiser had parked at the stoplight, blocking traffic from going down her block.

  “You live here?” The female officer called when she reached the corner.

  “About halfway down the block. What’s going on?”

  “Apartment fire.”

  Katherine went cold. “That big building on the corner?” Three stories, red brick, weeds in the yard and a rickety wooden porches attached to the sides.

  “Yes.” The officer was distracted by traffic.

  Katherine started down the road. She could see two engines parked in the road and hoses already snaked from the hydrant across the street. A crowd huddled on the sidewalk in various states of morning attire. Katherine walked faster and faster along the sidewalk until she was running. Skidding up her driveway she wrapped Archer’s leash around her wrought iron railing. “Just stay.”