Burn (The Firefighters of Darling Bay Book 2)

by Rachael Herron

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The first call of the day was from PD, a drunk guy in the bushes. Coin was the one lucky enough to find him, and doubly lucky to be the one the guy chose to vomit on while they were taking vitals.

  The second call was for a rattler in a back yard. Usually animal control would handle it, but they were closed, and the people in the house were having a birthday party that afternoon, so Tox killed the snake and then Coin drew the short straw to dispose of the body. Hank just laughed when they got back in the rig. “Puke and rattlesnake blood, two liquids we never thought we were signing up to handle, huh?”

  The next call—Lexie gave it to them even though they’d requested to return to the station for cleanup—was to change the batteries in an old lady’s smoke detector that she couldn’t reach.

  “I’m not going in,” said Coin, hitting the brakes too hard in front of the battery house. “I’m filthy, and if I go in there, the woman will probably dump battery acid in my lap or something. I’m staying out here.”

  “I’ll stay with you,” Hank said cheerfully.

  But Tox, their captain, said, “You’re coming with me. You think I don’t know that Samantha lives next door?”

  “And saying hello to her would be … wrong?” Hank had been hovering around Samantha Rowe for months now.

  Tox said, “If I have to change a stupid battery, then I need backup, and Coin stinks too bad.”

  Coin sighed and rested his head on the steering wheel. It was already the worst day ever, and it just kept getting better. Every time Lexie spoke on the radio, he felt ill.

  Coin had screwed it all up by moving too fast.

  He shouldn’t have pushed her to admit she was in love with him—he’d known it was true, but it seemed as if she hadn’t. The realization had been a shock to her system, and it hadn’t seemed like a good one.

  And then should have stayed. He should have planted himself firmly on her porch and refused to leave. But the whole point was that she never asked him to do a thing, and that he’d always said he would do anything for her. What he’d meant by that was that he’d take a bullet for her. Step in front of a train. Drag her prized possession out of a four-alarm fire.

  Take her to Bora Bora.

  Not leave. The first thing she’d ever asked him for was for him to leave. He couldn’t have said no. But by acceding to her wish, Coin knew he’d lost her forever. By now she’d probably talked herself out of feeling anything for him. He’d seen her do it before. When her dad died, she’d refused to talk to anyone, saying she was fine. She’d maintained that party line until HR believed her and let her come back. But he’d seen her that first week back on the job. She had literally white-knuckled it. Whenever anyone was looking at her she seemed like her good old Lexie self, laughing and joking with the guys and with the other dispatchers. He’d overheard her manager tell Lexie that she shouldn’t handle the next fire. Someone else could do it. That very night they’d gotten a good one-alarm room-and-contents fire, and Lexie hadn’t given up control. She’d handled the radio as she had every one of her other fires—like a pro.

  But one time, that first week she was back, he’d been working outside the dispatch window trimming the hydrangeas that grew in their large planter. He’d looked in and had caught sight of her, her fingers wrapped through and around her headset cord as if knitting it between her hands. Her face had been stark white, her lips pale. Her eyes had held the unshed tears it had probably taken all her strength to hold back.

  Even then, years ago, he’d wanted to go inside and ease her pain.

  The only thing she’d ever wanted from him was for him to leave.

  Coin groaned and got out of the rig. He needed to move, to stretch his legs. If he stood in front of the engine, he’d be able to see the wharf from here. Maybe that would help. He doubted it. Really, the only thing that had helped was Serena this morning at her mom’s when he’d dropped off a book she needed. She’d hugged him hard and said, “Don’t look so sad. If you can’t fix a problem, you’re not trying hard enough.”

  This he didn’t know if he could fix. Yeah, he would try his hardest, but besides being the love of his life, Lexie was also the most stubborn woman he’d ever met. She didn’t change her mind quickly or easily. Ever.

  He sat on the rig’s fender. Below, the road wound into town, and over the tops of the roofs came the sound of barking seals and the metal dings of sail lines hitting masts. Another gorgeous day in paradise.

  No wonder he felt like hell.

  “Hey, buddy, can you help me?”

  To his right, a short man with a shaved head wearing an old black T-shirt and jeans that had seen better days, shuffled forward, his hand extended. His fingers were as dirty as his face.

  Darling Bay had two homeless guys, both named Pete. The Petes were harmless, and the Darling Bay council let them have a key to the city garage in the winter so they’d stay dry. When firefighters went to pump gas, either the younger or the older Pete would help, washing as far up a window as he could reach, which was never far. They were cheerful, harmless fellows who knew everyone.

  Coin didn’t recognize this man, and something about his eyes made him stand up off the bumper. “What do you need help with?”

  “I just got this thing, I need you to check it out.”

  Fabulous. He’d probably get a closeup view of the guy’s junk in a minute and have to street-diagnose some rash. Maybe the guy would pee on Coin’s shoe, then his day would be completely perfect. He looked over the man’s shoulder toward the house but neither Tox nor Hank had come back out yet. How long did it take to change a dang battery? She was probably one of those who said “a battery for my smoke detector” but actually meant “I’m lonely, please fix my screen door and my dryer while you’re here.” They got their fair share of those calls.

  “Sorry, buddy, but whatever it is, I can’t make a diagnosis out here. I’m not a doctor. Do you need an ambulance to take you to the hospital?”

  “Nah,” the man said, “I need your morphine.”

  Too late, Coin saw the gun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Lexie’d had been a horrible day. The first thing Megan had said was, “How’d it go with Coin?”

  Lexie had burst into tears.

  Lexie didn’t cry in dispatch. Really, she tried to cry nowhere at all, but crying in dispatch was against all her work rules, every single one. If you told a woman how to do CPR on her husband—a man she couldn’t lose, a man she told over and over as she pumped, “Please don’t leave me, love. Please don’t leave me, love”—you just hung up the phone at the end of the call and kept on with whatever you’d been doing before the phone rang. Emailing reports. Making a sandwich. Gossiping with a coworker. You did not cry.

  So when Lexie broke into sobs at Megan's question, she had no idea what to do. Megan looked as horrified as Lexie felt. “Oh, honey. Oh, no. Oh, what can I do?”

  At every Oh, Lexie wanted to howl louder, but she managed to bring it down. She sniffled her way through six Kleenex, finally biting her inner lip hard enough to draw blood which at least made her stop blubbering like an idiot.

  “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

  Thankfully, 911 rang and Megan had thrown her body at the phone like she was covering a live grenade. By the time Megan hung up with the caller, Lexie had dried her eyes completely. She then distracted her with the speculation that one of the keyboards was dying, and they’d moved on. Megan hadn’t asked her another word.

  The calls were rough, too. One unsuccessful suicide attempt, two possible strokes, one elderly fall victim who’d been down all night, unable to get to the phone. At least she got to make sure Engine One stayed out of the station. Lexie felt incrementally better when she could double click on its automatic vehicle locator and make sure she wasn’t going to accidentally run into Coin in the hallway or the kitchen, because he was out working in his zone. Good grief, if she couldn’t control her emotions when Megan simply asked he
r a question, how would she control herself when she actually saw the man?

  She missed him.

  That was possibly the worst part. Funny how she’d never noticed before that every day started with him. She bet Coin knew it. Even on her off-duty days, she usually woke to a text. Coin would send her Serena’s latest not-funny joke, or ask her how many lemons he should put in lemonade. Something. There was always something on her phone from him when she woke at home. At work, he brought her coffee. Every morning.

  She missed him so much. His voice, his laugh, the way he looked at her like she was something special, someone beautiful.

  This morning, he hadn’t come in.

  Lexie thought she might have been okay if he had. Like after her father died, she’d push the emotion into a compartment and deal with it another day. Or never.

  He hadn’t brought her coffee, though. She looked him up in Telestaff to see if he’d called out sick or been moved to a different station for the day. Nope. There was his name, big as life, on Engine One, right where he normally was. The taste of disappoint had warred with abject relief. Fine, he was ignoring her. She could do the same until she healed. Until she got over him.

  Considering that she’d just found out she was into him, she had no idea how long that would be. When she’d grabbed extra creamer from the kitchen, she’d heard his laugh in the apparatus bay. If she’d been asked on 911 if a heart could physically twist inside a chest, she’d have been pretty confident that it couldn’t. But hers was starting to make a habit of it.

  She knew she shouldn’t have sent them on the battery-change call. Normally that was something they held for a free crew. It definitely wasn’t something they’d give to a crew who needed to come in for cleanup. One of them was either covered in vomit or rattlesnake juice, or both, and by now Tox and Hank probably hated her right along with Coin.

  Lexie wondered what Coin had told the guys about her. She stuck a Tootsie Pop into her mouth and didn’t, for a moment, notice that she’d forgotten to take the paper off.

  She just couldn’t let him come back to the station yet. She needed another ten minutes. Maybe another ten minutes after that, too. Maybe she could make Engine One stay out till her afternoon rest period. She’d eat dinner in dispatch instead of grabbing it down the hall, and if he did come in, she’d fake a headache.

  He wasn’t coming in, though. She knew that. If Coin had been going to come try to change her mind, he would have already done it.

  The fact that he hadn’t meant he’d changed his mind about her.

  How could a heart that had barely learned it was in love break with such a shattering smash?

  The radio squawked, drawing her attention away from the window and the two skateboarding kids in front, back to her screen.

  “Last unit?” she asked.

  No answer.

  “Was there a unit with traffic for Darling?”

  Still no answer.

  Fine. So it was open air, someone hitting their side mike with their butt as they got in a rig. She wondered if it was Coin, if it came from his mike. Was he possibly thinking about her right now, too? Or was he up a ladder inside, changing batteries?

  What if he’d fallen?

  It was a silly fear, and she felt ashamed as soon as she’d had it. Coin was fine. If he’d fallen, the first thing Tox would have done would be to call on the radio for a rescue ambulance.

  Another squawk.

  No. Something was wrong. Lexie heard something in the background that was off. She couldn’t have described it for anyone else, and she wished Megan were in the room to ask her if she’d gotten the same gut feeling from the sound of the open air.

  “Last unit, go again.”

  The emergency beacon flashed on her screen. It was labeled Engine One.

  “Engine One, are you clear for a code three hundred?”

  There was a pause, and then Coin’s voice came back, clear as day and calm as he’d ever sounded, “Affirm. I’m clear.”

  The innocuous words were code. They meant the opposite. They meant he was in serious trouble.

  Lexie said with an equal calm she didn’t feel in her heart, “Copy that.”

  And she sprang into action.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “See, man? I told the dispatcher I was okay. That’s what code three hundred means. She was just checking on me. They have to do that. What’s your name, anyway?”

  “I don’t gotta tell you. Just give me the stuff. Hurry up.”

  They were in the rig, the man in the front passenger seat where Tox usually sat. “I just want to know your first name. You don’t have to tell me your last name. I’m Coin.”

  “What kind of a name is that?”

  “My dad liked money. What’s yours?”

  “Louis.” The man looked chagrined, and the pistol drooped in his hand. “But they call me Trigger.”

  That wasn’t a soothing thing to hear.

  “Okay, Louis. Here’s what I’m concerned about.”

  “No concerns! Just give me what you have.”

  “We don’t have—”

  “Now!” Louis was getting more agitated by the minute. “Just give it to me.”

  Over Louis’s shoulder, he saw Hank and Tox run out the front door of the house. They froze on the lawn when they saw someone else in the engine with Coin. They knew as well as anyone else in the department what a code three hundred meant, even if none of them had ever heard a real one before.

  Coin dragged his eyes away from them before Louis noticed.

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We don’t carry drugs on the engine. Only the rescue ambulance has those.”

  Louis looked confused.

  “I’m telling you the truth. I couldn’t give you anything if I wanted to. And I do want to, Louis. You’re obviously upset—”

  “You’re lying!”

  “But before you do something you’ll regret, before you do something you can’t take back, I suggest you jump down and take off running.”

  “Where’s the ambulance, then?” Louis looked out the window as if he could make one appear. “Get one here.”

  “Come on, buddy. You think I can just call an ambulance and get it here?”

  “If I have a gun in your face, you can’t do that? To save your own life you’re not gonna do that?”

  Sirens wailed in the distance.

  “What’s that? Why are they coming?”

  Coin held up his hands, careful to move slowly. “I don’t know. But what I think you should do is get out of here as fast as you can. You can still get away.”

  “Not without what I came for. Use that thing.” He pointed at the radio. “Get the ambulance here.”

  Coin’s heart froze. What if this guy was really serious? What if he didn’t care how many people he took out on the way to get his fix?

  What about Lexie? She’d never know that he’d really meant it—she’d never know that she was his heart, his everything. His love.

  “Okay, Louis. I’ll call an ambulance.” He let Louis think he was doing it for him.

  It wasn’t totally true. He knew how this would probably play out. Coin was calling it for himself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  When Coin called the code three hundred, Lexie turned into a blur of action. Her heart might have been beating a thousand times faster than normal, but that was nothing she hadn’t worked around before. She paged Megan up from her rest, and she called in Sue, who lived two blocks away. She called PD and had them head toward Coin’s location, code three. She started two engines, two rescues, and Jack Barger, the battalion chief on duty. She started a helo, staging it on the football field at the high school, two blocks away from the call.

  In between this, the phone rang off the hook—every current chief, every retired chief, every curious and worried member of the department wanted to know what was going on. Lexie and Megan slapped them all on perma-hold. Every minute on the phone was a minute she could miss a
transmission from Coin. They could rot before she answered their idiotic questions.

  Her heart.

  “Darling Fire, are you reporting an emergency?” she said as quickly as she could to the next caller, her finger already hovering over the Hold button.

  “Lex, it’s Tox. He’s with a guy with a gun in the engine.”

  “Is he hurt?”

  “We don’t think so.”

  “Suspect description?” Lexie snapped her fingers at Megan to get her attention. Without being asked, Megan dialed PD back to give them the update Lexie was typing into the call.

  “White male, maybe forty-five, wearing a black T-shirt. That’s all I can see from the porch. He yelled out the window at us to stay back.”

  “What kind of gun?” Lexie typed as fast as Tox talked.

  “Black handgun, maybe semiautomatic.”

  “Anyone else around? On foot? Other cars?”

  “Nothing evident.”

  The radio blurted its open mike sound, and Lexie threw Tox on hold without saying anything.

  She waited. Megan hung up with the police dispatcher and stayed silent in her chair, her fingers over the keyboard, listening as hard as Lexie was.

  “Darling Fire, Engine One calling.”

  Lexie took half a breath to still her vocal chords and then said as evenly as she could, “Go ahead to Darling.”

  “Can you start a rescue my direction?”

  Megan gasped.

  Lexie said with a confidence she didn’t feel, “Affirm, Engine One. Reason?”

  There was a pause, and Lexie wondered if it was possible to actually die from fear.

  Finally Coin said, “Well, number one, I got a guy named Louis with me here. He needs a fix of something and I think we’ll give it to him, okay, Darling?”

  “Affirm,” Lexie managed.

  “And number two,” Coin continued, his voice steady over the air in her headset. “I have to tell you something, Darling Fire.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I love you, darlin’. I always have. I love you more than anyone except Serena, and you tell her I said so, that’s what I need you to do for me, and know that I love—”