Fire at Twilight: The Firefighters of Darling Bay 1

by Lila Ashe

  The other two firefighters nodded, their hands full, poised to act on Tox’s command.

  Grace watched, holding her breath in her chest. Tox’s hands were so big, so wide, and yet his touch on the tiny boy were small and precise. It was almost delicate, the way he lowered his head to put his ear next to the baby’s mouth. No cars passed. Even the birds were silent, as if everyone was waiting.

  “He’s got air,” said Tox. His voice was professional, unshaken. The baby gave a strange, small gasp, and then grabbed another one. Color flooded back into his face—he went mottled blue and red, and then turned an unholy plum color.

  Coin said to the father, “He’ll be fine.”

  Grace forgot to look at the father’s face—she was too busy staring at Tox’s.

  There was no one else in his world at that moment. She had the feeling that if a car exploded or a meteor crashed behind them right now, the other firefighters would scramble to do what had to be done, but Tox—he wouldn’t move. He wouldn’t stop what he was doing—hooking up what looked like oxygen to the baby’s nose with the smallest piece of plastic. Who made that plastic? Who could possibly be responsible for manufacturing plastic for inserting into tiny children’s noses like that? Tox looked enormous, hunched over the child, but his huge fingers looked unbelievably gentle touching the baby’s nose. Earlier, when she’d seen him at her clinic, he’d moved as if he were caged, constantly rocking on his heels, pushing his fist into his palm, as if energy was roiling under his skin. Now, he was still. Contained. Almost … peaceful looking.

  An ambulance had pulled out of the garage and already had the back doors standing open. A female firefighter said, “Sir? Do you want to come with us in the back?”

  The man nodded numbly.

  Tox appeared reluctant to hand the child to the woman. A pretty woman with a short blond bob, she smiled at him encouragingly. “Come on, Tox.”

  Tox handed over the baby and turned to the father. “Name?”

  The father jumped and touched his chest. “Me? John Murray.”

  Tox shook his head impatiently. “Baby.”

  “Johnny. His name is Johnny.”

  A smile crossed Tox’s face, and Grace noticed small lines at the corners of his eyes. “Great name. Strong little guy you have there.”

  Relief wreathed the man’s expression. He launched himself at Tox in a hug. Grace watched as Tox went completely rigid, but he managed to give the man a light pat on the back. Then the man leaped into the ambulance. Tox turned his back on them, gathering gear off the lawn. A firefighter Grace hadn’t seen before said something about the Angel of Death being vanquished. Tox’s mouth twisted, but then he gave what sounded like a grudging laugh, his relief audible.

  Samantha tapped Grace on the elbow. “We should probably go,” she whispered.

  Grace jumped. “What? Yeah.”

  Samantha was all eyes. She looked pale. She’d never done that well around medical problems. When their mother was sick, Sam had been great at dealing with doctors, leaving Grace to take physical care of their mother. It had been a good, fair division of labor. Now Grace put her arm around Samantha’s shoulders.

  “You ready to finish our walk?”

  Sam’s eyes got bigger. “Really? We have to do that?”

  Tox turned to face them. He’d gone back to looking like he had caffeine in his blood. His posture was rigid. Ready. “Just walk down to the breakwater and get a cinnamon roll at Josie’s Bakery Or a sundae at Skip’s.”

  Sam grabbed Grace’s hand. “Skip’s Peanutter Blast.”

  Grace shook her head. “No way. We’re out here being healthy.”

  “Screw that,” said Tox. “You see that baby?” He pointed at the ambulance pulling on to the street. “You never know in life. You might get hit by a car on the walk home.”

  “Cheery thought.”

  “Have ice cream first.” He looked down at his hands, hands that had just been cradling a tiny life. “You won’t regret it.”

  It was surprisingly sweet, coming from the man who seemed to have no soft edges. Grace felt herself melting like the ice cream still in the bowl Tox had put on the bench.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Come on, Sam. Peanutter Blast it is.”

  As they walked away, Grace could almost feel his gaze on her back. She tuned out Samantha’s chatter for a moment and steeled herself to look behind her. To meet those sea-green eyes. To see if doing so would make her heart skip again in that strange rhythm she didn’t really enjoy.

  She pulled her head high and pretended to look up in the sky, as if a plane were flying low overhead. Then she turned to look at him.

  He was gone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next day in dispatch, Lexie gave Tox a rash of abuse. After ten minutes of good-natured ribbing, Tox said, “Come on. It’s not like I was gonna adopt the kid.”

  “Really? Because I heard you were about to pull up your shirt and let little Johnny look for milk.”

  Tox sighed and popped the chair so that it reclined backward. “I was just doing my job. You know, my very important job. Unlike you, I get to actually get off my ass and save lives every once in a while.”

  Lexie threw a pencil at him. He caught it left-handed and threw it back at her. She missed. She always did.

  “Oh, yeah?” she said. “That guy on Route 119 that coded last week? You saw what his wife was like. And who talked her down? Got her to listen? Told her how to do CPR that guaranteed she wasn’t gonna get his life insurance quite yet?” She stuck two thumbs into her chest. “That would be moi.”

  Tox rubbed his neck. “Yeah, whatever. Field save, phone save, he’s still got to go sometime. We just put it off for a little while. Probably not for long. That man looked like he buttered his bacon.”

  “Is that sexual?” Lexie raised a cheerful eyebrow. “Because I’m so ready to sue someone.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  Lexie was a good dispatcher, and over the years, Tox had learned what that meant in terms of his job. A good dispatcher could mean the difference between a good tour and a bad tour. A bad dispatcher could mean the difference between life and death, literally. Lexie was his favorite dispatcher, and he considered her a friend. Maybe she didn’t know that, exactly. It wasn’t like he advertised how he felt about people by taking out skywriters. But she listened to his whining. She laughed at him, and she didn’t put up with his bull. During some shifts, he wouldn’t even walk down the hall to dispatch. But when Lexie was working, he routinely spent an hour or more shooting the crap with her. She was smart and funny, and knew how to multitask like it was no one’s business. He’d been in dispatch and watched her give baby-birthing instructions while jotting directions to the county fair and eating a bowl of chili at the same time. “This job’s easy,” she always said. “As long as you’re a schizophrenic octopus.”

  Now she answered a non-emergency line and said with a sweet-as-honey voice, “Sorry, that’s through fire prevention, sir, and they’re closed on the weekend. Can you call on Monday? They can help you find a weed abatement company then.” She hung up with a click on her numeric pad and said, “Idiots. Can’t even go to Dan’s Hardware and buy their own flipping weed whacker.” She looked at Tox. “How hard is that? People! What are we, babysitters?”

  Another thing Tox liked about Lexie was her attitude. That and her tattoos, green vines with black roses that trailed out of both short sleeves of her uniform polo shirt. “Yup.”

  “I need a raise,” she said.

  Tox rubbed his neck. Blast it, it ached. Something about being bent over that kid had tweaked it again—it had been hurting something fierce ever since last night.

  “What’s wrong with you?” demanded Lexie.

  “Nothin’. Where are those Red Vines you had last tour?”

  “I ate ‘em. Is that your neck thing acting up again?”

  “No.”

  “Liar,” Lexie said, stabbing the pen in his direction. “That’s the
injury you got last year in that garage fire.”

  “No way.” Tox had never gone after worker’s comp—way too much paperwork, and he had been scared of the time they might make him take off. Lexie was one of the few people in the department he’d told about it.

  “You’re so bad at lying. Your eyes go all squinty and creepy.”

  “Creepy?” He’d take a lot from her, but not that. “My eyes don’t get creepy.”

  “Like you’re outside my window peeping in.”

  “Dream on, woman. I’m not into redheads.”

  “Seriously, how many times do I have to lecture you about this?”

  “I can give you a good answer for that. None.”

  She held her right hand up, palm out. “I took an oath.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Serve and protect. I serve the citizens and protect you guys.”

  He scoffed, “You give us heartburn with your addiction to red chili pepper, that’s what you give us.”

  “My friend’s an acupuncturist. You have to go see her.”

  Instead of rolling his eyes, as he would have any other day of the year, Tox felt the skin prickle on the back of his neck. He tried to play it cool, like he had no idea what acupuncture even was. “Nah.”

  “Hey! That’s where the air conditioner fire was yesterday. At Grace’s clinic? That was One’s zone, right?” She tapped a few keys and peered at one of the five screens in front of her. “Yeah. I knew it. You went there yesterday. Was my friend Grace Rowe there?”

  He shrugged and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Squinty! Creepy!”

  “Yeah, I met her. The quack, right?”

  “It’s not quackery. I swear to you. You know how I know?”

  Tox sighed. “How?”

  “My brother’s cat.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Mr. Sniffles. He got hit by a car, and his ass got broken so that he peed all over the house.”

  “That sounds amazing.”

  Lexie hit a button on the side of her chair. It sunk down so she could sit back and stick her legs out straight. “Yeah, it was great. The house smelled like a litter box, only a little worse. They had to manually pee him. I didn’t even know you could do that to a cat. Twice a day, they hoisted him up onto a pile of paper towels and squeezed his bladder till he peed.”

  “No freaking way. I have to deal with enough catheters in my line of work.”

  “Yeah. So, his wife wanted Mr. Sniffles put down. I have to say, I can see the argument there. I didn’t know what kind of a life it was for Mr. Sniffles to drag himself around the house like that. He didn’t even look comfortable. But James was desperate to save his cat. Went everywhere, talked to everyone. Someone suggested acupuncture at some place up in Eureka. It was a day off for me, and there’s a sushi place we like there, so I went along for the ride, thinking I’d get a good laugh and some great baked scallop nigiri.”

  “Everything about this conversation is gross.”

  “I didn’t believe in it at all. The acupuncturist, though, he kind of just looked like anyone else in Eureka. Jeans, carefully groomed facial hair. More hipster than hippie, you know? And Mr. Sniffles is freaking because it smells like a vet’s office, and he’s been in about a million of them. James puts the cat on the table and holds him down. He’s getting scratched, and Mr. Sniffles is fighting, and the doctor doesn’t even trip. He just sticks a couple of these little needles into the cat. And then the craziest thing happened.”

  Tox couldn’t help asking, “What?”

  “Mr. Sniffles started to purr.”

  “Huh.”

  “No, dude, that’s big. He started to purr and then he conked out, fast asleep like the doctor had drugged him or something. James is standing there openmouthed, and the doctor just walks out, saying he would leave them in for about twenty minutes.”

  “So did the cat get up and walk?”

  The radio blared.

  “Ladder Three, Darling copies, in quarters.” Lexie let off the foot pedal and typed for a second. Then she turned back to him. “Nah. He was just the same.”

  “What the point of this story? That acupuncture makes cats purr?”

  “It means cats don’t know what the needles are supposed to do to them. But they react to it, without knowing. And yeah, after about twelve sessions, that dang cat was peeing on his own again, jumping in and out of the litter box. It was crazy.”

  Tox said, “He probably just finally healed.”

  “Sure. That was obvious. But something made him finally heal, and the only thing that changed was the acupuncture. And for me, it helps my insomnia.”

  Tox pulled at the edge of a sticker on the side of the phone monitor.

  “Stop that.” She slapped his hand. “I’m going to give you two sessions with her.”

  He would have to spend more time with Grace if Lexie did that. No, he didn’t think so. Tox didn’t want that.

  Except that he did. “Nah,” he made himself say.

  Lexie swung in her chair to yet another computer. “I’m doing it.” She punched the keyboard, minimizing the page she’d been on and bringing up another one.

  “Wait, what was that?” He recognized the web page she’d tried to hide. He’d been on it once, with crappy results.

  “Nothing.”

  “That was HoldMe.com, right?”

  “No.” Lexie scowled.

  “It was. Don’t lie to me, Lex. Are you on the prowl?”

  Lexie stopped typing and lifted her eyes to his. She had red wavy hair that she piled up out of her way with one of those plastic clips with all the teeth. Her headset was usually crooked, though she straightened it every time the phone rang. She was pleasantly rounded, curved in all the right places, and the tattoos she sported gave her a little edge. Other guys in the station considered her hot, but Tox had always seen her as more of a little sister than anything, someone to tease mercilessly.

  “No!” she said again.

  “Why were you looking at that site, then?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You’re way too nosy. I hate it when you get like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you have the right to know what I do when I’m here. You don’t.”

  Tox felt a pinprick of something that hurt a little, though he didn’t want to admit it. “I thought I was your friend.”

  “Oh, shut up,” she said, but her face softened.

  “Really,” he said. “I don’t need to know what you do when you’re not here—”

  “Which, with all my overtime, is basically never,” she pointed out.

  “True. But it does matter to me that you’re happy. And that if you date, that it’s a nice guy.” Tox said, grabbing her blue squishy stress ball off her desk and smashing it, ignoring the strain he felt in his neck.

  “Dang, Ellis.” She only used his last name when she was surprised. “That’s kind of a sweet thing to say. Are you feeling okay?”

  “Just don’t go on any dates with serial killers, okay?”

  “If I do,” she said, pulling her wallet out of her purse, “I’ll be sure to let you know before we go out so you can track him down later.”

  He pointed to her credit card. “What are you doing?”

  “Gift certificate.” Lexie entered her card numbers faster than he ever could have. When Tox used the computer in the day room to type up his reports, he had to hunt and peck with two fingers, and it always hurt his neck. Which was why Susie Costello at Admin was always breathing down his neck about missing reports.

  “No, don’t—”

  “Too late.” She tapped something loudly and the printer began to spit out a piece of paper. “You are no match for technology.” She held it out to him. “Take it.”

  “No.”

  “Fine.” She put it on her desk and started folding it.

  Tox watched.

  Sixty seconds later, Lexie sailed a perfect paper airplane at his head. It hit him square in
the middle of the forehead. “Now take it. And go. If you don’t get fixed, you’re gonna end up on light duty, in here with me, and neither of us would be able to stand that.”

  Muttering under his breath, he folded it and shoved it in his back pocket. “You’re not a very nice person,” he said as he left the room.

  “Screw you, too.” She flipped him off and followed it with a blown kiss.

  “Thanks, Lexie.”

  911 rang. “You’re welcome.” Tap. “911, what’s the address of the emergency?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Grace was getting used to the rhythm of the clinic, settling in. Finally. It felt good. The first year she’d been open, she hadn’t known what to expect. She could go from busy to dead in the space of fifteen minutes. About six months ago, she’d had a Friday on which every scheduled patient had canceled and she’d gotten no walkins, not one. It had scared her so badly she’d spent her whole weekend on the computer, setting up advertising, brainstorming ways to get the clinic’s name out there. And then, that following Monday, she’d been so busy she’d never gotten a chance to eat lunch. She hadn’t even had her tea.

  This Monday morning she had three appointments scheduled, and she hoped for more walkins. But usually no one came in before ten except for Mrs. Finch who got up at five every morning because she said a day without a sunrise was a day wasted. Grace tended to think that was a little overboard. The sun came up without her worrying about it. Most days, anyway.

  She walked out onto the front porch of her practice. She’d managed to grab the little Victorian cottage when it had come on the market, when it was still a fixer-upper. She’d put her own sweat equity into it, taking months to get everything done before opening. It had been a mark of pride, though, learning how to redo drywall (the previous owners had a son who liked to put his fist through the wall when he was angry, which seemed to have been way too often) and how to retile the roof. The fact that she knew how the bathroom was plumbed made her confident she’d know what to do if the sink started leaking again. It felt more like home here, at the practice, than her own small house did, a quarter mile away.