Slow Burn (Smoke Jumpers)

by Anne Marsh

  And that was the heart of the problem, wasn’t it?

  “I need that piece, Faye,” her editor said, and now he sounded more frantic than angry. “I need to finish the issue. This can’t wait. Shoot it, send it—or I’ll use something else.”

  “Could you push it to the next issue?”

  “Faye—no. I’m booked. It’s now, or it’s never. How hard can this be? You said you were ready for this. You wanted to shoot this story. This was your chance.”

  “You’ll have it,” she promised.

  “When?” He wasn’t ending the call until he had a date. They both knew that. It was his job.

  “Soon,” she promised.

  “Two days,” he countered. “That’s it. That’s all the time I have to give you. This isn’t me going all hard-ass on you, Faye. I have deadlines, too, and you’ve left me with a big fucking hole to fill.”

  “I haven’t. I won’t,” she said quickly, and then she hung up before he could move on the next step in his collection effort. Sure, the magazine couldn’t force her to turn in her photos—but she also couldn’t force them to pay her. Or employ her again. She had a sneaking suspicion, too, that editors talked—and she was headed straight for the shit-list if she didn’t deliver.

  And she didn’t blame the editor.

  He had a job to do, and she’d made promises. So the real question was, why wasn’t she planted in a chair, working up her photos? She’d already taken enough shots for two pictorials. All she had to do was finish editing them—and choose. Which ones. Which story she wanted to tell the public. She’d started with that first set of images, driving into Strong.

  Grabbing her laptop, she paged through the earliest set of pics. Those photos were some of the best she’d ever shot. Even though she hadn’t known the full story at the time, the strength and determination of the unknown firefighter seemed to jump right out of the image. He was fighting. Taking a stand. Giving it all he had. The punch line, though, was that he was almost certainly the bad guy in this story—and so far he’d gotten away with it. He was a pretend hero in a town full of the real deal.

  If she included those pictures, gave them the caption they merited, Strong’s firefighters would pay the price. They deserved funding for their new firehouse and they’d certainly earned their dreams.

  Her cell rang again, and she turned it off, tossing it onto the bunk bed. Denial wasn’t a permanent solution, but right now it worked for her. She had to deliver pictures—and she had them. Good ones, but she’d promised Evan two weeks. True, her track record with promises wasn’t the best. She and Mike had promised each other eternity and had settled for two years. She’d promised Evan two weeks, and now it looked as if he’d be lucky to get one.

  She could wait this out, give Evan the time she’d promised him, but she’d be left holding the bag. No magazine job. No pay. She didn’t need to check the contents of her purse to know that wasn’t a good thing if she wanted to continue eating.

  Or she could finish the job. Hand everything over to her editor and let him make the call about what he ran. Pretend to herself that he wouldn’t be over-the-moon happy to run pictures of an unknown firefighter-arsonist so the magazine’s readers could run a lineup themselves, comparing the faces of Strong’s bravest with the unknown guy setting fires.

  She had four hours until Evan showed up for tonight’s date. Real country line-dancing on a genuine sawdust floor, he’d promised, although that wicked grin of his when he’d waved the flyer for Ma’s Friday-night extravaganza said he had a lot more planned than line-dancing.

  Four hours to decide. Time was ticking down, and she had to pick her photos. Pick a side. Pick how her Strong adventure was going to end.

  Evan parked his truck outside the firehouse, and Faye tried not to think about the promise of that act. That parking job said he would come back with her tonight. After her phone call earlier that day with her editor, she needed the hope that today could still end well. Their walk to Ma’s took them past Nonna and Ben slapping red paint onto a pair of old Adirondack chairs. She liked the color, a real take-no-prisoners red. Like her car.

  “See you later,” Evan called to the pair, but his feet didn’t stop moving. Maybe he wanted to be at Ma’s, or maybe he liked the walk. The disappearance of the sun beneath the horizon had brought one of those deliciously cool summer nights, and the crickets were already singing up a storm.

  Evan had skipped the dress-up and was wearing his usual faded Levis and a white cotton T-shirt tucked in, paired with another pair of steel-toed boots. Did the man own anything but shoes made for shit-kicking? Sure, she’d seen him relaxed and casual, but that was in bed and naked. She mentally tried to imagine Evan in flip-flops, the happy little slap of plastic against his bare heels. Yeah. That was hard to picture.

  “You ready to do this?” He looked over at her and gave her that little smile of his. From the cheerful noise and light spilling out the half-open door, Ma’s was a hot spot tonight.

  “Yeah. Absolutely.”

  He’d volunteered to take her out for a night on the town and show her how firefighters lived it up when they weren’t jumping. She had a feeling this wasn’t pure altruism on his part, though. Maybe this was Evan code for date. Either way, she figured she’d get more background for her piece and more time with him. He was a tough nut to crack, but he had to talk sometime, right?

  Evan got them inside, past the enthusiastic line-dancers filling up the barroom floor, and then past the jukebox. She thought he smiled when they drew near it. Yeah. There it was. The happy spot where they’d met and she’d fallen asleep on him. That had so not been one of her finer moments.

  Evan cut straight across the floor. She stared shamelessly at his fine ass, enjoying the way the denim cupped him.

  He snagged them a table and then spent the next hour rounding up firefighters to come over and talk with her. Two Diet Cokes later—no rum punches tonight, she’d decided—she knew plenty about Strong and what kind of mischief a jumper could get up to there.

  Mack and Zay and Joey, three rough and tough, not-quite-civilized men, crowded around the table swapping stories and making sure she had everything she needed. All of them shared the same precision buzz cut, shadowed eyes, and steely determination to do what it took.

  “You were all in the military together?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Joey’s earnest face watched her as if he couldn’t wait to hear what she asked next. As if he was focused only on her. Those eyes were going to do a number on some woman someday. Curious. Eager. As if there was nothing more he wanted to do than talk her up. That kind of attention was heady.

  “Two tours of sun and sand,” Mack drawled. “At the military beach.”

  “Middle East,” she guessed, and he shrugged and nodded. Somewhere, he’d acquired an armful of tattoos. Before or after his tour of duty, he’d gone and gotten some ink, and he hadn’t stinted.

  He didn’t seem to mind her attention. “It’s not a state secret.”

  “Anymore.” Zay tipped his longneck back.

  “And serving in the Marine Corps together gave you the idea to go into the firefighting business?” she asked.

  Mack smiled real slow. “Well, now, see, we were already in the firefighting business there, honey. We simply moved our operations back to a more palatable base of operations.”

  Joey whistled. “Fancy words, man.”

  Mack flipped a good-natured finger in Joey’s direction. “We all baked in that desert. Hotter than hell during the day, and then you froze your ass off at night. The wildlife wasn’t friendly, and the locals were even less so. At least here I can have a beer without watching my back.”

  “So by ‘firefighting,’ you mean gunfights?”

  “That, too.” Evan slid another Diet Coke in front of her, dropping down onto the booth beside her. “We were CFR crew.”

  “We sat our asses in the crash truck and watched the planes come in. If any of those boys missed, we were the Welcome Wagon�
�you get me? Most of the time, you’re baking from the afterburner, waiting for the windows of the truck to stop rattling, because all of those boys hit hard.”

  “And then, sometimes, they’d miss or run into trouble up above, and we’d have work to do.”

  “Yeah. Military Jaws of Life—that was us. If a pilot came in hard and went off the taxi, we went out there pronto and got him out.”

  “How would you do that?” She couldn’t imagine these guys hanging out at the end of an airstrip, waiting for something to go wrong.

  Zay shot her a devilish grin. “Well, first you beat down the flames, because those flyboys don’t do things the easy way. Then you pop the cockpit and fish him out, toss him down to the paramedics. It’s an exciting way to pass a day, and the flight line’s not a bad place to be. Planes come in, planes go up. Here, though, you’ve got a bigger area to cover.”

  “Yeah. When you pull duty, your ass isn’t parked in a truck waiting for trouble to come to you,” Joey teased.

  “You’ve seen a plane go down?”

  “Yeah.” The hard look in Mack’s eyes said he’d seen more than his fair share. “You see the plane coming in, see how she’s going to land, and it’s like watching a highlights reel all slo-mo. You’ve got the truck going, and you’re pedal to the metal all the way, but there’s nothing you can do to stop the crash. That’s already happening. You’re going out there to pick up the pieces and make sure no one else gets burned.”

  “Imagine it.” Zay leaned forward, planting his forearms on the table. “You look up, and there’s this fighter jet coming down all wrong. You know it. The pilot has to know it. First there’s all this noise, a real roar as the plane heads for base, and then there’s nothing. You’ve got silence because the engines just died, and silence is bad. That pilot stuck up there in the cockpit, well, he probably knows what’s up, and he’s fighting to minimize the impact, because he won’t leave all that machine to free-will it across the tarmac. When you look around, you see the buildings and people there. If he hits, he hits, but the other people need to walk away, because dying isn’t their job, and flying the plane is his.”

  Mack picked up the story, as if he couldn’t see the tears prickling the back of Faye’s eyes. “Worst one came in nose down. The engines cut out maybe three hundred feet up. The pilot stuck her nose into the ground to avoid further casualties, and she did cartwheels for two hundred yards.”

  “But he put her down,” Joey said.

  “And we fished what was left of him out of the cockpit after we got the fire out,” Mack countered.

  “So you’d rather be here.”

  “Sure would.” Joey turned his beer bottle in his hand. “Serving was good. That was important shit, but this is home. We’re keeping things safe where we come from. I like that more than waiting at the end of the flight line for trouble to fly into me.”

  “Better to go looking for trouble,” Evan added. “There’s plenty of bad shit out there you don’t want knocking on your front door.”

  “Amen to that,” Zay agreed. “Far too many wildland fires burning stuff up these days. We had that one last year that we couldn’t contain. There we were, called in as backup, but it was too late, and she ran free. After eating up two thousand acres, that fire came knocking on the door of the nearest town and took out whole neighborhoods of houses.”

  “Good men there,” Zay said quietly. “That’s a hell of a way to go, and those boys made every second count.”

  “So that’s why you’re here in Strong?”

  Three pairs of eyes swiveled to Evan, like her answer was sitting right there.

  “To fight fires? Sure.” He leaned back in the booth and resumed being silent.

  “That’s not what I meant, and we both know it. Why Strong and not some other town? Donovan Brothers is a well-known outfit. Last summer, you ran jobs at multiple sites, including national parks. There was more action there, more jumps. Strong doesn’t have the budget of even one of those places. And yet here you are.”

  “Upper-management thing,” Mack said cheerfully. “Joey, come dance with me. I’m out of here.”

  Evan’s boys left double-time. Before the song finished up, Mack and Joey were switching off the male “lead” in the dancing as they twirled each other down the line.

  Evan stared out at the line dance as if it was the final quarter of the Super Bowl and the score was tied. Boots slapped the floor as pairs of dancers sashayed down the line. Mack twirled Joey again, and the rest of the jump team whooped it up with good-natured teasing and a chorus of clinking beer bottles, but no one, she noticed, had gone too far. These men knew their limits. They’d all be good to go up tonight or tomorrow. Whenever the call came in.

  “I need you to talk to me, Evan.” She flipped off the recorder and got her hand on Evan’s knee under the table. Even that small personal connection threatened to drown out any words.

  “You ask. I answer.” He picked up his beer bottle, then set it down again. “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. No.” Frustrated, she reached for her paper napkin, shredding the thing into pieces. Her fingers rolled the scraps into long cigarillos, piling one on top of the other. He wasn’t going to talk. He was large and grouchy. Too damn big and unconcerned, sprawled there in the booth. She should have walked away and interviewed the other firefighters, but she wanted to hear his story.

  “What is it, Faye?” He leaned forward, topping off her soda.

  “You’re giving me all the whats except for one. What this place means to you. Why you want to be here so badly. Why you came back to Strong when you could have set up shop almost anywhere.”

  “You going to print every word I say?” he said finally.

  She started arranging the cigarillos into a little fence. “Probably not. I’m writing a handful of captions to go with a set of photos, Evan. Not an encyclopedia.”

  “You think I should do a lot of talking?”

  “You could do more.” She knocked down the fence with a little flick of her finger. “I asked you why you picked Strong. Why are you and your guys working on this firehouse in this town?”

  “Yeah. I heard that.” He eyed her carefully and brought the beer bottle to his lips. She shouldn’t be watching the muscles of his throat work or staring at that big hand wrapped around the bottle.

  “You said it was what Jack wanted,” she said.

  “That’s true.”

  “But what do you want?”

  The bottle hit the table. “What he wants.”

  She’d gotten a short version of that story already. It was a pretty story, but she knew the reality had to be ugly. Three young boys alone on the streets definitely wasn’t a happy beginning, even if the ending had ultimately turned out okay. More than okay. She couldn’t miss the fierce devotion these three men had for one another and their adoptive mother.

  “That’s not enough, Evan. I want to know the why of it.”

  He picked up her hand and turned it over, running her fingers through his. “So is this for your readers or for you?”

  “Me.”

  He shrugged. “Thing is, I don’t know if I have the why of it. Some things just are, Faye. Sometimes there aren’t a whole bunch of words waiting to be said.”

  “Try.” She shoved the mutilated napkin away. “Just once.”

  He gently swept away the napkin. “You want to dance?”

  The jukebox was working through a slow song, a cowboy promising heaven to the woman in his arms. Evan held out a hand, and she went with him. She’d picked out a white tank top and another flirty little skirt made from some kind of floaty, silky material, all light purple with tiny white dots. Damned if he knew what it was called, but he sure liked the way the fabric spilled around his legs when they danced.

  He wanted to pick her up again and carry her right out that door. He’d done it once before, and something warned him he’d never stop wanting to do that. He didn’t deserve a woman like this one, though, and she had no idea who or
what she was asking for. Worse, without knowing it, she was asking him to give her all the reasons she should be picking out another dance partner.

  “Ask your questions,” he said gruffly, putting a hand on her back. The thin cotton tank top made it all too easy to feel the gentle outline of her ribs where his fingers curved around. He’d always liked this dancing. The touching. The way her fingers curled into his shoulders. He wasn’t much of a dancer, but this wasn’t much about dancing, either. Yeah, this kind of dancing he was good with. Faye’s questions? Not so much. But she wanted words, so he’d give them to her. He simply didn’t know where to start, so she’d have to do the starting for both of them.

  She looked at him, and those brown eyes of hers looked doubtful. She didn’t think he’d go through with this.

  She lobbed a real softball at him. “Why is it all about Jack and Rio?”

  “You already got the CliffsNotes version, right? You heard the bit about how the three of us were fosters, but we decided we were tight. That we were a family.”

  “I heard that.” Her fingers rested lightly on his T-shirt. Move her fingers an inch and she’d be touching bare skin. “You were ten when you came to Strong and Nonna took you in.”

  “I ran away from the house I was in for the first time when I was, maybe, seven. I spent the next few years living on and off the streets, fighting the system, fighting to live anywhere but where I was. Jack and Rio were the same. We three boys probably had ‘trouble’ stamped on our faces. We were completely out of control and completely sure we knew what was best. Since we were only kids, I doubt we had even half of it right.”

  His boys filled up the barroom floor, doing a little dancing themselves. They made space for him and Faye, though, the line opening up and closing around them. Only Jack was sidelined, although the way Lily was looking at him, his evening would still end happily.

  “Did your families know what had happened to you?”

  “Our family is right here.”