"The twins took to him right away," Prudy said, rubbing the mare's graceful neck.
"The twins take to every male they meet over fifteen," Darcy muttered as she laid her forehead against Berry's neck for her version of a hug. "It's a stage, especially with children who've lost their father at an early age."
Prudy snorted, and Berry pricked her ears. "They didn't take to Grant Koch."
"Grant just came on too strong, that's all. His son is in high school. He's not used to little children."
"Ah, I see. And Chief Calhoun is?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Prudy!" she exploded. "Will you please finish that novel of yours and stop using me as resource material."
She gave Berry a final pat and headed toward the door. Prudy fell in step beside her.
"Hey, what do you know? That's the first time I've seen you lose your cool since I got here."
"It's the heat."
"No way, Mommy. Whether you like it or not, you're still carrying a torch for that guy."
* * *
Chapter 4
« ^ »
Judd walked quickly through the cavernous garage holding South Company's three trucks. Bright red paint gleamed under a fresh coat of wax, and the chrome had been polished to a sheen that not even a perfectionist like himself could fault.
More important, he observed, the hoses were stacked correctly on top of the pumper and the brass fittings were free of grime and grease. To an experienced fire fighter, those were comforting signs that the other equipment would be in top condition, as well.
No one who'd ever worked in a sloppy department ever wanted to do so again. A fireman's gear was the second most important part of his job. The first was his training, which was why he'd hit the front door the first day with a remedial program already mapped out, one that had each of the three duty sections out on training runs at least once a week, even more often when time permitted.
The men had grumbled, but he'd noticed more than one subtle nod of appreciation when he'd laid out in detail the new procedures he intended to implement.
The big doors were open. Hambone, the station's new puppy, was sound asleep in a patch of sunshine, snoring loud enough to rattle the glass. As far as Judd had been able to determine, napping was what the mutt did best.
Outside on the driveway, Section A—ten men and two women—was engaged in a rowdy game of basketball. Like a bunch of kids at recess, Judd thought. Eager to pack as much fun and activity into a rare hour of slack time.
He understood the feeling. Sitting around waiting for the alarm to sound was a sure way to develop ulcers. At least it had always been like that for him.
After unlocking the door to his office, he turned on the lights and opened every window in the place. It didn't help. He still smelled foul.
Scowling, he peeled off his gamy shirt and tossed it into the corner, then bent to untie the mud-spattered shoes he'd spit shined earlier that morning.
No wonder the people he'd encountered on the way into the station had given him the fish eye. He'd made a hell of an impression on the hometown folks, all right. A bad one.
"Talk to you a minute, Chief?"
A glance toward his office door revealed company commander Lieutenant Gordon Monkhouse standing in the doorway. Not quite at attention, Judd noted, but respectful nevertheless, the way he'd always been around the brass in the city whenever their paths had crossed.
"Sure thing, Monk—if you think you can stand the stink."
The lieutenant stepped into the office, then grimaced. "Phew, I see what you mean. What happened?"
"Tangled with a skunk-baiting dog out at the Kerrigan place."
He took a quick look-see at the messages on his desk. He'd had a call from a buddy in the city, another from the insurance agent handling the hotel fire. Nothing that couldn't wait, he decided as he stripped down to his skivvies, adding his trousers to the pile in the corner. It helped, but not enough. No doubt he would have to torch the whole uniform.
The lieutenant hovered near the door, clearly reluctant to get too close. "Uh, some of the guys were talking about taking up a collection to put up a memorial to Mike in Timberland Park. We were hoping to get your support."
"Nice idea. Yours?"
"Mine and couple of other guys. Mike was friends with just about everyone in the county."
Unlike his successor, who could drive a ladder truck through a jam-packed crowd at the county fair and not hit a single solitary friend.
"Put me down for a hundred. Anonymously."
"Yes, sir!"
"Anything else you need before I wash off this stink?"
"Oh yeah, sorry. I wanted to let you know that I set up the meetings with each station like you asked. The schedule's on your desk."
"Thanks. I'll get to it later." Judd hauled a fresh shirt from his locker, one of six he'd just collected from the seamstress who had sewn the red and blue patches of the Grantley Fire Department on the sleeves.
"Anything else?" he asked when he realized that Monk was still there, shifting from one foot to the other like an awkward schoolboy called to the principal's office.
"Nothing, except that the exterminator you called came right after you left. Said it was a rush job, something or other about rats in your office. Anyway, he was on a tight schedule so I let him into your office. I didn't want you to worry in case you noticed someone had been in here."
"Exterminator? I didn't call an exterminator."
Monk's gaze darted around the office nervously. "I'm positive he used your name specifically, but maybe he meant Chief Kerrigan."
"Did you watch him while he worked?"
"No, sir. I was just starting the morning briefing when he showed up, so I just got the spare key and let him in."
"Spare key?"
"Yeah. Chief Kerrigan always keeps … kept one on a nail above one of the pipes in the furnace room. In case he forgot his, you know."
Judd decided to play his cards close. "Good idea. Happens that way sometimes."
"Yessir," Monk said, clearly relieved. "Especially to the chief. In fact, he told me once that he had keys stashed all over town, just in case."
Judd made a mental note to call a locksmith first thing after his shower. "Thanks for telling me," he said, slamming his locker door.
"Well, I wasn't sure if I'd done the right thing, letting that guy in here without your permission."
The last of the strain bled from the lieutenant's handsome face as he followed Judd from the office. He headed for the kitchen, oblivious to the hard glint that now lit Judd's eyes.
The concrete-block wall of the firehouse held the hushed quiet of a tomb. Outside, a steady drizzle was busily turning the pitted streets into muddy rivulets—a blessing for the duty section asleep in the dorm upstairs but a problem for the merchants along Grantley's Main Street
.
It was past midnight and Judd was still working at his desk. For the past six hours he'd been poring over the files in Mike's office, and now stacks of personnel folders and miscellaneous papers littered the desk.
As far as he could tell, nothing had been disturbed and nothing was obviously missing, but Mike had a filing system uniquely his own. Scowling, he stared for a moment at the mess. It didn't make sense.
Could Mike have called the exterminator before he died? he wondered, and then dismissed that as improbable. Monk struck him as a careful, conscientious officer who would know what he'd heard.
So, if the guy was legit, where was the work order? The fire department was like any bureaucracy. It demanded a paper trail for everything, especially the money its officers spent.
Okay, so why would someone claim to be an exterminator and insist on getting into his office? Why go to all that trouble and then take nothing? Nothing he knew about, anyway.
Too many unanswered questions made him nervous.
In the city he would already have started a quiet investigation of the firehouse books. Fire fighters, like everyone else, had th
eir weaknesses and troubles and, increasingly, their addictions.
Sometimes the temptation to pick up some easy money by altering a vital fire inspection report for a businessman or a contractor or even a private homeowner disinclined to put out the money to make badly needed alterations was just too great to resist. He, himself, had been approached a time or two.
Still, he reminded himself, this was Grantley, Oregon, not San Francisco. People left their doors open at night and the only drive-by shooting in Grantley's history had occurred when reformed smoker Mossy Francis emptied a load of buckshot in a billboard advertising cigarettes.
Yawning, he reached for his coffee cup, only to discover that it was empty again. So was the pot in the station kitchen, something that hadn't happened once in the more than fifteen years he'd spent in San Francisco's Mission District. There, a probie had been assigned to keep the coffee fresh and the pot full, no matter what time of day or night.
In the brittle heat of summer, fire fighters lived on coffee and nerves. In winter, when the ever present fog frayed annoyances into confrontations and littered the streets with tangled bits of metal and bone, crews called out on one run after another craved the caffeine to keep them going.
Not here, however. In the week since he'd taken over, South Company had gone out on exactly one run—a controlled burn in one of the orchards that had gotten away from the owner.
Judd slid his reading glasses down his nose and rubbed his tired eyes. A lot of things were different here, like the ice that formed on the walls whenever he walked in, or the quick looks of antagonism shot his way when he asked questions.
The prodigal returns, he thought. Only no one was hauling out a fatted calf for Judd Calhoun. Not that he'd expected it to be easy. Redemption never was.
Eyes narrowed, Judd rested his head against the chair back and stared unseeing at the ceiling. Darcy wasn't the only one who mourned Pat Kerrigan. So did he.
Not that he'd wanted to care about the man. He hadn't, especially since Pat had seen through his tough guy act in about two minutes.
That attitude you're hiding behind is a double-edged sword, boy. Keep pushing people away long enough and you'll cut open your own belly.
Yeah, right, he'd thought at the time, and immediately figured Pat to be as much of a hypocrite as Judd's old man. Only it turned out that Pat actually walked the way he talked.
He never gave his word lightly, but when he did, he kept it. And he had a theory that mistakes were part of life—not unforgivable sins that took the poor sinning slob one step closer to hell.
Maybe, if Pat hadn't died—
Sitting up abruptly, he sent papers flying. Only a fool or a damned fraud like his father based his life on maybes.
Judd Calhoun based his life on things he could touch and see—like the slow burn of terrible hurt in a pair of Irish blue eyes.
It had been that vivid, accusing burn that had gone with him into the U.S. navy, through four years as a fire-fighting specialist on the carrier Enterprise, through dozens of harrowing minutes in the heat and smoke and stench where he'd tried to bury his guilt.
He'd been little more than a kid then, and so it had taken him a while to learn about shame. Instead of fading, it just went underground to fester, like an infection under a scab.
Instinctively, his gaze went to his right hand, where the skin was white and puckered in a wide swath from his knuckles to his wrist. It had taken a dozen grafts to replace the charred, dead skin.
In June it would be fifteen years since the night he'd passed out in a dirty, dingy flophouse in San Francisco's famous Tenderloin. He'd been out of the navy for nearly eight months by then and his separation pay had been spent, mostly on redheaded women with blue eyes.
Someone—no one ever found out who—had lighted a fire in one of the rooms for warmth and then passed out while it was still smoldering. The old place, tinder brittle from age, had become a pyre within minutes.
Jerked from a dead sleep, Judd had taken precious seconds to realize that he was reliving the night of his high school graduation. This time, he'd gotten himself and two other guys out by the time the first engine arrived. By the time the first hoses went in, he'd been leaning against a lamp post, retching his guts out.
Maybe if he hadn't seen the faces of the three firemen who'd gone in first, he wouldn't have gone in after them when the roof came down.
Two were already dead when he reached them. The third, a straw-haired kid with terror in his eyes, had been pinned under a beam. Judd had pulled him out, and they'd both staggered, blind with smoke and choking up blood, into the night air.
It was only when the battalion chief had come to shake his hand that he realized he'd been seriously burned. In the hospital bed he couldn't even pay for, he'd finally slammed into reality full force.
He was twenty-five years old, looked fifty and felt twice that. He had no family, no friends and no job. Mostly he had a bellyful of guilt and a lot of memories he couldn't shake, no matter how hard he tried.
No one waved a flag when he decided to climb out of the pit he'd made of his life. No one even knew. But he remembered every one of those days when he'd struggled to find something to like about himself.
Hiring on with the San Francisco Fire Department had helped. Winning his first promotion had been a milestone. So had his first lifesaving citation.
Slowly, inch by inch, he'd rebuilt himself until he no longer started each morning trying to find something to like about himself.
Jaw tight, Judd closed the last folder, stuck it on top of the others and turned out the light.
The bunk was narrow and the mattress was full of lumps. Judd scarcely noticed. Worn-out, he fell asleep immediately and slept like a man drugged for a few hours.
And then, at four, just like clockwork, he woke up drenched in sweat, breathing hard. He'd been dreaming again. About Darcy lying on the cool grass by a river, her eyes open and soft, her smile welcoming.
It took him hours to fall asleep again, and when he did, the old nightmare was there, waiting, just like always.
"Darcy, wake up! There's someone downstairs, in your office." Darcy woke to find Prudy crouching by her bed, shaking her.
"How do you know?" she asked, sitting up in one movement, her hand already pushing back the sheet.
"I got up to go to the bathroom and I heard a noise. I thought it was Rosie Lee walking in her sleep again, but when I started down the stairs to go get her, I heard this thumping sound coming from your office and then I saw a light flickering on and off under the door, like a flashlight, you know?"
By the time Prudy was forced to take a breath, Darcy had snatched her father's old Colt .45 from the bedside table and was motioning for the girl to stay put.
"Call 911," she whispered, gesturing toward the phone with the pistol's long barrel. Blond hair glinting in the moonlight coming through the window, Prudy did as she was told.
"Wait, Darcy!" she whispered. "There's no dial tone."
"Push the button."
"I did. It's dead."
Think, Darcy. You have a house full of kids, a pistol with no bullets and a dead phone. What now?
She glanced around frantically, but the familiar shapes of furniture and shadowed walls offered no help. Why she thought of Judd at that moment was a mystery she didn't want to explore.
"Stay calm," she hissed to the frightened girl still huddled by the phone.
"Where are you going?" Prudy shot back in a frantic whisper that made Darcy wince.
"Shh," she cautioned in a barely audible tone as she edged toward the door. "I'll be right back. I'm just going to scout around, that's all."
She moved like a shadow, her bare feet silent on the stair runner. At the bottom of the stairs, she paused to listen, but other than the usual chorus of groans and squeaks from the old house, she heard nothing.
Darkness shrouded the hall, but Darcy knew every inch of the old house as though she'd grown up blind. Taking a tighter grip on the he
avy gun, she edged step by step down the hall.
Her office had originally served as the ladies' parlor and consequently was located as far from the dining room and the men's cigars as early nineteenth-century architecture would permit.
She was almost to the door when it burst open and a large dark shape plowed into her like a tackle bent on maiming the star quarterback.
Her breath escaped in a rush, and she tumbled backward, striking her head against the wall as she fell. Dizzy and furious at the man's nerve, she struggled to get to her feet.
At the same time, she heard the sound of a body crashing into the newel post, followed by a rough curse in a muffled masculine voice. A split second later, she heard the front door open and the thud of footsteps across the porch and down the steps.
By the time she found her balance and lurched down the hall to the wide open front door, there was no one in sight.
The porch floor was cold and damp against her bare soles as she hurried from one corner to the other, searching for a car, a truck, a figure. Anything. But all she saw was darkness, and all she heard was rain.
"Darcy? Are you all right?"
Startled, Darcy spun around, her hand clutching at her throat.
"Darn it, Prudy! I told you to stay upstairs."
"I heard noises. I was afraid you were hurt."
As she hurried across the cold boards, Darcy managed a shaky smile for the fragile-looking girl framed in the doorway like a modern-day Madonna.
"Oh, honey, that was sweet of you, but you have to think of those babies of yours first. What if that man had come at you instead of me?"
"Come at you? Are you hurt? What happened? What on earth do you think that guy wanted here?"
Prudy was still talking as Darcy led her inside and closed the door behind them. The house was quiet, thank goodness. The advantage of thick walls, she thought as she switched on a wall light near the stairs.
"Okay, back to bed. There's nothing—" Darcy stopped, ears straining. "Did you hear something?"
Prudy nodded, her eyes darting toward the window. "Sounds like a car."
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