by J. R. Ward
“Yeah. It’s me. Long time, no talk, right?”
“It’s been a while.” She cleared her throat. “Ah, how are you? How’s Deandra?”
“Oh, she’s great, we’re great, I’m great. We moved into the house, you know. I got a new Charger, and I’m working on the engine already. You know, getting more horses under that hood. Guess I haven’t changed, huh?”
“Guess not.” She swung her eyes around the enclosed porch and wondered how she could end things without being rude. “So, um . . . what else is new?”
“So, yeah, so Deandra’s really great. She got a job at Avento Salon? It’s that fancy place in the center of town. Did you know that Reese Witherspoon showed up there for highlights last week? She was a good tipper. I think she’s working on a movie somewhere around here. Deandra’s just manning the front desk, but she’s going to be a stylist soon. Did you know that she’s gotten her cosmetology degree?”
Anne’s looked back at the laptop screen. The map that she’d been studying was of the old part of downtown New Brunswick, far from the center, or Centre, where Moose’s wife worked. The latter was Disneyland clean with almost Rodeo Drive kinds of high-end shops and restaurants. The former was where she had been earlier in the day on Harbor Street. Where the dead buildings were.
Where people started fires sometimes for reasons. Like they wanted to, oh, say, get rid of some office equipment that maybe they didn’t want anyone else to see or find?
“That’s great. Hey, Moose?” She hit print and her wireless Brother started chattering on the corner of her desk. “I’m actually working right now. Was there something you needed?”
“Oh, that’s right. You’re a fire inspector. How’s that going?”
“Today was my first day.” And it was rocky, thanks, Moose. “What can I do for you?”
“Hey, is Don Marshall your boss?”
“Yes, he is.”
“Did you know that he used to play college ball for Syracuse—”
“Why was it that you called, Moose?” As the connection went quiet, her heart beat a little faster. “Moose?”
“Yeah.” The long, slow exhale did not inspire confidence. “Listen . . . it’s about Danny.”
Her heart outright pounded. “Is he dead?”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that.” There was another pause. “I mean, not right now. At least as far as I know and I left him about fifteen minutes ago. But, yeah, he . . . he’s not doing real good. He needs someone who can really talk to him. Make him see what he’s doing to himself.”
She wanted to ask what exactly that was, but she knew. Or at least could guess.
“Hello? Anne?”
She focused at her prosthesis. And thought of Don Marshall so appropriately handing her her ass.
Danny was a complication. Big time. And she had a new job, more recovery to work on, and . . .
She wanted to see him too much for comfort.
“Don’t take this the wrong way.” She cleared her throat. “But I can’t get involved, Moose. I’m out of that life with you all now. I actually don’t know why you called me.”
“No one else has a shot at reaching him, Anne. And you owe him. You know exactly why I called you.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, Anne got in her car. Then she hopped back out, jogged up to her front door, and checked to make sure she had locked things. She had, but she tried the door again, feeling the resistance of the dead bolt. It was nearly impossible not to do it a third time.
Forcing herself to walk back to the Subaru, she told herself she knew what this was. Knew exactly why she was obsessing and what to do to counteract the black hole of not-rational she was falling into. The only solution was to keep going, no matter how panicky she felt. Ever since the fire, her brain had had these triggered-by-stress glitches, almost as if the anxiety she’d felt while trapped had been so great that it had destroyed the normal neuropathways in her brain. Now, if something made her feel uneasy? She tripped and fell into repetitive action as opposed to introspection and processing, the external expression of the disquiet getting twisted into an illusion that if she could just be absolutely certain she had done something correctly, everything would be all right.
It made sense, but it was also bullshit, and she was getting tired of pulling herself out of the tailspin.
The good news was that she had all of this to mull over on her way across town. Which was better than wondering what the hell Danny Maguire was going to do when she knocked on his door.
As it turned out, he didn’t do anything.
He and his three roommates had lived on the bottom floor of the same powder blue forties-era duplex in Pleasant Heights since they’d graduated from UMass New Brunie. From what she’d heard, the landlady lived upstairs and was Jack’s mother’s first cousin or something.
Anne had only been to the place twice before. Once for a Halloween party and then for Moose and Deandra’s engagement shitshow, as it had been called: Generally speaking, if you couldn’t civilly make it through the announcement of your intention to get married, it probably was a good indication you shouldn’t be aisling it. But whatever.
Walking up to the shallow front porch with its side-by-side pair of storm doors and matched set of mailboxes, Anne tugged the sleeve of her fleece down over her prosthesis and knocked with her right set of knuckles. When there was no answer, she gave it another shot, the little chain up top rustling against the cheap metal frame.
There was no doorbell and no reason for a peep hole. Two firefighters, a cop, and a SWAT guy didn’t need to worry who might be trying to get into their place.
Taking out her phone, she dialed Danny’s number. She wasn’t sure exactly when she had memorized the digits, but they were in her head like the address of her childhood home, the date of her father’s death, all the New Brunswick fire station numbers.
No answer.
Propping that storm door open with her hip, she tried the doorknob and found it locked. After banging some more, this time on solid wood, she stepped back and looked up. Like that was going to do anything.
With a curse, she descended the five steps and crossed the shallow lawn, hooking up with the asphalt drive that led down to the detached garage. There were no lights on in his place, but five windows down, the blue flicker of a TV was a subtle strobe in the darkness.
As she went along, her footfalls seemed extra loud, the shuffle and crunch of the first of the fallen leaves the kind of thing that should surely wake up the entire neighborhood. Around back, Danny’s rear door was sheltered by the set of stairs that led up to the second floor, and she was glad the cheap fixture overhead was out. She didn’t want to shine a bright light on any of this.
No storm door here, so she knocked on the jamb and then cupped her hands and leaned in to see through the glass window. The kitchen was a bomb zone, dirty dishes in the sink, empty beer bottles on all the counters, crushed packs of cigarettes lying around randomly like the wrecked cars of a demolition derby.
She knocked again and then tried the knob, expecting it to be locked and for her to be free to go—
The door opened so easily, it was as if the apartment had joined the list of people trying to turn her into a savior. Damn it.
“Danny?” When there was no answer, she stepped over the threshold. “Danny, come on . . . wake up, wouldja?”
The sitting room was through the kitchen and down the hall some, the last space before you got to the block of bedrooms and the pair of baths. And as she walked forward, the flickering light of the TV cast shadows on the floor, and made her think of the guiding beacon of the afterlife.
What if he really was dead?
She paused and called out, “Danny?”
When there was no response, she cursed and kept going. Heart pounding, palm sweating, she halted in the archway of the parlor. The sound of soft sn
oring made her go weak with relief.
Danny Maguire was alive but seriously out of it, collapsed on the couch with nothing but a pair of black boxer briefs covering him. His head was propped up on the heavy arm he’d cocked over his shoulder, and his hard-muscled body was stretched out in a sprawl that was so sexual she had to look away and catch her breath again.
God, she’d forgotten how many tattoos he had.
Her eyes had to return, and she flushed. His chest was enormous, the pads of his pecs developed and maintained by the demands of his work, and his ribbed stomach was the anti-Moose, all six-pack and then some. Then there were his hip bones and his . . .
Shaking herself, she checked out his tats. The ink he had gotten over the years wasn’t the result of some metrosexual, hipster grand plan. It was a layering of meaningful events, all of them losses: Danny carried the department’s dead all over himself, the birth and death dates, the nicknames, even portraits, on occasion, of those who had been lost forming a map of mourning in his skin that was as beautiful as it was tragic.
Where would you have put me? she wondered.
“Anne?”
As he spoke her name, she swung her stare northward, away from the waistband of his black Hanes.
“Danny.”
He blinked a couple of times and lifted his head. “Am I dreaming?”
His voice was a husky whisper, and she knew it was hoarse from drinking, from getting into that fight at Timeout with that rich kid, from trading punches with Vic Rizzo. Moose had given her the rundown. And now that Danny was awake and staring at her, she could see the bruising on the side of his face. He was going to have a black eye tomorrow.
“You don’t look so good,” she said. “No offense.”
Danny groaned as he sat up, and she ignored the cracking sound that was either his back or his shoulder. Or maybe both. And then she had to look at the TV as he rubbed his short black hair—because otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to take her eyes off the way his biceps bulged.
When he reached for a pack of Marlboros, she shook her head. “Are you serious?”
“What.” He put one of the cancer sticks between his teeth. “And I suppose you won’t get my lighter for me, will you.”
“I absolutely will not. I’m not your maid, and you were just treated for smoke inhalation, for godsakes.”
“So which one of those little old ladies called you to come over here?”
As he got to his feet, she turned away and needed a place to go, so she wandered down the hall toward the bedrooms. It seemed weird to look into two of the four spaces and see nothing but dust bunnies and forgotten hangers, Moose had moved in with Deandra, Mick was in rehab out of state—the addiction kind, not the physical. The third bedroom, Jack’s, housed little more than a stripped bed and a bureau that looked as if it were throwing up the shirts and pants that were in its drawers. The final crib was Danny’s, and she merely glanced in as she pivoted around for the return trip.
Anne stopped. He was leaning against the hallway wall like James Dean, that cigarette lit between his fingers.
His eyes were hooded as he stared at her, and she wanted to tell him to put some damn clothes on—except that seemed like an admission that she was noticing his body.
“I’ve lost two and a half of my roommates as you can see.” He motioned to the vacant rooms with his free hand. “Moose and Deandra. Then Mick went into that rehab program. Now Jack is worried about that sister of his again and staying with her. They’re dropping like flies, I tell ya.”
“Times change.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Your face is busted up.”
“Vic needs to lose your number.”
“Moose was the one who called me.”
“Him, too, then.”
“What are you doing, Danny.” She nodded toward his trainwreck of a room. “I mean, look at this place.”
There was laundry on the floor—in two piles that she guessed meant one was clean and the other dirty. The bed was a shambles of sheets and blankets with a bald pillow at the headboard. And the window’s curtain had bought the farm, the rod hanging cockeyed, a blanket nailed in place so he didn’t flash the neighbors.
“I don’t spend a lot of time in there,” he muttered before taking a draw.
She bent down and picked up a flimsy piece of lace. “At least you’re not alone, though.”
He shrugged. “I might as well be.”
“Oh, come on.” Anne let the lingerie dangle. “What was wrong with her? Given the cup size here, I’m thinking her anatomy was just fine.”
Danny was quiet for a while. Then in a low voice, he said, “She wasn’t you. That was the trouble.”
chapter
15
In the suddenly charged silence, Anne decided she hadn’t heard that right. Nope. She most certainly hadn’t heard that.
“Enough with the bullcrap.” She dropped the Victoria’s Secret and wiped her hand on her hip. “Moose is worried about you. A lot of people are worried about you.”
Danny shrugged. “No reason to be.”
“You got into a fistfight.”
“No, I didn’t. I choked the bastard after he insulted Josefina. So I didn’t actually punch him.”
“I’m talking about Vic. You hit one of us—I mean, you. You hit another firefighter—”
“He was in my way—”
“—because he wouldn’t let you kill someone when you’d had six beers in sixty minutes.”
“I’m sober.”
“Not when you were strangling him. And if by some miracle your liver was able to process all that alcohol load by now, then you need to follow Mick’s example and go inpatient.” She shook her head. “Seriously, what the hell are you doing to yourself. You risked your life today at that fire. You blew off procedure—”
“Moose really needs to forget he knows you.”
“—and endangered yourself—”
“This coming from you?”
“—and nearly didn’t get out of there. All for a kid’s homework.” She put her palm up. “And don’t give me that holier-than-thou about how important it was to get it for her. That’s an excuse. If you’re looking to commit suicide, do your department a favor and just put a bullet in your head or hang yourself from the ceiling. But don’t do it on the job where every single man or woman on-site will feel like it’s their fault. That is not fair to them. It’s just not.”
There was a tense silence. And then his eyes dropped to her prosthesis.
As they lingered on the model of her hand, she shook her head. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you for a second use what happened to me as a justification for self-destructing. You do not get to do that.”
“You expect me to feel good about cutting your fucking arm off?”
“It was my wrist and hand, for one thing. And what I expect is for you not to pretend like it happened to you.” She held up the elephant in the room. “I have to live with this. I lost my career. I am having to reinvent myself. You, on the other hand, still have your life, your job, your friends, and your calling. You’ve got everything you had the moment you jumped into that stairwell. Nothing has changed for you.”
Danny straightened and walked toward her, his body filling the distance between the corridor’s walls. As he stopped in front of her, he swept his hard stare over her face. “I was buried under a thousand pounds of debris. I lost part of my colon, all of my spleen, and a quarter of my liver. Not as dramatic as a hand, granted, but as long as you’re bringing that kind of crap up, let’s be accurate. And how about you not tell me how I’m supposed to feel? Thanks for giving me the suicide tip, though. I’ll put it in my back pocket for later.”
The memory of him in that ICU room made her nauseous. “I’m not suggesting you weren’t hurt.”
“Oh, I guess I misunderstood the nothing-has-chang
ed-for-you part. Sounded to me like you think it’s been a cake walk on my end. But yeah, I got that wrong. Clearly.” He leaned forward. “It’s not like I single-handedly maimed one of the best firefighters this city had and then spent three months trying to walk again. It’s not like I was stuck in the belly of the beast with you. It’s not like you and I were both surrounded by that fucking monster that’s been picking off members of our department one by one, year by year—”
“Shut up.”
As he recoiled, Anne took a step forward and lifted her chin. She was tall for a woman, but he still managed to dwarf her by a good six inches and more than a hundred pounds. Not that that his size advantage mattered when she was standing up for herself.
“You don’t get it.” She shook her head. “Fire isn’t a beast. It isn’t evil. It’s not an animal that prowls around and takes revenge for all of its buddies we’ve killed by extinguishing them. Jesus Christ, Danny.” She motioned to his tattoos. “You’re taking everything too personally—”
“What did you just say.”
“You heard me.”
“I—” He looked to the ceiling. “Wait, actually, this is a relief. Because the fact that you just told me I shouldn’t care about my friends and my family being killed in the line of duty means this is a fucked-up dream—”
“You’re wrong—”
He yelled over her. “—and I’m about to wake up hungover and pissed off that I have to go to work!”
Anne stared up at him and wished like hell she could give him the realizations that had come to her over the previous months of suffering and change. But you couldn’t do that. People had to earn their evolution. Or not.
“You got it all wrong, Danny. Fire is like cancer. It doesn’t care what it kills. We mean nothing to it because it’s not alive. You’re not battling a beast. There’s no monster there. It’s exactly the same as a rogue set of cells that wipes out a young girl or an old man, a rich person or somebody who’s poor. My father, your brother, and Sol all died from doing a job. Not because fire stalked them and took them down.” She raised her prosthesis. “This happened to me because of my job. And I had to decide whether or not I was going let random circumstance, in a risk pool I was well aware of swimming in, ruin my life or not. I wasn’t a target. I wasn’t singled out. It was a danger I accepted, and I got hurt, and everyone who’s been injured or killed made the same calculation and just happened to come up short. I’m not saying you shouldn’t mourn the people we’ve both lost. What I’m telling you is . . . don’t let that fire we both went into willingly a year ago kill you by default. You made it out in fact, don’t give that blessing up.”
