The Protector

Cole sent him a sympathetic smile. “Something after 2 A.M.”

  Two and a half hours. Jack felt like he had run a marathon. The fire turnout coat sat heavy on his shoulders and it stuck and rubbed at his neck as he moved. The last hours had turned his blue uniform shirt and cotton T-shirt under the coat into a sweaty mass. Jack knew he could forget any idea of sleep tonight. It would be dawn before they got the fire mop-up complete.

  His left knee was still complaining about the force of the impact earlier when he dropped from the engine to the asphalt street with more speed than care. The initial sight of the house with smoke beginning to pour from the roof vents had made him push faster than safety would dictate.

  It might have appeared haphazard to the spectators watching their arrival, but the company had executed a well-coordinated attack on the fire. The crew from Ladder Truck 81 had gone after the roof and ventilated the fire; the men from Engine 81 had surged to lay hose and get water on the face of the fire; and the crew of Rescue Squad 81 had hit the ground reaching for air tanks, ready to go in if people were trapped.

  The drills and teamwork had paid off; no time had been lost during the attack. There were benefits to working with the best. And a few drawbacks. First engine on the scene, last engine to leave.

  He’d kill for a shower. The smell of smoke and sweat was a stench he didn’t mind as long as he was moving and was downwind of himself.

  “You did a good job of knocking it down.”

  He was pleased at the praise for Cole didn’t give it lightly. “Thanks.”

  Jack would prefer to be on the roof or pulling down scorched plaster, even coiling hose, than to be the guy tapped to manage the scene. But the captain of Company 81 had been called to the site of a chemical spill, so the job passed to Jack.

  He retrieved two bottles of ice water from the rescue squad and handed one to Cole. As he drank, Jack scanned the few remaining spectators—neighbors hurriedly dressed, a couple kids entranced at the sight of the red engine and ladder truck, local media, a cop blocking the street from thru traffic.

  Some firebugs were watchers. They acted just so the firefighters would get called out. They’d stand and watch the battle, their own personal entertainment. No one stood out among those gathered.

  Jack turned back to the house and watched guys turn a nozzle back on to deal with a pocket of fire found smoldering in the wall between the garage and the breezeway. “This isn’t going to be his last fire.”

  “Safe wager.”

  “Any ideas?”

  Cole drank deeply, then shook his head. “No ideas, no assumptions, no conclusions. You know how this job is done.”

  Jack did. It took patience he didn’t have. “My men are at risk.” His words were quiet because he knew the memory Cole carried, knew how the words would resonate.

  Cole reached over and squeezed his shoulder.

  Jack didn’t know if he ever wanted to make captain, knowing how much the privilege and burden of command had cost his friend. Cole had led Company 65 before moving to head the arson group. He’d moved because an arsonist had made it personal. Jack wanted to ask about Cassie, about Ash, but found himself in this situation hesitant to voice the names.

  “Lieutenant?” A firefighter from Truck 81 stepped to the open front door. “You’re going to want to see this.”

  The heat from the floor came through his boots. Jack could hear the fire, a rushing sound, huge, consuming. Every step took him closer to it. The hallway turned and he felt the stairwell post. He started up the stairs. There was someone still in the house. They had to get her out.

  The smoke was coming down in rolling waves. Fire brightened the darkness ahead of him, surging through the smoke in licks of vicious flames.

  The heat was too intense.

  The smoke was too low.

  No one in this house could still be alive.

  It was a grim realization that firmed with each step and by the sixth step Jack stopped. He wanted to rush through the flames, he desperately wanted to change reality. His sister Rachel would be crushed at the news her friend was dead, and Tabitha’s husband— Jack couldn’t change what had already happened. He was responsible for his men’s lives. Jack put out his arm, stopping Ben, the lieutenant of Black Shift who had taken the place of the rookie on Jack’s crew for this attempted evacuation. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  Bruce and Nate in the rear of the group turned at his words to lead the way out. Ben Rohr hesitated. Jack squeezed his shoulder. The lieutenant was the veteran of the group, in his early forties but still had more fires under his belt than Jack had ever seen. He understood how torn the man was to turn back from a victim—there was no choice. Ben headed down the stairs.

  The fire roared behind Jack, reaching out to touch the back of his heavy fire coat. It had already claimed a victim. They couldn’t afford to give it another. Jack felt the post at the bottom of the steps and turned the corner into the hall as the fire roared down the stairway landing and part of the ceiling buckled.

  The sound of sirens screaming outside provided direction. Jack followed the noise toward the door they had entered. Water slapped against the side of the house, hissing as it turned to steam. Men rushed to meet them and clipped shakes of heads passed the painful word. Hard hands slapped their shoulders, counting them. “Last man,” Jack shouted. “Drown it.” The firefighter on the nozzle nodded and pulled hose into the doorway, then opened it.

  Jack pushed off his gear. The night air felt cold after the oppressive heat. They would join the fight to stop the fire, but it would be a grim fight with no good outcome. People, property—they had already lost both. How was he supposed to tell his sister that Tabitha was dead? The thought of doing so was enough to drive the sickness deep.

  Neighbors, cops, and spectators had gathered to watch the scene and Jack saw the reaction as word a neighbor had died swept through the crowd.

  “We could have made it,” Ben said, staring at the flames, absorbed in watching them.

  “Going up, but we couldn’t have made it back out,” Jack murmured, watching the veteran firefighter weighing the odds of which could move faster: firefighter or flames. It would have been a suicide mission.

  “Get out of my way!”

  Jack turned to see a man surging past police. Gage Collier, the reporter a familiar face to local firefighters and police. This was Gage’s home. Gage’s wife. Jack stepped forward to meet the man before he reached his crew. There were no words for what he felt. “Gage, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. “

  Jack saw the punch coming but did nothing to block it.

  “She was pregnant!”

  Jack jerked awake, breathing hard. He shoved himself upright to get away from the heavy, haunted sleep. The nightmare always came after a fire now. Two years old, and it was still a living memory. It merged with other memories: the victims he hadn’t been able to reach, the screams of people caught in flames, the nursing home—always the inevitable memory of the nursing home fire. Jack loved being a fireman but the costs were building. Did the arsonist know what he was doing? Not only destroying property but the firefighters who battled the fires.

  Jack would have called his family, just to hear another voice tonight besides the fading ones in his head, but the one person who could help him the most to talk through the trauma was his sister Rachel. And she already had to live with the fact it was her friend who died.

  He got up to pace and forced the memories down again. They’d linger and he would live with them. Tabitha died because they had been late to the fire.

  Ben still called that the department’s blackest day, for a brush fire on the other side of the district had cost them precious minutes in response time. A new lieutenant and a veteran both haunted by the same memory. It wasn’t a bond Jack would have chosen, but it was one that went deep. He didn’t know how Ben coped. Jack had better learn because otherwise he would have to think about walking away from the profession he loved. This was slowly killing him.


  Two

  The fertilizer bags were in his way, and after the fourth trip into the garage, he kicked one of them and succeeded in hurting his foot. The Thanksgiving meal today would be chicken from the local fast-food place, the pie a frozen thing that was put in the oven. It was a far cry from the home-cooked feasts of years past, but since the divorce he’d been making do. It had only been a week since the last fire, but he wanted to go burn something. They were destroying him and his family. He had to get their attention, had to get things changed.

  The newspaper had relegated the fire investigation to the seventh page in the city section. A short statement by the investigating officer— the fire is under investigation. A quote from the homeowner about how thankful his family was for the support of friends and family at this holiday time. Soft stuff, routine stuff, no hard news in the article. The community had five fires in seven weeks, an arsonist stalking their fire department, and what did they do? Yawn.

  Well someone was going to notice; someone was going to hear, if only Jack. He slammed the trunk of the gray sedan. It wouldn’t change what he lived with, what his family lived with, but it was a place to start. By the time he was done he would have all of them paying attention.

  He’d have to leave a message this time.

  The phone rang right next to his ear. Jack was startled awake. His face was inches from the clock on the nightstand, the digits blinking 5:40 A.M. A week since the arson fire and he was finally enjoying sleep again. He hated getting awakened from the dream of his mom hugging him and smelling like lilacs. He loved that memory, it was one of the clearest from his childhood.

  A photo of his parents was in a silver frame behind the clock, crowded by car keys, his beeper, and a tattered wallet. His parents had died in a car crash, way before Jack was ready to let them go. He’d been eleven. Another frame beside the photo sat empty, one of his sister’s not so subtle ways of suggesting he get a girlfriend. He’d never gotten the courage to move the empty frame to a drawer.

  Jack reluctantly reached over to answer the phone. Thanksgiving Day inevitably meant people choking on turkey sandwiches, grease fires in the kitchen, kids playing together banging heads and chipping teeth. It was going to be a long day and he was in no hurry to start it. “Hello?”

  “Jack, I need you,” Kate whispered.

  He wedged the phone tighter to his ear. What was his sister doing up at this time of day, and why was she whispering? Neither fit her. “What’s wrong?”

  “You really don’t want to die, do you? Come on, put it down. Don’t eat it,” she crooned.

  Jack shoved himself up. His sister was a police hostage negotiator, a good one. She was having two conversations. “Where are you?” Where was the rest of her team? She normally tugged in their oldest brother Marcus when she needed help.

  “My apartment roof. No, don’t go out on the ledge. Don’t.” Her voice sounded frustrated and that was rare for Kate. She was known for her apparent boredom during a crisis. “I need an extra pair of hands. Marvel got into the turkey bones and he’s going to kill himself eating them. I can’t catch him. You’ve got the magic touch.”

  He had his shirt half on. That stopped him. “Your cat? You woke me up for a cat?”

  “Jack—” The phone clattered against stone and he heard the unmistakable sound of Kate lunging. Her apartment roof was flat, gravel topped, with a large concrete ledge around it, and that noise was gravel scattering. “That does it. He’s now in the elm tree clutching the turkey leg and hissing at me.”

  “Let him be.”

  “Dave gave me that cat.”

  Jack closed his eyes. Her fiancé, Dave Richman, had given her the cat. And Kate hadn’t had a cat since someone shot her last one through her living room window. Jack looked with regret at his pillow and instead reached for his keys. “I’m coming.”

  “Thank you.”

  An O’Malley called, an O’Malley came. They needed a cat rescued, gutters cleaned, his sisters called him. If they had a real crisis, they called one of the others. Jack smiled and reached for his billfold, not entirely minding his role in the family.

  They’d celebrated Thanksgiving together two weeks ago, as several of them were working this long weekend. He had a lot to be thankful for today, and family headed the list.

  The seven of them were close, a group bound together not by blood, but by choice. They were all orphans. At Trevor House over two decades ago they had chosen to become their own family, and had later legally changed their last names. It was unique but it worked. He’d lost so much when his parents died, had been so lonely. By the time the legal logistics had been sorted out, he’d been twelve, at the foster home, and adoption was unlikely. Trevor House had become his home. The O’Malleys had filled the huge void. They were family, even when the calls came at the most inconvenient times for something only family could understand.

  Jack found the street Kate lived on in downtown Chicago blocked off, the street and the sidewalks marked with fluorescent red spray paint and big, new drainage tiles sitting on the small strips of grass. No city crew was present to actually work on the project, but they still left the street blocked off. Jack parked a block away and hiked back to Kate’s building, taking the outside fire escape up to the roof. Kate often sat on a lawn chair up here at night to watch the city she risked her life to protect.

  She was at the east corner of the roof, half leaning over the ledge. Jack summed up the problem in a glance. “You can negotiate with a man holding a gun but can’t negotiate with your own cat.”

  She looked over her shoulder, relief and frustration both showing on her normally impassive face. “Just help me get to him before he gets a bone splinter stuck in his gut and bleeds to death.”

  Jack winced at the image. He pulled on gloves and opened the canvas backpack he kept for rescuing critters. Fires often trapped pets and he’d learned early on to be prepared. “What were you doing up before 6 A.M.?”

  “Do you have any idea how long a turkey takes to bake?”

  “Yes. I gather you didn’t.”

  “I try to avoid the actual meal preparation on holidays so that it’s actually a holiday. Dave is coming to dinner. I’ve got to work today, and I do not have four hours to sit and watch a turkey cook. I put it in about one this morning when I got home from a page, and then got up at a horrible hour to get it out.”

  Kate would have been smarter just to take turkey out of the freezer from all the leftovers or buy her turkey already baked from the store deli. “You had to take the meat off the bones?”

  “I don’t exactly have room to put that massive carcass in my refrigerator.”

  Jack stepped up on the ledge. “Let me guess. Marvel got into the trash.”

  “He grabbed the turkey bones and bolted.”

  Marvel sank his teeth into the turkey leg and flattened his ears back, offering a threatening rumble. The old yellow tabby was not a house cat, had never been a house cat, and only Kate would try to domesticate him. Dave had been feeling sorry for Kate when he handed her the stray that liked to wander his property. It was doubtful he’d considered what Kate and an opinionated scrapper would be like together.

  The old elm tree was one of the few that hadn’t been slaughtered in the attempt to rid Chicago of an Asian beetle infestation. Jack hoped the limb hadn’t been hollowed out so it would break under his weight. He took the big step from the ledge onto the tree.

  “You’re not content to set off Dave’s alarm system, get in fights and come home bloody, and eat my sister out of house and home. Now you have to pretend you’re a squirrel and trees are your home,” he said softly, edging out on the limb toward the cat. The next limb was too far away for the cat to jump to and still hold the turkey bone. The cat was cornered.

  “Come here, you big lumbering furball.” Jack reached for the tomcat. He got a swipe with a greasy paw for his troubles. The claws caught the back of his wrist just behind the glove protection. The turkey bone fell to the ground.

/>   “Nice, Marvel. Very nice,” Jack remarked grimly, gripping him. The deep scratches stung. And it was obvious why the cat had acquired the name. It really was a marvel he was still alive.

  Jack tucked the cat inside the backpack, then flipped over and latched the canvas flap to keep him inside. He would have tossed the pack to the roof, but Kate wouldn’t appreciate it. He worked his way out of the tree back to the roof.

  He offered her the squirming bag. “One mad cat.”

  Kate took the canvas satchel and wisely kept it closed. She patted Jack’s chest. “Come down to the apartment and I’ll fix you breakfast,” she offered over the cat howls.

  “Make it coffee to go. I’m due at work.”

  “Any leads on your arsonist?”

  “Sure. He likes to burn things.” He was getting philosophical about it. His job was to put out the fires; Cole’s was to find the man setting them. And Jack knew better than to bet against Cole.

  Her pager went off. Kate glanced down at it on her belt. “Jack—” He took the cat before she asked. Kate was already dialing. The conversation was short. “Someone just shot up a liquor store over on Princeton.”

  “Sounds like we’re both going to have a long day.”

  She was already jogging across the roof to the fire escape. “Lock him in the bathroom?”

  “Go. It’s handled. Be careful.”

  “Always am. I owe you one.”

  “Remember that next time we play basketball.”

  She laughed and disappeared.

  Jack whistled over the noise as he carried the cat back to Kate’s apartment. Her home showed the evidence of her late night return— her gym bag dropped inside the door, tennis shoes in the hallway, her jacket tossed toward the chair, and mail sliding off the hallway table.

  Jack warily let Marvel out in the bathroom and watched the cat settle with a huff on the toilet seat cover that matched the rugs. At least the frills were good for something. Jack tugged the door firmly closed.

  Out of habit, he checked to make sure the bedroom windows were closed and locked, checked that the fire alarm was flashing to show good batteries. He walked back to the kitchen to fix himself coffee. He could get some at the fire station, but that was a twenty-minute drive and he’d never last that long. Jack wondered how many car wrecks he would work before his shift ended. Too many. And probably at least two kitchen fires. Holidays were predictable that way.