~ Chapter Nine ~
Carter
“You’re still mad?”
I cut my eyes to look over my right shoulder at the dipshit who stood next to me. “Put it this way … If I didn’t know you’d walk through fire for me, I’d be looking for a place to bury your body right now.” I turned back to look ahead, on the short stool I sat on, cleaning my equipment.
“It was just a damn joke, Carter,” Don defended himself.
I still was pissed from the previous night when he snatched my phone out of my hand while I was on the phone with Michelle. I’d had to be held back by three of our guys not to rip his damn head off. Obviously, I’d cooled down a little since then.
“That’s your problem, Donnie, you joke too much,” Sean added behind me, and I nodded in agreement.
“No one else takes my jokes to heart. And don’t fucking call me Donnie!”
I chuckled with the rest of the guys in the room. Nothing got under Don’s skin like being called Donnie. I suspected there was something deeper behind that nickname, but for now I couldn’t care less. Just as long as he knew that when it came to Michelle, all jokes were off limits.
“Eric never bitched this much when we teased him when he first started dating Angela.”
“See,” I pointed my hand that held a dirty rag in it, “that’s your fucking mistake. I’m not Eric.” We all knew when Eric was serious about Angela. Yeah, we joked and teased him a little, up until a point. But Eric wasn’t like me. He was tough, sure, but he had more patience than I did when it came to my woman.
“Whatever,” Don grumbled.
“Townsend!”
My head popped up to see Captain Waverly coming our way. When we made eye contact, he waved his head for me to follow him.
“Fuck.” I knew what this shit was about. I tossed the rag to the side and stood to follow the captain back to his office. When we reached it, he went over to sit behind his desk and I shut the door behind me. As soon as I turned, he tossed a small plastic cup, encased in a plastic bag, in my direction.
I caught it with ease and stared down at it. “Seriously?” I snarled.
“Random testing. You know how it works.”
I sure did and I still hated it.
“Look, you’ve only got about three more months of this bullshit. Keep it clean until then, no more testing, and I will personally put in a good word when you send in that lieutenant’s application.”
I lifted my head to stare at the captain, raising an eyebrow. “Lieutenant, huh?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never considered it.”
“’Course I have. Especially when Eric took his exam last year.”
“Kim’s got a level head, all the guys respect him. He was made to be a leader, and so were you. Rescue division of this squad needs a lieutenant eventually. Nobody’s as good at figuring out rescue missions as you. And I’ve been in this department for almost thirty years, I don’t hand out compliments lightly.”
I stared at the captain, letting his words sink in. He wasn’t just blowing smoke up my ass. I didn’t work with guys who did. If you didn’t cut it, they’d let you know. We didn’t have time to coddle feelings around here. Our calls were life or death, and in that environment, favoritism over quality did not fare very well.
“Take the fucking drug test, pass it, and keep doing the job you’ve been doing.”
I stared angrily at the piss cup in my hands. I didn’t have a choice. I’d fucked up and this was part of my penance. I nodded at the captain and went to the bathroom to relieve myself in the cup. I sealed the lid and brought it back to the captain’s office.
“You know, I’m not too keen on having to be this close to your piss either,” he joked.
A smirk broke out on my lips. “That’s grade A urine right there.”
He removed one of his testing strips from his desk and put on a pair of rubber gloves to unseal the cup. I watched as he inserted the testing strip.
“Five minutes and this’ll be over. Go on back to cleaning your equipment. We’ll be getting a call soon enough.” Captain almost had a sixth sense about when a call would come in.
I did as instructed, not worrying too heavily about the test results. Every one I’d taken since coming back had come out clean because I wasn’t on anything. I refused to even take ibuprofen when I had a headache. Save for a few beers down at Charlie’s every now and again, I didn’t mess with any sort of drug.
Sure enough, just as Captain predicted, I hadn’t been back to cleaning my equipment more than three minutes when the station’s alarm sounded and we got a call for a house fire.
“Let’s go!” Eric yelled as we all gathered our gear to head to the rig. This was going to be an interesting call. I could just feel it.
****
“Anyone inside?” I questioned the police officer who stood at the side of his car, trying to hold spectators back a distance from the flames. Eric was handing out directions to Don, and two other squad members who were in our rig. Captain Waverly was giving direction out to the other five members of our station who pulled up in a second truck from our station.
“One came out. Father. Says that his wife and two children are still inside.”
Fuck! I cursed in my head. I just knew this call was going to be fucked up.
“Harvard!” I yelled to Eric. “Cop says we’ve got a female and two children trapped inside. We’ve gotta contain this shit and get to them.”
Eric nodded and stared back at the house. From the outside it looked like a two story home that also had a basement. My guess was that the family was on the second floor, most likely where the bedrooms were. I began to map out a possible escape route in my head.
“We need to go in the backdoor,” I yelled to Eric.
He gave me a look, but eventually nodded.
“Captain and the others will bring in the hose once we’re out.”
I nodded and picked up my hatchet, tossed my helmet over my head, and began running to the back of the house. I was followed by Eric and Don.
“Locked!” Eric yelled of the back door.
“Got it!” I called, and as soon as he stepped out of the way, I swung my hatchet into the wooden door repeatedly until it broke open. The smoke was thick and we immediately covered our face with our oxygen masks.
“Family’s probably on the second floor in the bedrooms,” I yelled through my mask so my team could hear me.
“Don, check downstairs. Carter and I will check upstairs.”
“Roger that,” Don responded and we all followed our respective routes.
Eric and I passed through thick, black smoke to find the winding staircase. This was an older model home which was good and bad. It was good because these homes tended to be sturdier and they all had similar layouts. It was also bad since a lot of the stuff used to build the homes didn’t have the same protections as the more modern homes to prevent entire loss of the home.
“I got the door on the left,” Eric yelled in front of me.
“I got the right.”
I touched the handle of the right door and found it wasn’t warm. I hoped no one was inside. Pushing the door open I yelled out, “Fire department! Anyone in here! Call out!” I repeated this over and over and got no response. Thanks to the smoke, it was dark, but I was able to make my way over to the bed at the far corner, having noticed lumps on the bed that looked like human forms.
“Shit,” I yelled into my communication device that rested on a strap on my shoulder. “I’ve got them all. They’re passed out, possibly from the smoke.” I crouched down to retrieve the smaller body in my arms just as Eric made his way into the bedroom.
“The mother’s passed out, too,” I tell Eric.
“Shit!” he cursed, looking upwards at the cracking of the roof, under the pressure of the fire. “We gotta get outta here.”
At that moment, Don burst into the room. I handed him the child I’d held in my arms, while Eric did his best to manage with the woman who was presumably their mother. I reached for the second smaller body, that I reasoned was the second child the officer had told me about initially. We moved quickly, following behind Don to retrace our steps back down the hallway and down the stairs. The child in my arms didn’t stir, and that caused me to pick up the pace even more. I shielded the lifeless body in my arms, doing my best to protect it from the scorching heat of the house fire and to cover his mouth from the harsh smoke. I was barely able to see anything, instead using my sense of direction to make it back to the back door.
Once outside, I realized the body in my arms was that of a young boy. Eric, Don, and I carried the victims around the house and to the paramedics who were waiting to tend to them. I stood back and observed the three people―two children and a mother―laid out on separate gurneys, medics trying to assess their injuries, while a distraught father yelled and screamed in the background, needing to be held back by police officers.
“Sir, sir, let the medics do their job.”
It was a familiar sight, but one that never failed to twist my insides. Instead of watching, I turned to go back and help with the hose to put the fire out.
It took another twenty minutes to completely extinguish the flames. By the time we’d finished the house was a shell of what it’d once been, although it was still standing.
I followed Captain Waverly inside, Eric and Don right behind me. The other guys were busy putting up the hose and other equipment back into the rig outside.
“Fireplace,” Don grunted.
I looked over at him. We were standing in the middle of the burned out living room. The smoke was still clearing from the house, but we were doing our initial fire investigation. The investigators from the department would be down soon enough, but Don said he’d had a feeling about this fire and wanted to do some digging.
“Looks like it started in the fireplace?” I questioned.
Don nodded; his dark hair was plastered to his head from sweat due to his helmet. I was sure mine looked the same way.
“Yeah, no screen,” he answered, crouching low. Gone was the jokester Don from the night before, replaced by the serious fire investigator.
“Probably started here from the fireplace being left on. There are newspaper ashes around.” He pointed and I, too, observed the small pieces of newspaper that were scattered here and there, throughout the living room. No screen to cover the fireplace and using newspaper to help keep the fire going were a terrible combination that could make for a deadly fire. I could easily see how this could’ve happened. But something still nagged at me. It just didn’t add up. When I peered over at Don, his right eyebrow was raised as he looked at the char marks on the floor around us. I knew he sensed it, too.
He followed me up the stairs, having pulled out his phone to snap pictures of the scene. We moved up the stairs where Eric and the captain were searching around, taking note of the situation. I stopped right before getting to the room in which we’d found the mother and her children. I crouched down, eyeing the charred piece of newspaper at my foot.
“Don,” I called, “you should get a picture of this.”
He came around me to see what I was looking at. “Shit!” A frown formed on his face and he took the photo. Once he did, I lifted the paper with my hand, holding it up in front of my face.
“I don’t care how powerful a fire is, it’s not going to carry shreds of newspaper up a staircase and deposit it at the very door where we found our victims.”
“No.” Don shook his head. “No, it’s not.”
I looked around, noticing another small piece of newspaper, again burnt around the edges. “This was set intentionally.”
Don looked me dead in the eye but remained silent. I’d just read his conclusions out loud.
“We’ll need to pass this along to the fire investigators.”
I nodded, too angry to speak. The thought of someone doing something like this on purpose sent a cold chill through my veins. I knew the type of person it took to plan out killing someone. Hell, I was the type of person who’d done it in my former career. But even I’d never harm a woman and her sleeping children.
“You think it was the father?” Don questioned.
That pissed me off even more. I kept quiet. The memory of the screaming father as he watched his wife and children being treated by the medics ran across my mind. I doubted it was him. Of course, he could’ve been putting on a show.
“Anything’s possible.” I stood and continued to walk with Don around the house as he snapped photo after photo for what he thought might be important. At this point, I was just contented knowing that the sick bastard who’d attempted to kill this family hadn’t succeeded. Rescue Four had done its job, and for that I was grateful.