Chapter Five – Lucy

 

I sat in the right lane at the stop light, waiting for the signal to switch from red to green. Halfway home in my little Cavalier, my mind was still spinning from the conversation with my boss. About his friendly suggestion regarding my career opportunities if I didn’t either figure this all out, or just make it all go away.

I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, reminding myself that I needed to go home and recharge. That I needed to recuperate from the events of the last two days. Put my mind together, let it sort through everything. Take a long bath maybe, enjoy a glass of wine. Netflix or TV. Something. Anything other than work on the case.

Of course, you can tell yourself you’re going to do one thing. But actually doing it? Sometimes that goes right out the window. At least, I know that was the case with me that night. Which was probably one of the reasons why I had my case files loaded up in my briefcase and sitting in my passenger seat.

My briefcase. Another reminder of Cassidy. He’d thought it would make me look professional when I got the job as a fire inspector, even though none of them ever used one and gave me weird looks. But I’d held onto it because he’d given it to me as a gift.

I sighed and leaned my head against my fist as I kept waiting for that damn light to change, my eyes flickering to the left side of the intersection. The Stop & Shop where the first fire incident had occurred was just a couple miles down that way.

I frowned, my eyes seemingly stuck in that side-eyes gesture as I tried to convince myself I didn’t need to go down there.

Neither my dad, or Cassidy, would have gone to sleep for that recharge time. It just wasn’t in them to back down from a fight, even for a moment. Every fire was a fight, they’d have said, a fight with something that was a force of nature. Something you never turned your back on, or even blinked while you stared it down. Because one wrong misstep, and civilians were dead. Your friends were dead.

You were dead.

While investigating fires wasn’t that intense, or deadly, it was still important. And still a fight. Sure, I wasn’t running into fires anymore, and I wasn’t carrying what sometimes felt like my entire body weight’s worth of gear on my back. But, it was still a struggle.

Because sometimes, you had to fight with the truth when it was hiding. And, in my line of work, the truth loved to hide. You had to grab it with both hands, wrestle it from where it was hiding, and pull it out into the daylight. Consequences be damned. Anything less, and you weren’t doing your job right.

That was another thing both men in my life ingrained in me. If there’s a job worth doing, it’s worth doing right. Which made my boss’s suggestion for the source of Cassidy’s fatal fire even worse. The idea that his own gross incompetence had somehow led to his death was just too much to consider. It really would be more than a blemish on his name. Because the only thing that could be worse than losing both a mentor and an old friend, was the idea that I might end up tarnishing the good name he had left behind.

I jolted back to reality as the car behind me laid on its horn and took off around me, its tires squealing as it laid rubber across the intersection. A shadowy form gave me the finger as it passed by, in that almost universal American symbol of hello, and I was too surprised to even return the favor.

What did I care if some guy, or gal, gave me the finger anyways? I was on a case, wasn’t I? My mind was occupied by something important.

Important. Shit.

“Dammit, Lucy,” I muttered.

I was decided.

Who needed rest and relaxation? Especially when there was a job like this sitting on the back burner of your mind, just waiting to boil over and spoil everything else on the stove?

I checked my mirrors, making sure everything was clear before flipping my blinker on and cutting across from the far right lane to the left. I slammed on the gas and accelerated through the empty intersection, silently praying that there weren’t any of Shamrock’s finest parked in a squad car to witness what I was doing. After all, I didn’t have as many friends on the force as I did in the firehouse.

“Okay, Lucy,” I reminded myself out loud as I headed for the Stop & Shop, both hands white-knuckling the steering wheel, “just one quick look. That’s all. You get in there, look it over again, then you call it a night. Deal?”

I frowned and shook my head. “Yeah, okay,” I replied to myself, and the otherwise empty car. “Deal. You got it.”

Maybe, I thought, I’d pick up some minor detail that I hadn’t seen weeks before. Maybe this could be like some kind of refresher course for my brain, and my subconscious would take all that relaxation time later tonight to, I don’t know, figure this all out for me? Put two and two together, and make sure it didn’t keep coming up as five.

It could happen, right?

Probably not.

But, even if my subconscious didn’t work out the whole case on its own while I slept soundly tonight, what was really the worst that could happen?

I mean, all I was doing was stopping off on one little errand on the way home.

There was no harm in that, even if it was work related.

Right?