Skin Deep (Station Seventeen #1)
Kimberly Kincaid
1
Kellan Walker stood with an ax in one hand and a sledgehammer in the other, thanking his lucky fucking stars he didn’t have an office job. Not that pushing paper was a bad way to go, necessarily—honest work, and all that. But a nine to five fit him about as well as a suit and tie, and since he hadn’t sported those particular torture devices since his father’s funeral ten years ago, he was all too happy to stick to the helmet and turnout gear he wore every day for the Remington Fire Department.
Better that the fires were literal than figurative. At least those he could put out.
“Is that a sledgehammer in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”
Kellan looked up from his spot in Station Seventeen’s triple-wide engine bay, chuffing out a laugh at the familiar, feminine voice greeting him from the doorway. “I’m always happy to see you when I’m doing inventory, McCullough. Care to help out a brother in need?”
“You want me to pick up your slack again, Walker?” His fellow engine-mate Shae McCullough arched a honey-colored brow at him, and Christ, even in her sleep she probably had enough brass for a band. Cue up the number one reason Kellan liked her.
“I prefer to think of it more as lending your professional expertise. Sharing is caring,” he reminded her, putting just enough of a cocky smile to the words to make her cave. Ballbreaker or not, Shae always had his back, just like he’d had hers since the minute he’d crossed the threshold at Seventeen two years ago. Being a firefighter was the closest thing he’d found to the seven years he’d spent in the Army. He and Shae were part of a team, along with everyone else on engine, squad, and even Parker and Quinn on the ambo. They didn’t just carry their weight. They carried each other equally.
Still, Kellan knew better than to think McCullough would lower her brass knuckles all the way on his account.
“Caring, my ass. You owe me,” she grumbled, although the slight lift of her lips negated any sting the words might otherwise hold.
“I can live with that.”
Kellan let go of a laugh along with the words, his work boots scuffing over the smooth concrete of the engine bay floor as he returned both the ax and the sledge to their respective storage compartments in Engine Seventeen. But before he and Shae could pop open the next one down to do a head count on the Halligan bars, the piercing sound of the all-call echoed off the cinder block walls of the engine bay.
“Engine Seventeen, Squad Six, Ambulance Twenty-Two, structure fire, ninety-three hundred block of Glendale Avenue, requesting immediate response.”
Just like that, Kellan’s pulse tripped into go mode in his veins. “Nothing like a crispy job right out of the chute,” he said, double-checking that the storage compartments were all latched tight before quickly hanging the inventory clipboard in his grasp back on the nearby support post. Damn, they’d barely taken a chunk out of their morning shift-change duties. Not that it mattered in the grander scheme of things catching fire.
“You’re not complaining, are you?” Shae shot a disbelieving glance over the shoulder of her navy blue uniform shirt as she pulled herself into the operator’s seat, throwing on her headset and kicking the engine over into a low growl.
Kellan clambered into the back step behind her, moving all the way down to the spot diagonal from hers, directly behind the officer’s seat. “Hell no,” he said, because as crazy as it might seem to civilians, he’d rather be busy than bored. He hadn’t become a firefighter to sit around the station. Give him the chance to run into a shit storm while all others were running out, and Kellan would take it every day of the week. Twice on Sundays.
He parked himself in the seat where he’d stowed his turnout gear barely fifteen minutes ago, inhaling to counter the physiological responses tempting his body to get jacked up. His heart might want to charge full speed ahead against his sternum and flatten his lungs to boot, but he’d learned how to show his adrenal gland who was boss long before day one at the Remington Fire Academy. Being a sniper for the Rangers tended to teach a guy how to keep his shit in check. After two tours in Afghanistan, the methods for managing his adrenaline were pretty much stitched into Kellan’s DNA.
Deep breaths. Quick decisions. Precise movements. No dwelling on what was in front of you or what was already done.
Ever.
Kellan’s lieutenant, Ian Gamble, slid his huge frame into the officer’s seat in the front of the engine at the same time Station Seventeen’s rookie, Luke Slater, scrambled into the back step to sit behind Shae. Gamble turned to pin the rookie with a you-got-lucky-you-weren’t-last-in stare, hooking his headset over his ears and jutting his darkly-stubbled chin at Shae in a nonverbal “let’s go.”
Both Kellan and Slater grabbed the headsets hanging over their respective seats, because between the hundred and thirty decibel sirens and the rattle and whoosh of cabin noise inside the engine’s boxy interior, they didn’t have a prayer of hearing their lieutenant otherwise.
“Okay you guys, buckle down because this looks like the real deal,” Gamble cut out into his mic, the scraped-up edges of his voice a perfect match for his gruff demeanor. He leaned forward to look at the screen built into the dashboard that connected them with Remington’s emergency services system. “Dispatch is reporting flames showing at a residence on the north side of the district. Nearest cross street is Woodmoor,” he said, mostly for Shae’s benefit.