Consumed (Firefighters #1)(31)

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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 snoring 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.