Consumed (Firefighters #1)(11)

It was the list of the fallen who had died in the line of duty, the ones who were missed every day and night, the ghosts who followed them on every call . . . the regrets that didn’t just have titles in all caps, but faces, clear as day.

Daniel Michael Maguire. Would they recite him in order as the newest one, or by his brother, John Thomas Maguire?

Anne would drink to him. Anne would raise her glass and think of this night and feel the tightness in her chest and the sting in the corners of her eyes. She would maybe remember the laughs. She would definitely think of working this fire. And she might just recall that one time they’d made love.

In the end, though, he would be another thing she ran from.

If he could have apologized to her for that, he would’ve, and wasn’t fate a bitch. He wouldn’t be dying now if he hadn’t saved her, so she could regret him and carry the guilt around with her for the rest of her life.

One-handed.

As he shut his eyes against the memory of that axe he’d swung, he had a passing thought that he should bang the pipe again.

And that was it.

The end.





chapter




6



Victor “Ropes” Rizzo got out of his truck and flicked his cigarette to the ground. Crushing it with his boot, he ignored the way his heart pounded in his rib cage. Up ahead, on the far side of a ring of frozen scruff, the barbequed remains of an old abandoned warehouse were like a corpse at the end of an autopsy.

Holes everywhere. Leaking bricks. Whole sections gone.

Fire trucks were clustered at the collapsed northeastern corner, their flashing lights overlapping to form a surging red glow that showed little good news. Those brick outer walls had collapsed into a slope that was tall enough to require climbing, and his first thought was that if somebody was under all that weight, they needed a pine box. But at least the blaze was wholly contained, the hoses off, the steam as yet rising into the night sky while smoke, its not-so-distant cousin, lingered like a specter of the dead in the cold post-traumatic air.

As his nose tingled at the old, familiar of soot and chemical stink, his eyes tracked the movements of firefighters from both his 617 stationhouse and the 499 while they picked around the debris mountain, their bodies throwing shadows over bricks, concrete blocks, sections of wood.

He hitched his shoulder brace up a little higher under his parka and walked across the cracked asphalt. Incident command had set up post out of one of the engines, but he went right by the—

“You’re not cleared for duty, Rizzo.”

He shook his head at Captain Baker. “I’m going in. Sorry.”

“You’re med’d out.”

“So file me under concerned fucking citizen.”

“I am so fucking tired of all of you!”

Rizzo blew a kiss and marched across to the rescue efforts, his boots crunching over stones slippery from what had been sprayed and then frozen. A couple of the boys sifting through the pile looked at him, and one even spoke up, “No way, Rizzo.”

Of course it was his fellow 617 Chuck Parnesi—but at least the 499’s crew stayed out of it. Then again, you didn’t get involved in another family’s drama.

“Seriously, Rizzo—”

“Did I hear someone talking?” Rizzo started to climb up on the pile, his balance all marble-on-an-old-table because of his bum-ass shoulder. “I didn’t think so.”

“Your arm’s in a sling.”

“And again, I say, wouldn’t it be a waste of a someone’s time to comment on what is my fucking business.”

As Chuck got into a debate with himself, Rizzo tripped and went down to his knees on the uneven slope—but a gloved hand presented itself to help him up. It was Robert Miller, a.k.a., Moose, from the 499. Danny’s old roommate. The man’s civilian clothes were soaking wet and covered with ash, and there was blood smudged down the front of his shirt. His eyes were pits of suffering, his face pale beneath his trimmed beard.

Rizzo didn’t hesitate to take what was offered.

The 617 and the 499 houses were not friends. They were not buddies. They didn’t mix down at Timeout Sports Bar; they didn’t work out or do off-duty second jobs together; they didn’t clap each other on the shoulders and yuk it up if they met in town.

Bust a beer bottle over your head was more like it. They were competitors: for resources from the city, recruits from the academy, performance on the job. Except here was the thing. Both sides suffered from ah-hell-no-that’s-my-little-brother syndrome. They were allowed to pick on the other guy, but no one else could, and in this situation, when a fellow firefighter was buried in debris? As far as Ropes or any of the other guys at the 617 cared, it was one of their own—and nobody was going to stop digging until they recovered Danny Maguire . . . or his remains.

With grunts and curses, firefighters were hefting charred beams, toasted office equipment, and bundles of bricks still mortared together out of the warehouse, the metastases growing on either side of the massive hole in the flank of the three-story structure.

Ropes knew better than to try that shit with his arm, so he got busy with his flashlight.

Holy shit. So much of so heavy.

This had to have been a manufacturing facility first, before it had become a warehouse and then a crack den. But why would you put the machinery on the second floor? Lot of weight to crank up to a higher level.