Where There's Smoke
“Very nice.” Sloane admired them. “Fast work. How did you get all this done? You were only just starting when I left for my meeting.”
He shrugged, clicking his mouse. “I kind of skipped lunch.”
“What?” She frowned at him. “You’re too skinny as it is, Dave.” She didn’t recognize herself playing the role of older sister because she’d never been one. “Go eat and I’ll finish qualifying the last one. Go,” she shooed as he hesitated. “Now.”
Dave stood up and grabbed his sunglasses off his desk. “Okay, mem sahib, your wish is my command.” He walked jauntily out into the hall. A moment later the door opened again and his head popped back inside. “Hey, boss?”
“Yes?”
“You really think I could be a rock star?”
Sloane tried to keep a straight face. “Truth?”
“Truth.”
“Don’t quit your day job,” she advised.
The door to the lab clicked closed on his whistle and Sloane got to work monitoring the simulations. Her good humor slid into humming concentration as she ran the Orienteer module through scenario after scenario. When the phone rang, she picked it up absently. “Sloane Hillyard.”
“Nick Trask, Ladder 67.”
She would have recognized his voice even without the introduction. It was unsettling how clearly she could imagine the lines of his face. Still, no one was going to distract her from getting the gear qualified, no matter how good-looking he was. Too much was at stake.
She made herself speak coolly, impersonally. “Captain Trask. How are you?”
“Good enough. How about you?”
“Fine, thanks. I saw the fire at the tank farm on the news. It looked bad.”
“For a while. We held onto it, though. Chief Douglass is a good firefighter.” It was the highest praise a firefighter could give.
“I’m glad everything worked out all right.” Sloane took a deep breath. “So what can I do for you, captain?”
“You could call me Nick, for starters. I only get called Captain Trask when I’m visiting schools or getting chewed out by the chief.”
She blinked. “Why?”
“Why do I get chewed out?”
“Why should I call you Nick?”
“We’re going to be working together, right? It might make things a little more friendly.”
“You didn’t seem too happy about the situation the other day. Why the sudden change of pace?”
“Call it an experiment. I know Ayre’s an operator, but you were right the other day, I don’t know you at all. I figure you deserve the benefit of the doubt.”
Oh, nice wasn’t fair, she thought with a little twist of alarm. Nice could be dangerous. Nice could be just the start of far more than she could handle. She paused. “So what can I do for you…Nick?”
“I thought it was the other way around. That was the gist of our conversation yesterday, wasn’t it?”
“It was.” Sloane drew a precise pattern of interlocking diamonds on her desk blotter, trying to ignore the quick flutter in her stomach. “You made it pretty clear you wanted nothing to do with pandering to the politicos.” And she wanted nothing to do with any man who could make her stomach flutter. Especially if he was a firefighter.
“You hold a grudge?”
“No, but I need cooperation. Nick.”
“Well, my opinion of the situation hasn’t changed, but as you pointed out, it isn’t up to me. So if I can help you out—safely—then I’ll do it.”
The stiff note in his voice let her relax a bit. “Start with an open mind.”
“Done. If the equipment’s good, you’ll have my support. Just don’t expect it to go any further than the testing. The day the department has the money to buy pricey electronics like you’re peddling is the day I’ll be driving to work in a Rolls.”
Sloane took a deep breath. “I don’t know what you drive, but I do know this equipment is going to be an important tool, as common in firehouses as thermal cameras.”
“No doubt.”
“No, there isn’t,” she said shortly. There couldn’t be, not after all she’d been through. “Now is there something else, Captain Trask?”
“Nick. And yeah, there is. I need to know what you want to do about the testing. How many men you want, when, what kind of apparatus, all that. You might find an engine company better suited to your needs, by the way.”
Sloane shook her head, forgetting that he couldn’t see her. “No, it has to be a truck company. I’ve got five Orienteers to test, plus the master unit that I’ll be using to monitor. I’d like to keep it to the same group of men.”
“We can do that if you schedule carefully.”
“Good. What I had in mind was a session or two at the training facility, where we’ll have control. Once I’m sure the kinks are all out of it, you can start taking it onto fire grounds. I need a minimum of three fire situations over and above the training facility sessions to get meaningful statistics.”
“Okay. Let’s set up some dates.”
It didn’t take long, when it came down to it, and she entered the dates in her computer with satisfaction. “We’re all set, then. I’ll see you at the Quincy facility on Saturday.”
“All right.” Nick paused. “You know, Bill Grant backed you when I talked to him. Despite his unfortunate tendency to cooperate with Ayre, he’s a good man. Don’t let him down.”
Sloane hung up the telephone. Don’t let him down. The words echoed in her mind as she stared at the computer screen. She wasn’t seeing the data, though. She was seeing a red-headed boy hanging around the local firehouse, wiping down the engine and listening to the stories of courage and glory. Don’t let him down. She saw him on the edge of manhood, wearing the blue of the Hartford fire service, his lieutenant’s badge gleaming on his chest, pride gleaming in his eyes. She saw him at the altar, uncomfortable in his tuxedo and unmindful of the discomfort as he looked at the glowing woman who had just become his wife. Don’t let him down. She saw his casket being lowered into the ground.
The fire had been in an abandoned warehouse honeycombed with cold-storage lockers, decrepit and way below code. Two of Mitch’s guys had been searching a tangle of rooms for victims when the smoke had thickened and they’d gotten lost. Mitch had plunged in to find them. And had never come out.
How quickly had he passed out from the fumes after his air had run out? Sloane wondered for the thousandth time. Seconds? Heartbeats? Before or after he heard the voices of the firefighters on the other side of the wall, the firefighters who couldn’t find him?
Before or after the whole room flashed over into merciless, killing flame?
Officially, the cause of death had been the smoke inhalation, but the real culprit had been the labyrinthine building and the lack of orientation equipment. It could happen to any firefighter at any time. It had been Mitch’s bad luck it had happened to him. Even five years later, remembering made her tighten with the fury of senseless waste, struggle against the tearing loss.
Don’t let him down.
She wouldn’t let him down, Sloane thought now, staring around her lab, nor any of the people who staked their lives on the quality of their equipment. And she wouldn’t let down their families. She remembered what it was like to lose someone. She remembered too well….
Chapter Three
It was visible as she drove in, an improbable, eccentric structure that looked as though a committee of quarrelsome architects had built it out of giant-sized Tinkertoys. The closer Sloane came, the more bizarre it looked, meticulously executed building segments arbitrarily slapped together into a four-story monstrosity, the whole considerably less than the sum of the parts. Depending on the side of approach, the structure looked like an apartment house, an industrial building, a parking structure or a tract house on stilts.
It was the showpiece of the Boston fire-training facility and every inch of it had been carefully planned. It would never win any beauty contests, Sloane conceded ruefully as she parked her car and got out, but its sheer quirkiness appealed to her.
Or perhaps it appealed to her because it was where she was going to get a chance to see what her gear could really do.
Anticipation sharpened her awareness of everything around her, the early-morning tang in the air, the lines of the putty-colored tower silhouetted against the brilliant blue sky. Nerves knotted her stomach as they had since she’d awoken that morning. There was no need to worry, she told herself for the hundredth time as she got out of her car. Everything was going to go fine.
Ladder 67’s truck was already parked on the wide concrete apron surrounding the tower, its aerial ladder stretched out to the top of the building. Nearby was a pumper, hoses trailing out toward the tower. From a distance, they looked like Tonka toys. In fact, the whole scene looked like nothing so much as a child’s play area after its owner had gone for milk and cookies. A mind-boggling array of fireplugs poked out of the concrete at intervals. Sloane skirted one, heading toward where the ladder truck waited in the slanting shadow of the tower.
Why did it have to be Ladder 67? she wondered, glancing at the group gathered around the truck. Things would have been so much easier if Bill Grant had let her change to another company. She had enough to worry without having to contend with Nick Trask. Not that she was about to let a man distract her from her job, but she’d have far more peace of mind with a captain who was oh, say, pushing sixty, with the start of a paunch and a couple of grandkids on the way.
She wouldn’t have felt so much at risk.
Still, Nick Trask was far from the first challenge she’d faced in bringing the Orienteer this far. She’d deal with him, just as she’d dealt with everything else. The important thing was to keep focused on what really mattered.
Making her brother’s death mean something.
She recognized Nick immediately. He stood out from the other men, even though they were all dressed in their department T-shirts and dark trousers. Cockiness, Sloane thought immediately, but intrinsic honesty forced her to admit that it wasn’t. Instead, it was confidence, complete confidence in his ability to deal with any fire that might arise and a man who could walk into an inferno without flinching wasn’t daunted by much else. He turned to look at her from where he leaned against the side of the truck and against her will she felt the spurt of adrenaline in her veins. Oh, yes, the legions of women who probably fell at his feet had to have had something to do with that confidence, as well. Willfully ignoring the sardonic curve of his mouth, Sloane squared her shoulders and kept walking.
When she drew near, Nick pushed away from the side of the ladder truck. “What, is Councilman Ayre running late for his photo op?”
“No Councilman Ayre, sorry to disappoint you.”
He studied her a moment. “Who said I was disappointed?”
No man should be allowed to have such long eyelashes, she thought. “Just a guess. It’s good equipment. It can save lives, including yours.” Pulling a neat pair of files out of the battered leather satchel at her feet, she stacked them on her clipboard. “After Hartford, I can’t see any department giving up equipment like this.”
“You’re obviously new to Boston, or at least the politics.”
“Hardly. I’ve been here three years.”
He laughed. Sloane stared at him, her cheeks tinting. “What?”
“No wonder you’re such an optimist.” The high color that stained the edges of her cheekbones suited her, Nick thought. And it was definitely personal with her.
Sloane frowned. “If Boston’s such a useless place and you hate it so much, why do you stay?”
“Loving the city doesn’t mean I have to agree with the agenda of the people running it.”
“I suppose, but why choose a job that’s subject to the whims of the politicians?”
“I didn’t. It chose me.”
For a moment, she just stared back at him. She looked a little like a Hollywood femme fatale, Nick thought, in her black turtleneck and tan jacket, dark glasses hiding her eyes. Her hair caught the light like a shower of sparks. Her skin was milk-pale and flawless.
He wondered abruptly how it tasted.
Concentrate on the job, Trask. “So what’s the plan?”
“First let’s go over how the equipment works, then get some smoke going and let them take the Orienteer through its paces.”
“You want smoke, we’ve got it. Come on, I’ll show you.”
A change came over her as she faced the burn tower, a tenseness he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been so aware of her. For a moment something in her stance suggested wariness, perhaps dread. It was there and gone in a flash. There was a story there, he thought again.
Sooner or later, he was going to find out what it was.
He led her into the cool of the burn tower’s shadow. At close range, the cinder block walls were scarred by water-marks and black flares of soot.
“What do they use for the fire?” Sloane asked.
“Bales of hay, wood pallets. It depends on whether we want smoke or heat.” Nick led her to stairs that threaded up the outside of the tower. He stood back to let her go first. He’d given the tour plenty of times. Funny, he’d never noticed the narrowness of the stairway before, even when it had been crowded with a dozen people.
They stopped at the first landing, in front of a discolored steel door that led to the interior of the building. Nick pulled it open. The metal groaned in complaint. Fire was never easy on anything. “Here’s the first burn room, in through here.”
Coming in from the bright sunlight, it took Sloane’s eyes a moment to adjust to dimness as she shoved her sunglasses up onto her head. The air felt dank and close. In the mix of odors that assaulted her nose there was the stench of stale smoke, drowned char, of burned concrete and gasoline. Their footsteps echoed as though they were in a cave.
Nick stepped in behind her. The back of her neck prickled in sudden awareness. Then the room became shrouded in shadow as he closed the door. Sloane forced her attention to the space in front of her, away from the soft sound of his breath.
She blinked, then blinked again.
The scene in front of her was weirdly disorienting, like a surrealist painting or a scene from a psycho movie. There was much that was familiar, but the context bewildered. The space looked like an ordinary living room, if one discounted the fact that the walls and furniture were completely encrusted with soot. There were the familiar shapes of a couch and a coffee table, but instead of rugs, the center of the floor was piled high with gasoline-soaked wood. It was like something out of an arsonist’s daydream—or a firefighter’s nightmare.
“Well, the color scheme’s simple enough,” she said dryly. “Black on black.”
Nick stood motionless by the door, watching her as she moved about the room. “The training people like to simulate a real-life situation as much as possible,” he murmured. “The furniture’s heavy-gauge sheet steel. Watch yourself, by the way. This stuff is coated with soot an inch thick.”
The furniture was absolutely matte black, sucking up all the available light, baffling the eye. It looked both soft as velvet and absolutely solid. Sloane couldn’t resist touching it with her fingertip. She gave a surprised laugh when her finger sank in to the second knuckle, sending soot cascading down in small avalanches.
“I warned you,” Nick pointed out mildly.
“Empirical method.” Sloane tried unobtrusively to shake the soot off her fingers. “I have to experiment and observe. I’m a scientist, it’s part of my profession.” She caught the quick gleam of teeth as he smiled.
Nick pulled a rag from his back pocket and tossed it to her. “Good thing you wore a black sweater. You ought to do a study sometime of the migration and breeding patterns of soot. You’d be amazed at how much of your clothing that little bit will cover.”
Sloane gave a scrub or two to her hands and handed it back to him. “Maybe I’ll turn into one of those people who write fan letters to the detergent companies.”
“Maybe.” He frowned and stepped forward with the cloth. Before she knew what he was about, he’d touched it to her cheekbone.
Sloane jerked back.
“Hold still for a minute. You’ve got soot on your face. You don’t want to look like Tom Brady on game day, do you?”
She felt the touch of the fabric, the heat of his finger beneath. The heat of his body. He was too near, she thought, too solid, too hard to ignore. “Are you done yet?” She glanced up and locked eyes with him and the words caught in her throat. His gaze was intent, as if he were trying to see through her skin. His eyes looked hot and dark.
The silence stretched out. “Well, that’s all we can do here. Come on,” he said abruptly, moving to the far side of the room. “If you like interior design, there’s more to see.”
It was time to get out of this close, dark room. She didn’t want to react to his presence so strongly, Sloane thought as they started down the interior stairs.
She didn’t seem to be able to help it.
In the stairwell, sunlight spilled through an open door high above. Light and shadow, bright and dark. They climbed the stairs in sync, shoulder to shoulder in silence broken only by the hollow ring of footsteps echoing off the cinder block walls, the whisper of hands sliding on the railings, the almost imperceptible rhythm of breath.
“Is this the first time you’ve been in one of these?”
Sloane jumped at Nick’s voice. “Yes. I didn’t expect it to be like this.”
“Are things usually the way you expect?”
You’re not. “Often enough.”
They came to a landing and stepped through a door into another burn room. Light streamed in through the empty window cutout and Sloane breathed a sigh of relief. There would be no repeat of the shadowed intimacy of the room downstairs, no repeat of the closeness of the stairwell. It should have helped.
It didn’t, especially when she saw the furniture. “The master bedroom, of course.” Her voice sounded stilted and strange in her own ears. Her mouth was dry. Silly.
“Not much sleeping goes on in here.”
Sloane walked to the window to lean out of the open cutout, immensely conscious of every movement, every breath. “I didn’t realize we were so high up,” she murmured. “The tower doesn’t look that big from the ground.”
“It’s a lot higher when you’re hanging off it on a rope.”
“No thanks. I hate heights.” Sloane started to turn away from the window, then gasped and jerked backward, knocking into Nick. His hands caught her shoulders automatically; he released her a moment later.
But not before she absorbed the feel of his palms.
Deep in her belly something clenched like a fist.
Adrenaline, she told herself, that was all it was. Whether it was from Nick’s touch or the thing she’d seen, she couldn’t tell. Because she didn’t want to find out, she stared instead at the figure wedged between the bed and the wall. “What in God’s name is that?”
“That?” Nick grinned. “That’s Harvey.”
It lay flat on the concrete, dressed in turnouts and steel-toed boots, one arm stretched out plaintively toward her ankle. It was ridiculously thin and even in its reclining position was tall enough to have been instantly drafted by the NBA, had it only been alive. “Harvey?”
Nick seemed to relax. “Our search-and-rescue dummy. They stash him and his wife, Gladys, in here somewhere before they start the fires. When we send the crew in to search, they’d better come out with both of them. Harvey’s set up to weigh about as much as the average man. Feel.”
Nick reached past her to pick up the outstretched arm. He was near enough that she could catch the scent of male, near enough that she could see the play of muscle through his T-shirt as he bent over. She moved to step away but a stray piece of wood from the fire pile caught her heel and she stumbled backward, arms out to brace against the wall behind her.
And in a surge of terror felt only empty space.
There were moments of absolute clarity in life. One minute Nick was bending down over Harvey, glad of something to do, the next, Sloane’s cry was ringing in his ears. There was no pause for thought, no time for horror. Operating only on reflex, he surged up toward the window cutout even as Sloane’s feet left the floor. Pulling her back in to safety took a flicker of a second. For an instant there was only adrenaline. Then he swept her to him, holding her tightly.
“There was nothing there.” Sloane’s voice wavered. “I just backed up and there was nothing there.”
Four stories. Four stories down. His mind repeated it like a litany of horror. And at the bottom, solid concrete. “It’s all right,” Nick whispered, as much to himself as her. “I caught you. You’re safe now. You’re safe.”
He’d saved lives before. The amazement and rush were familiar, but no close call had ever shaken him this much. All the fragrant luxuries of her, the precious individuality, so fragile and so very nearly snuffed out. She was alive now, though, wondrously, completely alive.
He’d had no idea how right she would feel in his arms, close enough that he could feel her heart beating against his chest. For a moment, there was only the soft feathering of her breath over his neck, the silkiness of her hair against his cheek. He heard her sigh, then her body seemed to melt into his.
There was a shout and the sound of footsteps clattering up the stairs. Nick pulled away, staring at Sloane, who looked as shaken as he felt. Then O’Hanlan and Knapp burst into the room.
“My God, are you all right?” O’Hanlan turned to Nick. “Jesus, Trask, what happened? We turned around and there she was hanging half out the window.”
Sloane sounded calm, looked calm unless you noticed how rigidly she’d clasped her hands together. “I tripped.”
“Good thing Nick was here.” O’Hanlan studied her with concerned eyes. “You’re sure you’re okay? You scared the life out of us.”
“I nearly scared the life out of myself.” Sloane glanced over at Nick, as though unable to help herself.
He knew how she felt. He hadn’t caught up with what had just happened himself, knew only that it had started something, a drumbeat in his head that made the idea of professional detachment toward her a joke. “Let’s get downstairs,” he said brusquely.
It replayed in her mind over and over as they descended the tower. The whole thing had taken a matter of seconds. Shadow, then harsh sunlight, then a glimpse of blue sky as she’d rocked outside the building. And there had been terror, blinding terror. It had seemed like hours before her heart had begun beating again.
The solid ground under her feet came as a relief. Sloane couldn’t understand why it was only then that she started to tremble, first her hands, then her whole body. The men milled about nearby, talking idly, staring over at her. She took a deep breath and willed the shakes away. If she just ignored it, she thought with a tinge of desperation, maybe she could manage.
Nick walked up and looked at her carefully. “Do you need some time to get calmed down?” he asked.
To her utter horror she felt tears threaten. For a ridiculous instant, she wanted only to be held by him again. Instead, she laced her fingers together to still their trembling and took a deep breath. “I’m fine.” She attempted to smile. “Let’s get started. The gear’s in my trunk.”
Nick studied her and shook his head decisively. “Give me your keys and go sit down for a couple of minutes,” he instructed.
“Don’t order me around,” she returned. “I’m—”
“Look, don’t argue,” Nick said sharply. “I don’t care how tough you are, anyone would need a couple of minutes to recover from a scare like that.” His voice softened. “We’ve got plenty of time. I’ll get a couple of the guys to bring the gear over and then we can go to it. Now sit.” He paused. “Please?”
Sloane perched on the step of the ladder truck and gradually the wobbliness went out of her muscles. It was a relief to feel like herself again and ready to get started. Before she did, though, she had something to take care of.