Crash Lights and Sirens, Book 1 (3 page)

So. Here they go.

He’s on time but Falvey’s already done with the checklist when he gets there, ticking off the last couple of supplies on the page. “Hey,” Nick says carefully, dumping his pack through the open window of the cab. “You wanna drive?”

“Nah, it’s all you.” Taryn tucks the pen behind her ear, shoving her hands in her pockets. The weak winter sunlight is glinting off the gold in her hair. “Ready to go?”

“Sure thing.”

They climb into the bus, kick the heat up a couple of notches. “So,” Falvey says, before Nick’s even got his seat belt buckled. She’s got this tone in her voice like she’s trying to sell him a life insurance policy, oddly jocular. “That was probably a mistake.”

Not two minutes and they’re off to the races. Nick raises his eyebrows; he can’t help it. “Hey, I asked if you wanted to drive.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I do,” he agrees. In the cab it smells like McDonald’s, whatever fried garbage the morning guys were eating. He’d roll down the window if it weren’t so fucking cold. “I remember from last time.”

Taryn scowls at him. “Well, last time it was definitely a mistake.”

Last time she was with Pete, he guesses; last time—and this time, actually—she came after him. For three whole months after the fire she barely glanced at him, like if they never talked about it that meant it hadn’t happened. Nick nods and looks back at the road. “Ah.”

“Look, I’m sorry, okay?” Taryn sighs, leaning her head back against the seat. She’s got freckles all across her cheeks, this pale, pale skin. “It was a dick move.”

Nick raises his eyebrows. He has no idea what she wants from this situation. Thinks chances are good she probably doesn’t know either. “Which part?” he asks.

“All of it!” She sounds frustrated now. She sounds like a kid. “Can you help me out, please?”

“Falvey—” Nick begins, no clue what he’s going to say to her, but in the end it doesn’t matter because he gets cut off by the radio, a burst of static and dispatch announcing a quadruple pileup along the I-90 on-ramp. The call is for multiple responders, and he and Falvey are the third-closest team. Nick nods, and Taryn dives for the transmitter with something that looks a lot like relief. Up go the lights and sirens, and then there’s no more talking.

It’s a messy accident, spreaders necessary for two of the cars at minimum. Another team and the fire department are already on scene, prying apart a truck and a minivan; it’ll be nothing but bodies coming out of those. Thankfully the whole ramp has been closed down, so at least they aren’t going to have to worry about oncoming traffic. He and Falvey take the vehicle with the least damage, a Prius crushed by itself against the guardrail.

“Smoke,” Taryn declares, pointing to the rear. It’s thick, curling up from the undercarriage. Falvey ducks her head in the open window, addressing the passenger. “Ma’am, can you hear me?” The fire department has already shoved box cribs around the wheels, securing the car and cutting all the glass out. Legally, no one can help immobile patients until an EMT or paramedic gives the okay.

“Gonna have to take off the roof,” Nick says. The driver is a woman in her midthirties, unconscious with a head injury. He has a cervical collar ready before Taryn even asks.

“Airbags,” Falvey points out as she’s securing it, and yeah, Nick sees the problem too. They haven’t deployed. It’s bad news, and not just because of what it means for the driver—they could be triggered by the extraction and injure her further, or even pop out to surprise him and Falvey. Nick knows a paramedic who broke an arm in six places like that. Then he realizes something else.

“Christ, Falvey, this is a hybrid.” Nick can see real flames now, licking their way around the trunk. “We gotta get her out before that battery explodes everywhere.” Gas tanks never do, that shit is for the movies, but high-volt packs are trickier. Nick tries the crushed driver-side door on a Hail Mary, but the handle comes away in his grip. The passenger’s side is completely blocked by the guardrail.

“Yeah, already on it.” Falvey’s swung herself through the driver’s window and into the passenger’s seat without disturbing the patient, gymnast-bendy. “Okay, take the cribs out.”

Nick looks at the piles securing the wheels, then back at Taryn’s face. The on-ramp is a steep, curving hill, the Prius pointed nose down beside the guardrail. “That’s not a good idea,” he says.

Falvey shoves aside some hair that’s fallen out of her tight ponytail. “Sure it is. We can’t wait to get the roof open, so we’re gonna unjam the door. It’s fine. We’ll coast, I’ll pull the emergency brake. Easy.”

She has a point. The car is totaled on the driver’s side, door mechanism crunched, but other than being blocked by the guardrail, the passenger’s side looks intact. All they have to do is move the car a few feet. “I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to like it,” Falvey huffs. “You just have to do it. We don’t have time to argue.”

It’s against regs. It’s a dangerous plan, and it’s completely against regs.

Nick kicks the piles out from in front of the wheels.

“Thank you so much,” Falvey calls snottily out the window, then throws the car into neutral. Nick watches it roll forward, streaming smoke. At least half the firefighters are watching too. Through the back window he can see Taryn’s hand on the wheel, steering it away from the railing.

Start to finish the whole production takes thirty seconds. It feels like decades to Nick, the strange way time can stretch when you’re holding your breath. But then Taryn’s jamming the car into park and kicking open the newly freed door, Nick already waiting with a spine board, and after that it’s just one quick slide to get the patient out of the wreck. Taryn scrambles out behind her, the jolted airbags deploying with a
whoosh
just as she touches pavement.

“Good timing,” Nick jokes, steadier than he feels. Falvey is grinning like she hasn’t got a care, already setting up the IV. She lives for accidents like this. The firemen start streaming around the stretcher to put out the smoking car, one of them high-fiving Taryn as he races past.

“Watch the batteries,” Falvey calls.

They run on lights and sirens all the way to Berkshire Medical Center, traffic parting like a wave. The patient isn’t critical enough to warrant the rush, but both of them are hopping with leftover adrenaline, albeit for different reasons. Nick lets Taryn be the one to help the doctors with the unload, and she’s still catching her breath when she climbs back into the bus, greenish eyes shining with satisfaction. “That was pretty good,” she says, grinning. She looks so fucking pleased with herself that Nick can’t help smiling back.

“Yeah, Falvey.” He huffs a quiet laugh into the warm air of the cab. She’s got a pretty good smile on her, is the truth. “It didn’t suck.”

They stare at each other for a long minute. Nick looks away first. “What happened with Pete?” he asks.

“Nothing.” Falvey shrugs in a way that almost certainly means something. “It didn’t work out.”

Nick shrugs back. “Okay.”

They sit there for a long time, not talking. After a while it starts to snow outside the bus. Nick thinks of the first day he ever met Falvey, shiny new rookie and how there wasn’t any fear in her at all. “You ready to go back?” he asks.

“Yeah.” Taryn nods, tucks her hands between her thighs to warm them. It would be better if he didn’t think about her so much. “Let’s go.”

Taryn gets home by eleven thirty and miracle of miracles everybody’s still in one piece and where they’re supposed to be, the boys passed out on the floor in front of the TV and Caitlin reading a Nancy Drew on the couch. There’s still no sign of Jesse. Taryn tamps down her annoyance and chases everybody upstairs. It’s the weekend, so it’s not a huge deal if the kids are up late, but it’s hard enough to keep them on any kind of schedule as it is. The hallway smells like something might have been burning earlier.

“How’d it go with the hot dogs?” Taryn asks, standing in the doorway of the room she shares with Caitlin. Twenty-four years old, and she sleeps in a twin bed next to a middle-schooler. There’s a poster of Justin Bieber on the opposite wall.

Caitlin shrugs, not looking up from her book. She’s a reader, Caitlin. She’s smart. “Fine.”

Taryn nods. Glances at the closed door down the end of the hall. “Ma?”

Another shrug. “She came down for a while,” Caitlin says.

“She eat?”

Caitlin shakes her head. “Went to Sully’s, I think.”

Sully’s is the liquor store on the corner. Taryn rolls her eyes. “Okay,” she says, tapping her short nails on the doorframe. “I’m gonna shower. Don’t stay up too much longer, all right?”

She’s halfway through when someone starts pounding on the bathroom door. Rosemary, from the sounds of it, three sheets to the wind. Taryn wraps a towel around herself, combing the worst of the soap out of her hair. “Ma?”

“You’re hogging it,” Rosemary slurs, listing in the open doorway. Her blue eyes are bloodshot, cheeks bloated with an alcoholic flush. “Get out.”

The Falveys have one bathroom between the six of them, a mildewy tub and toilet that haven’t been replaced since the eighties. Sometimes, when she’s drunk or in a mood, Rosemary times the kids while they’re using it. Once, she hauled Caitlin right off the toilet.

“I’m almost done, Ma,” Taryn tries, but Rosemary reaches for her elbow, missing and yanking the towel. Taryn has to fight to keep herself covered. “Okay,” she snaps. “Lay off.”

She heads downstairs instead, using the pull-out kitchen faucet to finish rinsing her hair. She could have argued—it’s nearly midnight, no one else needs the bathroom; Rosemary didn’t even duck in after her, just watched her all the way down the hall—but it isn’t worth it. If Rosemary gets going, she can wake up the whole neighborhood.

Caitlin’s asleep by the time Taryn gets back. She takes the book from Caitlin’s lax, skinny hand, turning out the reading lamp on the nightstand. She pulls a heavy sweatshirt and a pair of slippers on over her pajamas, then opens the bedroom window and climbs out onto the flat part of the roof. She can see the whole neighborhood from here, hear cars rumbling by, a shout every once in a while. Over the summer she used to climb up to call Pete and say good night.

Taryn sighs. Pete’s a resident at the Fairview hospital in Great Barrington. They met her second shift out as a paramedic, routine transport of a high school girl who’d crashed her parents’ shiny new Jetta in the parking lot after eighth period. He took her out for oysters on their first date.

(She still can’t think about it without feeling sick to her stomach, coming down the stairs last week and finding him standing in her living room with that look of total horror on his face. “Nice to finally meet you,” he said to her mother, and that was the moment Taryn knew beyond a doubt that she wasn’t going to be moving in with him after all.)

“What are you doing?”

That’s Caitlin, climbing out onto the roof herself, the comforter from her bed wrapped around her narrow shoulders. Taryn holds an arm out, pulls her close. “Careful,” she says, then, once Caitlin is settled, “Just thinking.”

“About Pete?”

“Sort of,” Taryn admits. “It’s okay.” That’s the strangest part of this whole breakup, really. It does feel okay. Ever since she called it off Taryn’s been waiting for it to hit her, to feel more than a passing twinge of sadness or regret for hurting Pete’s feelings. To feel anything other than a shameful, unmistakable sense of relief. The truth is that even before everything came apart, Taryn knew it wasn’t an exact right fit between them, that moving in together was probably supposed to be about more than a mutual love of blue Doritos and wanting to share a bedroom with someone who isn’t your little sister. She knows it was wrong that she let it get as far as it did. But Taryn liked how much Pete liked her, even if she purposely kept parts of her life away from him. She thought it meant she could be normal.

She didn’t love him though. She cared about him. It was easy to be his girlfriend, but the truth is she’s thought more about Pete since they broke up than she ever did when they were together. Even when they were getting ready to move in together, she never lost time dreaming about the planes of his body or the sound of his laugh—a stare-out-the-window-while-you’re-washing-the-dishes, distracting-as-hell kind of think. Maybe Pete wasn’t wrong when he said she was cold.

She thinks about Kanelos that way sometimes—the smell of the soap he uses, the sharp cliff of his jaw. She isn’t sure what that means.

 
“We should go inside,” she tells her sister now, snuggling closer. The streets have quieted down for the night. Caitlin’s body feels like a furnace beside her, this prepubescent fire Taryn needs to protect and keep lit. “It’s late.”

“And freezing,” Caitlin points out, sniffling. “Your hair is an icicle.”

Taryn reaches up and runs a hand through her damp ponytail, still wet and so cold it’s nearly solid. “Fair point,” she murmurs. Caitlin tugs her back inside the house.

Chapter Three

A week passes. Nick works. He rides with Lynette his next couple of shifts, meets Jerry for a beer at Old Court. He walks the dog. He keeps his head down. He goes for Italian food with an exceedingly chatty friend of his sister Ioanna’s, a single mom with two little boys. Ioanna started trying to set him up once Maddie had been gone for a year, women from book clubs and the playground and her husband’s office; eventually Nick figured out he needed a date about every three months or so to keep her off his back. Path of least resistance, he guesses. Anyway, she means well.