It's a Wonderful Fireman: A Bachelor Firemen Novella (The Bachelor Firemen of San Gabriel) (2 page)

A short silence, followed by a huff of breath. “I don’t like it when you say things like that, Mulligan. You’re not broken-down.”

Little did she know. Okay,
certain
parts of him worked fine. Especially around her. It was the invisible parts that no longer functioned.

“And you’re not old,” she continued. “You’re only a few years older than me.”

In years, maybe. In terrible experiences, he had several lifetimes on her.

“
And
you’re not a hulk. Well, I suppose maybe you’re a hulk, if that’s a good thing, like the Incredible Hulk. But not if you mean it as a bad thing.”

The wistfulness in her voice made him soften. Lizzie was . . . Lizzie was a darling. A sweet-hearted spitfire of a girl who deserved someone less . . . scarred.

“This isn’t my favorite time of year,” he told her. “If I was smart, I’d check into a motel room about a week before Christmas and come out in time for all the New Year’s parties. Sorry, Lizzie. I’m not a Christmas guy. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“Okay. I can understand that. It’s a tough time of year for a lot of people. The ER is always crazy around the end of the year. Fine. I won’t bug you about it again.”

And that, right there, was one of the many reasons he couldn’t seem to walk away from Lizzie for good. She
got
it. Always practical, she knew when to step back, when to give him some room. She just . . . got it.

“I wanted to tell you something else, Mulligan.” Her serious tone made him frown. “I was going to tell everyone at once, at Christmas, but if you’re not going to be there, you get to hear it first. I got offered a job.”

“That’s great. Congratulations.” Lizzie had recently finished her EMT training and had been working on her pilot’s license and helicopter certification. Her dream was to be a flight paramedic. She’d be a damn good one too. Lizzie was quick and sure-handed and daring and smart. He’d seen her in action during ride-alongs and been blown away every time.

“The job is in British Columbia.”

“What?” In the tilt-a-whirl of his reaction, her words didn’t even make sense to him. What was British Columbia? Was it a state he’d never heard of? Or two countries put together? “What are you talking about?”

“British Columbia. It’s in Canada. Western Canada.”

“You can’t move to Canada.”

“Of course I can move to Canada. I just have to get a work visa and update my passport and—”

A welling sense of panic threatened. “But you’re not Canadian. It’s a foreign country.”

“Oh, I see. You’re worried about the language difference.”

The teasing note in her voice made his jaw tighten. “I know they speak English in Canada.”

“They also speak French in certain regions, and there are a few native languages such as Inupiat, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be safe with English.”

“Okay, smart-ass. That doesn’t change my basic point. You belong here. Your . . . your family’s here.”

“My family is all over the world. At least I’ll be on the same continent. My mother will be over the moon. She loves Canadians. She’s always going on about how nice they are.”

Nice.
No one had ever accused Dean Mulligan of being
nice
.

“And they have cute accents. I’m a sucker for cute accents. Scottish is best, like Matt McBride’s. Makes me weak in the knees. But Canadian is right up there too. The way they say ‘aboot,’ it’s adorable.”

Adorable.
There was another word never used to describe Mulligan. Lizzie, heading off to Canada, land of adorable accents. Dean wanted to rip something apart. Unfortunately, the workout room didn’t offer much besides iron bars and mirrors. He contented himself with thumping his free weight onto the padded workout mat. It rolled, nearly catching his toe.

“What was that?” Lizzie asked. “Sounded like an earthquake.”

Everyone in San Gabriel was still a little antsy about quakes and aftershocks, even though it had been over six months since the Los Feliz earthquake had struck.

“No. Nothing like that.” Well, maybe a little like that. Her news was more like a bombshell than an earthquake though. His ears were still ringing. And his head was pounding. And a tone was blaring . . .

He yanked the phone away from his head and listened.

“Structure fire at 1608 Sierra Vista Way. Battalion 6, Task Force 1, Task Force 3. Strip mall with possible victims inside. Incident number two twenty-one. Time of incident, nine fifteen.”

“I have to go, Lizzie.” He was already pelting toward the door.

“I heard. Go.”

Lizzie got it. She just got it.

He ran to the apparatus bay, reaching it ahead of the rest of the crew, who were coming from the kitchen. He tossed his phone in his locker and quickly donned his gear, doing a quickie double-check of his regulator, which had acted up last shift. It seemed fine now. He hopped into Truck 1 and fastened himself in. His right leg jumped with adrenaline. While he always experienced some degree of nerves before a fire, this didn’t sound like an ordinary fire. A strip mall two days before Christmas was going to be a madhouse.

His stomach tightened, thinking of flammable tinsel, scented candles, wrapping paper catching a spark.

Fred, the apparatus operator, slid into the driver’s seat. “Got a little more info. It’s an electrical fire that started inside a shoe store. It spread fast through the rest of the mall. Six shops or so. I think there’s a Yogurtland in there.”

Ace hopped in, followed by Skeet, the new captain of the truck company. One, the tiller man—or tiller woman, in this case—steered from the rear of the rig. Over in Engine 1, Vader, Double D, Sabina, and Sanchez were already rolling toward the big garage door as it rattled up.

Once they left the garage, Fred hit the sirens and lights, and they rumbled through the streets, morning traffic parting before the mighty rigs of Task Force 1. Mulligan distracted himself from his nerves by waving to a kid in an SUV that had pulled over. The boy was halfway out the car window, waving madly. His golden retriever was trying to climb over his back until finally the boy’s mother pulled them both back in the vehicle, and then the SUV was ancient history, three blocks back.

A boy, a dog, a mother . . . the dog reminded him of Bruiser, the stray golden he’d taken in and who’d followed him around the minor leagues until he got too old.

The far backseat of the SUV had been loaded with boxes, and a spruce tree had been lashed to the roof. A boy, a dog, a mother, Christmas . . .
damn
.

He
hated
this time of year.

“Mulligan, are you listening?”

“Huh?” Mulligan swiveled to see Fred glaring at him. He was fiddling with his breathing apparatus.

“I said, don’t mess with my sister. If you do, things are going to get ugly.”

Fred might look young, but he was actually a badass with multiple black belts in various martial arts Mulligan had never heard of. Mulligan was a fist-to-the-jaw sort of guy himself. “I’m not messing with her.”

“She likes you.”

“I’m sure you can talk her out of it.”

“If you believe that, you don’t know Lizzie. Trent once tried to talk her out of trying to parachute off the porch roof with her Halloween butterfly wings. He had to pin her down, but even that didn’t work. We had to set up a trampoline. No one can talk her out of anything.”

Mulligan’s heart sank. That meant he couldn’t talk her out of moving to Canada. Which would be tough to do anyway, since he couldn’t give her a good reason to stay. “Lizzie and I are friends.”

“So are we.
For now.
” With one last menacing hairy eyeball, Fred retreated behind his face mask.

Great. Just what he needed—to piss off a martial arts master whose future father-in-law was a tech billionaire. If he got on Fred and Rachel’s bad side, he might get his ass kicked
and
his Internet erased.

Like a roiling tornado, black smoke churned over the tiled rooftops up ahead. “Whoa,” said someone before they all went quiet and listened to the initial size-up on the dispatch channel. As the first on scene, the Battalion 6 chief took charge as incident commander.

“Engine 6 is on the scene of a one-story, L-shaped strip mall; give me two additional task forces. Companies responding to the Sierra Vista incident, be advised there are no known current occupants on the premises. Heavy black smoke showing through the roof. No exposure problem. All companies be advised, Sierra Vista is blocked, enter from First Street. Engine 6, you are fire attack in division Alpha.”

No occupants and no exposure problem—or risk of spreading to nearby buildings. That was a relief.

“Truck 1, vent the roof. You will be known as Roof Division,” continued the IC as they reached the scene. “Heavy smoke is building up inside the Christmas store, Under the Mistletoe.”

Truck 1 had their mission: they’d be going up on that hot, smoking roof.

Fred pulled up close to the middle of the strip mall, where a storefront decorated like Santa’s workshop was declared, by an ornate, gold-and-scarlet sign, to be Under the Mistletoe. Smoke puffed through the doorjambs and various cracks in the façade. As soon as the truck came to a stop, everyone got busy. Mulligan jumped out of the rig, then stashed his breathing apparatus on the ground while he set chock blocks behind the tires and lowered the ground jacks that would stabilize the aerial ladder. While Fred got the aerial into position, Mulligan grabbed a chainsaw from inside the rig. He donned his breathing apparatus, set his face mask into place, then swung himself onto the roof of the truck.

He squinted through smoke-laden air at the aerial, which made a bridge from Truck 1 to the roof of the strip mall. Inside the building, the fire howled like an injured creature, like a wild, mocking witch ready to wreak fury on the world. Mulligan was not a religious man, but he muttered “Lord, help us” under his breath. Throngs of civilians clustered around the edges of the parking lot, gawking and taking photos or videos. Fire was photogenic, no doubt about it.

Mulligan tightened his grip on his chainsaw and swung one-handed up the aerial. It took a lot of muscle power to hump ninety pounds of gear up a ladder using only one hand. Thank you, free weights. Fred, Skeet, and One followed him up the aerial, while Ace grabbed a rotary saw and crowbar and headed to the front door to provide forcible entry for the engine company.

The ferocious heat of the flames cooked the air, sending it in weird little currents and swirls. Mulligan had obsessively studied the science of fire because he’d grown up with no education, and a burning curiosity about anything and everything consumed him. He’d spent hours and days and weeks learning how to read smoke. He’d practiced with old video footage from Channel Six News. Pop in a tape, watch the smoke. How much, how thick, how fast, what color? He’d picked the brains of veteran firefighters who’d been on thousands of firegrounds. No one,
no one
at Station 1 could read smoke as well as he could.

As he climbed the ladder, he automatically analyzed the information he gleaned from the storefront window and smoking cracks in the building. The black, turbulent smoke moving at such high velocity meant the fire was very hot and very close—a heavy fire load. It would be impossible to tell more about the materials being burned by the fire because a strip mall like this would contain a huge variety of substances. The large quantity of heavy black smoke, its velocity, and its thinness told him that if they didn’t ventilate this thing soon, it would flash. It hadn’t quite reached the “black fire” stage he’d seen only a few times, in which black snakes of smoke curled back toward the fire. But if he didn’t release some of the superheated air inside Under the Mistletoe, the heat would radiate back on the fire and the entire “box” would become so hot that every surface would combust.

No firefighter could survive a flashover, not even in full bunker gear. The truck company’s job was to make a heat hole to keep that from happening.

Mulligan reached the edge of the roof and stepped onto the blistering asphalt tile surface. His blood pounded in his ears, telling him to hurry, but not make any mistakes. They needed to get this done, then get the hell off the roof. Sounding with his roof kit and stepping gingerly along the main beam line, he found his spot between the rafters. With his chainsaw, he made a head cut—the first cut—then turned the corner and made another, longer line, so he had two sides of a rectangle. Fred worked from the other side until they’d chainsawed out a rectangle of plywood. One and Skeet used their rubbish hooks to pop the boards, stepping nimbly back when black smoke attacked the open air in tumultuous billows.

They all watched for a brief second, then headed back to the ladder. Mulligan gestured for the others to go first. That was how he liked it; he’d claimed that role when he first joined the truck company. Skeet went down first, then One, then Fred, the crew stepping quickly from rung to rung down the steel lifeline that led from the hot roof to Truck 1. Then, quick as a spark, everything changed.

The IC crackled over dispatch. “Engine company, pull out. Pull out now.” Fred, still on the aerial, looked back at Mulligan and waved him urgently toward the ladder. A rumble from underneath shook the building.
Get to the ladder, get to the ladder
. Someone shouted on the tactical channel, something about the façade. Mulligan looked down as a crack appeared beneath him.
Ladder, ladder.
But no, he couldn’t make it to the ladder, not without jumping over that gap ripping across the roof.
The façade
.
Oh my God
. The façade was falling away, the entire front of the building sinking backward like an exhausted person collapsing onto a bed.

He stepped backward, away from the gulf opening beneath his feet, and then he was falling, down, down, down a rabbit hole of smoke and blackness. Something came out of his mouth—a shout? A laugh?—but the constant roar of flames drowned it out and there was no one to hear anyway.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” he heard on his radio. “Firefighter Mulligan through the roof on the Delta side.” Then silence, as all talk on the tactical channel stopped, and all sound disappeared.