The Firefighter's Match

by Allie Pleiter

  Alex raked his fingers through his hair. “They were rappelling down the side of a cliff. Darkness, bats, all kinds of good television. Evidently you earned bonus points if you went first because no one knew what was at the bottom, and Max jumped at the chance to increase his lead. He’d been the clear front-runner all week.”

  “I had no idea, but then again, how could I? You don’t allow me any communication with Max.” Technically, it was the show that didn’t allow communication—Max had shown her the pile of “do not disclose” statements he’d had to sign before the car had come to pick him up. She knew it wasn’t fair to blame Alex for what WWW had done, but the panic was yelling accusations in the back of her brain she didn’t have the energy to fight. “I didn’t even know he was in the state park...so close.”

  “You weren’t supposed to know. The only reason I knew was because it was my job to make sure equipment got there. I’m not even sure Max knew he was only an hour from home. They do a good job of isolating the set.”

  He was skirting the issue. “So what happened?”

  “He fell. We think he may have swatted a bat and taken his hand off the break strand—I don’t know the details yet, really—but he swung far to one side and hit the platform where the camera crew was.” She watched Alex pause for a moment, crafting his next words. “His back struck the metal scaffolding.”

  “Was he wearing safety gear?” Max was in the habit of skipping such equipment. In the week before he left, as he was teaching her how to rent the kayaks and canoes he offered alongside cabin and motorboat rentals, she watched him give a safety lesson five times a day to customers, then completely disregard all of it when he went out himself.

  “Yes, he was. The show required it. I don’t think I’ve heard mention of any head injuries, although he wasn’t conscious when they lifted him. I do know he...hit...pretty hard. I’ll check my phone again when we land but I don’t think they really have a lot of information. I don’t want to tell you something I can’t be sure is true.”

  “Yeah.” JJ fought the gruesome image of Max’s limp body being pulled from the rigging. She kept reminding herself he was still alive. But how close to death and for how long?

  “Hey.” Alex’s hand landed softly on her shoulder. “I’m really sorry this happened. I’m praying for Max.”

  “Sure.” The past hour’s revelations were ambushing her composure, stealing her sense of control when she needed it most. She had been just as guilty of not divulging personal information during their long dock conversations as Alex had been, but somehow it all felt like hiding to her now. Her head knew Alex hadn’t deliberately hidden his connection with WWW any more than she’d deliberately hidden her combat tour, but her gut felt cheated. Lied to, deceived, blindsided.

  “They texted me just before we took off to say Max was going into surgery. You won’t be able to see him when we get there, but you should be able to when he wakes up.” He pulled out his phone to scroll down and reread the message, then looked up at her, his face cast in orange by the sunrise in front of them. “Although they are going to keep him under heavy sedation for the next twenty-four hours.”

  “A medically induced coma.” JJ wasn’t a doctor, but she’d been near enough medic units to know that didn’t call for a lot of optimism.

  “They didn’t use those words, but I’d guess yes.” She watched him choose to share the next fact, able to read the reluctance on his face. “The spinal cord injury is far enough up that they are worried about the use of his arms. I want you to believe me, JJ, when I say we are working with the studio to bring the very best people in on this. He’ll have the best care available—I promise you that.”

  She couldn’t find much comfort in that. In Afghanistan, she’d seen burn victims given “the very best care available.” It only meant their lives were ten percent less excruciating. That didn’t seem like much of an advantage.

  Alex checked his watch. “We should be there in twenty minutes.”

  Her mind turned back to the secrets he had kept from her. Now all of his upscale toys made sense. His shoes were top of the line; his leather bag looked like it had cost more than her first car. It was logical that he’d own the best of his store’s merchandise, but it suddenly filled her with resentment. She was finding out something new about Alex Cushman every minute, and that didn’t feel good at all. “But you don’t work for WWW. Why are you here and not them?”

  That seemed to catch him off guard. He thought for a moment before answering. “Because it was the right thing to do. I was nearby and I knew you. I didn’t think you should hear this news from a stranger.”

  The irony of his words struck them both at the same time. He was a stranger. She knew Alex—she’d been startled, almost frightened by how familiar he felt out there on the dock—but she didn’t know him.

  “I’m not a stranger, JJ.” He’d sensed what she was thinking. “I’m so, so sorry this happened but I’m glad I have the chance to be here to help you and your family.”

  Corporate sorry—the “don’t sue me” kind of sorry—wasn’t anything close to the kind of sorry that would make up for the impact this would have on Max’s life. Even if he survived his injuries, he’d be dealing with the consequences for months. Maybe even years. People didn’t just get up and walk away from spinal cord injuries. Max’s life as he knew it might very well be over. “Sorry” didn’t come close to covering that.

  Alex grabbed her hand. “Hey, I know you’re upset. You have every right to be. But please don’t cast me as the enemy right now. I’m here and I want to help and I’m going to help. I’ll make sure Adventure Gear and WWW take responsibility for whatever happened and make it right. I want you to believe that I’m not just spouting some company line here. I truly do care about what happens to you and your brother. I’m still just Alex.”

  JJ pulled her hand from his. “No, you’re not.”

  Chapter Three

  The panic in his brother’s voice was getting annoying. “This could be a publicity nightmare, Alex. You need to get back to Denver and hold down the fort while I stay here on the set. I talked to the guard station an hour ago and he told me there was an Entertainment Today reporter sniffing around. The studio’s not containing it—for all I know they want it to leak to give the show more publicity. Some of these production assistants are too young not to fall for a reporter flashing a wad of cash for spilling the details.”

  Alex leaned onto the cold hospital cafeteria table and rested his head in his hand. It didn’t feel like there was enough coffee in the world to get him through today. “Sam, they just airlifted a contestant to a trauma center. It won’t take long for people to figure out there’s been an accident.”

  “I want to keep a lid on things for a few days at least. I just hope the WWW execs are good at this kind of damage control.” Since the beginning of their association with Wide Wild World, Sam had an annoying habit of counting himself among the studio types. It was one of the reasons Alex steered clear of any involvement in this promotional deal, compromising instead with a quick product delivery and a “vacation nearby.”

  “Let them handle it, Sam. We’re just a vendor. I stepped in to help with JJ because I was nearby, but the heavy lifting on this belongs to them.”

  There was a brief, uncomfortable pause before his brother said, “Not entirely.”

  Alex squeezed his eyes shut. In the seven years he and his brother had built Adventure Gear into a serious player in the outdoor equipment market, nothing good had ever come after Sam’s use of the phrase “not entirely.” “What are you saying?”

  “We don’t really know what happened yet.”

  “Of course we don’t know. Max Jones isn’t even out of surgery. It’ll be hours before we know what’s going on. If then.” Alex’s stomach twisted as he remembered the look in JJ’s eyes as the doctor had explained the situation. There were so many unknowns at this point, and JJ didn’t strike him as the type to handle ambiguity well.

&
nbsp; “I don’t mean with Jones. I mean with the fall.”

  “That’s what those stunt production guys are for. It’s their job to solve those kinds of problems before they happen. And right now, it’s their job to figure out where they went wrong. I really think you need to keep out of this as much as you can, Sam. We don’t need to get mixed up in a situation like this.” That sounded pretty ironic coming from the guy who’d just escorted the victim’s sister to the bedside. Well, not bedside yet.

  She’d looked terrible sitting on a stiff couch in the ill-named “trauma family lounge.” But when he’d tried again to comfort her while she waited for Max to come out of surgery, she’d barked at him to leave her alone. No matter what she said, Alex had no plans to leave until JJ’s mother showed up. This didn’t look like the kind of crisis anyone should face alone. He’d wait out an hour in this sad little cafeteria, then bring her some coffee and maybe try to get her to eat some breakfast.

  “We’re mixed up in it already. Really, Alex, I think you should go back to Denver.”

  There was a reason Alex called his brother Chicken Little when they were younger. The sky was always falling with Sam. And he usually wanted Alex to fix it. “They don’t need me back at headquarters. A man’s future is hanging in the balance here. I think WWW can handle any publicity woes.”

  He heard Sam pull a door shut and his brother’s voice lowered to barely a whisper. “They’re calling it equipment failure.”

  That sure sounded like studio types to him. “Come on, Sam, what did you think they were going to say? They can’t very well stand up and boast that one of their production assistants dropped Max. Where was the guy on the belay line when Max fell, anyway?”

  “The producer just roasted me in her office. She says the guy on the belay line is saying it was gear failure. Our equipment. They’re saying it was our line and hardware that failed.”

  This was exactly why Alex had never been keen on this promotional venture in the first place. It raised their visibility, but it also made them a target for finger-pointing if anything went wrong. Adventure Gear didn’t need the national exposure—they already had a good reputation among outdoor enthusiasts. The people who spent serious money on their gear knew AG products were top-notch. Alex never saw the point in high visibility to the reality television audience—he guessed ninety percent of them were couch potatoes who’d never seen the inside of a tent and never planned to. “They’re blowing smoke. You know it’s usually human error, and our stuff is better than that. And they aren’t even using our SpiderSilk lines until next season.”

  “Not entirely.”

  The tiny red alarm in the back of Alex’s mind that had started flashing hours ago suddenly bloomed into a full-blown wail. A surge of dread filled him so quickly he nearly lost the horrid coffee he’d just downed. Oh, no. The SpiderSilk prototype lines he’d delivered. They wouldn’t, would they? Alex stood up, not caring that he knocked the chair back to rattle on the floor in the empty cafeteria. “Sam. Sam, tell me you did not allow WWW to use the SpiderSilk. They were only supposed to look at it for next season—not use it now. Tell me they weren’t using the SpiderSilk. Tell me that right now.”

  The silence hit him like a brick wall.

  “Right here, right now, Sam. Tell me you didn’t give them some kind of permission to use the SpiderSilk. Tell me Max Jones didn’t fall from a rigging of the SpiderSilk.”

  “You’d said they were through testing.”

  Alex sank back to the table, stunned. Oh, Father God, what have I done by stepping back and letting Sam run things? I knew something like this would happen if I left. I knew it and ignored it because I was sick of Sam.

  “I said they were through initial testing. That doesn’t mean we’re ready for a man to dangle from them. At night. In the rain. That’s a brand-new coating we were using. What were you thinking?”

  “You said it was like nothing we’d ever made before. We tested them way beyond fourteen kilonewtons. You said they would revolutionize the industry.”

  “Next year. When the UIAA approved them as ready. We tested for weight with traditional belay devices—not for rain or melting point.... They’re not ready.” Alex raked one hand through his hair, panic rising up his spine until it gripped his throat. “Sam, how could you do this? Do you have any idea what you’ve done? To Max? To us?”

  “They were making noises like they’d go with someone else next season if we didn’t sweeten the deal. They didn’t want to wait until next year to showcase the SpiderSilk. They thought the unknown, the ‘test pilot’ element gave a great new twist. Hey, come on, the guy even knew he was using a prototype and signed a special release waiver and everything. And nobody said anything about a climb in the dark during bad weather.”

  “And it never occurred to you to ask me if I thought the SpiderSilk was ready?” Alex was shouting into his phone.

  “Hey, you’re the one who went AWOL and left me to run the company, remember?”

  They’d had a million arguments like this in the past year. AG was second in market share, and Sam was gunning full out for the top spot. He’d always been a little too eager to cut corners in the name of flash and speed, and Alex had always been the one to stop him. In truth, at times Alex had been too cautious, and Sam’s bold strokes had leaped the company forward to new heights. It was only recently Sam had begun to gamble on things that should never be risked. They’d fought so much in the past month that work had become torture. Alex had finally grown so weary of the constant battle that he had indeed taken a break to try to figure out if it was time to leave Adventure Gear altogether. It was the whole reason behind his seclusion in Gordon Falls—which was a joke, he realized. If he’d really wanted to get away, what was he doing secluding himself so close to where the show was?

  “You should never have done that. Never.”

  “Well, I didn’t think you much cared what I did anymore. They way you talked, you weren’t coming back. Are you still walking away?”

  A part of Alex—the squabbling sibling, angry, finger-pointing part—yearned to throw his hands up and do just that. In his two-week absence, Sam had managed to trash the Adventure Gear reputation it had taken Alex years to build. He wanted to say that he was done trying to rein Sam in, trying to hold on to integrity in a profit-hungry world. In this moment, Alex felt more than ready to leave AG in the dust and go get his joy back in some new adventure.

  “I don’t know.” It was a truthful answer.

  “We don’t have the luxury of ‘I don’t know.’ Fine, Alex, go ahead and disappear like you always do.”

  And that was just it. Alex did disappear. Too much. He’d come to realize that his “adventures” this past year were really just running away from the unpleasantness AG had become. Some part of Alex knew it was time to decide to either truly leave or truly stay. Nothing could have forced the issue more completely than the disaster that now lay in front of him. He wanted to have some comeback for the deserved accusation Sam just hurled at him, but he didn’t have one.

  Sam nearly growled into the phone, “Just know that this time I can’t guarantee there will be an AG to come back to if you bolt again. At least I can say that I was doing what I thought was right for the company. Risks don’t always pay off, and this one blew up in my face, but...”

  “No, this one blew up in Max Jones’s spine. A man’s life, Sam.”

  “This is my doing—I get that.”

  “Do you? Do you really?” Alex wanted to think that Sam had finally made such a mess that he would wise up. A failed product or a botched marketing ploy was easy to shake off—for Sam, anyway. Had the cost finally been high enough to get through to Sam? Could he walk away and know Sam would pay attention to these kinds of issues in the future?

  His brother’s growl dissolved to a sigh. “We’ve been in worse scrapes than this, you know we have, and solving this kind of stuff is what you do best. Come on, Alex, you’re our fix-it guy. You come up with the hot new produc
t and then convince the world that they can’t live without it. You can get the family on board with seeing things our way—I know you can. I’m asking you to help. But I’m not going to beg.”

  This wasn’t a business decision anymore. JJ was upstairs wondering if her brother would ever walk again. For whatever reason, God had orchestrated him right into the middle of this storm, and he now knew he couldn’t walk away from it. There would be no bolting—not even back to Denver.

  “I’ll stay here at the hospital until we get word on Max Jones. Get the ropes and hardware back from production and get Doc out here on the next flight.” If anyone would be able to ascertain what had happened with the equipment, Mario “Doc” Dovini would. As their chief climbing expert and product development specialist in Denver, Doc would be the man with the answers. After all, they’d taken to calling the flamboyant Italian “Doc” because his diagnostic skills were so extraordinary.

  “I got part of the gear back thirty minutes ago and Doc is due in at 10:48.”

  Maybe Sam was ready to take Adventure Gear’s helm without him, after all. He had to be absolutely certain, though, and right now he was anything but sure.

  * * *

  He looked like a dead man.

  That was all JJ could think of as she stared at the body on the bed in front of her. Enclosed in braces and packs and tubes and monitors, Max actually looked more like a machine than her brother. He was so banged up and trussed up that the only thing that still looked like Max was the hand lying beside hers on the stark white blanket. She put her hand on top of it, startled by how cold it was. She wanted the fingers to squeeze hers, to show some sign of life, but they were limp and still.