Although smoke clogged the restaurant’s interior, the handful of large windows that hadn’t been boarded up allowed in enough daylight to keep visibility out of the hell no range. Cole’s brain fired off command after command as his body put them into motion, and finally, they managed to get the fire in the dining room contained, then extinguished. Andersen radioed in with an all clear from the kitchen, and Donovan and Crews doused the last of the flames on the restaurant’s opposite wall.
“Holy shit,” Crews said, pausing to give his own all clear through the two-way. “Something in this place must have been completely FUBAR to start a fire that nasty.”
Cole pulled his mask from over his face, and the acrid punch of waterlogged ashes and fizzling smoke took over his senses. He surveyed what was left of the charred walls and furnishings, puddles of thick, soot-swirled water collecting over nearly every inch of the dining room floorboards. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize the place was a total loss.
He blew out a breath. “The houses off the avenue might be new, but some of these businesses have been here for a couple decades, I think. Maybe the weather kicked something off with the electrical system.”
They saw fires from old wiring all the time. Granted, things didn’t usually go pear-shaped this fast, but no one had been inside to report the smell of smoke right away. Who knew how long the fire had been building before anyone had noticed.
Crews nodded with just one dip of his helmet. “Either way, the insurance company’s gonna take a crazy hit on this one. Good work, you three.”
“Yeah,” Donovan said, his grin flashing bright white against his soot-streaked face. “Not bad for your real first fire, huh, Tough Stuff?”
The sound of Savannah’s laughter snagged Cole’s attention and sent a pang through his gut. The fire had been substantial enough to redline the building from cinder blocks to shingles. Yet every time he’d issued a directive, there she’d been, backing him up on the nozzle the same way anyone else on engine would. She might not’ve moved as intuitively as Donovan or Crews or even Jonesey would, but he hadn’t had to worry about her, or the way she got the job done either.
“Thanks, Donovan. It is kind of a rush.”
Crews grunted out a sound that was cynical on the surface, but held just a hint of amusement underneath. “Glad you think so, candidate, because we’re not done yet. Unless you want an encore here, we’ve got to make sure this fire stays out.”
They walked through the protocol for preventing flareups, gathering their gear and reloading the hoses to the engine as they went. Savannah proved to be a quick study, watching Donovan and Crews just as carefully as she watched him until everything was done.
“Nice job,” Cole said, unable to contain his smile at the sight of the grin reaching all the way up to her eyes.
“Thanks, but I can’t take all the credit. The guy training me doesn’t suck.” She waggled her brows toward her disheveled hairline, and Donovan’s laughter joined in with Cole’s.
“Aw, look at you, Nelson. So full of sunshine.” Donovan shouldered his Halligan bar, leading the way back out into daylight and toward the engine. Cole was tempted to point out that Savannah was full of something completely different from sunshine, but the sound of a young girl’s cry froze the words and his laughter right on his tongue.
“Please! Come quick! I need help.” The girl belonging to the voice, who couldn’t have been any more than ten, rushed toward them, the panic-stricken look on her face blotting out all the ease that had just rebuilt in Cole’s gut.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, immediately scanning the area for potential danger but coming up empty. “Is someone hurt?”
The girl pointed in the opposite direction from Martinsburg Avenue, toward what looked like a tree-lined jogging path leading into a slightly more wooded area. “No, but they’re stuck. They just fell right into the storm drain. Please, you have to save them.”
Cole’s pulse triple-timed through his veins as he turned to follow the little girl, Savannah hot on his heels. Crews and Donovan fell in behind them, hollering to the guys on squad for assistance.
But Cole was already halfway across the parking lot, his sights locked on the jogging trail.
Chapter Fourteen
Savannah got six steps down the bike path behind the restaurant before her adrenaline caught up with the rest of her. But this—this was what she’d signed up for when she’d started at the academy. No chance in hell was she going to tap out just because of a little fatigue.
The muscles in her legs threatened to veto her conviction, but Savannah forced them to do their job regardless of the achy burn. She could raid the icebox for frozen peas as soon as they got back to the station. Right now? They had a job to do.
“Here!” The girl stopped short in front of a metal storm grate set into the neatly paved footpath, her eyes brimming with worry and tears. “My friend and I were playing in the park but we got bored and came up the trail. They must have come up from the pond over by the playground, and they fell right in.”
Savannah’s gaze narrowed over the holes in the storm grate, which were four-by-four inches, if that. The story wasn’t adding up in her head. “Sweetheart, did your friend fall down here?”
“No.” The girl shook her head, her blond braids swaying over her shoulders. “My friend went back to the park to get help from her mom.”
“Then who’s in the drain?” Everett asked, bending at the knees and bracing his forearms over the tops of his bunker pants so he could look the girl in the eye.
“The ducks.”
Savannah’s mouth fell open. She chanced a glance at Donovan, but her fellow firefighter’s baby blues said he was flying on the same nothing she was.
Oz and Andersen came clattering to a stop as they reached the group, Oz’s gaze lasered in on the storm drain. “What’re we looking at?” he asked.
Everett paused, pulling off his helmet to tug one hand through his hair. Reaching into one of the deep-welled pockets in his turnout gear, he palmed a flashlight and shined it past the thick, black grate. “Four . . . make that five baby ducks. They can’t be more than ten days old.”
Oz’s silver-shot brows flew upward. “Excuse me?”
“They followed the mama,” the girl said, her voice wavering in earnest now. “The mama duck was walking on the path, and me and Jody were watching from right there.” She pointed to a bench on the other side of the foot path. “But the babies were too little, and they fell through the holes. Please, if they stay down there they won’t have anything to eat! Can’t you get them out?”
Everett slid a glance first at Crews, then at Oz. “It’s about a twelve-foot drop. There’s water in the bottom, which is probably the only reason they even survived the fall. But this thing isn’t really meant for access from the top side. The space is really tight. I don’t even know that we could get a man down there, let alone a man on a ladder.”
“For baby ducks?” Oz folded his arms over his chest, staring at the grate. “I can’t risk getting a man stuck in a storm drain for something like that.”
Savannah eyeballed the size of the opening. “What about a woman?”
After a drawn-out beat of silence, it was Crews who finally spoke. “You want us to drop you into that storm drain so you can rescue a bunch of baby ducks?”
“Well, I’d prefer it if you didn’t drop me,” she said, smiling to offset the fresh burst of adrenaline that accompanied the offer she’d just made. “But I’d fit better than anyone else, right? Can you lower me down?”
“No,” Oz said at the same time Everett said, “Maybe,” and the two men locked eyes.
Everett tilted his head. “It’s too tight for us to get her in there conventionally. But we could harness her up and lower her down like we do for rope rescue.” He sent his gaze back down into the storm drain, clearly thinking out a plan.
But Oz wasn’t having it. “We do rope rescue for people. And your rookie here isn’t trai
ned on squad. She’s less than a month out of the academy, for Chrissake.”
Donovan slipped in to guide the little girl back to the bench down the path, and Savannah bit her lip until they were out of earshot.
“It’s twelve feet into a drainpipe for a quick grab. I’m pretty sure I can handle it,” she said. Hell, she was nearly six feet tall on her own, and that was half the distance to the bottom. There might not be any wiggle room in that storm drain, but how hard could it be for them to slip her in long enough to scoop up a few ducks? “Look, this thing is made for water runoff, so it’s all pipes and grates. I get that they’re just ducks, but we all know they won’t make it out of there any other way. So what’s the big deal if we give this a shot?”
“You’re not trained for this, that’s what.” Oz jabbed a finger at the grate. “And I’m none too interested in figuring out how to haul your ass out of there when you fuck this up.”
“She’s not going to fuck this up.” Everett’s voice was quiet, but it rattled through Savannah anyway. He stood, his expression enviably calm. “I’ll talk her through the whole thing. It’s a straight shot to the bottom ledge, and Nelson is right. The ducks won’t fit past the drainage system, otherwise they’d have floated through already. All we have to do is lower her down for a couple of minutes and then pull her back up. She’s the only one of us who will fit with any room to move, and she’s also the lightest. It makes sense to lower her instead of anyone else.”
Oz made a rude noise, his arms threading even tighter over his soot-stained turnout gear. “I can’t believe we’re even standing here having this conversation.”
Donovan stepped in from the spot where he’d rejoined them, his normally easygoing smile hardening by a fraction beneath the blond stubble on his chin. “Then why don’t we stop talking and start getting something done?”
For a second, Savannah thought Oz would follow up on the argument flashing in his glacial stare. But then he wrapped his work-callused fingers around the radio on his shoulder. “It’s Westin’s call. But for the record, this is a shit idea.”
Fortunately for Savannah, Captain Westin disagreed. After a quick back-and-forth over the radio with Oz and Crews, Westin appeared on the trail, surveying the storm grate with careful attention as Donovan and Crews lifted the cover from the opening.
“All right, Nelson. Oz and Andersen are going to work the ropes topside for you while Everett and Crews assist. We’re going to make this quick and easy. Is that understood?”
“Yes sir,” she said, slipping out of her coat and into the harness Everett held between his fingers. She stepped into the leg openings and pulled the thick nylon straps into place before holding her arms up to let Everett repeat the process over her shoulders.
“Listen,” he said, stepping in close, his hands working in a series of quick, capable tugs. “That drain is really narrow. We’re going to do this as fast as we can, but once you’re in there, you won’t have any room at all to turn or maneuver your position.” He paused his movements, his fingers on the steel harness loop resting directly over the center of her chest. “The only way this is going to work is if you go down inverted.”
Savannah’s mouth turned to sand. “You’re going to lower me upside down?”
“I’ll be on the radio with you the whole time, and like Westin said, we’re doing this fast.” He tested the lines clipped to her harness with a couple of decisive pulls. “So let’s get it done. Okay?”
He sounded so calm that her “okay” in return just popped right out. She tightened her helmet, skimming one last glance over the storm drain opening before lying sunny-side down on the footpath beside it.
Everyone’s eyes were on her. She could do this.
Nerves of steel.
Savannah looked up at Everett and gave him a nod. “Let’s get it done.”
Crews crouched down beside her. Wrapping his arms around her shins, he levered her legs upward while she lifted her hands over her head to literally dive into the dark, dusty space. The spotlight on her helmet provided enough illumination for her to see a few feet in front of her, but not enough to signal how close she was to the bottom of the drain. Crews’s voice, which had been so clear only a minute ago, faded into a muffled murmur as he lowered her farther into the yawning darkness. She felt someone—Crews? Everett?—tap the bottom of her boot, her breath catching in a hard gasp when Crews let go of her legs to let the harness support her, her body inside the drainpipe from head to heels.
Oh God. Oh God.
The space was tight as hell, and twice as dark.
Savannah’s heart began to pound. She sucked in a breath, struggling to find some way of getting her bearings. Her temples slammed from the pressure of being upside down, her pulse drumming against her eardrums so hard she was sure they’d burst. The air was thick with the smell of mildew and wet concrete, filling her mouth and stopping up her lungs . . .
But then Everett’s voice echoed over the radio. “Hey. You’re completely on the line, all systems go, so we’re going to start lowering you down. You good?”
She snaked a hand close to her body, fingers shaking in her gloves as she pressed the button on her two-way. “C-copy,” she managed, although it was half lie, half bravado.
As if Everett sensed the fractured truth, he said, “Okay. Take deep breaths and find a good focal point. We’ll have you down there in no time.”
Savannah focused on the beam of the spotlight against the curve of concrete in front of her, relief splashing through her chest as she started to move downward. Inch by inch, she regained her composure, until finally, she heard the soft whoosh of water and spotted a flash of movement at the edge of the light’s reach.
“Hold.”
The line jerked to a stop, and Everett’s voice followed barely a second later. “Are you at the bottom of the drain?”
Savannah tilted her head to shine her spotlight over the small, crumbling ledge by the bottom of the storm drain, a bubble of laughter welling all the way up from her belly. “Copy, but you might want to work on your math, Everett. I’ve got six baby ducks down here.”
“Well,” he said, his smile carrying through in his tone. “Since you’re going to have your hands more full than anticipated, I guess you’d better start grabbing them up so we can get this show on the road.”
Sure. Of all the times he could go all smartass on her, he just had to choose the moment when she was dangling sunny-side down in a drainpipe. “Copy that.”
Savannah shook out the small nylon bag she’d tucked into her harness, grinning at the fuzzy mob in front of her. “I know, guys. Not ideal, but it’s only temporary, and it’s a hell of a lot better than staying down here.”
One by one, she scooped the wiggly little critters into the bag, the ducks quacking their displeasure even though she made sure to handle them gently. Her fingertips started to tingle with each movement, her vision going slightly blurry around the edges by the time the last dark gray-and-white duckling slid in with his brethren, and she focused extra hard on the wall in front of her as she radioed a breathless “all clear.” Everett’s answer echoed back, and with each upward tug, Savannah concentrated on the cadence of his voice, counting slowly in her head.
Thirty-six . . . thirty-seven . . . thirty-eight . . .
Daylight hit her in a dizzying blast.
A pair of strong hands wrapped around her ankles, lifting her out of the storm drain to right her on the footpath, and oooookay. Turned out going teakettle over ass was about as much fun as being knocked in the reverse.
“Nelson.” Everett knelt between her knees, his olive-green eyes pinning her with an assessing stare. “You good?”
She blinked back the bright white kaleidoscopes dancing in her peripheral vision. “Yeah. I’m fine,” she said, catching her breath as she passed off the ducks to Donovan’s waiting hands. “Piece of cake.”
“Aw, look.” Donovan cradled the bag in one arm, reaching in to scoop one of the ducklings into the
center of his glove. “We should call you the duck whisperer, Nelson.”
“Oh! You did it. You saved them!” The girl’s voice rang out, her face lit with happiness and relief where she stood with her friend and her friend’s mother. Donovan brought the ducks over to the periphery of the footpath, and Savannah pushed to her feet to join him.
“Yep, but I had a great team.” She grinned and stroked the top of one of the ducklings’ heads. She might not be big on cute and cuddly, but she had to admit, baby ducks kind of brought the adorable.
“Thank you! Oh, thank you.” The girl broke into an ear to ear smile, throwing her arms around Savannah’s waist.
“Whoa,” she said, her face prickling with a startled flush as she laughed and hugged the girl back. “Um, sure thing.”
Captain Westin appeared over Donovan’s shoulder, his gray-blond brows raised along with the corners of his mouth. “Well done, candidate.”
“Thank you, sir. But really, it was all of us.” She nodded at Everett and Crews and Donovan, then widened her gesture to include Andersen and Oz. She might not like the guy, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t put credit where it belonged.
“Well. Let’s get these ducks to animal control and head back to the house.”
Fifteen minutes had their gear packed up, and fifteen more had them back at Station Eight. Savannah’s muscles screamed from exhaustion, the rest of her running on fumes from her spent adrenaline, and she’d never wanted a shower or a meal so badly in her twenty-six years.
But her fatigue and her filthiness both took a backseat to the pride filling every inch of her rib cage. Not only had she busted down a door in order to fight the fire in that restaurant, but she’d been an instrumental part of a rescue call. A part her team had needed in order to get the job done. A part that had mattered.
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