by Lila Ashe
Table of Contents
Title Page
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
EPILOGUE
About the Author
Did you enjoy Fire at Dawn?
EXCERPT OF FIRE AT DUSK
FIRE AT DAWN
THE FIREFIGHTERS OF DARLING BAY
LILA ASHE
Copyright © 2013 by Lila Ashe.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Fire at Dusk / Lila Ashe. — 1st ed.
ISBN 978-1-940785-04-2
CHAPTER ONE
The guy just wasn’t getting it.
Lexie sighed and stepped on the pedal so her voice would carry to the firefighter who was on her last nerve. “2219 Ivy. Repeating. Two two one nine. Do you copy?”
Coin Keefe’s voice filled her headset. “Copy two two one nine. There’s still no one answering the door, and there’s no key where you reported. Can you call back?”
“Affirm.” Lexie knew she sounded short, but good grief, the call was for an eighty-two-year old woman who had fallen in her bathroom. She’d told him that. What, did Coin expect that the patient would get up and go unlock the door because they couldn’t find the key under the pink flamingo? Coin probably just wanted her to say pink flamingo on the radio again. Firefighters always got a kick out of the dumbest things.
Okay, maybe everyone at the fire department did. Last week she’d gotten to say that a person had slipped on a banana peel. In nine years of working dispatch, she’d never heard of that happening in real life. All the guys who tromped through dispatch to see if she’d really said what they thought they’d heard hadn’t heard of it, either. No one slipped and fell on a banana peel unless there was a laugh track attached. The victim, thankfully, was mostly unharmed.
The woman’s voice was weaker on the phone now. “Hello?”
“I’m still here, ma’am. We’re trying to get in to help you, but the key’s been removed from your hiding place.”
“Oh, no. I remember now. My nephew borrowed the key the last time he came over. Oh, dear.”
“Is there another way in?”
“Around the back, the sliding glass door should be unlocked.”
It wasn’t surprising. In Darling Bay, most people left their back doors unlocked, if not their front ones as well. Officially, Lexie disapproved of this, if asked for her dispatcher opinion. Of course it wasn’t safe. Crime happened, even in their small coastal town. But heck, it sure made the fire department’s job easier.
Depressing the foot pedal so the firefighters—but not the patient—could hear her, she said, “Engine One, the back slider should be open.”
“Copy.”
“Ma’am,” Lexie said to the woman, “I’m just going to keep you on the phone until they get in there, okay? I want to make sure you’re all right.”
“Honey, I told you, I’m not hurt. I just can’t move.”
A lot of elderly people thought this, until they tried to stand. Lexie hated that she took so many broken hip calls. Once the first hip went, many people lost their mobility, then their strength and their resistance to infection … “I know, but just stay on the line with me a little longer, do you mind doing that for me?”
“Just one strong young man should do it.”
Lexie smiled. “Okay.”
“Or two. I’m not a little person anymore. Two strong young men should do the trick to get me back on my feet.”
“I understand. I’m not that little, either.”
“Nothing wrong with that, honey. Can you just make sure you’re sending me the good ones?”
“The good men?”
“I mean the handsome ones. I don’t want the old ones. Oh, and I want men. Strong young men.”
“I picked up on that.”
“Do you even have any women working there?”
What an embarrassing question to be asked on a recorded line. “We do. We have three.” In the whole department, consisting of almost seventy firefighters, only three were women. Women belonged in dispatch, and always had. Not on the fire line. Or at least that’s the way the fire department in Darling Bay worked. It was a thing. Lexie hated it, but it was a thing.
“I don’t want any women. Waste of time when I need help.”
“They’re very strong women,” said Lexie.
“I’m sure they are. But they’re not what I want. Once I called 911 and all I got was a huge man who looked as if he drank too much and a couple of whippersnappers who seemed scared of me. You best not be sending me that group again.”
Lexie was having a hard time not laughing out loud now. That must have been Murphy’s crew. He’d captained Engine One before retiring a few years back, and he’d been the training captain so he always had the new guys with him. Murphy had liked his whiskey on his nights off. And his beer, and his ouzo, and his bourbon …
“No, I made sure the handsome ones are coming, ma’am.” It was true, actually. Tox was a big guy who struck women dumb as he walked past them while wearing his dark blue uniform. Lexie had seen it happen at Mabel’s Cafe too many times to count. Coin, with his dark black hair and quiet confidence, was classically good-looking, Lexie supposed. Maybe almost movie-star good-looking. Reporters always liked to snap his picture, his face coated with soot, after fires. And Hank carried his height well and had a very sweet smile.
“Oh, good. Just the handsome strong young men. That’s all I want.” She made a content humming noise in Lexie’s ear. Well, at least she wasn’t the panicked type.
“They should be with you any minute. Do you hear them in the backyard yet?”
“I don’t hear a thing, dearie. I can barely hear you.”
Lexie pressed the foot-pedal. “Engine One, patient’s still awaiting contact.” That should get them to move a little faster.
There was a pause and then, over the radio, came a startled yip. Then Coin’s voice, shouting. “Darling Fire, we’re inside the residence. Get her to call off her dog!”
“Ma’am,” said Lexie quickly. “Call your dog.”
“What? I can’t quite hear you.”
Coin keyed up on
the radio again but barking was the only thing that came across. Wild, frantic, angry barking.
“It’s really important,” said Lexie loudly, “that you call off your dog.”
“But I don’t have a dog,” wailed the woman. “Where are the strong young men?”
With a stomp, Lexie said on the radio, “Engine One, you’re in the wrong house. Patient has no dog.”
Tox came up on the radio, roaring over the barking, “Two two one nine?”
“Affirm,” said Lexie crisply. “Ivy. Confirm you’re on Ivy?”
A long pause.
Then Coin’s voice came across the radio. “Darling Fire, we’re on Oak. We copy Ivy. Switching locations.”
Lexie flicked her mute switch so the woman wouldn’t hear her sigh. Then she said, “Ma’am, those strong young men are almost with you. They’re right around the corner, I promise.”
CHAPTER TWO
Of course it had to be Lexie on the radio. Coin thumped the side of the driver’s door of the engine with his fist after parking in the bay at Station One. It would have to be her, when he was busy screwing up. Looking back on his almost ten year career, almost every time he’d messed up on a call, she’d been on shift to listen to him being a dumb-ass. That made sense—they’d always been on A shift together, and the dispatchers had the same 48-hour schedule as the firefighters did. Two days on, four days off. Not too shabby.
And that’s why Lexie had heard him screw up. Again.
In the day room, he heard a chorus of laughter.
“Woof!” hollered Luke. “Grrrr.”
Guy Mazanti threw a stuffed dog at him.
Coin caught it one handed. “Really? Did you guys go out and spend money on this?” How had the truck even found time? They must have left the station as soon as they heard the call, because sure enough, the little old lady had just been a pick-up-put-back. No need to take her to the hospital. They’d only been out of the station a grand total of maybe thirty minutes. Forty-five if you counted the time spent at the house on Oak trying to repair the damage they’d done. And the truck crew had time to buy a stuffed dog to throw at him. “Very resourceful.” He tucked the dog under his arm and pushed the day room’s swinging door.
“Hey!” yelled Luke. “We were going to give that to Methyl!”
Methyl was Tox’s yellow mutt and spent A-shift days at the station. She had her own crate, full of the stuffed animals she loved. Methyl didn’t need another one. The stuffed dog was Coin’s now.
And it was time to face the music in dispatch.
Sure enough, Lexie was sitting at her terminal, head propped on her fist, her eyes wide. Those boisterous red curls were piled on her head and she had tired smudges under her eyes, and she was still the prettiest girl in town. “Hoo boy. I can’t wait to hear this.”
He held out the stuffed dog. “Arf.”
She smiled then. Grinned, really. “Is that for me?”
“Sure is.” Let the truck guys tell her later they’d bought it. He didn’t have to come clean about that.
“Adorable. Now spill. How did you mess that one up so good?”
Coin sighed and sat in the guest chair at the small round table. Telling her about it was a good excuse to be in dispatch, not that he ever tried very hard to find one. Coin just knew he wanted to be near her way more than he wanted to hang out with the guys down the hall. She was round and curvy in all the right places, and that rose tattoo of hers wound so enticingly out from the sleeve of her uniform polo. How many times had he wanted to ask to see the whole thing? Yeah, being in dispatch was better than listening to Tox try to train Methyl to sit for the millionth time. “You remember that fire we had last year on Ivy?”
“Oh, it was the same hundred block, right?” She turned and punched some keys, her fingers flying. “Yeah, it was right next to door to the patient tonight.”
“I worked the back of that on the Charlie side.”
Her grin got wider. “So you were on Oak for the fire. Not on Ivy.”
He nodded. “And then apparently I drove right back to Oak when I heard Ivy.”
“And Tox and Hank didn’t notice.”
“They’re just dumb.”
“No, they’re not,” said Lexie.
They weren’t. They just hadn’t noticed. It was his fault—Coin was the engineer. The driver. Sure, Tox was his captain and he was supposed to navigate, but in a town like Darling Bay, with only twenty thousand residents, they mostly knew exactly where they were going. His guys trusted him.
“Was anyone home?”
“In the house we broke into? Yeah.”
Lexie laughed. “More. Don’t you dare stop there.”
“We had to break the side kitchen window in order to reach the latch for the sliding glass door.”
“Because it was locked, even though I’d told you it was open, and you weren’t wasting any more time on what silly dispatch said.”
“Mmm.” Coin didn’t want to agree, but she was right. “So we bust in. This huge dog, massive, maybe a German Shepherd mixed with Malamute, rushed us.”
“What did you do?”
“I threw a sandwich at him.”
Lexie shook her head as if she thought she’d heard him wrong. “A sandwich.”
“Yep.”
“What kind?”
“Peanut butter, pickle, and grape jelly.”
“Number one, that is disgusting and probably illegal in seven states, and number two, why did you have that in your pocket?”
“Serena came by earlier with her mother, and she’d made it special for me.”
“Because she hates her father, obviously.”
Coin knew Lexie was joking, but it still struck a small, quiet nerve. Serena loved him as any eleven-year-old girl loved her father. How long would it be until he could no longer say that? Soon she’d be in her teens and she’d hate him just like the child-rearing books said she would. It would break his heart when that happened. “Probably.”
Lexie looked chagrined. “Coin, I’m sorry. I was kidding.”
He pushed a knuckle into the tabletop. “I know. I’m just trying to prep myself for the teen years. You know I hated my father. I don’t want the same thing to happen with my daughter and me.”
“I never hated my father when I was a teenager.”
“No one ever hated Robert Tindall.” Coin had admired the district chief, though he’d only worked under him a year when he’d died. The whole town had grieved, but no one more than Lexie. She’d been on the radio when it had happened. A hoarder’s house fire on Smythe Lane. An electrical line had come down and draped itself over the chief’s rig while he was taking over incident command, but he hadn’t known it was there. When he’d touched the back door to set up his mobile radio post, he’d been electrocuted almost instantly. The guys had worked him harder than anyone they’d ever worked, abandoning the empty house and letting it burn to the ground, but they never got a rhythm back.
Lexie had dispatched it all, refusing to let anyone take her radio that night. She’d come close to not being able to come back.
But Lexie was tough. So tough. Coin had thought that night that she was braver than any of the guys on the line. Her voice hadn’t even shaken.
Now she said, “I was too busy hating my mother,” and her eyes sparkled. “Still am, as a matter of fact. More, please, about the call. And that disgusting sandwich.”
“The sandwich is a joke between Serena and me. I told her one day I’d make her a peanut butter, pickle, and jelly sandwich, just joking around, but Serena latched on to it as a thing, and now she actually likes them that way. I don’t love them—”
“Because you’re sane.”
“—but she thinks I do, so she wraps them up tight in plastic wrap and sticks them in the pockets of my work pants sometimes. I’d just found it on the way to the call.”
Lexie shook her head. “How do you not find a sandwich? In your pocket?”
“Cargo pockets. Do you know how much
crap we keep in here?”
“So you’re telling me you threw the sandwich in your pocket at a German Shepherd. That’s kind of adorable.”
Coin felt his face go red. He hated it when that happened in front of Lexie. Nothing worse than a man who blushed.
CHAPTER THREE
There was really nothing cuter than a man who blushed, Lexie decided.
Sweet Coin.
“Oh, my gosh, I’m tired of sitting.” She hit the button that raised the bank of monitors—the radio, the phone, the CAD—so that she could stand and work at the same time. At least Darling Bay Fire had sprung for a new ComCen when they’d redone the station five years back. It was a small room, full of computers—six screens at each of the four terminals—but with the big window and the raised ceiling, it felt spacious enough. On the center table was a collection of colored gourds—Sue’s contribution—and in an early nod to Halloween, a plastic skull lit up and blinked next to the fax machine.
Lexie finished adjusting her work desk to the right height and leaned against it. “Okay. So who was in the house?”
“A man who was busy ignoring his dog. He didn’t know we’d broken in until we went back, after picking up our patient. He just thought the dog had been barking at squirrels.”
“Big squirrels in uniform carrying sandwiches.”
“He was pretty heated. We had to do the board-up for him.”
“You should have thrown your pickle at him.” Lexie bit her bottom lip to keep from giggling. “So did the little old lady approve of the crew I sent her?”
Coin shot her a sideways look. “What exactly did you say to her?”
“She wanted the handsome ones.”