by Lila Ashe
“Sorry, buddy, but whatever it is, I can’t make a diagnosis out here. I’m not a doctor. Do you need an ambulance to take you to the hospital?”
“Nah,” the man said, “I need your morphine.”
Too late, Coin saw the gun.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Lexie’d had been a horrible day. The first thing Megan had said was, “How’d it go with Coin?”
Lexie had burst into tears.
Lexie didn’t cry in dispatch. Really, she tried to cry nowhere at all, but crying in dispatch was against all her work rules, every single one. If you told a woman how to do CPR on her husband—a man she couldn’t lose, a man she told over and over as she pumped, “Please don’t leave me, love. Please don’t leave me, love”—you just hung up the phone at the end of the call and kept on with whatever you’d been doing before the phone rang. Emailing reports. Making a sandwich. Gossiping with a coworker. You did not cry.
So when Lexie broke into sobs at Megan’s question, she had no idea what to do. Megan looked as horrified as Lexie felt. “Oh, honey. Oh, no. Oh, what can I do?”
At every Oh, Lexie wanted to howl louder, but she managed to bring it down. She sniffled her way through six Kleenex, finally biting her inner lip hard enough to draw blood which at least made her stop blubbering like an idiot.
“I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”
Thankfully, 911 rang and Megan had thrown her body at the phone like she was covering a live grenade. By the time Megan hung up with the caller, Lexie had dried her eyes completely. She then distracted her with the speculation that one of the keyboards was dying, and they’d moved on. Megan hadn’t asked her another word.
The calls were rough, too. One unsuccessful suicide attempt, two possible strokes, one elderly fall victim who’d been down all night, unable to get to the phone. At least she got to make sure Engine One stayed out of the station. Lexie felt incrementally better when she could double click on its automatic vehicle locator and make sure she wasn’t going to accidentally run into Coin in the hallway or the kitchen, because he was out working in his zone. Good grief, if she couldn’t control her emotions when Megan simply asked her a question, how would she control herself when she actually saw the man?
She missed him.
That was possibly the worst part. Funny how she’d never noticed before that every day started with him. She bet Coin knew it. Even on her off-duty days, she usually woke to a text. Coin would send her Serena’s latest not-funny joke, or ask her how many lemons he should put in lemonade. Something. There was always something on her phone from him when she woke at home. At work, he brought her coffee. Every morning.
She missed him so much. His voice, his laugh, the way he looked at her like she was something special, someone beautiful.
This morning, he hadn’t come in.
Lexie thought she might have been okay if he had. Like after her father died, she’d push the emotion into a compartment and deal with it another day. Or never.
He hadn’t brought her coffee, though. She looked him up in Telestaff to see if he’d called out sick or been moved to a different station for the day. Nope. There was his name, big as life, on Engine One, right where he normally was. The taste of disappoint had warred with abject relief. Fine, he was ignoring her. She could do the same until she healed. Until she got over him.
Considering that she’d just found out she was into him, she had no idea how long that would be. When she’d grabbed extra creamer from the kitchen, she’d heard his laugh in the apparatus bay. If she’d been asked on 911 if a heart could physically twist inside a chest, she’d have been pretty confident that it couldn’t. But hers was starting to make a habit of it.
She knew she shouldn’t have sent them on the battery-change call. Normally that was something they held for a free crew. It definitely wasn’t something they’d give to a crew who needed to come in for cleanup. One of them was either covered in vomit or rattlesnake juice, or both, and by now Tox and Hank probably hated her right along with Coin.
Lexie wondered what Coin had told the guys about her. She stuck a Tootsie Pop into her mouth and didn’t, for a moment, notice that she’d forgotten to take the paper off.
She just couldn’t let him come back to the station yet. She needed another ten minutes. Maybe another ten minutes after that, too. Maybe she could make Engine One stay out till her afternoon rest period. She’d eat dinner in dispatch instead of grabbing it down the hall, and if he did come in, she’d fake a headache.
He wasn’t coming in, though. She knew that. If Coin had been going to come try to change her mind, he would have already done it.
The fact that he hadn’t meant he’d changed his mind about her.
How could a heart that had barely learned it was in love break with such a shattering smash?
The radio squawked, drawing her attention away from the window and the two skateboarding kids in front, back to her screen.
“Last unit?” she asked.
No answer.
“Was there a unit with traffic for Darling?”
Still no answer.
Fine. So it was open air, someone hitting their side mike with their butt as they got in a rig. She wondered if it was Coin, if it came from his mike. Was he possibly thinking about her right now, too? Or was he up a ladder inside, changing batteries?
What if he’d fallen?
It was a silly fear, and she felt ashamed as soon as she’d had it. Coin was fine. If he’d fallen, the first thing Tox would have done would be to call on the radio for a rescue ambulance.
Another squawk.
No. Something was wrong. Lexie heard something in the background that was off. She couldn’t have described it for anyone else, and she wished Megan were in the room to ask her if she’d gotten the same gut feeling from the sound of the open air.
“Last unit, go again.”
The emergency beacon flashed on her screen. It was labeled Engine One.
“Engine One, are you clear for a code three hundred?”
There was a pause, and then Coin’s voice came back, clear as day and calm as he’d ever sounded, “Affirm. I’m clear.”
The innocuous words were code. They meant the opposite. They meant he was in serious trouble.
Lexie said with an equal calm she didn’t feel in her heart, “Copy that.”
And she sprang into action.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“See, man? I told the dispatcher I was okay. That’s what code three hundred means. She was just checking on me. They have to do that. What’s your name, anyway?”
“I don’t gotta tell you. Just give me the stuff. Hurry up.”
They were in the rig, the man in the front passenger seat where Tox usually sat. “I just want to know your first name. You don’t have to tell me your last name. I’m Coin.”
“What kind of a name is that?”
“My dad liked money. What’s yours?”
“Louis.” The man looked chagrined, and the pistol drooped in his hand. “But they call me Trigger.”
That wasn’t a soothing thing to hear.
“Okay, Louis. Here’s what I’m concerned about.”
“No concerns! Just give me what you have.”
“We don’t have—”
“Now!” Louis was getting more agitated by the minute. “Just give it to me.”
Over Louis’s shoulder, he saw Hank and Tox run out the front door of the house. They froze on the lawn when they saw someone else in the engine with Coin. They knew as well as anyone else in the department what a code three hundred meant, even if none of them had ever heard a real one before.
Coin dragged his eyes away from them before Louis noticed.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We don’t carry drugs on the engine. Only the rescue ambulance has those.”
Louis looked confused.
“I’m telling you the truth. I couldn’t give you anything if I wanted to. And I do want to, Louis. You’re obviously u
pset—”
“You’re lying!”
“But before you do something you’ll regret, before you do something you can’t take back, I suggest you jump down and take off running.”
“Where’s the ambulance, then?” Louis looked out the window as if he could make one appear. “Get one here.”
“Come on, buddy. You think I can just call an ambulance and get it here?”
“If I have a gun in your face, you can’t do that? To save your own life you’re not gonna do that?”
Sirens wailed in the distance.
“What’s that? Why are they coming?”
Coin held up his hands, careful to move slowly. “I don’t know. But what I think you should do is get out of here as fast as you can. You can still get away.”
“Not without what I came for. Use that thing.” He pointed at the radio. “Get the ambulance here.”
Coin’s heart froze. What if this guy was really serious? What if he didn’t care how many people he took out on the way to get his fix?
What about Lexie? She’d never know that he’d really meant it—she’d never know that she was his heart, his everything. His love.
“Okay, Louis. I’ll call an ambulance.” He let Louis think he was doing it for him.
It wasn’t totally true. He knew how this would probably play out. Coin was calling it for himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When Coin called the code three hundred, Lexie turned into a blur of action. Her heart might have been beating a thousand times faster than normal, but that was nothing she hadn’t worked around before. She paged Megan up from her rest, and she called in Sue, who lived two blocks away. She called PD and had them head toward Coin’s location, code three. She started two engines, two rescues, and Jack Barger, the battalion chief on duty. She started a helo, staging it on the football field at the high school, two blocks away from the call.
In between this, the phone rang off the hook—every current chief, every retired chief, every curious and worried member of the department wanted to know what was going on. Lexie and Megan slapped them all on perma-hold. Every minute on the phone was a minute she could miss a transmission from Coin. They could rot before she answered their idiotic questions.
Her heart.
“Darling Fire, are you reporting an emergency?” she said as quickly as she could to the next caller, her finger already hovering over the Hold button.
“Lex, it’s Tox. He’s with a guy with a gun in the engine.”
“Is he hurt?”
“We don’t think so.”
“Suspect description?” Lexie snapped her fingers at Megan to get her attention. Without being asked, Megan dialed PD back to give them the update Lexie was typing into the call.
“White male, maybe forty-five, wearing a black T-shirt. That’s all I can see from the porch. He yelled out the window at us to stay back.”
“What kind of gun?” Lexie typed as fast as Tox talked.
“Black handgun, maybe semiautomatic.”
“Anyone else around? On foot? Other cars?”
“Nothing evident.”
The radio blurted its open mike sound, and Lexie threw Tox on hold without saying anything.
She waited. Megan hung up with the police dispatcher and stayed silent in her chair, her fingers over the keyboard, listening as hard as Lexie was.
“Darling Fire, Engine One calling.”
Lexie took half a breath to still her vocal chords and then said as evenly as she could, “Go ahead to Darling.”
“Can you start a rescue my direction?”
Megan gasped.
Lexie said with a confidence she didn’t feel, “Affirm, Engine One. Reason?”
There was a pause, and Lexie wondered if it was possible to actually die from fear.
Finally Coin said, “Well, number one, I got a guy named Louis with me here. He needs a fix of something and I think we’ll give it to him, okay, Darling?”
“Affirm,” Lexie managed.
“And number two,” Coin continued, his voice steady over the air in her headset. “I have to tell you something, Darling Fire.”
“Go ahead.”
“I love you, darlin’. I always have. I love you more than anyone except Serena, and you tell her I said so, that’s what I need you to do for me, and know that I love—”
A thunderclap filled her ears, and the radio went silent.
Four firefighters entered dispatch at a run, their faces drawn. Mazanti made sure the door shut with barely a click, and none of them made a sound. Even the phones stopped ringing.
Lexie only knew one thing—she needed to be with him. The only thing that kept her in her chair was the fact that she didn’t trust anyone else to be on the radio right now. She couldn’t lose him this way. The same way.
She couldn’t.
The radio blared into activity. Tox yelled, “Get the rescue here, Darling! Code three!”
As if she’d send the ambulance in any other way. As if they’d respond any other way. Lexie knew the crew on Rescue Two were almost as panicked as she was.
They weren’t in love with Coin, though. He was their friend, but not their best friend.
Coin was her love. Coin was hers. Other radios blared, stepping on each other’s traffic.
“Units, clear the air.” It was Lexie’s radio now. “Captain One, status check,” she said.
Tox responded, “He’s hit, Darling. In the chest. We got vitals, but his heart rate’s slipping.”
“Battalion One, copy?” She released the pedal and coughed, the sob she wouldn’t release becoming a physical thing in her chest.
“Affirm,” shouted Chief Barger, his siren blaring in the background.
Lexie coughed, trying to clear her throat.
Megan said, “Can I take the radio for you?”
Lexie just shook her head, hard. This was hers. She would do her job. Maybe if she did her job the best she could, this time she could save the man she loved. She had to. With the sleeve of her sweatshirt, in between transmissions, she wiped the tears that dripped off her cheek. Every other second, she typed as fast as she could.
She did her job.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Coin woke up in pain.
Pain everywhere. From the front of his forehead all the way to his kneecaps, as if his body was on fire. The worst was when he tried to breathe—it felt as if a ladder had been propped on his chest and the biggest guys in the department—Tox, Devo, Stu—were climbing it.
He knew he wasn’t in the dorm. He wasn’t in his own house. And with the beeping and white wall and blue curtain, he sure as heck wasn’t at Lexie’s.
The hospital.
He couldn’t remember a dang thing, though.
Sleepy. He was so tired …
But no, this was important.
If he was in the hospital, then something had happened. A fire—was that why his lungs hurt? He couldn’t remember …
It was quiet in this room with just the low beep of his heart monitor punctuating his thoughts. In the hall he heard voices, but their words didn’t make sense.
Had he had a stroke? That wouldn’t explain the pain.
Walk it back, Keefe.
He’d been at work. It had been a bad day.
Coin wracked his brain. Why had it been a bad day? Serena? His heart rate sped up—it was amplified by the electronic beeps. Was she okay? Had something happened, a car accident?
A nurse entered carrying a syringe.
“What happened? My daughter—”
“You’re awake!” The nurse, an older woman with graying hair pulled back in a short ponytail, had young eyes. “Your daughter will be so pleased.”
Relief flooded his body, pure and clean. For a second nothing hurt at all.
Lexie. Another pulse of adrenaline went though him. What wasn’t he remembering? Something about Lexie. He remembered the kiss in the cemetery, and then the night they’d spent together came back to him.
Oh.
He remembered. All of it, it came back in the space of a few seconds. The junkie with the gun, the way he’d aimed, and then fired.
What he’d told Lexie on the radio.
What Lexie had asked him to do—to leave her. To not come back.
“Where was I hit?” Coin croaked, trying to keep the despair from filling him completely, from drowning him.
“Eleven millimeters from your heart. If the man’s hand had shaken even the tiniest bit, you wouldn’t be here right now.”
If he wasn’t here, it wouldn’t hurt this bad, knowing he’d tried to win her, and lost. But that wasn’t fair—that wasn’t right. He couldn’t think that. The most important thing to think about was Serena. He had to get better for her.
“I’m going to call your daughter,” said the nurse. “She’s with her mother in the waiting room. They’ve refused to leave.” She hung another liter of fluids. “You should also know that at any given point, there are at least six firefighters out there, sometimes more. I don’t think there’s been a time that room has been empty.”
“How long …?”
“Not that long, hon.” She glanced at her watch. “You’ve been here for about twenty-three hours. You had surgery yesterday and you got moved out of recovery six hours ago. I have to say, it’s heartening to see the way your coworkers care about you. And your wife! How on earth do you work with your wife? I couldn’t work at this hospital if my Bernie worked here. I’d stab him with a pencil before the first day was out, but that said, he’d probably like it. I’ll go get them now.”
Coin tried to shake his head to clear it, but it hurt too much. He gasped and stilled. What did the nurse mean? He didn’t work with Janice. Nothing made sense. All he knew was that he wanted to see Serena, wanted to hug her, to make sure she was okay.
And he wanted to see Lexie.
Not that it would happen. He tried, he’d failed.