Montana Hero

by Debra Salonen

  “Oh, shit,” a woman’s voice said.

  No shit, he silently seconded. He didn’t recognize the voice or the woman in the doorway but his first impression hit hard and fast. Pretty. Amused.

  “Save the doughnuts,” he barked, juggling the box in her direction.

  “Oh, hell, no.”

  She reached out and grabbed his right forearm and held on with a strength that surprised him, since she was half his size. The box tipped and fell, but given the short distance between them, it only dropped as far as Flynn’s waist before his rescuer pulled him to safety.

  The box lodged vertically between them. His left arm automatically wrapped behind her back. His right clasped between her hands. The top of her head, which reached just about to Flynn’s chin, was pointed down.

  “Wow. Good catch. You brought doughnuts?”

  She let go of his arm to take hold of the box before looking up.

  Green eyes.

  Oh, I am so screwed.

  Laughing green eyes. Intelligent, too. Full of piss and vinegar as his mother might say. The kind of eyes that had proven to be Flynn’s downfall more than once in the past—especially the recent past.

  “Yes. From the bakery.”

  “Cool.” She stepped back and spun around, box in hand. “Guys, he brought doughnuts. Ken never did that.”

  Flynn figured out her name by process of elimination. She wasn’t old enough to be Janet, the main dispatcher, and the third woman designated for that task couldn’t make the meeting because her child was sick. She’d called at five to tell him.

  That left Katherine Robinson. “She goes by Kat,” the County Personnel Director told him. “Single mom. Moved here from Texas. Started as a relief dispatcher. Got a permanent spot when Margie Crain retired at the first of the year. She’s good. Only thing keeping her from applying for your job was her son. She didn’t want to take time away from him.”

  Flynn hadn’t asked for details. He believed in letting people tell their own stories. And he had a feeling Katherine Robinson’s story would be one he’d enjoy hearing.

  He stomped the slush from his boots, re-clipped the keys to his belt loop, and then stepped inside.

  “Good morning,” he said, unzipping his jacket. He’d dressed to impress—khaki cargo pants and long-sleeve red T-shirt with the SAR logo on the chest pocket. The color combo of SAR’s official uniform, he’d been told.

  He glanced around. Not a single other red shirt among them.

  “Thank you all for coming in early. I’d hoped to connect with each of you before this, but the Sheriff had other plans for me.” He kept his tone light with just a hint of irony. He knew how the system worked, as did these seasoned veterans, he was certain. “But you’ll be happy to know we are now the proud owners of the complete 2015 Emergency Response Handbook and FEMA’s Emergency Response to Terrorism, volumes I and II, if you need a little light reading.”

  “Welcome to our world,” a tall, skinny guy with a shaved head and trim goatee said. Dressed in a standard issue navy blue paramedic jumpsuit, the fellow took a giant bite of a powdered sugar doughnut he’d plucked from the box Kat Robinson passed around. Residual white granules snowed across his broad chest.

  After shoving the final bit into his wide mouth, he advanced toward Flynn, dusting sugar from his hands. “Brad Johnson. EMT.”

  The other five paramedics, one in uniform and four in street clothes, followed suit. Four men, two women.

  Flynn had read the performance reviews of every member of his team. It had become clear within a few pages that his predecessor had obvious favorites. Katherine Robinson was not one of them. Flynn wondered why.

  After shucking his coat and hanging it up on a designated hook, Flynn shook hands with each of them. He tried to fit a face to the names he’d studied last night. Brad, Jeff, Kermit, Mike, Brenda, and Kerry. The ambulance service was contracted with the County Sheriff’s Department and didn’t fall under Flynn’s control, per se, but since the two teams worked closely together and space in the jail was at a premium, the EMT crew used a section of the SAR building for their base of operations, too.

  “I look forward to getting to know each of you. If you have any ideas for making SAR run more smoothly, I’d love to hear them.”

  “Just let us do our jobs,” Kat Robinson piped up from a spot behind the dispatch desk.

  “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” Flynn asked.

  He felt the tension in the room as he walked to the coffee station that had been set up at the back of the room. Instead of grabbing a cup, he turned and looked at the group. “Let’s clear the air.”

  He took a breath and let it out. “I’ve read the reports. I have a general idea what went down with the previous administration. I’m not a bureaucrat by nature. I’ve been on fire lines long enough to know that you don’t make it back if you’re not all playing on the same team.”

  His last close call hit that tripwire of memory. A “flashback,” the shrinks called it. He used willpower to keep the images at bay. “I’m hoping we can be a team that puts our rescue calls first, but each other a close second.”

  The silence made him wonder what he’d just stepped in? Piles of old loyalty? Land mines left by the previous toxic administration?

  Kat Robinson came to his rescue. She stood and clapped. “Call me an optimist, but I have a good feeling about you.” She looked at the others. “How bad can he be? We already had the worst.”

  The cold, flat tone of her voice told him there was no love loss where Kenneth Morrison was concerned, but he watched the face of the other dispatcher for her reaction. The senior woman wore a nearly unreadable mask. She reminded Flynn of his mother, who over the years had perfected her “iceberg” look, as Ryker called it. “All you ever see with Mom is the tip of the iceberg. It’s what’s underneath her smile that crushes your soul when it hits.”

  The woman—Janet Haynes, Flynn believed—was fifty-seven. On the tall side…five-foot-eight, maybe. Not extremely overweight, but most of the extra pounds had settled in her backside. Her voice carried when she said, “Kenny did his best. And he’s not here to defend himself.”

  Her eyes narrowed in an unattractive squint as she turned to face Flynn. “We had a team. We did good work. One mistake and you go down in flames. That’s what living and working in a small town, with small-minded people, will get you. I have two years left for my thirty, then I’m outa here. Just so you know.”

  Got it, Flynn thought. Don’t expect to find you on my team either of those years.

  The others? Time would tell. Associations, favorites, who-was-screwing-whom would shake out and reveal itself soon enough. In the meantime, he had an agenda of his own to put in place.

  He walked to his office, a small cubicle near the restrooms. He might have thought it was a janitorial closet if not for the filing cabinets and Internet connection. The only window faced the interior, so he could keep an eye on his underlings, apparently.

  He’d printed out a welcome letter-slash-questionnaire last night. “Utterly cheesy,” Ryker called it.

  “Smart and heartfelt,” Mia, Ryker’s fiancée, had countered saucily.

  As he passed a copy to each person, he said, “You’ll see a couple of team-building exercises listed here, including a zip line adventure a buddy of mine is setting up. The initial course will be open in mid- to late-May, depending on the weather, with the full course completed in time for summer tourists.”

  “Do you plan to invite the volunteers, too?” Kermit asked.

  “To each of the training exercises? Yes. To the team-building excursions? No.”

  The two female EMTs had their heads together talking in muffled voices. Flynn couldn’t get a sense from their body language if they were pleased or pissed.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m coming into a very well-oiled machine. I get that. I’m not planning to make major changes to your established protocol any time soon. I want to use the next couple of months to observe
and get a feel for how you operate. I’ll probably respond to every call. Don’t freak out. I won’t be doing formal evaluations. I merely need to see how we react to 911 calls and what I…we…can do to improve our recovery success rate.”

  He carried his thermal mug to the coffee urn at the back of the room. He didn’t have any diehard ideology he felt compelled to press upon them. But his last boss had taught him a few things about being a manager, and now was Flynn’s time to try implementing them.

  “You’ll see I included my schedule this week. I will do my best to be available if anyone wants to talk. But to break the ice, I’d appreciate it if you’d each return your questionnaire for a quick one-on-one chat. Consider it your chance to tell me what you think works best about this unit’s present protocols and what you think needs changing.”

  He made a sweeping gesture. “I left a job that I loved to move nearly two thousand miles away to take a job that pays less and is completely outside my comfort zone, so obviously change doesn’t scare me. Feel free to make a list.”

  Everyone nodded, except Kat Robinson, who was already scribbling like mad. Somebody knows exactly what needs changing and she isn’t afraid to say so, he thought, forcing his eyes to look away from her pretty auburn head bowed so intently over her work, like a student taking the SATs.

  Flynn’s gut told him he was going to like her—even if his mind cried, “No way, buddy boy. You know what happened the last time you fell for someone you worked with.”

  Darla happened.

  His ex-wife, who was happily remarried and living in the house Flynn bought with his first inheritance. He’d let her pick the “house of her dreams’ thinking they’d be living in it together. Wrong. Schmuck that he was, he didn’t see the writing on the newly painted walls until she broke the news she’d never really gotten over her first love, who was newly single and well…sorry, Flynn.

  He wasn’t going down that road again. Ever. Ryker had encouraged him to start looking for a house sooner rather than later. “Things don’t stay on the market for long around here, Flynn. Even if you decide to rent instead of buy, you need to get out there and look.”

  They both knew Flynn’s temporary living quarters in the back of Bailey Jenkins-Zabrinski’s jewelry shop were just that—temporary. Ryker, too, had made use of the cozy rooms for a few months when he first moved to Marietta. Now, Ryker and Mia were building a new home on the lot he and Flynn had inherited from their father. With the money Ryker paid for Flynn’s share, Flynn decided he could be picky and find exactly the right spot that called to him. No bride with a hidden agenda would take half of it in the divorce. Because if Flynn ever fell in love again—a very big if—he planned to think with his head, not his libido.

  Chapter Two

  ‡

  BFH, Kat jotted in the margin of her new boss’s neatly typed letter of welcome.

  Big freakin’ hunk.

  She immediately scribbled over the letters. As if life wasn’t complicated enough. The last thing she needed was more testosterone in her world.

  Kat had butted heads with her last boss from Day One. She’d nearly quit a dozen times. Why hadn’t she? Stubbornness. A trait she came by honestly. Plus, Lord knew, she needed the job.

  Starting over from scratch, like evacuees from their old life, took money. And she’d left San Antonio with less in the kitty than she’d hoped. The cost of keeping Mom in a full care facility that specialized in treating Alzheimer’s patients these past three years had eaten up nearly all of her late stepfather’s life insurance money. The hospital and crematorium took the rest.

  Not that Kat had any attachment to Lloyd’s money. He’d made it clear when he took out the policy that if anything happened to him he expected Kat to keep Grace with her at home for as long as humanly possible then make sure Mom got the best care money could buy.

  She closed her eyes and let out a long, tired sigh. She’d tried but nothing worked out quite as well as she’d planned. She helped Mom sell the condo she and Lloyd loved. Kat took control of Mom’s finances when it became clear Mom didn’t know the difference between a dollar and a scam artist out to steal it from her. She’d moved Mom into the home Kat shared with her husband and young son. A futile arrangement that lasted until Greg moved out and Mom accidentally set the place on fire.

  Luckily, Kat had quit her job by then because finding adequate in-home caregivers proved the greatest challenge of all. Mom had hated the “strangers” she claimed stole from her and mistreated Brady—claims never substantiated by the “Nanny Cam” Greg installed in the house.

  They’d all learned more than any of them ever wanted to know about the slow and methodical unraveling of the brain of an Alzheimer’s patient. The moments of clarity were the worst, of course, because for a heartbeat—just long enough to remember how to turn on the stove and start to fry your grandson an egg—the person you loved was herself again.

  Then the smoke alarms went off. And flames spread to the towel tossed on top of the pan instead of a lid. Luckily, Kat, who was hanging up clothes in the back yard, was close enough to get everyone out alive. Insurance covered the structural damage, but that little bit of Mom that still knew Kat on the good days and still sang Beach Boys songs to Brady disappeared, never to return.

  “Life doesn’t come with any guarantees,” her mom once told her. “You should know that by now.”

  Kat knew.

  She shook her head to get her mind back in the present. Once she decided to make a leap of faith and move to Montana, she’d applied for this job online. The Sheriff, who had final say in all new SAR hires, told her in their Skype interview that the letter she’d written describing the moment when the firefighters and paramedics came to her house in answer to her frantic 911 call had set her apart from other applicants. She’d been honest when she wrote that the focus and purpose she’d seen in the eyes of her rescuers was something that had been missing from her life for far too long and reminded her of the goals she’d started out with in college.

  She’d planned to become a doctor—a goal completely out of reach at the moment, but this job felt like a step in the right direction. Or it had…until she met Ken Morrison.

  She glanced toward the office where Flynn Bensen now sat, his focus trained on the paramedic across the desk from him.

  After Ken’s arrest, Kat had entertained the idea of applying for his job…for about ten seconds. Until the reality of being a single mom of a ten-and-a-half-year-old boy with special needs slapped her upside the head. Something had been going on with Brady for the past six months or so that had Kat baffled, as well as frustrated.

  Was it pre-teen hormones as another mom who had a kid in Brady’s class suggested? Or unresolved grief, as Kat suspected. Brady had adored his grandmother. He stopped eating eggs for a year after the fire. Mom’s death had been hard on them both.

  “Is it possible the Teen Fairy has started sprinkling hormones in Brady’s cereal every morning?” Kat asked Brady’s teacher at their conference a few weeks ago. “First, he’s excited about something you’re doing in school. Then, he sulks because someone said something…I can’t keep up. I don’t know how you do it.”

  “I go home at night to an understanding husband, two cats, and a bottle of wine,” the woman said with a reassuring laugh. “Believe me, I do understand. Brady’s a really special kid. His occasional savant moments more than make up for his…er…personal interaction challenges.” Her smile reassured Kat that, at least, Kat had made the right decision where public education was concerned. Private school tuition was not in her budget as long as Greg kept playing games with Brady’s child support.

  “Raising an autistic child without benefit of a strong family support net must be very difficult. Is his dad not in the picture?”

  Not any more. Was he ever? “Greg grew up in a military family. His father believed in the ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ adage.” A crack across her four-year-old son’s cheek had been the last straw for Kat. “Tha
t parenting style simply doesn’t work with a child like Brady. Greg knows it. For now, he’s content to let me have sole custody.”

  Content? How ’bout ecstatic? No wife and kid around means Greg can date and waste money on pricy toys to impress his latest girlfriend instead of coughing up his monthly child support check.

  She yanked a post-it from the dispenser on her desk and scribbled a note to contact the San Antonio Child Support people. Again.

  She snuck another glance at Flynn Bensen. Was it the cant of his shoulders as he leaned forward, elbows on desk, to give his complete attention to each employee who stepped into his office that made her believe her handsome new boss was not the type to dodge child support? Or any other responsibility he took on.

  Flynn Bensen would have been on her side after the fire—not showing up half-drunk, threatening to call Child Protective Services if Kat didn’t get her “crazy damn mother under lock and key.”

  She pushed the memory back into the box where she kept all the other million or so sad reminders of her mother’s ruined life and got up. She grabbed the Best Mommy in the World mug off her desk and walked to the back of the room to refresh her coffee.

  Not that she needed the additional caffeine. She’d been jittery since that brief, up-close-and-personal encounter with Flynn Bensen in the doorway. Should she blame the man’s off-the-chart sexual magnetism? Or the fact Kat hadn’t been laid in so long her body couldn’t tell the difference between plain ol’ nice-guy attraction and hot-damn-ain’t-he-the-bomb kind of mojo?

  “What do you think?” Janet asked, sidling up beside Kat. “Kind of a dick, right?”

  A dick?

  At the word, Kat momentarily pictured her new boss naked. With a package every bit as impressive as his broad shoulders, trim waist and thickly muscled legs. She coughed into her fist to clear the dryness in her throat. “It’s a little early to tell, isn’t it?”

  Kat still hadn’t figured out Janet. She didn’t know whether to blame the woman’s blind loyalty toward their former boss on unrequited love, a mother complex or Stockholm syndrome.