Page 8 of Inferno
The ladder lieutenant stood at the bottom of the unit on top of his truck. He grasped the radio on his jacket and replied, “Two pairs on a search of the east side, two outside ascending to the second floor now. We’ve got people trapped on this side of the building.”
They must’ve seen them in the window and decided to get up there from the outside. Meanwhile, their colleagues did a room by room search of the same part of the building from the inside.
Julio wanted to say a prayer for them, but the most feeling he nursed for God these days was a whole lot of anger.The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh awaywas certainly true. But he couldn’t finish the expression. Not with the way he raged inside.
“Copy that,” Julio said. “Truck report.”
Static crackle greeted him.
Julio scanned the building. Flames licked out of broken windows up into the evening sky. Not yet dark, he could see the color of the smoke. “Not good.” He lifted his radio. “All positions, evac now. I repeat, evac now. This thing is turning deadly.”
Two firefighters fled out the front doors, followed by a third.
“Out!” Julio yelled into the radio. “Everyone out!”
The ladder guys paused. Someone screamed from inside the window.
A second later an explosion from deep inside the building rocked the structure.
And then it started to collapse in on itself.
FOUR
Samantha led the way out of the residential house and back to the car, parked at the curb. Her department vehicle was an old dark-red Toyota with a hundred fifty thousand miles on it, and temperature controls that only worked when they chose to.
She beeped the locks and opened the driver’s door.
On the other side of the car, Romeo pulled open his door. “So that was a bust.”
She tipped her head to the side in a kind of nod and slid in. “Her dad, I’m guessing. He convinced her not to say anything.”
“So the kid gets away with harassing her?”
Samantha pulled the car away from the curb. “Nothing we can do with no testimony and no physical evidence.”
It would be a measure of the kind of cop he was, what Romeo did when his hands were tied in an investigation. How they reacted said a lot about a person’s character when they had no power in a situation.
As for her, she gripped the wheel. Maybe just more used to it? Feeling powerless never sat right. Who on earth would say that they were fine with it? She just had more experience—not just in her years on the job. She knew what it felt like to have no control.
Or no voice, the way so many assumed of her sister.
Plenty of people had dismissed Bristol as having no feelings, or no will, just because she had no way to communicate with a hearing person who didn’t know her language. Just because she couldn’t understand what a person said out loud didn’t mean she had nothing to say. That wasn’t all communication could be—or should be.
Life was about adapting to the situation you were in.
Making the best of it.
Romeo tapped his phone on his leg. “I’ll text my sister. She’s SRO at the East Benson High School. Maybe she knows this kid and she can keep an eye on him.”
Samantha nodded.
“And in the meantime, you can tell me who your friend was.”
She smiled but didn’t open her lips. Of course, he asked again. He’d been asking all day. Almost as if he’d fallen in love at first sight this morning at the diner—with her sister.
“She’s who you were having breakfast with, right?”
“Correct.” And they didn’t look alike enough that he’d immediately pegged them as siblings. Bristol looked like their mother, while Samantha took after their father.
