I look back at the house. The west roof is starting to go. If I had left her where she was, she would have had another three minutes, maybe four. Maybe less. The frame of the guest room is in the smoke now.
In my coat pocket the radio is still off.
I have not called dispatch. Val's contractor hasn't called either, not from the way the drive is still empty behind me. The call was supposed to go in five minutes ago and it didn't, because Val told her contractor to wait, because Val wanted to know what I would do. There is nobody coming. If I turn my radio on and report this fire from my own handle, I have three minutes beforethe first engine rolls and four before Val is on my earpiece asking why.
I turn the radio on. I turn the radio off.
Move.
I lift her again. Fifty more yards across the lawn to the gate. The gate is still closed. I punch in the code and walk through. Gravel of the service drive. Pines on both sides. My truck is around the first bend. I put her across the bench seat on the passenger side and I tuck the wool throw over her shoulders and I take the SCBA off her face because in the cab she doesn't need it anymore. She makes a small sound when I move her head. Her eyes stay closed. I wedge the wool throw under her cheek so she doesn't knock her temple against the door pillar.
I close the passenger door. I go around.
I am behind the wheel with the engine on and the heater up and the radio off before I admit to myself what I have done.
I have stolen a target.
I drive.
I stay under the speed limit. I keep the headlights dim. I take the back road through Millard and then the ridge cut up past the reservoir, routes I use for hunting in November and no other time of year. No cameras on any of them. No houses. A county sheriff I don't know by name but who won't be on the ridge tonight.
At the reservoir the phone on the seat lights up once. Text from Val, one word.Done?I look at the screen and I let it go dark without answering. I put my free hand on the wool throw over Evangeline's shoulder the way you put a hand on a dog sleeping in the back of a truck, not to wake it, only to know it's there.My hand stays on her for a mile and I take it off at the junction because my hand is a thing I cannot trust tonight.
---
The cabin is forty miles northwest, not east. The county road winds up into the hills where the forest gets dense and the houses get rare and the nearest neighbor is four miles through pine. I have owned this cabin for nine years. Val does not know the address. She knows I have a place and she has never asked where. The road up is a fire service road that turns to dirt at the last mile and my truck knows every pothole.
Evangeline Clark does not wake up on the drive.
I check her every two or three minutes. Pulse. Breathing. Color. Her color comes back slow. Her lips pink up by the time we're twenty miles out. Her respiration evens, then thickens into something closer to sleep than shock. I roll her onto her side when I stop at the county road junction, the way you put a drunk friend in the recovery position. I put my hand on her back. I keep it there through the light.
Her hair smells like smoke.
Under the smoke it smells like something else. Some kind of shampoo. Something expensive, light, a little floral. Not a perfume. A shampoo. I cannot tell you the last time I noticed what a woman's hair smelled like. I cannot tell you the last time I had a woman aside from the chief in my truck. I take my hand off her back.
I drive.
I run through what I have done the way a climber runs a route after the fall. I set a fire. I walked back into the fire I set. I carried a target across a lawn she was supposed to die on. I did not call dispatch. I did not log the rescue. I did not wait for the engines. I am taking a woman Val ordered dead to a cabin Val does not know about. Every one of these things is a crime. Onestacked on top of the other is something bigger than a crime. It's a new arrangement with Val that Val has not agreed to yet.
I think about turning around.
The thought is there and I sit with it honestly the way I was taught to sit with bad thoughts on ladder work. I could drive back to the hospital in Redwater. I could walk her into the ER and say I saw a fire and pulled her out and my radio was down. Kessler would carry that story for me. Val would be furious but Val would forgive what could be framed as a firefighter reflex. That is the version that keeps me in my rank. That is the version that keeps me breathing past tomorrow.
I do not turn around.
I do not turn around and I do not let myself list why because the why is not something I can hold yet. It's the photo and it's her face against my coat and it's the wordmineI thought in a burning house, and none of those are things I am going to think about tonight. Tonight I drive. Tonight I get her out of the city, into a bed, warm, alive. Tomorrow is another country.
The cabin comes up on the left. Single story. Cedar siding. Woodstove chimney. A porch I built myself the summer after the warehouse collapse, when my arm was still learning the new shape of itself. I laid every board of that porch with one working hand and one hand I was retraining. I know every knothole. I know which board sings when you step on it wrong and which board holds when the frost heaves. It's the only thing I own that Val has never set foot on. No outside light. No neighbors. The county plow doesn't come this far.
I pull up to the porch. I kill the engine.
I sit with my hands on the wheel.
In the passenger seat a woman I have known the name of for five hours is breathing steady against the wool throw. Her eyelashes are dark against her cheek. The cut on her palm has clotted. The silk of her nightgown has a smear of ash at the hem.She is the most expensive thing I have ever had in this truck and I don't know how I'm going to carry her into my house without my hands knowing they're touching her.
I carry her.
I unlock the front door with my elbow and I kick it open and I cross the living room to the bedroom and I lay her down on my bed. I straighten the wool throw. I push her hair back off her face with the back of my glove because my hand is still shaking and I do not trust my hand. I check her pulse again. Sixty-eight. Breathing even. I pull the quilt up over her. I turn on the lamp on the side table, low, so she doesn't wake into full dark.
