Page 65 of Christmas with Three Firemen

Firefighter Santos was operating on the second floor when conditions deteriorated rapidly.

Deteriorated. Like weather. Like luck.

The fire ran the ceiling against the layout of that building because somebody fed it a path, and I watched it happen from the street, and there is no box on this form for that.

I type the sentence again and leave it this time and fill in the rest: unit numbers, times, hospital, and sign at the bottom with the stylus in a signature that doesn’t look like mine.

Then I pull the next form, because there’s always a next form. Equipment out-of-service log.

I enter Rico’s helmet, shell compromised, heat damage, removed from service, and order the replacement from quartermaster stock, and I do not think about standing at the workbench with that helmet in my hands. I log it. That’s the job. You log the damage, and you order the replacement, and you keep the house running.

The house needs a lot of keeping right now.

Rico’s slot has a hole in it through at least February. I’ve been juggling the roster all week, moving Callum up, pulling overtime candidates, and every version of the board I build has the same problem, which is that it isn’t Rico.

This morning I did rig checks with Wes at six, walked both engines, and signed the sheets.

At eight, I spent forty minutes on the phone with the battalion chief, who wanted to talk about the task force and used the word coordination nine times and committed to nothing.

At noon I inspected the hydrant flows on our block because the cold snapped two caps last winter and I don’t trust December.

Somewhere in all of it I ate something. I don’t remember what.

This is what I’m good for. The machinery. Keep the rigs rolling, keep the roster covered, keep the paper moving, and a firehouse runs whether or not its captain sleeps, whether or not one of his men is lying in Harlem Hospital with one eyebrow, whether or not there is a folded piece of history sitting in an archive box downstairs that I have pulled off the shelf twice this week and put back twice without opening.

Whether or not the woman upstairs knows.

She knows. I watched her know, on the floor of the gym, with the photograph in her hands. Days ago now. And in those days I have written her exactly four notes on the backs of incident forms and fed all four into the shredder, and twice I have walked the mezzanine at night and stood outside her door with my knuckles an inch from the wood and listened to her pen scratching inside and walked away.

I run a station of people who go through doors for a living.

I can’t knock on one.

There’s a knock on mine.

She comes in carrying a folder, and I know before she opens her mouth that this is business, because she’s wearing the business face, the one from her first day, smooth and closed. I haven’t seen it in weeks. I’d forgotten how much I dislike it.

“I need to brief you on the investigation,” she says. “Sit or stand, your choice, but you’re going to want to hear all of it.”

“Close the door.”

She closes it. She doesn’t sit. She sets the folder on my desk, squares it to the edge with one finger, and lays it out for me like a case at trial.

The rebuilt paper trail. Insurance filings, permits, the subsidiary chain, everything public, everything clean, everything her weeks of work have recovered from the lawyers’ fire. And its ceiling: negligence. Civil exposure. A settlement, a sealed file, and a company that walks. Nothing on paper connects.

“The arsonist has to move again,” she says. “For this to end anywhere but a settlement conference against Delaney’s lawyers, he has to strike again, and he has to be caught doing it. Which means the station’s posture stays normal. Routines unchanged, nothing hardened, nothing that spooks him off. We coordinate quietly with the task force, and when he moves, we’re ready.” She looks at me straight. “I’m briefing you because it’s your house, and because I need your help making sure nobody here tips him off that we’re waiting.”

I let the silence sit while I look at what she’s actually put on my desk.

The shadows under her eyes have shadows. Her voice is level, but she has a red line pressed across her right palm, and her thumb keeps finding it while she talks, back and forth.

She’s laid the whole thing out in the flat delivery of someone who has rehearsed it against her own objections and won, and what she is asking me, in clean professional language, is to keep my crew and half the neighborhood inside the trap with the cheese.

“No,” I say.

“Grant.”

“You’re asking me to run my house as bait with my people in it. The answer’s no.”