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Not only was the jackass stupid enough to douse the whole thing in gasoline to, in his words, make quicker work of it, but he’d piled everything way too close to a grove of trees on his property, and when the wind kicked up, they’d caught quicker than a match, given how dry everything had been lately.
It had taken hours of long, hard, back-breaking work to get everything out, and the guy had come dangerously close to kick-starting a forest fire.
But the most ignorant thing the man had done was argue and fight with the cops who showed up to ticket his dumb ass for breaking the law. He actually took a swing at one of them and ended up being hauled in for assaulting an officer.
I couldn’t lie, watching them cuff the son of a bitch and load him into the back of a cruiser had been enjoyable as hell, given that the rest of my crew and I were sweating our asses off having just foughthisfire.
We’d headed back to the station, all of us stinking to high heaven and drained of energy. The building that housed Grapevine Fire Department had seen better days, to say the least—those days being before I’d been born—so the plumbing wasn’t exactly up to snuff. To make things fair, we’d draw straws to see who’d be lucky enough to shower first, that person being the only one who’d be blessed with hot water.
This time around, I’d been last, and by the time my turn rolled around, all that was left was icy water that made my balls burrow up into my body. The only silver lining was that my body was too tired to care.
The job with Grapevine FD had taken some getting used to, that was for sure. Hell, the whole move to a small town after living and working in a big city for years had been a culture shock, to say the least.
I was born and raised in Maryland and spent a decade as a firefighter with the Baltimore Fire Department before trading it all in to move to Small Town Nowhere, Virginia.
It had taken a while to get used to the much slower pace of small-town living, especially when it came to work. A normal shift in Baltimore had us running calls from the time we started to the time we ended, everything from medical emergencies to structure fires to car crashes. There was never a dull moment.
Things in Grapevine moved differently. We were still busy, but in a different way. Medical emergencies happened everywhere, but there weren’t nearly the same number of structure fires as we’d gotten in the city. However, the threat of brush and forest fires was much greater, especially given the drought we’d had lately. Everything was bone dry, the perfect kindling, and it wouldn’t take much to set off a disaster, which was nearly what had happened today. The owner of that property was in a serious world of hurts, and I couldn’t find it in myself to feel bad for the fool.
Reckless, selfish people deserved to pay the price for putting others in harm’s way, and he was paying his.
If only that were the case for every thoughtless asshole out there.
I hadn’t realized how tightly I was holding my body until the pain started radiating from my clenched jaw, and my blunt nails cut into my palms.
Standing beneath the icy water, I pulled in a fortifying breath and flexed my hands, releasing the tension from the balled up, white-knuckled fists I’d been holding them in. I blinked my eyes opened, taking in the aged and cracked tiles covering the shower wall. I focused all my energy on those tiles in an effort to pull myself back to the present. I was in the shower, not standing in the middle of the highway, being pelted by frigid rain drops.
The lights above me were a flickering florescent, not the standard white, red, and blue of emergency vehicles.
I wasn’t on some congested section of road in Maryland. I was in Grapevine, Virginia. My new home.
I pressed my palms against the cold wall. The tiles had once been white, but had grown dingy with age. They were just one of the many things that needed to be updated in the Grapevine fire house.
I was still on shift. I couldn’t afford to be pulled back into the past while I was responsible for the well-being of the people in my new town.
I took one last deep breath before cranking the nozzle to shut the water off. I did a half-assed job of drying myself before wrapping the towel around my waist and throwing the curtain to the shower stall back. I padded to the row of lockers along the back wall and made quick work of dressing in a clean uniform.
“Your balls turn to raisins in there?” Palmer, one of the other firefighters, razzed as I stepped out of the communal bathroom and into the sleeping quarters. What the room lacked in privacy, it made up for in, well... nothing, really.
The room was longer than it was wide and had vaulted ceilings that made it difficult for anyone over five seven to walk beneath. There wasn’t room for much of anything other than two rows of twin beds barely long enough for a teenager, let alone a grown man. It took up one half of the second story, while a dated weight room with a few sets of dumbbells, a rusted bench press bench, and a broken treadmill made up the other half.
Downstairs we had a large kitchen, a TV room with a couple ratty couches, and the chief’s office.
I balled up my used towel and chunked it at Palmer’s head as I moved past him. “Fuck drawing straws,” I grunted. No one knew how the hell he did it, but Palmer always managed to draw the long straw, meaning he always got the hot shower. I wasn’t sure how you could cheat at something like that, but we were all convinced that was what he was doing. “You get the last shower from here on out, dick.”
He laughed, laying the paperback he had been reading face down on his chest to keep his place. Palmer was the laid-back one of the crew. Never one to take things too seriously—unless we were on the scene of an accident or fire—he was always quick with a laugh or a joke. When things were slow around the firehouse, he was usually the one cutting up, making the rest of us laugh.
Working as a first responder in Grapevine was a whole hell of a lot different than in a big city. There were some shifts when things could get boring, so Palmer took it on himself to make sure things never got too stale.
“What can I say, man? Just lucky, I guess.”
“Lucky my ass. You’re cheating. Just haven’t figured out how yet.”
He let out another bark of laughter, not the least bit insulted. “They’re talkin’ dinner down there.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the opened door that led to the stairs. “Might wanna hustle to get your vote in. I already gave mine.”
I arched a brow. “What are the options tonight?”
His mouth pulled into a wince. “Well, it’s Crawford’s turn to cook.” That explained the look. Crawford was a beast when it came to the job, one of the best men you could want on your team fighting fires, but he couldn’t cook for shit. Rumor had it, when he was on kitchen duty a few years back, he and the entire crew had gone home when their shift was up and were hit with a worst case of food poisoning the town had ever seen. He still came up on rotation regularly because it was only fair, but on his nights, we didn’t vote over what he’d make. We’d vote over whether we were willing to let him cook or if we’d do takeout.
