Trial by Fire (3 page)

N
ick threw his hands over his face, elbows in the air, as Ray's anguished cry told him all he needed to know about Ben's condition. Ray's firstborn child and only son was dead.

He wailed out his own lament, oblivious to Karen and Bob, the paramedics who worked quickly to swap Cale's tank for their own oxygen mask. He sat up, clutching the mask, straining to see the boy.

He saw Ray fall onto his son's body and lift him up, as if by holding him he could bring him back to life. Issie's smoke-stained face twisted with momentary despair. Then, wiping her tears, as if rolling up her sleeves, she abandoned the body and ran over to Nick.

“Is he all right?” she asked Karen, as if Nick couldn't speak for himself.

“Smoke inhalation,” Karen said. “Airway doesn't seem patent. Nasal hairs are singed. Carbonaceous residue in the nose and mouth. He needs immediate transport. Also several pretty bad abrasions…Second-degree burns on the legs…”

“Let us take him,” Issie said. “Nick's a friend of mine. You take care of Ben.”

Nick couldn't take his eyes from Ben, limp in his father's arms. “He's dead, isn't he?” Nick managed to croak out.

She seemed to ignore him as they lifted his gurney into the ambulance. “There was nothing we could do,” she said in a dull monotone, as if he hadn't already seen the tears streaking through the smoke stains on her face. “He was probably dead before the fire.”

“What do you mean?”

“There's a bullet hole through his head.”

“Bullet hole?” Nick tried to sit up again. He hadn't seen a bullet hole, not with all the smoke and soot and rubble covering Ben. He wanted to ask where it was, but he couldn't make his voice function, and as Issie hung the bag and began to examine his legs, pain shot through him, clearing his mind of anything but that.

Steve Winder jumped into the unit. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Radio in, Steve. I need permission to intubate before the airway closes.”

“Intubate?” Nick choked. “No, I don't—”

“Nick, let me be the medic, okay?” Issie said. “I have to do it to keep it open, or it'll be so edematous that I can't get a tube in. But I'll do the nasotracheal.”

He heard Steve talking to the receiving physician, and the doctor giving them the go-ahead. He tried to hold himself still as Issie threaded the painful tube into his nose and down his trachea. “I know it hurts,” she said as she worked rapidly. “But I have to use as big a tube as I can get in, just to keep the way open. That's good. Don't try to talk.”

But Nick had so many questions. If Ben had a bullet hole through his head, who had shot him? Had Ben started the fire, or had the killer?

He arched at the pain as she checked his burns again.

“Second degree, partial thickness, Steve. Eight percent. He feels it, all right.”

As Steve radioed that into the receiving physician, Nick tried to remove his mind from the pain. She opened his clothes carefully, trying not to peel any cloth from the burns. “Nick, where else are you in pain? I only see burns on your legs.”

He pointed to his right side. She began to palpate him. “Feels like broken ribs,” she yelled to Steve. “Possible internal injuries.”

But Nick's mind wandered from his own injuries to the fire chief and deacon in his church, who had just encountered one of the worst tragedies of his life.

S
usan Ford ran two stop signs and a red light, then screeched around a corner. The smoke billowing above the trees on Antoinette Boulevard was her target. She didn't know who had called to tell her that her son had been found in the fire. She couldn't remember if the caller was a man or a woman, or whether it had been someone she knew. All she remembered were the words, hitting her like a cruel blast of evil.

She heard a siren and saw an ambulance heading the opposite direction, and her mother's heart almost made her turn around and follow. But something told her that wasn't Ben.

Maybe it was the voice on the phone, the finality of the tone, the very words they had chosen…
It's too late, isn't it, Lord? Don't let it be too late.

Her brown hands trembled as she punched on the scanner that Ray kept in the car. She tried to tune to the police frequency for information, but all she got was static.

She ran another red light, then peeled around a corner. The church came into view and she saw the flames that had devoured it, saw the firefighters still spraying it, saw the emergency vehicles parked in haphazard fashion wherever they had found a place on the street.

Paying no regard to the yellow tape blocking off the road, she drove right through it and came to a halt in front of the pumper truck.

She threw the door open and bolted out of the car. Another ambulance was parked at the curb, but there was no light flashing and no siren blaring. The paramedics were not hurrying.

She looked around for someone who could help her, then screamed, “Ray!”

Mark surrendered the hose to another firefighter, then jogged to be at her side. She didn't like the look on his face. “Susan…”

“Where's Ray?” she demanded, unable to ask where her son was. She didn't want to know yet, didn't want to hear the words. Somewhere in the pit of her stomach, she already knew.

“He's in the ambulance,” he said, “with Ben.”

Something about the way he said that gave her hope. She turned and ran to the ambulance, tried to get the door open. When she couldn't, she just banged on it, screaming, “Ray! Ray, let me in!”

The door came open, and she looked up and saw her husband slumped inside.

And next to him she saw a body with a sheet over it.

Her head was suddenly cloudy, her vision blurred, and she collapsed onto the asphalt. Ray leaped out of the rescue unit and gathered her back up.

“My baby.” Her words, couched in pain and brokenness, were barely audible.

“He's gone,” Ray said. “Shhh. He's gone.” His voice was hoarse, high pitched, and she could feel the pain coursing through him as he held her.

“What was he
doin'
here?” she asked through her teeth.

“Nobody knows.”

Not satisfied with that answer, Susan pulled out of Ray's arms, straightened with determination, and climbed into the rescue unit. She went to the body, grabbed the sheet and pulled it back, saw his face and his charred arms, the hair singed on his scalp…

Then she saw the hole through his forehead. Another anguished scream ripped out of her. “He was shot! Ray, he was shot!”

Ray nodded, but couldn't manage to speak a word.

“Who shot him?” she screamed. “Who shot my baby?”

He tried to guide her away from the body. She wailed in rage and despair, as if her very cries could bring him back from the dead.

 

O
utside the ambulance, Mark and the other firefighters began to realize the hopelessness of the situation. Already, most of the building had been consumed, and it was obvious that nothing was going to be salvageable. The roof had continued to cave in, little by little, and now some of the walls were beginning to crumble. Whoever was responsible for this had done a thorough job.

Mark ran to the truck to switch air tanks. Dan was already there doing the same.

“It's gone, man,” he said. “The church is history.”

Mark shook his head and stared back at it. “I can't believe it. In the blink of an eye it's totally gone.”

He didn't have the heart to fight the fire anymore, but still he put his mask back on and plunged back into the smoke. He had a job to do whether it looked possible or not, but he knew as soon as the fire was put out, the real work would begin.

I
ssie couldn't get Nick off her mind as she finished her shift that afternoon. In an uncharacteristically busy day, she had transported another fireman for smoke inhalation, then Miller Henderson over on Spencer Circle had gone into cardiac arrest. Apparently, he had been the carpenter who'd made the pews and pulpit for the church, and had keeled over at the thought that his work had all been destroyed. She'd revived him before she had gotten him into the ambulance, and the last word was that he was stable. Then there'd been a wreck over on the highway, and a teenaged boy escaped with his life.

It had been one of those days. But it was precisely because of the busyness of the afternoon that Issie found herself too tense to rest now. She was filled with nervous energy, and her thoughts kept gravitating back to the preacher. Nick had been diagnosed with smoke inhalation, bruised ribs, and second-degree burns that would keep him in the hospital overnight. The receiving physician had dealt with his airway first. Because both sides of his lungs sounded good, he was able to rule out a collapsed lung and determined that he was ventilating and oxygenating properly. He rushed him into the X-ray room and saw that there was no significant damage to the lungs. He had decided to take the tube out and administer oxygen through a mask. The medics had done the right thing, he told them in a rare compliment passed from doctor to paramedic. The chances of his airway closing en route had been high.

Because the doctor seemed reasonable, she had bucked protocol and stayed with Nick while he debrided the top, blistery layer of his burned skin. She'd made sure they gave him pain medication before they started the excruciating scrub-down with the antibacterial solution. He'd clung to her hand, his grip almost crushing her fingers, and yelled without inhibition as they ministered to his wounds. She had stayed, talking him through it like a Lamaze coach, until they applied the Silvadene, an antibiotic ointment which gave some relief. She had left him as they were dressing the wounds, knowing that someone back in Newpointe might need her again.

All the way back, she and Steve had been quiet. They'd kept the usually loud radio station off, and had both been lost in their thoughts. She couldn't get Ray and Ben out of her mind. Daily, they witnessed tragedy, sometimes were active players in it. It rarely made sense, and this made the least sense of all. Tragedy and death were no respecters of persons. They happened to good and bad people alike. Living the “good life” was no protection against life's blows, she thought, so what was the point in walking the straight lines?

She wasn't hungry enough to eat when she got off duty, and it was too early to go to Joe's Place, the bar where so many of the protective services employees hung out, so she decided to go back to the hospital in Slidell to see how Nick was doing. She donned a pair of blue jeans and a pink blouse. Her uniform was so colorless and bland that she tried to wear bright things as often as possible when she wasn't on duty.

As she took her hair out of its binding and shook it out, she wondered why she was making such a fuss. It wasn't like she was trying to impress Nick Foster, of all people. He was as different from her as the east was from the west. That was a quote from the Bible, she thought with a smirk, though she had no idea of the context. She doubted it had anything to do with personalities.

She touched up her makeup and applied lipstick to match her blouse, then stood back and took a look. She was still a pretty woman. She knew that because men's heads turned wherever she went. Only recently had she realized that was not necessarily a good thing.

The men who turned
her
head were nothing but trouble. For years that hadn't bothered her. The more trouble the better, as far as she was concerned. If they were married or ex-cons or escaped cons, or drinkers or druggies, or daredevils, or irreverently charming or roguish, they were her type.

But it was only lately that she realized the domino effect her own behavior had on other lives. She didn't live in a vacuum, and nothing she did affected her life only. There were wives and children, jobs at stake, even her own physical well-being…and she had found lately that she was known by the company she kept.

She wondered why it was that once you got on the wrong track it was so hard to get off. You just kept going, hoping somewhere the road would turn. But it never did.

She tugged herself away from the mirror, telling herself that she didn't need to stroll down this dark lane where she started hating herself and counting regrets.

She hurried out of her apartment as if fleeing from the thoughts pressing down on her, and dashed out to her car. She turned the radio on as loud as she could stand it. All the way to Slidell, she listened to blaring rock music, as if the volume could chase any random thought from her mind. The music kept her from thinking too hard about herself and her regrets. It always worked. If she just drove fast and kept busy, stopped thinking, hummed along to the music, she would eventually forget those thoughts that haunted her, and get back to living her life, without indictment, guilt, or apprehension. By the time she got to Joe's Place tonight, she'd have a clear mind and be able to start all over again, drinking what she liked, meeting whom she wanted, going home with whomever caught her eye.

The other paramedics would arrive there with various degrees of fatigue, ready to swap stories about their medical adventures that day…whose lives they'd saved, whose they'd lost, disgusting things they had dealt with, funny things patients had said…And then there were always the stories about the hospital personnel—young doctors who didn't even know how to properly intubate a patient, grumpy nurses who treated the medics like inferiors. Tonight she would tell of the doctor who'd admitted Nick, and how he'd treated her like someone who knew what she was doing. He was rare enough to make a good story.

They were her family, even more than her own family had ever been. Her mother had died two years earlier, but she hadn't grieved, for the woman had left her to fend for herself long before it was civil to do so. She had worked at a bar in Slidell until the day she died, chain-smoked, and never rebleached her hair until the black roots were two inches long. Issie had been ashamed of her.

When she'd needed a woman's ear, Issie had turned instead to Karen Insminger, the thirty-year-old medic they considered something of a matriarch in a young profession. She had a lot more miles on her than her age would suggest, and had managed to keep from burning out like so many other paramedics did. She thrived on the thrill of saving lives, of leaping giant obstacles, of doing what others could not do. She had seen things that normal humans should never see, had patched up gore and prolonged both life and death. She always had a story to tell.

When Issie couldn't talk to her father, an alcoholic who had abandoned her and moved to Las Vegas to strike it rich when she was eight years old, she talked to Steve Winder, her wiser, married, slightly older partner who shot straight with her. He dispensed advice to her, welcome or unwelcome, like he dispensed IV bags and epinephrine, and didn't mind telling her if she was stupid when, in fact, she was. He had never shown a romantic interest in her, which was why they worked well together. Instead, he seemed slightly amused and a little disgusted at her life, though his didn't seem that appealing to her, either. Since he left his wife at home with the kids while he hung out at Joe's Place almost every night, she figured his credibility was slightly impaired. Yes, he was like her father in many ways, except that Steve did occasionally show interest in Issie's life.

And then there was Bob Sigrest, the jokester of the group, who turned every horrible, ugly call into a stand-up routine, and had them laughing over their beer when they could just as easily have been crying. He was the great stress-reliever, the one who helped them keep things in perspective. He was the one who forced them to stop dwelling on death and gore, and kept them functioning. The two of them had shared a couple of trysts over the last couple of years, when night bled into morning and the alcohol had properly dulled their good sense. It usually took weeks for their friendship to recover, but eventually, it always had. The times following those “mistakes,” as she called them, were some of the loneliest she had ever spent. There was nothing worse than having to avoid someone's eyes because you'd done things in the dark that you would never have done in the light. If the lights could just stay perpetually off, if she never had to look in the mirror in daylight, her life might be easier to live.

But regardless of their past, she still enjoyed being around Bob, and Frenchy, and Twila (built like a linebacker and able to restrain the most combative patients, though her name made her sound like a petite blonde), and all the medics who showed up at Joe's Place every night. Sometimes a couple of firemen or cops would join them, and they'd try to outdo each other, implying that the other occupation was for wimps and old ladies, and that only theirs was the noble profession of heroes and champions.

They were a family, all right, not always a happy one, but they served their purpose much better than her real family did. Issie didn't waste her time trying to explain that relationship, or her need to spend each evening at the bar, to people who judged her. No one but another medic could really understand. She supposed firefighters and cops had the same relationship, that they, too, suffered stress unequaled in regular jobs.

She didn't know how Nick Foster managed to get through an ordinary night without a stiff drink and comrades who'd seen what he'd seen that day. Mark and Dan, she could understand. Being married, they had companions waiting at home, though she couldn't imagine how Allie had any understanding at all of Mark's job, when she did nothing more dangerous than pricking her finger on a rose thorn at the florist. Jill, Dan's wife, was a lawyer, so she wasn't exactly sheltered from the things they encountered. But it still wasn't the same. That was why, for a while, Mark had come to Joe's Place at night to sit around the table and swap stories and insults. As the alcohol filled their bloodstreams, the talk inevitably grew more serious, until Issie and Mark would be left there alone, in deep conversation about his marriage and her singleness.

But Allie had straightened him out somehow, and now he avoided both Joe's Place and Issie, as though either of them had the power to cast a spell on him that would lead him right back to destruction.

Or maybe it was Nick casting the spells. The preacher did seem to have a strong influence on those who attended his church. Like the pied piper, he had a charisma that she didn't understand, charisma that led people to do as he said. She wondered if it had anything to do with his blue eyes under those glasses he always hid behind, or his teddy bear look that made women want to hug him. He seemed harmless enough, yet he sure kept his people marching straight.

She got to the hospital in Slidell, got his room number from information, and headed up. His door was wide open, and she stepped over the threshold. Nick lay in bed with an oxygen mask over his face. He was attached to an IV replacing critical fluids in his body, and he lay staring out the window overlooking the parking lot. She rapped lightly on the door.

He turned, and she saw the shadows under his eyes. He wasn't wearing his glasses, and it was clear from the strained look on his face that he was in a lot of pain. He pulled the mask down. “Issie,” he said, but his voice was damaged. He wouldn't be singing tenor for a while.

She grinned and came inside. “I've been upset all day that they undid my hard work and took the tube out, so I came by to put it back in.”

He smiled weakly and held out a hand to stop her. “Don't come near me with any tubes.”

She laughed and came to the bed. “You're not mad, are you?”

He shook his head. “I owe you a big one. You looked out for me. Thanks.”

She shrugged off the gratitude. “I sure wouldn't recognize that voice over the phone. I'm surprised you're not worse off. Smoke inhalation can be deadly. Your nasal hairs were singed, you know. That's a bad sign.”

“It was only seconds between my tanks failing and the guys bringing me oxygen. Seemed like a long time, but I still had my mask on and had that little pocket of air. I wasn't inhaling any more than I had to.”

His voice just about cut out. Issie saw the ice chips on his table and offered him some. He lifted his mask and let her feed him.

“Thanks,” he whispered when his throat was wet again. “I don't even know why they're keeping me here overnight. I'm fine. I have too much to do to be stuck here.”

Issie dropped her purse on a chair and set her hands on her hips. “Don't kid me, Nick. Smoke inhalation, second-degree burns, bruised ribs. They have to keep you on this IV at least overnight, and get you set up on the dressing care program. In the morning, they'll probably get you to physical therapy for a whirlpool cleansing of the burn. And you know, you could still have internal bleeding. They have to watch you and make sure your stomach doesn't start swelling up and that you keep breathing normally. Not to scare you or anything.”

“Thanks,” he whispered. “You give me great peace.”

“Hey, medics don't do peace. We give great pre-hospital care, but peace is where we draw the line.” He smiled, and she turned her attention to the bandages on his legs. “So how are these feeling?”

“Ever been fried in a cauldron of hot oil?” he asked.

“Not that I recall.”

“Well, it's something like that.”

“Ouch,” she said. “That's gotta hurt. So are you using the painkillers?”

“Morphine.” He held up the pump. “I just click here if I need a dose. I'm trying to use it as little as possible. Don't want to get hooked.”

“Use it if you need it, Nick. You won't get hooked.”