Flash Point - Savannah Kade Page 0,10
brother here tells me you guys were out camping tonight. Is that right?” Leo hadn't quite believed Sterling’s story, but he didn’t know where the problem was. He watched as Bennett nodded along.
The clench Leo felt in his gut was real and he wanted to curl his fingers into fists to match. He was mad—mad at these kids, mad that the land was going up in flames, mad that he hadn't heard from the chief that they'd put it out. He wasn't mad that he'd been called out in the middle of the night. That was par for the course. But the rest of it? He was fighting himself not to unload on these two kids who honestly hadn't done anything that other kids hadn't. They just simply managed to catch their world on fire.
“I'm glad you're both found, and you can get warm now,” Leo told him, but at the last moment a spark caught in his brain and he tossed out a question. “It was just you and your brother out there, right?”
Next to him, Bennett uttered the one tight word, “Yes!”
But Leo knew better. Bennett and Sterling were lying and there was another kid still lost in the night with a fire raging nearby.
Chapter Seven
Jo was wrapping her hair in a towel when a knock at the door startled her.
Reaching out, and not liking that she wasn't dressed, she put her hand flat on the backside of the door. Holding it shut, she reminded herself that anyone with bad intentions wouldn't be knocking first. Probably.
“Yes?” she called out, almost relieved when she heard the Chief’s voice.
“You good?”
Why wouldn't she be?
“Yes?” she called back wondering why he would even ask.
“Can you be ready in about five?”
Oh! she thought, that was different. Jo reassessed the situation. Are you good? didn’t mean “the woman was taking too long in the bathroom.” It meant “are you warm? Can you go back out?” That was an acceptable thing to ask her.
“Yes!” she said, this time with far more assurance. “What's up?”
“We’ve got a Search and Rescue,” he told her, still calling through the heavy door. “Come out as soon as you can.”
“Will do, Chief.” She took her hand off the door, then turned around and toweled off as fast as she could. Fuck, she thought.
That meant going back out in this weather. It meant drying her hair completely. If she didn’t, it would freeze and turn any mistake into a deadly one.
Jo wondered what the search and rescue was about. They'd heard the two little boys from the fire were found. The Beatrice department had come in and taken over and the blaze was mostly knocked back before A-shift had left. The fire had been declared “under control” and that the remaining firefighters could handle it. Her shift had been ready to be relieved.
Taggert guided them back to the station to warm up, eat, and rest. They would stay alert in case things changed—shift wasn’t over—but no one expected anything other than the Beatrice crew to knock it all the way back and then go home themselves. If Taggert was still at the station in the middle of the night, that either meant he’d seen the fire get fully quenched or … something worse had come along that required their attention.
Once she was dry enough—she dressed in just a few moments; she was a professional—Jo opened the door and turned to look down the hallway, catching Kalan Smith as he passed by. “Dude, can you tell the chief that I have to dry my hair and I'll be ready to go.”
He offered her a small mock salute and the same response she’d given just moments before. “Will do.”
She hated the drying her hair part. The guys had short hair. They dried it by running their hands over it and only used the hairdryers if they needed to head right back out and in bad conditions like today. She could have put her hair up wet if the temperature wasn’t threatening to go sub-freezing.
Once again, she thought about chopping it all off. But, one, chopping it right now wasn’t an option. And, two, she fucking wasn't going to cut her hair. The long hair was the only thing she held on to, everything else she’d given over to the job. She didn’t make friends. She didn’t have relationships with anyone at work other than getting the job done. She loved the work but didn’t trust the workers.
She didn’t rebel, did everything asked of