Rescue - By Anita Shreve Page 0,17

to full-time and stayed at Rescue during his shifts. He’d been given the graveyard tour: midnight till eight. Sheila worked days at Geezer’s, as she’d come to call it, which made him wonder why someone else hadn’t thought up the nickname earlier. When his tour was over, he’d hang around Rescue for twenty minutes to talk to the new team, and then he’d go over to the diner for breakfast. She looked demeaned in the shiny gray uniform with the white apron. She usually told him he looked like hell, and he told her she looked nice. Sometimes she’d manage to brush her hand against his. Once she’d bent down and wrapped an arm around him, pretending to be reading an article in a newspaper Webster had spread on the counter. For Webster, breakfast in the diner was a necessity, but he ached when he left. He thought of Sheila as a drug that had hooked him after only one hit.

Sometimes Sheila asked him questions about his night. He’d tell her everything about each case, getting rid of the images and smells. She never made wisecracks about his work. Maybe the memory of her own accident was too fresh. He wondered what she did at night.

Four days into the third week, he’d ridden into Rescue with Burrows. They’d had a bad night, and the images weren’t pretty. Webster unloaded the back of the Bullet and hefted as much equipment as he could into Rescue and onto the counter in the squad room. So intent was he on getting the equipment into the basins without dropping something that he missed her over by the coffee machine. He noted an odd silence in the room and looked up to see Sheila with Callahan, a new recruit who’d arrived for the next tour.

For a moment, Webster felt paralyzed. What the hell was Sheila doing there? She had on her leather jacket, a black turtleneck, a different pair of jeans. Her hair was pinned up. A jolt traveled from his groin to his chest and back again. Burrows put a hand on his shoulder. “Relax, Webster,” he said. “It’s not as if anyone can keep a secret in this town.”

Webster joined Sheila at the coffee machine, and Callahan slid away. A manufactured banter behind him broke the silence.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I came to buy you a drink.”

“It’s eight o’clock in the morning. There isn’t a bar open in the entire state of Vermont.”

She leaned against the counter and cocked her head. “How about Albany?” she asked, teasing him. “That’s a city, isn’t?”

“I’m not driving to Albany.”

She put a finger to her cheek, mock thinking. “The bar at my place is open,” she said, as if it had just occurred to her.

“At this hour?”

“Yup.”

“Don’t you have to work?”

“I’m at the dentist’s,” she said with a smile. “That’s what Geezer thinks, anyway.”

“I have to clean the equipment, pack it away. Talk to the next crew. Give me twenty minutes.”

Webster worked steadily, aware of the glances of the other medics. If one of them was going to report him for fraternization, then so be it. He should be mad at Sheila for so casually jeopardizing his job.

After he left Rescue, he got into his car, Sheila already in the passenger seat.

Once inside the house with the jalousie porch, he took a quick glance around the kitchen, then grabbed her by the soft sleeve of her jacket, turned her around, and kissed her. She broke away and laughed at him. She guided him onto the porch. He didn’t care about being close to the road. Let the whole world watch.

She sat on the daybed and took off her clothes in a perfunctory way, as if she were alone. Another woman might have made a tease of it. For the first time, Webster saw her breasts, her pubic hair, the scar across her belly.

“You’re fucking gorgeous,” he said. Then he nodded in the direction of the scar. “Won’t that hurt?”

“I doubt I’ll notice it,” she said. “Though if you stand there with your jacket on much longer, I might get bored and fall asleep.”

The Sheila who’d had a no-nonsense way of removing her clothes slipped into a woman who was at least as pent up as Webster. It might be weeks before they could learn to take it slow.

Webster watched Sheila sleep in the overheated room of the B and B, the sheet pulled up over her breasts, a slender arm exposed and relaxed. The glossy