anything to a braggart was like spitting into the wind, with her likely coming out the loser. She might have been only five or six when he’d shared that particular bit of wisdom, but she’d gotten the message.
And that was why she’d never missed any of the self-defense lessons her papa had given her and her older sister, Maggie, every Saturday morning. If you couldn’t reason with bullies, sometimes you had to fight, she figured. It was also why, instead of leaving after, she used to sit on the Christmas tree bailer and watch Brody’s lessons.
But when she’d asked if she could take both, complaining all she and Maggie got for a weapon was a stick while Brody got to wield a sword, her papa had scooped her up with a laugh and plopped her on top of his tall, broad shoulders.
As he strode to the barn, he explained he was teaching his two beautiful daughters how to use anything that was straight and stout as a weapon, because in all likelihood they wouldn’t have a sword handy if they ever needed to defend themselves. He’d then promised Katy that, by her early teens, and wielding nothing more than a common broom, she would be able to trounce a grown man—including, he’d added with a tug on her leg, Brody.
Katy felt a fresh surge of tears at how much she missed those Saturday morning lessons, and her being so sure that by the time she left home, she could even trounce the world.
Except three weeks ago, the world had trounced her instead.
And in doing so, had turned her into a murderer.
Chapter Eight
Closing in on twenty minutes of searching upstairs and down and even the parking lot and fire pit area for his missing crew, Gunnar finally reached the end of his patience. None of the six squad members—one of whom was Katy, whom he hadn’t seen in three days—was responding to his texts or in-house pages. Even Welles was suspiciously absent.
By God, manually setting off the alarm should bring the delinquents running.
Gunnar reentered the station through an open bay door and strode down between the aerial and main engine, only to stop when he came to the empty slot where their rescue truck usually sat. He slowly turned in a circle. Both ambulances were here, as well as engines one and two, the aerial, and the on-duty captain’s pickup. Only 987 was out.
He couldn’t have missed an alarm. Christ, the few times it had sounded on his shift, every cell in his body had screamed in pain. And the one time it had gone off at night, he’d bolted out of bed ready to punch anything that moved, only to grab his pounding chest when he realized where he was, certain he was having a heart attack. How in hell did these people survive entire careers of constant adrenaline spikes? He’d been here barely three weeks and had already lost the ability to sleep through an entire night, even away from the station.
Hell, maybe Conroy was grouchy because she hadn’t slept in twenty-five years.
Gunnar cocked his head when he caught the muffled sound of snickering, then strode toward the utility room again. He stopped just short of the door and peeked around the corner to see his four missing firefighters and Conroy lined up along a large open window, their attention fixed on something outside.
Silently, he walked over and stood behind Gretchen because she was the shortest—calling herself five-foot-one was a bald-faced lie—and looked out the window to see what was so fascinating. But the only thing out there was their rescue truck, backed up at an odd angle against the thirty-foot wall of granite that had been cut out of the mountain to make room for the station. Then he heard voices coming from a fairly good height and leaned forward slightly to see the top of the cliff.
“The windshield,” Russo whispered from the side of his grinning mouth, keeping his eyes trained out the window while gesturing with his head.
Gunnar dropped his gaze to the truck’s windshield at the same time he heard a distinctly feminine snort, then stiffened when he saw the reflection of Katy hanging some twenty feet down from the top of their hose tower—leaving her another twenty feet above the ground—with Welles hanging from his own rope just off to her right.
“Listen,” Russo whispered.
“Well, I guess now we know,” Gunnar heard Katy mutter, “why they insisted on using the hose tower instead of the