Consumed

Abruptly, Danny blinked and saw only white, that rage of his coming back online with a hard-on.

The next thing he was aware of was Moose’s bearded face. His old roomie was up close and personal, and he was speaking, that mouth moving.

Danny couldn’t hear shit. It was like he was underwater, everything muffled.

“—come on now. I’m riding with you.”

There was a pull on Danny’s arm, and he glanced down, seeing Moose’s hand grip his biceps and urge him toward the interior of the ambulance.

“Play the game,” Moose said quietly. “You got too much to lose if you don’t. You don’t want to go out like this.”

Chavez stepped up. “Come on, Dannyboy. The ER will fast-track you and then we’ll be at Timeout. Okay?”

“Work with us,” Moose added. “As much as I’ve wanted to kick your ass since eight this morning, I don’t want you taking a shot at the chief. You can’t trust that voice in your head, Danny. I know that firsthand. The one that’s talking to you now always steers you wrong.”

• • •

Anne left work at five p.m., taking the stairs from the third floor down to the first. As she funneled across the lobby to the glass doors, she joined a cue of fellow municipal employees, everybody walking out into the late afternoon sunshine and finding their cars in the maze of the parking lot. On the way back to her house, she stopped at Papa Joe’s Pizza, a locally owned joint that she’d been going to since she’d moved into the neighborhood six years ago.

With her pepperoni-and-onion in the passenger seat, she continued on to Mapleton Avenue and hung a left. Her house, a nine-hundred-square-foot Cape Cod, was halfway down the street. Her garage was detached, and she parked in front of its single closed door.

Pizza in her good hand. Bag on her left shoulder. As she came up to her front door, she used the forefinger on her prosthesis to punch in a numerical code on the new lock she’d had installed a month after the fire.

When you had only one functioning hand, keys were a thing.

Inside, it smelled like home, a combination of Tide washing detergent, lemons, and something that was intrinsically 1404 Mapleton.

Kicking the door closed, she was abruptly exhausted.

The trip through the living space into the kitchen was a whopping twelve steps, and she ate the pizza standing up and next to the sink because she always washed her hand first and it seemed pretentious to set her Crate & Barrel table for one. She made it through half of the medium pie, put the rest away for tomorrow night’s reheat in the oven—never the microwave, because that made the crust spongy when it was hot and tough as nails when it was not—and then she just stood there.

God, her place was quiet.

And the only good news was that it wasn’t a Friday or a Saturday night. A random Monday was no big deal to be home alone with no other options than a CrossFit class, Big Bang Theory reruns, or cleaning a perfectly clean house. The weekends, on the other hand, were bad. All her buddies had been firefighters, but that was gone now—and it wasn’t that they didn’t liked her anymore, far from it. Even though she’d been the only woman in the boys’ club, they’d never treated her as anything other than equal.

The trouble was, after things had changed for her, she’d become a reminder of the risk pool they lived in, a downer through no fault of her own. And besides, over at Timeout, the boys spent their time trading in-jokes, bad stories, and shit that had happened at work.

She was out of the loop for the last one, and as for the bad stories? She was part of a big one that didn’t have a har-har at the end.

Anne looked down at her prosthesis. When she’d had the mold taken of her remaining hand, she remembered the guy asking her if she wanted the nails painted any specific kind of color. She’d thought he’d been serious, but it was a joke—and not a mean one. He’d been a veteran who was missing both his legs and walking very naturally around on his artificial limbs.

You can do this, he’d told her. I promise you.

“I can do this,” she said to her empty house.

The lack of an answer back seemed a commentary on her life, and that made her think of her mother’s latest bright idea. The woman was always offering to come over and “add a few touches” to Anne’s place. “Spruce things up.” “Make things more cozy.”

So she wanted to bring over a ficus. And not a plastic one.

Anne had sent her an email saying no because that was more efficient than a phone conversation that had a one-minute hello and a nineteen minute I’ve-got-to-go-now on her side. And as for the home stuff? The woman had never understood. These four walls and a roof were like the refrigerator of someone who ate out all the time. Back when she’d been at the fire station, she’d only come here to crash and recover enough to go back to work.

Her home had been where her job was.

Besides, she’d had enough Laura Ashley in the nineties to last her twelve lifetimes.

When one of her ankles began to ache, she glanced across at the digital clock on the microwave. She’d been standing here for a good half hour.

Motivating herself, she went across to the year-round porch that overlooked her small fenced-in backyard. She’d set up an office in the space as a way to ground herself in her new reality, thinking that she’d need a home base as an investigator. A trip to OfficeMax had yielded a laptop and a scanner/copier, as well as a low-end desk and a cheapie black chair with rollers under the base.

As she parked it in front of the setup, she opened the laptop, but didn’t turn it on.

She’d also bought herself some pens, document clips, a small pack of folders. Three legal pads and a ream of paper.

Looking around at everything, she decided it had been a waste of $400, just the vocabulary of an office instead of—

Anne frowned and focused on the laptop. Then she pushed herself back and regarded the desk. The scanner/copier.

The laptop again.

Office supplies. Bog-standard . . . office supplies. Like the ones that had been in her warehouse fire.

With a burst of energy, she got to her feet, flashed into the kitchen, and grabbed her bag.

She was in such a hurry to leave the house, she forgot to lock up.

Chapter 13

The Timeout Sports Bar & Grill was a venerable establishment, with a founding date of 1981. Back then, when everyone had been calling 867-5309 because some chick had Bette Davis eyes and every little thing she did was magic, it had been cutting-edge with its video games in one corner, the pool tables in the back, and the pictures of Larry Bird, Bobby Orr, and the “Miracle on Ice” team fresh and unfaded.

Thirty-seven years later? The original posters were still up, but Nomar and Dustin, Tom Brady and Cam Neely were flashing smiles along with the old greats, and the video games had been replaced by a booth section and more flat-screen TVs than a Best Buy’s showroom. The pool tables were still there, however, and Carl’s old lady, Terri, who ran the place after his death, would let you light up in the back as long as you popped a window and ashed in your longneck, not on her floor.

As with the evolving heroes in the frames, so, too, the clientele was a new generation of the same that had gone before. The firemen, cops, and detectives who were now sitting at the tables, playing pool, or hanging around the bar were the sons and nephews, the daughters and nieces, of the ones who had been there in the eighties, the nineties, the aughties.

“I bring you another one.”

Danny glanced up at the waitress as she put a fresh Bud down in front of him. Josefina had worked there for a year now, and with her long black hair and her deep brown eyes, she was something to look at, for sure.

“You know me too well,” he said.

“Sí, Dannyboy. I know you.”

As the woman winked and headed back to the bar, Moose cursed. “Do you mind.”

Danny took a pull and sat forward in his hard chair. “’Bout what.”

“Why do you have to get every female in this place?”

“I haven’t gone out with her.”

“Yet.”

“Nah.” He eyed the dark-haired woman as she took an order from another table. “Chavez would kill me. He’s in love with her.”