a far sight different from the surgical scrubs and occasional lab coat he had worn when he’d been a surgeon. But that was just part of the career trade-off. He was okay with it most days.
Today, when he’d pulled that child out of the burning apartment and carried him down the stairs, letting him breathe his air, he’d been very okay with it. The child had been hiding in the back of an old closet. Couldn’t be seen from a normal vantage point. Parents nowhere to be found. But one elderly lady had mentioned there might be a child up there, and that’s all it had taken to raise the hair on the back of his neck. Granted, he hadn’t known if the kid was still in there, but that hadn’t stopped him. Not when there had been a possibility. “If I check out okay, I’m coming back,” he told Steve.
“If you check out okay, you get three days off. This was a close one, Jess, and you brought it on yourself. So, you’re on leave, not suspension, and if you argue with me, it’ll be a week. Got it?”
“After what the lady told me, I should have just left the kid in there?” Jess snapped at his supervisor, instantly regretting it.
“You know what? Doesn’t matter how you check out medically, take the whole week so you’ll have plenty of time to think. Oh, and in case you’ve forgotten protocol, let me remind you that you are required to let someone know where you go. It’s not an option. We don’t do this job alone.” He shrugged. “I don’t want to have to hang you up like this, Corbett, but it’s all I can do. This time you’re off the hook easy. Next time I’ll do something official.”
Steve was right about this. Jess knew it. Didn’t have to like it, but he did know it. So now he had a whole empty week ahead of him. That, if nothing else, was his demon to deal with. “Then I’ll see you in a week.”
“Next week,” Steve said, waving Jess off to the ambulance where he waved off the paramedic who tried to help him in.
“I’m fine,” he grunted at her. Sitting out on the job, the way he was being forced to do, didn’t square with him. But, different from the days when he had been head of trauma in the army, he wasn’t head of anything now. Just another one of the many. Actually, one of the nearly fifteen thousand New York City firefighters and paramedics. One who was close to the bottom of the ladder. It was a good way to get lost, which was all he wanted. Get lost, stay lost. Do his job. Forget the rest of it.
“Which is why you’re in my ambulance?” she asked, following him in the door. “Because you’re fine?”
“Look, just do what you have to do, skip the comments and leave me the hell alone. Okay?” Plopping down on the stretcher inside the ambulance, Jess closed his eyes, even though the light was dimmed to almost total darkness. All he wanted to do was shut out the extraneous noises, but he couldn’t. In Afghanistan, there’d always been noise … screaming, crying, artillery going off. Here, the sounds weren’t the same, but they all amounted to suffering. Here, though, he got there first, made a different difference. Then he moved on, no commitments left behind.
“Too bad. The comments are the best part,” she quipped.
Nice voice. A little throaty, which wasn’t bad in the feminine variety … if he’d been looking for the feminine variety in anything. Which he wasn’t. So he laid his right forearm over his forehead, not so much because it was a comfortable position but more to shut out what he’d see when his eyes adjusted to the dark. The equipment, the storage bins, the paramedic … not his life anymore. “Then comment away, after you check me out and release me,” he said, not wanting to be a grouch about it. She was, after all, just doing her job, and being tough on her because of it wasn’t his style.
“Well, it says here you took in some significant smoke, which means you get a free ride to the hospital like it or not. So, for starters, I need to put the oxygen mask on you …”
Now he was annoyed. He didn’t need oxygen. Didn’t want the damn mask clamped down on his face.
“No, thanks,” he said, finally opening his eyes and shifting his arm up just enough to have a look when his eyes adjusted enough to make out a blur. First sight, red hair. Spunky red, even in the dimness. Short, boyish, in a pixie sort of a way. “Skip the oxygen. My lungs are fine, no matter what my captain thinks.”
She moved toward him, carrying both an oxygen mask and a blood-pressure cuff.
“Blood pressure’s okay, too. Unless you put that oxygen mask on me.”
She laughed. “Scared of a mask, fireman? A little bit claustrophobic?”
“Not scared or claustrophobic. Just don’t need it,” he said, now wishing he could get a better look at her. He was pretty sure she was shapely. Nice curves in silhouette. Oddly familiar to him, even in the dim light.
“Says you?”
“Says me. I’m a … used to be a trauma surgeon.”
“I’m impressed, fireman. But not swayed. You get the mask, I get your blood pressure. And I don’t negotiate.”
“But do you compromise?”
“Whoa, the fireman has an offer to make?”
He couldn’t help but chuckle at that. His paramedic was downright stubborn, and he liked it. “Not an offer. A compromise. I’ll cooperate unconditionally when you take my blood pressure if you let me wear a cannula instead of a mask.” Prongs up the nose were better than a mask any day. The thing was, when he geared up to go on a run, he was all about masks and other equipment. But a simple, lightweight, green oxygen mask … that was his last memory of Donna. Garbled words she’d tried saying to him through her oxygen mask. Words he’d wanted to understand but couldn’t. Words he should have heard if not for that mask.
“So, fireman, are you always this uncooperative?”
“Only when I have to be.”
“Let me guess. In your opinion, that’s most of the time.” He chuckled. “You’ve got some bedside manner, paramedic.”
“I try.” She pulled the cannula from the drawer and handed it to him. “Since you seem to know my job, you do the honors while I crank this baby up to full squeeze.” She was referring to the blood-pressure cuff she was dangling over him.
Damn, he really wanted a better look at her. She was tweaking his memory and all he could see right now were big protective eye goggles and a surgical mask. Smart move, considering all the soot and debris flying around out there, but very frustrating. “Is that a threat?”
“A promise.” She took his blood pressure then tossed the cuff back in the drawer.
“One twenty over eighty. Pretty good, for a man in your disgruntled and extremely dirty condition. Here, let me clean some of that soot off your face.” Grabbing a bottle of sterile water, she twisted off the lid then soaked a gauze pad and started to dab at his face. But he caught her wrist and stopped her.
“One twenty over eighty? Did you mean to tell me it was a perfect blood-pressure reading rather than just a pretty good one? Oh, and the dirty face is fine, it comes with the job.”
She wrestled out of his grip. “And the fireman gets a demerit for the worst manners I’ve met all day.”
“What the fireman wants is to get the hell out of
