Fire & Dark (The Night Horde SoCal Book 3) (12 page)

“Cordero, fuck! Let’s get it wet down.”

That would turn smoke and vapor into dense fog. “I won’t be able to see, then. I got it.”

“Fuck. I’m right behind you.” He hit his mic. “We need a unit on the line in here. Rescue going hot to the second floor.”

“Belay that. Line coming in.”

Pilar heard the order and ignored it. Fire moved fast. She saw the way through, but it wouldn’t be there long.

She could hear Moore huff into his mic. “No go. We’re up already.”

Then he was right behind her, following her path. When they got to the top, the blaze looked impassable, but Pilar had seen the break in it. She crossed just as water spumed up from below, and smoke and vapor filled the air.

They moved into the hallway, where flames were burning straight up the walls but staying close to the baseboards on the floor. Fire was a lazy bastard and always took the easiest path; Pilar turned and met Moore’s face shield, the best they could do for a meaningful look. Investigation wasn’t their field, but they both thought this looked like accelerant. On the second floor.

That was somebody else’s problem; they were on a rescue mission. Half the doors on the hallway were open. They checked each room, Pilar laying her hand on the closed doors and reading the stats before knocking them in. They found fire licking up the walls, blocking the windows, creeping onto the floor space in an oddly controlled way.

Toward the end of the hallway, on the interior side, Pilar laid her hand on a closed door and found a temperature read that suggested no fire—probably because the oxygen content was so low. Smoke must have filled the room. Nothing about this fire made sense.

With so little oxygen, there was little danger of backdraft, so she tried the knob. It turned, but the door didn’t give. It was blocked, and Pilar he thought she knew why. She rapped on the hollow, interior door, high, then moved downward, getting a sense of the block. It was low and thick. A body, then.

She turned and gestured to Moore, signaling what she intended. Then she raised her Halligan, meaning to hit high and rip the door in half. She could grab the kid, and Moore could get the dad. With luck, they were just unconscious.

He nodded.

And then the ceiling collapsed behind him. As fire fell from above, he lunged forward, into Pilar, and they tumbled to the floor. They were surrounded by flames.

Still lying on top of her, Moore yelled into his mic, “Structural collapse. Repeat, structural collapse. The ceiling is down, second floor. Full involvement. We are flanked.” He looked around and then rolled off her. They had about six feet clear around them. If help didn’t come from below soon, they were fucked.

“We need to get in there.”

Pilar nodded. “Aim high.”

Moore stood and swung his irons at the door. When he pulled out and took another swing, the water arrived and settled the fire.

Scalding fog filled the space, bringing the temperature up to brimstone intensity. Moore ripped the door open. Father and son were on the floor on the other side, unconscious. Moore reached over what was left of the door and grabbed the father, muscling him over his shoulders. Then Pilar grabbed the boy. They picked their way through the debris and headed to the staircase.

Outside, three engines and a tanker were now on the scene. And, joy of joys, a satellite news truck. The brush at the back was involved now, and that was a potential crisis, a wildfire waiting to break control. Moore and Pilar met paramedics at the edge of the safe zone and handed over their rescues.

Reyes ran up to them. “You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Pilar answered. “Lucky break.”

Moore laughed and pushed at her shoulder. “Only you could call that a lucky break.”

“We’re whole. That’s lucky.”

He nodded, and they went back to work.

~oOo~

It was daylight by the time they got back to the barn. They were on a thirty-six watch, so they still had several hours on the clock. After they ran their checks, some grabbed a bite, but most hit the showers and then their bunks.

Perez was one who’d headed to the kitchen, so Pilar had the tiny women’s bathroom to herself. She stood under the cool shower and let the fire wash away.

Father and son were alive. They were in bad shape, but they were alive.

They’d killed the brush fire in a few hours and had kept further exposure contained. And she and Moore had escaped that collapse alive.

All in all, it had been a good call.

But that fire had been weird. It hadn’t behaved like it should have, not entirely. But it had been familiar to her, too.

She hadn’t been completely honest with Connor when he’d asked why she’d wanted to be a firefighter; there was more to the story. When she was eight, she’d been staying overnight at a friend’s house. There’d been a fire in the middle of the night, and she and Mia hadn’t been able to get out. They’d been rescued by firefighters, carried out bundled up in strong arms, and she’d known her first heroes. She could still vividly recall that night, the way she’d felt waiting in a room filling with heat and smoke, the way the firefighter’s arms had felt.

They’d learned fire safety in school, and they’d remembered to stay low, so they’d been lying on the floor in Mia’s room, holding hands and waiting. Pilar had watched the flames, the way they’d danced, the way they’d seemed to follow a path they knew.

At the time, of course, she hadn’t known how fire ate a food it loved, an accelerant. Now she did.

Somebody had set the blaze when she was eight, and somebody had set the one tonight. They’d gone through the whole house, top to bottom, to douse it in fire food. While the family had slept.

The way tonight’s fire resounded in her memory, that must have been the reason she cared so much, felt so rocked—she’d done her job, gotten the victims out, delivered them alive to paramedics. She and Moore had come through their excitement unscathed. It had been a good call.

But she felt lonely. So fucking lonely. She wanted someone to give a shit that she could have died tonight. She wanted someone to bundle her up in strong arms and let her feel rescued for a little while.

It was stupid, and she didn’t understand how an ancient childhood memory and a weird fire tonight had tangled up and made her lonely. But that was the feeling she felt most strongly.

Connor had turned and left her house more than a week earlier. She missed him. They’d barely gotten to know each other, but she felt keenly that something important had been lost. That he was somebody who might get her, might get her life, might make room for it, since his own was outside convention, too.

But he didn’t want to try.

She should already have called Doug or Charlie, her fuck buddies, and fucked herself straight, but she hadn’t had an appetite for either of them, or for a random hookup. Ironically, sex without strings felt too complicated. Or she was already gone for the biker who only wanted to play. Either way, she was lonely.

When Perez came in, Pilar shut off the water and grabbed her towel.

“You leave me any hot?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want hot tonight. Already had plenty.” She dried off and pulled the clothes she wore here to sleep—loose sweatpants and an old t-shirt—on, then braided her unmanageable thicket of hair. She didn’t feel like undertaking the fuss to get it dried decently. “I’m gonna try to crash for a few.”

In the bunkroom, at the corner between the men’s bunks and the little nook they’d made for the women, Moore was waiting. He, too, was freshly showered and dressed in sweats. The blackout shades on the windows were drawn against the morning sun, and the room had the eerie blue glow of midnight.

“You okay,
chica
?” He reached out and picked up the braid lying over her shoulder. His face had healed some since the fight with Connor and now was mottled in faint, aged-looking pastels of yellow and green.

“Yeah, why?”

“Your force field is up.” That was what he called it when she was in a difficult mood.

She pulled her braid out of his hand. “Just tired. I’ll catch a couple, then I’ll be fine.”

He squinted at her, then nodded. “Yeah, me too. Assuming we stay quiet, I’m on the grill for lunch.”

“Cool.” She patted his bare belly and moved past him, then dropped to her bunk. She really was exhausted.

And so fucking lonely.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Connor walked out of the dorm, escorting a little twenty-year old education major to the front door. Mingling aromas of coffee and bacon filled the air, and Connor’s stomach rumbled. He needed to get…Kristy…out of here and get some grub before he showered and headed to the shop.

He’d already called her a cab. She had the wide-eyed look of a girl who was regretting some recent decisions. As she scanned the Hall, though, she settled a little. It was a Wednesday. The Hall was just a room, and as clean as it ever got. A couple of girls in the kitchen, and Trick slouched in a chair, dressed in his shop coverall, rubbing a hand over his newly-shorn head and holding some tattered paperback in his other hand. But he wasn’t reading; the giant television on the wall was showing the morning news, and Trick was focused there.

Connor opened the front door and led her into the early-morning sunshine, and the cab was just pulling up. “Okay, Kristy. You have a good day now.” He leaned in to kiss her cheek, but she jerked back.

“It’s
KEARsty
. I totally told you like a million times.”

He was losing his appetite for young chicks. Jesus, they were insipid. No pussy was tight enough to compensate for that whiny way so many of them had of talking, the way they turned up the last syllable of every sentence so that it sounded uncertain. “Okay, puss. Okay. Get on back to your life now.” He opened the cab door and guided her in, then leaned in the front window and paid the driver.

Then he turned around and went inside.

There was hot coffee in the machine behind the bar, so he went back and poured himself a big mug, then added a light splash of milk from the bar fridge.

“You want a cup, T?” he asked Trick.

Trick didn’t answer, so Connor padded over in his bare feet and sat on the couch facing the television. On a Wednesday morning, bare feet were safe in the Hall. On a Saturday morning, that was a risky choice.

The screen showed a reporter standing in Pershing Square in L.A.—the scene of Allen Cartwright’s death a week earlier.

That hit had gone smoothly, and exactly as planned. Trick had taken a position on the rooftop Sherlock and Bart had cased, and he’d made a bullseye, dropping Cartwright with a bullet in the forehead from about five hundred yards away.

They had no connection to Cartwright, and Trick had been sure to leave no trace of himself or his assignment behind. If a crime could be perfect, that hit, it seemed, was it.

He sat for a second and listened to the news. The reporter had thrown the story to footage of a press conference, several men in uniforms and bad suits lined up behind a podium. The man at the mic was obviously a Fed. They all just had a look about them.
… investigators have determined that the shot came from a distance, estimating at least four hundred yards. We are searching every building within a thousand-yard radius of the incident…

Connor turned to Trick. “Anything to worry you?”

His friend’s attention finally left the television. “No. They’re nowhere. And I left nothing. I’m sure of it. They’ll probably eventually figure out that the cameras were hacked, but Sherlock and Bart erased their tracks. I’ve played the scene out in my head about a thousand times in the past week, and it went just the way I’d played it out in my head beforehand. We didn’t leave a trace.”

He leaned back. “That guy had little kids. A wife. Sure the fuck wish I knew why La Zorra wanted him dead.” He rubbed his head again; he’d been doing that, like a nervous tic, since he’d had his dreads and beard cut off.

There was no point turning over the matter of La Zorra’s motives, so Connor changed the subject and nodded at Trick’s head. “How you doin’ with that, Velcro-head?”

Trick lifted his middle finger, flipping him a lazy bird. Then he answered the question. “My head doesn’t feel like it’s full of helium and about to float off anymore. And I almost recognize myself in the mirror. Still sucks, though.”

“So grow ‘em back.”

“I guess. I don’t know. The point is lost now. Turns out, I am who they trained me to be. A drone who kills without question.” Making a disgusted sound, he picked up the paperback on his lap and tossed it onto the table at his side. It was black, with a black and white picture on the cover, like one of those medieval etchings or something. Connor took a closer look, and the picture was pretty involved—and also pretty deranged: people hanging from chains and ropes. The title of the book was
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
, by Michel Foucault.

“That some fetish shit?”

Trick scoffed. “No, asshole. It’s not ‘fetish shit.’ It’s a critique of the prison system, and it has some stuff about soldiers, too. Soldiers are a lot like prisoners. We all are, actually. Everything we do is scrutinized and judged, every way we act is because of it. We all live in the panopticon.” At Connor’s frown, he shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. I’m in a mood.”

Trick was always reading some thick-ass book that put him in a mood. Connor considered him his best friend, and vice versa, but they were very different men. Aside from their physical differences—Trick was fair and lean, while Connor was burly and dark—they were different in interest and temperament as well.

Trick had a college degree. Connor had managed to get himself through high school without getting expelled. Trick was a voracious reader, who liked to Think Big Thoughts and have deep conversations about books and politics and current events. Connor thought politics was a crock of shit, and he had never been a reader. Reading meant sitting, and he didn’t like to sit. He liked to do.

He was a problem-solver, a fixer. Trick was a problem-seer, an analyst. Where Connor tended to be loud and was quick to fight, Trick was quiet and always measured in his responses.

Maybe that was why they got along so well and, ironically, got each other without trying. They were opposites, and they filled in each other’s gaps. They complemented each other.

While Connor was thinking that, the television caught his eye again. The screen was full of flames, showing a fire that had happened during the night. He saw the ‘76’ on one of the trucks and knew Cordero’s station was there. He didn’t know if she’d been working last night, but he watched intently, looking for her. Why he thought he’d be able to recognize her, he didn’t know. All the firefighters looked the same, buried in heavy gear.

But then two came out of the burning building, carrying bodies. One firefighter was considerably bigger than the other and had an adult over his shoulders. The other carried a child.

That was her. He knew it. His chest tightened. Fuck, she was impressive. An actual hero, carrying a child literally through fire to safety.

Ever looking for the ‘human interest’ story, the cameraman zoom hard toward the scene of the firefighters handing over the victims to the paramedics, laying them on stretchers.

And then Connor’s attention shifted from Cordero to the man on the stretcher. “I know that guy. That’s Marshall Bridges.” A glance at the text on the bottom of the screen, showing the street name, settled it.

Trick leaned in and studied the television, but then a firefighter blocked the camera and pushed the crew back. “I didn’t see. You sure? The Bridges Motors guy?”

“Yeah, yeah. He bought his oldest a Low Rider for high school graduation last year, had me pimp it out. He was a pain in the ass about it, and I had to talk to him a lot. He said some stuff that got me twitching, so I asked Sherlock to study him up. He didn’t need to—he’d already known. The guy has three chop shops across SoCal. That’s how he makes his real bank. And that means he’s hooked with some crazy
cholos
.”

“You think this is something, then?” Trick waved at the television.

Connor shrugged and stood. “Don’t know. Probably not. It’s interesting, though.” He rubbed his bare belly, which was really starting to complain. “But right now, I’m more interested in breakfast.”

~oOo~

“Hey, Mom!” That afternoon, Connor closed the front door of his parents’ house. When his mother, Bibi, didn’t answer, he walked through the entry and headed to the kitchen. The faint aroma of baking bread made his mouth water. He was going to raid the larder before he left.

“Mom? You around?”

He knew she was—her Cadillac was in the garage, and the overhead door was open. But when she still didn’t answer, and the kitchen was empty and pristine, two loaves of fresh bread cooling on racks on the granite counter, his heart sped up a little. “Mom!”

That fire at the Bridges’ house the night before had him extra twitchy, and without a solid reason. Yeah, Bridges bought stolen cars from the Aztecs—and every other gang in that biz in the bottom half of the state. Yeah, Cordero had worked the fire. Yeah, he, and by extension the Horde, was connected to Cordero and her problems with the Aztecs. But those were all coincidences. Correlation did not imply causation. The Horde had nothing to do with Bridges, except for tricking out his spoiled kid’s bike. Whatever trouble the Horde might have with the Aztecs, last night’s fire was irrelevant.

But he was twitchy anyway.

The Aztecs had done a couple of drive-bys past the clubhouse and bike shop over the last couple of weeks, since the Horde had meddled in their affairs. Nothing more than that, just literal drive-bys, slowly down the street, but Esposito was waving his dick around, and the Horde were waiting for them to do something more.

They had to wait, at least for now. La Zorra had not been impressed by the news that the Horde had any kind of trouble with the Aztecs. She shared their opinion of the gang as scum and generally beneath her notice, but she didn’t want to weaken her truce with the Fuentes cartel. Plus, her attention had been on the L.A. District Attorney.

La Zorra was pleased with the hit, and the Horde had brought in a huge stack of cash. But neither she nor they needed law to turn toward them over the Aztecs. She had asked Hoosier, Bart, and Connor to stand down until there was aggression, and they had agreed it was the best course. So they were waiting, and letting Raul Esposito wave his dick around. Connor wanted to cut it off.

And those assholes went for family all the time. If the Horde were sitting on their asses while a loved one got hurt, Connor would tear the whole fucking town apart.

He had asked Sherlock to check in on Cordero’s brother. Hugo was home with his grandmother, and so far, it didn’t look like the Aztecs were pushing on him to make his debt right. That was that, then, as far as Connor was concerned. He and Cordero, whatever had been going on between them, however she’d fucked with his head—that was dead. So Hugo and his sister were on their own. He needed to worry about his own family.

Good plan. Except he couldn’t stop thinking about her. The few times they’d fucked played in a loop all night, every night, whether or not he was with a Madison, Hailey, or Kristy—no,
KEARsty
. Whatever. But more than that, he thought about their dinner at The Bunkhouse, sitting across from her while they ate and talked, seeing her in that cardinal sin of a dress.

He’d been right to walk away. She’d changed things up between them, and he hadn’t wanted that. But she was still in his head.

Right now, though, the only thought in his head was his mother. He pulled his phone out, but before he called her, he tried one more time, yelling, “MOM!” at the top of his voice.

He dialed, and her phone rang in the house.

Fuck!

At the moment that his concern blossomed into fear, the French doors to the back yard opened, and in came his mother, wearing a floppy straw hat, her gardening gloves, and bright yellow rubber boots. “What the hell, Connor? Why are you in here roarin’ like a big ol’ grizzly?”

Relief exploded his heart, and he grabbed her and lifted her off the ground. “Jesus fuck, Mom. Thank God!”

She pushed on his shoulders, and he set her down. When he looked down at her face, she was giving him this look she had, one eyebrow up, her eyes a little squinty, like she was reading under his surface. Since he could remember, that look had made him feel naked—and guilty, whether or not he had something to hide.