Rare (9 page)

I couldn’t quite believe the education system had failed so many, but I could easily picture Ted rallying his troops to do something about it. The crazy old biker never ceased to surprise me. An image of him marching his group of talented waifs and strays into the test center flashed into my mind. “Maybe you can all study together.”

“Don’t even joke about it.”

Ash sat up so I could rummage through the box some more, but there wasn’t much of interest left, just some old sketches and a sweatshirt of Joe’s. I pulled it out and put it on the bed behind me. “Aren’t you going to ask me about the mystery girl?”

Ash stood up. He turned his back on me, stretched his arms above his head, and flopped down on the bed. “What’s she like?”

I searched for the right word as I shoved the box under the bed and crawled in. “She’s beautiful. Did you know she was a photographer?”

Ash shook his head and clicked the bedside light off. “She sounds amazing.”

S
UNDAY
, 4:00
a.m. We had two hours left on shift, and so far it had been a quiet night. Quiet and
long
. I’d spent a few hours updating a bunch of personal paperwork, including emergency contacts and other information for work—HIPAA had complicated everyone’s lives—but after that, the clock seemed to stop, and the more I stared at it, the slower the numbers changed.

Slow nights were like that. Lack of activity made the time drag, and ironically, wore me out more than a crazy shift. I tried every trick in the book to keep myself awake—coffee, doughnuts, bucketloads of sugary soda—but none of it did any good. All I wanted was a hot shower, my bed, and Ash’s chest for a pillow.

Mick’s mood didn’t help much either. He’d been in a foul temper for days, simmering on the precipice of a major blowout, waiting for something to push him over the edge. It had nearly happened the night before. We’d been called to pick up one of our frequent flyers: an old drunk who’d been a regular on our run sheet for as long as I could remember. He had chronic lice and stank to high heaven, but he was harmless enough. All he wanted was coffee and company. Sometimes, he even bought the coffee. Old Gabe was the kind of call we usually enjoyed
—
no death, no blood, no hassle
—
but, thanks to the CPD, it had all gone to shit last night. We’d responded to the call to find the police had gotten there first, and they weren’t happy. It was the third time that week they’d found him passed out in front of some swanky boutique, and they’d had enough. They gave us two choices
—
take him in, or they’d arrest him.

Nice.

The fat beat officer was an asshole. It didn’t matter how many times we told him the hospital wouldn’t take him, and that a night in the cells would probably kill the old man. He didn’t want to know.

“Take him home to your momma for all I care. Get him off this damn stoop.”

Prick.

I gave up arguing with him, but Mick persisted until I dragged him away. He was livid by the time we’d loaded the old dude and driven him an hour across the city to a refuge.

“This is bullshit, Pete. I’m fed up with this crap,” Mick had said.

He’d hardly spoken to me since.

I stretched my legs up on the dashboard with a heavy sigh. We were parked up by the lake in one of our favorite rest spots, hoping our shift would clock out before we got called out again, but it was wishful thinking. Time had slowed to a snail’s pace, and we were never that lucky. It was a brutal winter night, and I was tired, cold, and
bored
. If Mick wasn’t going to talk to me, I needed to find another way to occupy my brain. Usually, I resorted to thinking dirty thoughts about Ash, but Mick always seemed to know when I was doing that, and tonight, he didn’t seem in the mood to find it amusing.

On cue, he shifted in his seat beside me. “What are you huffing about now?”

They were the first words he’d uttered in hours, but his tone irritated the hell out of me. Getting bitched out was starting to grate. “Just bored, is all.”

“You want someone to crash their car to keep you entertained?”

I bit my tongue. I’d been here before with Mick, and sniping back only made things worse. I closed my eyes and silence fell over us again as I suppressed another sigh. Fighting with Mick was never any fun. Underneath the daily irritation of the other’s constant company, we were good friends. I didn’t like being at odds with him, especially when I saw no tangible reason.

I was dozing off when he leaned over and punched my arm. “Sorry, dude,” he said, though he didn’t sound all that contrite. “I’ve got some stuff going down at home. I’m sorry I’m taking it out on you.”

Mick having trouble at home was news to me. I sat up, rubbing my bleary eyes. “Is it Kate?”

Mick shrugged. “It’s a lot of things, but I can’t deal with any of it when I’m cooling my heels out here.”

I understood that feeling all too well. How many nights had I sat in this very same spot knowing Ash needed me at home? At least on a busy shift, time passed quickly, and exhausted or not, it was over before I really had time to fret. Quiet shifts had almost been my undoing. There’d been many nights I’d nearly walked off the job for good.

The only thing that stood in my way was Mick. He’d had my back when I needed it most. He had to know without question that I would be there for him in return. I opened my mouth to remind him, to ask him what he needed from me, but like so many other occasions from shifts gone by, I was cut off by the radio. Mick started the engine as I responded to the dispatch officer. We were on the road before we had a chance to pick up the conversation.

The ambulance flew through the streets as details filtered through the radio. We were headed to a run-down immigrant neighborhood on the border of our district. The police had forced entry into a third-floor apartment and discovered an unknown number of unconscious people. There was no sign of violence or fire, and some of the victims appeared to be very young. At the mention of kids, I chanced a glance at Mick, but his gaze was on the road and there was no time to check if he was ready for this. Flashing lights that matched ours appeared in my eyeline, and a few moments later Mick pulled the ambulance to a stop.

I got out first, and pushed my way through the crowd of onlookers. A police officer guarded the door to the dilapidated building. Irritation flashed through me when I saw it was the same asshole we’d locked horns with the day before. I nodded a terse greeting. “What have we got?”

The officer met my eyes, and instead of belligerence, all I saw was the aching sadness of a man who’d seen something terrible. He shook his head and waved me through. “Do what you can, son. It doesn’t look good in there.”

I took the stairs two at a time, with Mick a heartbeat behind me. The building had an elevator, but it didn’t work. In a dump like this, it had probably been busted for years. I was puffing a bit by the time we hit the third floor, but we had no time to recover. A young policewoman was waiting for us, and she led us to the apartment in question.

The door to the apartment was open. I paused there for a moment, taking in the scene before me. There was a lifeless body on the living room floor. One glance told me the CPR attempts being made by the police were futile. The girl was dead. Her body was stiff and her lips were blue. For the sake of the officers trying to revive her, I dropped to the floor to make sure, but I was right. There was no bringing her back. I shook my head at the officer closest to me and got to my feet. It felt wrong to leave the kid where she lay, but with my gut telling me every other fucker in the apartment had shared her fate, I had other things to do.

Mick moved past me to check the back rooms while I took a look around. The details of the call had been sketchy. Now we were here, I could see why. The apartment was old and tattered, but it was tidy and homely. There wasn’t a thing out of place, and nothing to explain the dead body on the floor. I walked through the living area and into the kitchen. I caught sight of an ancient boiler. I was eyeing it when Mick appeared beside me.

“All dead,” he said flatly. “Looks like they’ve been that way for a while.” He followed my gaze to the boiler and nodded. “Yeah, I’d say so.”

Being a paramedic used to mean I spent most of my time doing mundane runs and only a fraction of it seeing things nobody should ever have to see. Recently, that tiny percentage had seemed to grow with each shift that passed, and it was beginning to wear me down. Some days, I didn’t have it in me to see something tragic, and today turned out to be one of those days.

Once the suspected cause of death was known, the relevant calls were made, but it was hours before we left the scene. We carried four kids, an elderly man, and a pregnant woman out of that apartment, and with each devastating trip down the stairs, the weight of the call got heavier and heavier. We’d seen carbon monoxide poisoning before, but neither of us had ever seen it kill on the scale it had tonight. The irony that a twenty-dollar detector could have saved them all was enough to make me sick.

Mick was silent on the drive back to the firehouse. A call like that was his worst nightmare. Given his already low mood, I wasn’t surprised when he slid out of the ambulance the moment it stopped and disappeared inside. When he didn’t come back, I figured I was finishing the shift alone.

Cleaning up the ambulance took a while, and it was long past dawn by the time I got home. I was surprised to find Ash already up and drawing at the old battered table Ted’s wife had given us. Usually, if he was up when I got home in the morning, I’d find myself scrutinizing him for signs of insomnia, but today it wasn’t Ash that caught my eye. It was something far less appealing. “What the fuck is that?”

Ash raised an eyebrow, keeping his gaze on his work. “Gee, I don’t know. It looks like a couch.”

“I can see that,” I said testily. “What’s it doing here?”

“I think Vivienne sent it to us.”

“Why would Ellie’s mom send us a couch?”

“How would I know?”

There was a pause while I glared at the brown-leather monstrosity invading my living room. I tried to figure out how I could start the conversation over without being an ass, but it was tough. The couch was huge, and about the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. “It’s… uh, big.”

Ash’s lips twitched. “It sure is.”

I walked around the couch and viewed it from every angle. It was wide as hell and it took up most of the wall by the big bay window. With the couch we already owned and the big old chair, the room was more than a little crowded. “What’s in the boxes?”

Ash slid his pencil behind his ear and closed his sketchbook. “I don’t know. The couch freaked me out so I was too scared to look.”

“It can’t be that bad.”

He appeared like a ghost beside me. “Really? Look at the couch.”

He had a point, but I knew it probably wasn’t the couch that had unsettled him. Until the bed for the spare room had arrived a few weeks ago, he’d never experienced the joys of having surly delivery men stomp through his personal space. To say he didn’t appreciate it was an understatement, especially when one of them scuffed his precious white walls. “Want to look together?”

Ash fetched a knife. He passed it over and I sliced the boxes open. Inside each box, a pile of cushions greeted us, fucking loads of them, and every one as grotesquely huge as the couch.

My face must have been a picture. Ash burst out laughing and threw one at my head, before tossing the rest in the general direction of the couch. “There you go. It looks like a bed now.”

He was right. With the cushions piled haphazardly where they’d landed, the vulgar couch was beginning to look like something I could sleep on. The thought made me yawn so hard my jaw popped. “We’ll have to get rid of something,” I mused. “What are you more attached to, the chair or the old couch?”

“The chair.”

His answer surprised me. The sofa was as old and battered as the chair, but we’d spent a lot of time on it together. Call me sentimental, but I was attached to it. Some of our best moments had been spent on that couch.

Ash shrugged at my curious frown. “I like sitting with you. It’s too easy to be apart if we have two couches.”

Okay, I was tired as hell, and more than a little grouchy, but his logic made no sense. “Ash, I don’t lie on the couch with you because there’s nowhere else to sit.”

Ash was a passive soul, but he could be stubborn when he wanted to be. I could tell from the set of his jaw no amount of reasoning would do any good. I shrugged and let it go. I was attached to the memories we’d made on the old couch, but I was far more attached to him.

Besides, we’d fucked a lot on the chair too.

I took a quick shower and crawled into bed. Ash came in to say good-bye a few minutes later. He was wearing my clothes, and he looked far better in them than I did. He crouched on the floor by the side of the bed and met my one open eye with a searching gaze.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just a bad night.”

“I can stay a while, if you want?”

He touched my face, but I shook my head. He never left for work until he absolutely had to. Chances were he was already running late. “Maybe later?”

“Have it your way, fucker.” He kissed the top of my head with a rueful grin. We both knew I’d be over it by then and he wouldn’t ask me again. I preferred it that way. He had enough horror stories in his head; he didn’t need any more.

He left me to sleep, but I found it hard to switch off. The bad call and Mick’s obvious distress played on my mind, and after some restless dozing, I gave up on the bed and ventured back to the living room. I glared at the too big, too new sofa for a minute. It was hideous, but it was a freakin’ couch, right? How bad could it be?

N
OT
THAT
bad at all, apparently, because later that day, I woke up too late to do anything but shower and go back to work. Ash wasn’t home, but there were signs he’d been back: the coffee machine set ready to go, and the sandwich in the fridge with my name scrawled on the plastic baggie. I had to smile. It was something he did near enough every night shift I worked, and even with the tragedy of the night before still on my mind, it was a good start to my day.