An Honorable Man

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter One

The alarm sounded, and rookie firefighter Priscilla Garner cocked her head and listened. Maybe it wouldn’t be for her crew—but she hoped it was.

“That’s us!” someone called out.

A fire at last. Priscilla was more than glad to halt the endless chopping of onions, her current assigned task. Captain Campeon had finally stopped putting her in charge of meals at Fire Station 59, because though she honestly tried, the end results usually were inedible.

So she got to do the fun stuff. Like chopping onions and peeling potatoes. Sometimes she felt as if she was in the Army pulling KP duty. And if she wasn’t chopping or peeling, she was likely mopping, scrubbing toilets or washing dishes. Such mundane tasks made her twenty-four-hour shift creep by.

It would have been easy to assume she was being picked on because she was the only woman at the station, but she knew better. Her best friends, Ethan and Tony, got pretty much the same treatment. Such was the life of a rookie.

Otis Granger, suddenly alert, turned off the meat he’d been browning for chili and they headed wordlessly to their stations and struggled into their turnout gear.

As a rookie Priscilla’s job was to stick close to Otis, watch and learn. He was twenty years her senior, a hulking man with a huge belly and skin the color of milk chocolate. At first he had fought like a cornered feral cat about having to work with a woman. But once he’d realized she was determined to succeed at her job, he’d let up. They’d actually become friends.

Priscilla vaulted into her spot on the jump-seat, next to Ethan. She finished bunking out, fastening Velcro cuffs as the engine, with its siren blaring, headed for what had been reported as a Dumpster fire behind a Chinese restaurant.

The engine hurtled through Oak Cliff, a large, diverse section of Dallas south of the Trinity River. As they sped down Jefferson Street, the main shopping drag, past colorful stucco shopping centers, kids on bikes stopped to gawk.

Drawing nearer to the fire, Priscilla saw a plume of heavy black smoke rising up in an otherwise flawless October sky, and when they turned the last corner she realized they’d be battling something more serious than a trash fire. A storage shed behind an apartment building was burning fiercely.

Lieutenant Murphy “Murph” McCrae, their driver, reported the change in conditions over the radio to the dispatcher as he tried to get the engine down the narrow alley. But the passageway was constricted by a Dumpster that was off its base.

“We’ll have to go around to that parking lot,” he announced. “Garner, Granger, go on foot. Looks like there’s a chain-link fence needs taking down.”

Priscilla was on it at once. She jumped down from the engine, grabbed a pair of bolt cutters, and in forty pounds of gear ran as fast as she could toward the blaze. She pulled her self-contained breathing apparatus over her face as she ran. The small building was completely engulfed, and the trees nearby were smoldering and starting to catch.

Damn, this was exciting!

Feeling the heat of the fire on her face, she went to work on the fence. Moments later, Otis was at her side, steadying the hot metal with his insulated gloves and pulling it aside as she cut each link. Bystanders began to gather, and she had to chase a few of them back. By the time the fence was dispatched, the engine was pulling up in the parking lot adjacent to them.

Priscilla was itching to stretch hose and attack this beast. Another siren wailed in the distance, indicating a second engine was on its way. She and Otis unfurled the main hose, while McCrae worked the various controls, and soon they had a fully charged line with which to attack the flames.

It always amazed Priscilla how quickly a fierce, hot blaze could be tamed. In a matter of minutes, the fire was under control. The burning trees were extinguished, the charred roof and walls of the shed had been soaked, first with water, then with foam.

“Garner!” Murph bellowed. “I want you and Granger on the roof.”

She hopped to obey. Man, she loved this, tearing holes with her pike pole and looking for hot spots, which Ethan promptly extinguished from below. Ha, take that. And that! No flickering ember would escape her clear eye or her sharp pike.

They hadn’t been called to a real fire in over a week. And since Priscilla still had months left on her paramedic training, she didn’t usually get put on medical emergencies, so she’d been bored and antsy.

She tore at the blackened composite shingles, giving the roof savage stabs.

Shouted conversations drifted around her until one specific word caught her attention: arson.

She paused. “Ethan, did someone say it’s arson?”

“Yeah, there’s a bunch of paint cans and rags piled next to an outside wall. Probably just malicious mischief.”

A few seconds later Murph called Priscilla down from the roof.

Any mention of arson made Dallas firefighters jumpy these days. A huge fire the previous spring, when Priscilla was still at the fire academy, had proved lethal for three veteran firefighters because the arsonist had rigged the roof of the burning warehouse to collapse. The fatalities—the first in many years—had sent shock waves through the department. The loss had been especially hard on her firehouse, Station 59, where the men had all worked.

But the arsonist hadn’t stopped there. He continued to set fires every few weeks and he was setting them more often as time progressed.

When a familiar black Suburban pulled into the parking lot, Priscilla tensed. Captain Roark Epperson. He’d been an arson instructor at the fire academy; he’d also taken a much more personal interest in Priscilla, though no one else knew that.

Since their brief, explosive fling had ended uncomfortably, Priscilla usually managed to avoid the man.

She busied herself folding hose and watched from the corner of her eye as the tall, broad-shouldered investigator talked to Murph, then glanced her way—giving her a long, lingering look that she pretended not to see.

She hoped no one else noticed. The guys didn’t need anything else to torment her with.

Roark examined the pile of charred paint cans and blackened rags, then he took a few pictures with a digital camera. Since everyone was watching him, Priscilla gave up trying to pretend she wasn’t interested. She ambled closer so she could hear, too.

“Definitely arson, but not our boy,” Roark said to Murph. Our boy was Roark’s designation for the serial arsonist. “Probably a kid looking for a thrill. If it was the property owner wanting to collect insurance, he’d have gone to a little more trouble to hide his tracks.”

The sound of Roark’s Boston accent, still strong despite the years he’d spent in Texas, brought back unwanted memories. And his conclusions about this fire frustrated her. Not that she wanted the serial arsonist to set more blazes. On the other hand, with each fire he set, the potential existed for more clues to his identity—though so far he’d been damn clever about not leaving fingerprints or witnesses.

The collective mood relaxed as everyone continued about their business, putting away tools and ladders, joking and laughing now that the tension had eased. Priscilla continued to poke things with her pike pole.

“Hey, Pris, you going to the retirement party next week?” Ethan asked her. The captain in charge of the B shift at Station 59 was hanging up his hat.

“I can’t. I have to attend…you know, a family event. My cousin’s wedding is coming up, and she’s having this froufrou dinner for all the bridesmaids at the Mansion.” Priscilla poked at a stump. Sparks flew out of it. “Someone douse this thing.”

“Ooo, the Mansion.” Otis strolled over with the booster line and sprayed down the stump. “I always wanted to go there. Need a date?”

Priscilla laughed. “Ruby wouldn’t like that.” Ruby was Otis’s girlfriend and about to become wife number three. “Besides, my mother has a list of eligible candidates, should I want a date to this shindig. Which I don’t.”

“Uh-oh,” Ethan said. “Sounds like your mother is still trying to fix you up.”

Priscilla cringed inwardly. It must seem to everyone else that she couldn’t get her own dates. The fact was, Priscilla didn’t want to hook up with anybody. Her job kept her plenty busy. When she wasn’t at the station, she was training for her paramedic certification. But her mother was concerned about her, worried that her only child was lonely after a nasty breakup last year.

Most of the time Priscilla refused her mother’s matchmaking attempts. But occasionally she gave in—just to keep the peace. Since all the other bridesmaids would have husbands or boyfriends in attendance at the dinner, Priscilla would probably end up agreeing to a fix-up this time.

“Why don’t you tell your mother to knock it off?” Ethan asked.

The question made perfect sense. Priscilla was not exactly shy and retiring when it came to telling people what to do. She knew she had a reputation as the C shift control freak, always trying to organize things to her satisfaction.

But telling her mother what to do was a whole different plate of deviled eggs. Lorraine Garner was an unstoppable force.

“I don’t want to hurt her feelings,” Priscilla said. “She tries so hard and she only wants me to be happy. I try to tell her I don’t want a boyfriend….” And at this point she slid a look toward Roark, who had stopped talking with Murph and was blatantly eavesdropping. Damn. “But she assumes I’m pining away because I’m not attached. Going out on an occasional fix-up is easier than arguing.”

And she didn’t want to argue with her mother. She’d been a rebellious teenager, angry at the world, and she’d hurt her parents more than she’d realized with her obstinate determination to do things her way and have her misplaced revenge. Now that she was older and supposedly wiser, she tried to be more careful about balancing her wants and needs with their sensibilities. They were, after all, the only family she was likely to have, given her dismal track record with the opposite sex.

Ethan got a roll of yellow caution tape and tied one end to a fence post. “Would your mother lay off if you had a boyfriend?”