Where There's Smoke

“No Councilman Ayre, sorry to disappoint you.”

He studied her a moment. “Who said I was disappointed?”

No man should be allowed to have such long eyelashes, she thought. “Just a guess. It’s good equipment. It can save lives, including yours.” Pulling a neat pair of files out of the battered leather satchel at her feet, she stacked them on her clipboard. “After Hartford, I can’t see any department giving up equipment like this.”

“You’re obviously new to Boston, or at least the politics.”

“Hardly. I’ve been here three years.”

He laughed. Sloane stared at him, her cheeks tinting. “What?”

“No wonder you’re such an optimist.” The high color that stained the edges of her cheekbones suited her, Nick thought. And it was definitely personal with her.

Sloane frowned. “If Boston’s such a useless place and you hate it so much, why do you stay?”

“Loving the city doesn’t mean I have to agree with the agenda of the people running it.”

“I suppose, but why choose a job that’s subject to the whims of the politicians?”

“I didn’t. It chose me.”

For a moment, she just stared back at him. She looked a little like a Hollywood femme fatale, Nick thought, in her black turtleneck and tan jacket, dark glasses hiding her eyes. Her hair caught the light like a shower of sparks. Her skin was milk-pale and flawless.

He wondered abruptly how it tasted.

Concentrate on the job, Trask. “So what’s the plan?”

“First let’s go over how the equipment works, then get some smoke going and let them take the Orienteer through its paces.”

“You want smoke, we’ve got it. Come on, I’ll show you.”

A change came over her as she faced the burn tower, a tenseness he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been so aware of her. For a moment something in her stance suggested wariness, perhaps dread. It was there and gone in a flash. There was a story there, he thought again.

Sooner or later, he was going to find out what it was.

He led her into the cool of the burn tower’s shadow. At close range, the cinder block walls were scarred by water-marks and black flares of soot.

“What do they use for the fire?” Sloane asked.

“Bales of hay, wood pallets. It depends on whether we want smoke or heat.” Nick led her to stairs that threaded up the outside of the tower. He stood back to let her go first. He’d given the tour plenty of times. Funny, he’d never noticed the narrowness of the stairway before, even when it had been crowded with a dozen people.

They stopped at the first landing, in front of a discolored steel door that led to the interior of the building. Nick pulled it open. The metal groaned in complaint. Fire was never easy on anything. “Here’s the first burn room, in through here.”

Coming in from the bright sunlight, it took Sloane’s eyes a moment to adjust to dimness as she shoved her sunglasses up onto her head. The air felt dank and close. In the mix of odors that assaulted her nose there was the stench of stale smoke, drowned char, of burned concrete and gasoline. Their footsteps echoed as though they were in a cave.

Nick stepped in behind her. The back of her neck prickled in sudden awareness. Then the room became shrouded in shadow as he closed the door. Sloane forced her attention to the space in front of her, away from the soft sound of his breath.

She blinked, then blinked again.

The scene in front of her was weirdly disorienting, like a surrealist painting or a scene from a psycho movie. There was much that was familiar, but the context bewildered. The space looked like an ordinary living room, if one discounted the fact that the walls and furniture were completely encrusted with soot. There were the familiar shapes of a couch and a coffee table, but instead of rugs, the center of the floor was piled high with gasoline-soaked wood. It was like something out of an arsonist’s daydream—or a firefighter’s nightmare.

“Well, the color scheme’s simple enough,” she said dryly. “Black on black.”

Nick stood motionless by the door, watching her as she moved about the room. “The training people like to simulate a real-life situation as much as possible,” he murmured. “The furniture’s heavy-gauge sheet steel. Watch yourself, by the way. This stuff is coated with soot an inch thick.”

The furniture was absolutely matte black, sucking up all the available light, baffling the eye. It looked both soft as velvet and absolutely solid. Sloane couldn’t resist touching it with her fingertip. She gave a surprised laugh when her finger sank in to the second knuckle, sending soot cascading down in small avalanches.

“I warned you,” Nick pointed out mildly.

“Empirical method.” Sloane tried unobtrusively to shake the soot off her fingers. “I have to experiment and observe. I’m a scientist, it’s part of my profession.” She caught the quick gleam of teeth as he smiled.

Nick pulled a rag from his back pocket and tossed it to her. “Good thing you wore a black sweater. You ought to do a study sometime of the migration and breeding patterns of soot. You’d be amazed at how much of your clothing that little bit will cover.”

Sloane gave a scrub or two to her hands and handed it back to him. “Maybe I’ll turn into one of those people who write fan letters to the detergent companies.”

“Maybe.” He frowned and stepped forward with the cloth. Before she knew what he was about, he’d touched it to her cheekbone.

Sloane jerked back.

“Hold still for a minute. You’ve got soot on your face. You don’t want to look like Tom Brady on game day, do you?”

She felt the touch of the fabric, the heat of his finger beneath. The heat of his body. He was too near, she thought, too solid, too hard to ignore. “Are you done yet?” She glanced up and locked eyes with him and the words caught in her throat. His gaze was intent, as if he were trying to see through her skin. His eyes looked hot and dark.

The silence stretched out. “Well, that’s all we can do here. Come on,” he said abruptly, moving to the far side of the room. “If you like interior design, there’s more to see.”

It was time to get out of this close, dark room. She didn’t want to react to his presence so strongly, Sloane thought as they started down the interior stairs.

She didn’t seem to be able to help it.

In the stairwell, sunlight spilled through an open door high above. Light and shadow, bright and dark. They climbed the stairs in sync, shoulder to shoulder in silence broken only by the hollow ring of footsteps echoing off the cinder block walls, the whisper of hands sliding on the railings, the almost imperceptible rhythm of breath.

“Is this the first time you’ve been in one of these?”

Sloane jumped at Nick’s voice. “Yes. I didn’t expect it to be like this.”

“Are things usually the way you expect?”

You’re not. “Often enough.”

They came to a landing and stepped through a door into another burn room. Light streamed in through the empty window cutout and Sloane breathed a sigh of relief. There would be no repeat of the shadowed intimacy of the room downstairs, no repeat of the closeness of the stairwell. It should have helped.

It didn’t, especially when she saw the furniture. “The master bedroom, of course.” Her voice sounded stilted and strange in her own ears. Her mouth was dry. Silly.

“Not much sleeping goes on in here.”

Sloane walked to the window to lean out of the open cutout, immensely conscious of every movement, every breath. “I didn’t realize we were so high up,” she murmured. “The tower doesn’t look that big from the ground.”

“It’s a lot higher when you’re hanging off it on a rope.”