Kitabı oku: «Lucy And The Loner»

One

Lucy Dolan woke slowly to utter darkness and discovered quickly that she was unable to breathe. A huge, heavy weight seemed to have settled on her chest while she was sleeping, and it had pushed the air right out of her lungs. When she tried to inhale, her breath leapt back out of her mouth in the form of a burning cough that seared her throat and coated her tongue with a foul taste. Another cough followed, then another and another, until she began to grow dizzy and rolled right out of bed.

Landing on the floor jarred her fully awake and afforded her some meager ability to catch her breath. But the air that passed through her lips tasted dirty and felt hot. Instead of reviving her, it made her head ache and caused her to feel oddly lethargic. As she reeled awkwardly over onto her back, she wondered why she couldn’t see the hallway light that she always kept lit at night. Only then did she realize that what she was breathing wasn’t air at all—it was smoke. Thick, black smoke that eclipsed the hallway light, burned her eyes and threatened to suffocate her.

Fire. Good God, her house was on fire.

When the recognition of that finally registered, her mind scurried into action. Unfortunately, instead of rehearsing an escape route that she’d never bothered to plan anyway, all Lucy could think about was Mack.

Mack. Oh, God. Where was Mack?

The last time she’d seen him, he’d been stretched out on the couch in the living room, the television still tuned to the Bullets game in its fourth quarter. He’d been sleeping soundly, but she hadn’t had the heart to turn off the TV, knowing he preferred to doze in front of the flickering light. So she’d pulled the edge of the cotton throw over his feet to ward off the autumn chill, and she’d crept up to bed, knowing he’d join her there later when he awoke and realized she’d gone up without him.

She had to find him. She couldn’t leave the house without Mack. If anything happened to him, Lucy would die herself.

In a distant corner of her brain, she recalled something from elementary school about how if your house was on fire, you should crawl along the floor, where there was likely to be more air, and touch any doors to check for heat before you opened them. Most of all, she remembered, you shouldn’t panic. But when she rolled back over, the scratch of the rug against her belly made her remember something else, too. She remembered that she slept in the nude.

So much for not panicking.

She tried to get her bearings and forced all thought from her mind to focus instead on survival—her own and Mack’s. She always discarded her clothes on the chair by the bedroom door before she went to bed, and—gee, what a coincidence—the door was also the best exit from the smoke-filled room. Certainly that was the direction she needed to pursue if she was going to find Mack.

Slowly and deliberately, keeping her breathing as shallow and steady as she could, Lucy clawed at the rag rug beneath her, pulling her body along the floor toward the chair. She fumbled around for a few seconds before her fingers lit on the boxer shorts and T-shirt that lay there in a crumpled ball. When she snatched the garments down to the floor, her hand skimmed against a soft patch of fur, and she remembered the tattered teddy bear who perpetually occupied that chair as if it were a throne.

She couldn’t save much, Lucy thought as she reached up again, but by God, she would take care of the two things that mattered the most to her in the world. She was going to get Mack and Stevie the bear out of there. When all was said and done, they were all she had left in the world anyway.

It took her only a couple of seconds to struggle into her clothes, then, clutching Stevie savagely under one arm, she crawled out into the hall and immediately lost her way. She could tell neither where the fire was coming from, nor where the smoke was thinnest, nor could she detect any heat that might give her a clue.

Yet she knew she had to make her way downstairs. If Mack wasn’t in bed with her, chances were good that he was still sleeping on the couch. If everything worked out the way it was supposed to, she would find him, rouse him, and they could flee through the front door together. Only problem was, by now she was so disoriented that she wasn’t sure in which direction the stairs lay, let alone the front door.

It took her two tries and too many valuable minutes to find her way to the stairs. When she finally managed to locate them, she slithered like a snake, step by step, to the bottom. Toward the end she began to feel woozier and even more confused, and she bumped her chin hard on something when she lost her bearings.

For a moment Lucy simply lay sprawled on the floor at the foot of the steps, dizzy and disoriented, uncertain about exactly where she was. Her head was pounding, her mouth was dry and her chest felt as if it was going to explode. All around her was darkness and heat, and she didn’t know which way to go. Vaguely she heard a strange sound and registered it as the whisper of the fire consuming her house.

Funny how quiet that sound seemed, she thought as a buzzing swelled up from somewhere deep inside her brain. Her mind was reeling now, and her lungs felt as if they, too, were being eaten by hot flames. She’d always thought fire would be louder than this, hotter than this, faster than this. She didn’t realize it would be so...so...so...

Somewhere in the house glass shattered, the odd tinkling sound seeming clearer than anything she had ever heard. Her hand clenched convulsively on the ragged bear she had managed to cling to, and she gripped it as fiercely as Arthur would have seized the Holy Grail, had he ever found it. But Arthur never had. Arthur had gone to his death never knowing the fate of that thing he’d sought so faithfully, so relentlessly, all his life.

Lucy didn’t want that to happen to her. Stevie the bear was the only link she had to her own Grail, and she didn’t want to lose him or the prize he signified to her. In some deep, delirious part of her brain, she vowed to herself that if she managed to get out of this thing alive, she’d go after that prize—her Grail.

Somehow, if she managed to get out of this thing alive, Lucy would find her twin brother.

But her thoughts as she fought off unconsciousness weren’t for Stevie or her missing twin or the odd emptiness in her soul that had accompanied her all her life. Her only thoughts—indistinct and incoherent—were for Mack. Oh, God...she had to find Mack....

Boone Cagney heaved himself out of the cab of the bright red ladder truck, feeling, as always, that faint thrill deep down inside him where the little boy who’d always wanted to be a fireman still lived. Quickly, dispassionately, he surveyed the burning house.

Not as bad as some he’d seen, he noted as he immediately reached for his bunkers, but not much would be salvageable after the fire was out, either. With a competency and ablemindedness that had come with years of fighting fires, he donned roughly fifty pounds of protective gear—pants, coat, helmet and gloves. Finally, when he had his self-contained breathing apparatus in place, he forgot all about the fact that scarcely ten minutes ago, he’d been sound asleep, and he headed into the fray.

A handful of civilians mingled in the yards of neighboring houses, but he had no way of knowing yet if any of them were residents of the one that was on fire. Probably none of them were, because no one was acting hysterical—yet. Because it was just past 3:00 a.m., whoever lived here had more than likely been home when the fire broke out. The chances were good that they might even still be lying in bed overcome by smoke, oblivious to the fact that their house was burning down.

He made a quick survey of the grounds, noting there were no toys to indicate the presence of children, nor fences to indicate the presence of a pet. Which didn’t necessarily mean that there weren’t any, but it was a good sign. A pickup truck was parked in the driveway far enough back to be safe from the flames for now, one of those sporty models that weren’t meant for transporting anything much heavier than a good-sized golden retriever. Even in the dark, Boone could tell the color was one of those weird mixes of pink and purple, so he guessed that at least one of the occupants of the house was female.

Although a good part of the structure had already been engulfed by flame, his practiced eye told him the source of the fire was probably somewhere in the basement, more than likely in the back. The aged garage, which stood independently of and behind the house, was also on fire, probably due to an errant spark from the burning building or stray bits of airborne, smoldering ash. Rolls of opaque black smoke bled from a number of broken windows around the base of the house.

While his colleagues advanced the hose lines, Boone went to work on the ladders. As far as he could see, the flames were confined to the lower level of the house for now, but they would still have to be quick in their search of the second floor above the fire. He noted one window on the side of the house was open, in spite of the cool October night, and, determining it to be the most likely place to find a resident, he called to another firefighter and suggested they enter the house there.

Immediately after crawling through the window, he was surrounded by smoke, but his vision was still clear enough for him to make out a bed. An empty bed. Its covers were rumpled and kicked to the foot, however, as if someone had awakened and left in a hurry.

A quick search of the two other rooms upstairs revealed one to be a home office of sorts, with a personal computer on the desk whose screen saver still danced and glowed eerily through the dark haze of smoke. The other room was evidently a spare bedroom, unused if the still-made bed was any indication. Exiting that one, Boone nodded to his partner in the search, and the two men headed for the stairway at the end of the hall.

At the foot of the stairs, he found a woman. Initially, he thought her unconscious, but when he rolled her over, she groaned, and he could see that she was barely hanging on.

“Morgan!” he called into the radio he carried to alert the firefighters outside of the progress inside. “I got a woman just inside the front door—foot of the steps!”

“No other victims found,” a voice crackled over the radio in response. “No one’s been able to get into the basement—that’s the source of the fire. But the neighbors said she lives by herself. Shouldn’t be anyone else in there.”

“Well, that’s something, anyway,” he said to himself, relieved that this rescue, at least, would be uneventful. The woman on the floor was small and slender, seemingly without weight, so he easily scooped her up into his arms.

He exited through the front door, and carried the semiconscious woman across the front lawn toward the street, then lay her effortlessly on the grass. When she groaned again, a sputtering cough erupted, and she flailed one hand in front of herself as if she were trying to physically grab hold of the fresh air. To help her out, Boone went back to the ladder truck to retrieve the oxygen they carried on all the rigs, returned to the woman and cupped the clear mask over her mouth.

As he monitored her breathing and waited for the ambulance, he noted the brown-and-black teddy bear she held clenched in one hand. It was threadbare in spots, ragged in others, and a fierce, hot fury gripped him at what her possession of the toy might mean. She coughed and sputtered some more, tears spilling freely from her eyes, but unable to wait any longer, Boone snatched the mask off her face and pulled her to a sitting position.

“Lady,” he said, giving her a quick shake to help rouse her. “You’re okay. But I need to know if there’s anyone else inside the house.”

A new series of rough, ragged coughs rocked her for a minute, and more tears rolled down her cheeks, leaving stark, clean streaks in the soot that smudged her face. Then she looked up and gazed at him with wide, panicked eyes, eyes that were so big and so blue, he nearly forgot for a moment where he was. Hastily, he brushed the odd sensation off and reminded himself that he had a job to do.

“Mack,” the woman whispered hoarsely, the single word barely audible. She stared vacantly at the burning building for a moment, then riveted her gaze to Boone’s with an intensity that shook him to his core. “Mack is still inside the house.”

Great, Boone thought. Why was he not surprised? Her rescue had been too easy, too neat. Evidently she didn’t live alone after all. Obviously her neighbors didn’t know her as well as they thought they did. Or maybe she just had a boyfriend they didn’t know about.

“Is Mack your husband?” he barked out, the roar of the flames behind them growing louder, threatening to drown out their voices. “Your boyfriend?”

She started coughing again, then stared at him, obviously still confused and uncertain. “My husband?” she finally repeated, her expression bewildered, those blue, blue eyes gradually sharpening their focus a bit. “No, I—I’m divorced. And I don’t have a...a boyfriend. Mack is my—” She seemed to recall the gravity of the situation then, because she grabbed his coat savagely and cried, “Mack! My God, he’s still in there!”

With one strong hand, she jerked Boone down until his face was within inches of hers, and her eyes filled with tears again. “You’ve got to get him out of there. Mack is all I have left. He’s...he’s...” She began to cry in earnest then. “God, he’s only three years old! Please...you have to help him!”

Boone’s entire body went rigid. “Where was he the last time you saw him?”

“Asleep on the couch in the living room,” she said, crying freely now, her sobs blurring her words. “He was sleeping so soundly, I didn’t want to wake him when I went to bed, so I Just left him alone. I...I... Oh, no...”

Something hot and coarse knotted in Boone’s belly. Once more, he noted the teddy bear the woman clenched in the hand that wasn’t gripping his coat. He hadn’t seen a child’s bedroom, nor any other indication of a child’s occupancy, save the teddy bear in the woman’s death grip.

But they hadn’t made it down to the basement, he reminded himself, a sick feeling gnawing at his belly when he remembered the radio announcement that the other firefighters hadn’t been able to make it down there. That’s where her child’s room must be. Good thing she’d left him sleeping on the couch, Boone thought. Otherwise the kid would have been a goner.

Man, a kid, he thought wildly. There was still a kid in there.

“Where’s your living room?” he demanded. “Where’s the couch he was sleeping on?”

The woman seemed to snap out of her stupor some, because her next directions were offered with some degree of coherency and a great deal of demand. “Turn left when you go through the front door. The couch is on the far side of the room.”

Boone nodded. “Okay, we’ll get him out. You stay put. Thompson!” he shouted out to one of the other firefighters nearest the front door. He heaved himself away from the woman, shoved his helmet visor back down over his face and began to race toward the burning house. “There’s a kid inside! We’re going back in for a kid!”

Boone had fought enough fires that watching his back was second nature. What other people might consider a terrifying situation was just another job for him to do. Usually. But when there was a kid involved, something inside him got anxious. Something inside him got scared. Something inside him got wary.

This time when he entered the house, it was with a single-minded intent to locate a three-year-old boy.

The general rule of thumb in his line of work was that where victims of fires were concerned, adults acted like dogs, and children acted like cats. While the former tended to run, the latter would normally hide. Boone hoped like hell this kid wasn’t an expert at hide-and-seek. Otherwise, they were both going to wind up toast.

Left, he reminded himself as he passed over the threshold and into an incinerator. She told you to turn left.

When he’d entered the house the first time, the flames had been confined pretty much to the back of the house. Now, suddenly, there was fire everywhere. The smoke, too, impeded his progress, blinding him at times. Without wasting a moment, he motioned Thompson toward one side of the room, and Boone moved to the other, looking for a couch against the opposite wall, finding it exactly where she had said it would be.

But there was no child sleeping on it.

Terrific, he thought morosely. Who knew where the kid could have taken off to?

“Check across the hall,” he told his partner. “But don’t go far.”

As Boone moved quickly forward to search the room, he caught a quick movement from the corner of his eye, and, spinning quickly back around, saw that there was someone on the couch, after all. But it wasn’t a child. Instead, a huge, black, malevolent-looking beast reared back on its hind legs, clearly terrified and slashing at the air with its claws.

Helplessly, Boone groaned aloud. A cat. He’d come back into a raging inferno to save a child, only to be obstructed now with the rescue of a cat. He hated cats. He really did. For good reason, too. And this one looked to be a real bruiser. Or flesh-eater, as the case may be.

An ominous creak sang out above him, a sound with which Boone was all too familiar. The upper floor was about to come down on top of him. He had maybe thirty seconds to get out before it did. Without even thinking about what he was doing, he completed his rushed search of the room and, satisfied the boy was elsewhere in the house, crossed to snag the cat, collect Thompson, and head for the front door. They’d have to come back for the boy through another entrance. They had no other choice.

When he was within inches of grabbing the big animal, it backed against the sofa cushion, flattened its ears angrily, and batted wildly at him with claws roughly the size of scimitars. Even with his hands well protected with heavy gloves, Boone halted before seizing the cat.

“You gonna give me a hard time, big guy?” he asked the growling beast, wondering why he was bothering, since he already pretty much knew the answer, and time was slipping by fast.

The cat hissed, spit, growled some more, flailed at the air, reared up on its hind legs as if to strike... then keeled over, quickly losing consciousness. Boone’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. Okay, so maybe not the exact answer he was expecting, but it would make his job infinitely easier.

“A fighter to the end, huh?” he muttered as he scooped the animal up as effortlessly as he had its owner only moments ago. “I admire your spirit.”

He tucked the cat into his coat and called out to Thompson, and the two men turned to flee, barely making it out of the house before the floor above the living room crashed down in an explosion of pyrotechnics. The reverberation of the noise and the flash of heat at his back told Boone how close he’d come to being trapped. Wouldn’t have been the first time, he reminded himself. Then again, did he really want to go through an experience like that again?

As he raced from the house into the chaos outside, he saw the woman he had carried to safety earlier being restrained—barely—by one of the other firefighters. Behind her, an ambulance with red lights tumbling through the haze of smoke stood ready to carry her to the hospital. But she’d obviously refused to make the trip until she knew the fate of her child, and Boone wasn’t exactly surprised.

He could see that she had been watching for him to emerge from the house, and when she saw him, she catapulted forward. Her face was still streaked with black from the smoke, her short hair was matted to her forehead with perspiration and the water from the firehoses, her clothes were wet and filthy and clung to her like a second skin. But those eyes...

He had to force himself to look away. He’d never seen anyone with eyes that blue. And the soot on her face only made them appear that much more vivid. Her gaze penetrated him to his soul when he approached her. This was a woman who would never be able to hide her feelings, he thought. Her eyes, huge and round and thickly lashed, were the kind of eyes that a man would lose sleep over. Some men, anyway, he amended. Not him. He never lost sleep over anyone. Not anymore, anyway.

He was overcome with a sense of guilt and failure at having come from the house without her son, and could only watch helplessly as she kept moving forward, her gaze never leaving his, her pace never slowing. Her lips parted, but no words emerged. Which was just as well. He could already hear her accusing, panicked voice demanding to know why he’d come out of the house without her child. As she drew near enough to reach out and touch him, Boone withdrew the still-unconscious cat from his coat, to hand the animal off to one of his colleagues before returning for the boy.

But at the sight of the motionless animal, the woman halted in her tracks and fell to her knees. Then she buried her head in her hands and began to weep as if her heart were broken.

“Mack,” she sobbed without looking up, as if she couldn’t bear the sight of the unconscious beast. “Oh, Mack. You were too late to save him.”

Boone gazed at her for a moment, completely dumfounded. Then, finally, he realized what he had done. He held up the caL “This is Mack?” he asked incredulously.

The woman nodded and finally looked up at him, her eyes filled with tears. Her gaze dropped briefly to the motionless animal in his arms before returning to fix it on Boone’s face. Then she began to cry freely again.

Boone could only stare back at her for a moment, so entranced was he by the piercing intensity of her gaze. Finally, he shook the hypnotic sensation off and managed to ask, “Mack is your cat? I went back into that inferno to save your cat?”

She nodded mutely as she lifted a hand to gingerly stroke one of the cat’s dangling paws. “Oh, God, he’s dead. You couldn’t get him out. Oh, it’s all my fault.” She buried her face in her hands again, and began to cry even more helplessly.

She was terrified that she had lost her cat, Boone realized, the same way a mother feared the loss of her child. Her whole body shuddered with every sob that erupted from inside her, and her dark head moved helplessly back and forth. Before he could stop himself, he threaded his fingers through her short hair, stroking the damp tresses until she looked up at him again. Gently he urged her head backward and pushed her bangs back from her forehead.

“No, lady, don’t cry,” he said softly, swiping at a fat tear that tumbled down her cheek. The cat twitched in his arms when he did so. “It’s okay. Your cat’s still alive. He’s even starting to come around. He just needs oxygen.”

She gazed at him levelly, those blue, blue eyes incredulous. “He’s alive?” she cried. “You got him out okay? He’s not dead?”

Boone shook his head and turned to make his way quickly to the oxygen he had used earlier, with the woman following only inches behind him, scrambling three steps for every one of his. “He was unconscious, but he’s starting to rouse,” he called over his shoulder as he went. “And he does need oxygen.”

He settled the animal gently on the grass beside the teddy bear the woman had left there, picked up the same plastic mask she had worn, and dropped it over the animal’s muzzle. Then he shed his gloves and began to slowly stroke his hand over the cat’s thick, wet fur, rubbing it lightly under the chin and cupping a hand over its rib cage to feel for its heartbeat.

Okay, he conceded as he watched the helpless creature lay still and half-conscious. Maybe cats weren’t so awful after all. This one, at least, had shown some spirit and had a strong will to survive. Boone had to respect that. It was something he identified with greatly. Survival was his reason for living, after all.

“His pulse is strong,” Boone told the woman. “Just give him a minute.”

Stooped down on his haunches, he was more than a little aware of her hovering over him. She stood close behind him, her knees pressing against his back and her hands settled on his shoulders. Obviously, she had no qualms about getting familiar with strangers. Boone had to force himself not to physically shake her off. He did have qualms about getting familiar with strangers. And not just ones with huge, haunting blue eyes, either.

But now that the immediacy and danger of the situation had passed, he was able to consider her a little more fully. Still holding the mask over the cat’s muzzle, he turned around to look at her.

Man, she was a mess. Soot-covered, water-damaged, shivering from the cold and damp, she was bedraggled enough to qualify for urchin status. In spite of her appearance, however, there was something compelling about her. Boone wasn’t sure what, but something in her struck him as being just as spirited, just as much a survivor as her cat was. Had he not gone in after the animal, he was quite certain she would have done so herself, barefoot and unprotected as she was. Even at the risk of killing herself, she would have gone back to retrieve that cat.

He wasn’t sure he could say the same thing about himself. He was a loner, and he couldn’t imagine caring so much for someone that he would place that someone’s well-being above his own. Sure, part of what he did for a living was save lives. But hey, that was his job.