Three Little Indians
(Book I in The Firedance Trilogy)
~ Part 1 of 7 ~
Copyright © September 2002; Revised, January 2010 by Hunter E. Black
Any version of this story that does not contain the © date of 2010 is obsolete.
Genre: Drama
Pairing: Johnny Gage/Roy DeSoto (slash? Intense friendship); John Gage/Other
Rated: MA Rape; graphic violence; adult situations.
Author's Note: Neither the title of this story nor any reference to "Indians" in the text is intended to offend any Native Americans of any tribe. The author grew up when the term Indian was not considered demeaning, or pejorative. However, the term is used in that way by one character in the story, and the author sincerely hopes he is well-hated.
Author's Disclaimers: This story is written for pleasure and is not intended to violate any preexisting copyrights. You may download a copy for your personal use, but not for profit. All characters and incidents in this story are products of the writer's imagination and/or based upon the TV series, Emergency! Any relation to any persons living or dead is really a stretch, if you ask me!
Three Little Indians
(Book I in The Firedance Trilogy)
Prologue: October 1976
"All rise!"
The courtroom was packed with reporters.
Firefighter/ paramedic Roy DeSoto stood with the rest of the observers and court personnel. He stood with the defendant. He stood with Captain Hank Stanley, the only other member of A-shift from Station 51 who had voluntarily come to the opening of the trial.
Roy was grateful for that: he didn't want the full list of charges against the defendant read in front of Chet, Marco, and Mike. Not that they wouldn't have been supportive, in their own ways. But even the LA Times had declined to list some of the more sensational charges, and Roy was glad that he wouldn't have to face a crew of men who had heard them all.
Captain Stanley was another matter. Roy had learned a lot about his Captain in the past months. And all he had learned made him grateful that the man was here, today.
Whether John Gage shared that feeling, Roy couldn't tell. Of course, Roy had had a hard time being able to tell much about his partner's state of mind for some time. He'd refused all offers assistance, especially those that indicated he might need any psychological counseling. After months of administrative leave, he'd returned to the station and carried out his duties without any sign of what he'd been through. Or that he was weeks away from facing one of the most grueling ordeals of his life.
But now that the jury had been seated and the trial had started; now that the opening remarks from both the prosecutions for the State of California and the defendant were about to begin, Roy tried to catch a glimpse of his partner. He couldn't.
Johnny wasn't sitting with him and Captain Stanley: he sat in front of them, his back to the crowded courtroom. No fewer than four FBI agents surrounded him. Roy knew only one of them.
"This court is in session," the bailiff announced. "The Honorable Craig Robertson presiding."
The judge tapped his gavel and took his seat. The rest of the court room sat as well.
Opening statements began immediately. The primary charge of first degree murder carried a mandatory life sentence. The other charges, all carefully lined up to bolster the first, could result in a total of several lifetimes in prison for the defendant. From his seat several rows back, Roy saw Johnny lean forward, his head resting in his hands, as the charges were enumerated and described by the prosecuting attorney.
"I'm a walking, talking lie, Roy! And no one sees through it, not even you..."
Next to him, Roy was aware of the Captain's response to some of the charges, charges he'd been unaware of until now.
"Dear God," he whispered. His face was impassive, but his words were filled with horror.
The prosecutor's statements were carefully chosen to create anger and revulsion in the jury over the heinous acts committed by the defendant. The defense's position was to down-play the severity, motivations, and reality of the alleged crimes.
"The worst thing is, I learned I could live with it. Make excuses. Justify myself. Finally, even get to the point where it didn't make me sick to look in the mirror any more."
"I turned myself from a villain into a hero..."
Two sides of one coin, Roy thought absently. If he were a juror, he wondered, which of the two lawyers would he believe more convincing right now? Which would he be likely to believe?
But Roy wasn't a juror.
He was a witness: one of the star witnesses.
"For personal and professional reasons, I am resigning from the LACoFD as a firefighter/ paramedic..." Johnny's words. Again. They haunted Roy: every blasted, horrible word.
Roy had been there for all of it.
"...I want him for murder, Mr. DeSoto. Everything else, as far as I'm concerned, is icing on the cake..." That wasn't Johnny: that was the so-called FBI agent.
Roy knew what the truth was.
It was up to the lawyers to make sure the men and women who sat in the boxed seats to the side of the room knew it, too. John Gage's life – and possibly Roy's, as well - depended on it.
"The State calls its first witness..."
E!
March 1975
"I'm sorry, guys, we did our best. She arrested – and we couldn't revive her."
Looking back, Roy realized, that had been the moment that had changed everything. Doctor Kelly Brackett, delivering what was, unfortunately, routine bad news after he and Johnny delivered a patient to Rampart Hospital, the physician's eyes reflecting both genuine grief and also the necessary dispassion anyone in the medical field developed to remain sane.
Jenny Carpenter, their latest victim, came into the hospital on a gurney. Johnny had accompanied her in the ambulance: Roy had followed in the squad. She had five children and a husband who, throughout her rescue, had waited and watched impassively while the paramedics had stabilized her and taken her to the hospital. Her family – all of them – had followed the ambulance and had gotten the news just before Roy and Johnny did.
It was, under any circumstance, a tragedy. Five young, motherless children and a widower stood huddled at the far end of the hall, away from the base station, but within view, their cries and grief seeping into Roy's soul.
"No," Johnny said quietly, his eyes defying Brackett's words. "No, there was no reason for her to die!"
He'd seemed a bit more agitated than usual, Roy recalled.
He waved his handi-talkie in the air and raised his voice. "She was stabilized! Her vitals were fine when I brought her in!"
When I brought her in...
I... Not "we".
That should have been Roy's first clue. But Roy hadn't been looking for clues or answers or explanations that day. He didn't know he'd have to. He'd been thinking about how he would feel if Joanne died, left him alone with his own children to raise, left his own heart torn open...
"Johnny, sometimes it just happens," Brackett said patiently, his hands thrust in his lab coat pockets, his ever-present stethoscope draped around his neck. The quiet sobbing from the end of the hall echoed in Roy's ears.
"No, not – There was no reason for her to die!"
"Johnny –"
"She should have been fine! She just needed–"
"John, she went hypovolemic and then flatlined. Maybe a valve defect, who knows?"
"Who knows?" The rising volume and pitch in his partner's voice surprised Roy.
He put a hand on Johnny's arm. "Johnny, come on, there's nothing more –"
"I want to know why she's dead, Doc! I want to know why she isn't alive, because she should be!"
The man was furious out of proportion to the situation.
Roy touched his shoulder, trying again to calm him: they were drawing the attention of others in the area, including the victim's family. They didn't need that.
"Johnny, come on." He began to pull his partner from the station, grabbing the supplies he needed to restock their boxes.
But Johnny pulled away and stared angrily, frantically, at Brackett.
"You're going to do an autopsy?"
"If the family requests one," Brackett agreed, holding his own composure, countering Johnny's sudden outburst.
"Well I request one!"
"Johnny, we can't do one just because – "
"Dammit, I was the one who saved her! I brought her in here, and I want to know why she came in here alive and is going out in a hearse!"
"Johnny!"
"John, you guys did a fine job in the field, there was nothing –"
"I want an autopsy!"
It was his final order that pushed Brackett's patience over the edge. He met Johnny's angry glare with an equal one and said, still quietly, "You don't give the orders here, Mr. Gage." His voice warned Roy that this would be a really good time to get his partner out of there. "I'll review the case and talk with her family, and if we deem it worthwhile, we'll do an autopsy. But not because a paramedic wants one done!"
Johnny opened his mouth again, but this time Roy grabbed him more firmly and propelled him down the hall.
"Sorry, Doc," the senior paramedic muttered, as he half-shoved his furious partner along the hallway.
As they closed on Jenny Carpenter's family, he paused and said, "We're real sorry. We did everything we could." He spoke to the husband, couldn't bear to meet the children's eyes.
The man, probably in his mid-forties, had made no pretense of hiding his grief. His tear-streaked face met Roy's eyes, and then he turned and glared at Johnny. John Gage met the glare steadily, silently.
"We'll see about that," he answered. Then he drew his children close with his arms and pulled himself and them away from Roy and Johnny.
Stunned by the man's response, Roy glanced at his partner.
And that, he realized, was something else he should have paid more attention to. The look in Johnny's eyes had mimicked the one in the widower's, but neither had been of anger or grief. They had looked at each other with hatred, pure and unadulterated.
"You care to explain that?" Roy demanded as he stowed the drug box in the bay and slammed the door shut. Johnny got into the squad without answering and frustrated, Roy followed. He put the keys in the ignition.
"You know, that was very unprofessional..."
"Just drop it!" Johnny snapped. He rolled his window down and rested his elbow on the edge, nibbling one of his fingernails.
Roy took a deep breath. He didn't like being embarrassed in front of Brackett: the doctor had an uncanny way of making him (and, he knew, many other paramedics) feel like a moron on the best of days, but having Johnny go off on him had really… Not made sense!
He turned on the squad engine and Johnny picked up the mike. "Squad 51 available from Rampart."
"Squad 51, 10-4."
"So, what?" Roy asked, low-keying it for now. He pulled out of the parking lot. "Did you – know her? Or him?"
…The patient's front door was opened by the oldest child, who just stood there silently as they dragged oxygen, defibrillator, bioscope, and drug and trauma boxes into their living room.
It was a fairly expensive, large, ranch house, nicely decorated in the most current style. Inside, the place was clean and orderly, except for four children who stood crying and being held by their father or sitting on the floor sobbing in hysterics.
"What happened to Mommy?"
"It's alright." Roy soothed the small girl, whose uncontrollable breathing in panicky sobs was threatening to put her into the same condition as her mother. "It's alright, we're here to help your mom."
Johnny dropped to one knee at the woman's side and put a hand on her chest.
"She's having trouble breathing." He turned on the oxygen and placed a mask over the unconscious woman's face and placed the stethoscope in his ears. "No ralls," Johnny reported. "What's her name?" he called sharply to the man who stood there watching them and holding the smallest child.
"Jenny..."
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Johnny glance at him quickly, then turn away. "She shouldn't have died, Roy."
"Rampart, the patient is stabilized and breathing on her own. Blood pressure is 80/55. We are transporting now. ETA is about fifteen minutes.
"10-4, 51."
"You heard Brackett, sometimes–"
"Not this time! She was stable, Roy! All her vitals were stable, her IV was in, she had almost regained consciousness – "
"What, then?" He turned at the intersection and caught a look at Johnny's profile. His jaw was clenching, the veins on his neck stood out, he was practically ready to throw something. "You think someone screwed up at Rampart? Or do you think we screwed up in the field?"
Johnny glared out the front of the squad car for a few breaths, then turned to stare out the side window.
"What? You think she was murdered or something?" Roy pressed. His partner was acting very strangely.
"I'm just saying," John repeated, very slowly, as if he were explaining this to a child, "that she shouldn't – have – died!" He pounded the window ledge with each final word, and Roy winced.
"Alright, look, we'll call over there later this afternoon, okay" Roy offered. "See if they've made any decision about following up on it." They were nearly at the station.
"No." John shook his head. "If they do an autopsy, they do an autopsy. If they don't, they don't. You don't need Brackett on your case, too."
He forced a smile as they pulled up to the firehouse and Roy turned the squad around to back it in. He parked, waited until the engine was off, then put a hand on Johnny's arm and held him for just a minute before they got out.
"You don't think you did something wrong out there, do you?"
Johnny's eyes drifted out of focus for a second, and then he shrugged and pulled himself free. "Naw." He seemed to have slipped off the fury very quickly, Roy thought. Too quickly.
"I'm gonna go wash up," he said, heading toward the latrine. Roy watched him go, a little worried. Then he smelled Chet's newly-perfected pizzas and decided to file the episode under job stress.
E!
Three days on, three days off. The innovative, unforgiving rotation schedule, an experiment some bureaucrat at Headquarters had plotted, put them together for the next forty-eight hours, most of which passed without incident.
In the middle of the night, Roy got up to use the head and noticed Johnny's bunk was empty. There was no sound from the latrine, but a sliver of light shone under the door to the engine bay. After taking care of his business, he passed quietly through the sleeping men in the dorm, through the deserted bay, and cracked open the door to the break room just a bit.
Johnny was on the phone, leaning against the wall, running his fingers through his hair.
"Look, I don't care, there was–" He was cut off by whomever he was speaking to and he sighed heavily, just listening for several seconds. He bent one leg back and planted his stockinged foot against the wall behind him for support.
"No, you listen! I tried!" His voice was agitated, growing louder, and he fought to pull it back down to a whisper. "I can't, I told you already! – Then you tell them–" He shifted his position, turned and saw Roy.
For a second, Johnny was startled by the uninvited audience, and there was a flash of something almost like panic in his eyes.
Roy grinned at him and walked purposefully through the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. Whatever else his partner had to say was lost in the background noise Roy provided.
When he heard the phone jangle on the wall, he turned and grinned again, still feeling ashamed that he had stood and listened for as long as he had.
"Didn't mean to eavesdrop," he apologized lamely, gulping water. "I just got up and…" he gestured with his glass to finish his pathetic excuse.
"Yeah, no problem." Johnny headed back to the dorms.
"Girl trouble?" Roy asked carefully. He glanced at the clock on the wall and tried to imagine calling a woman at this hour.
"Uh, yeah." Johnny was a pathetic liar. His basic decency made that a skill he had never mastered – or tried to, Roy had always thought. There was something almost gullible about his partner.
Johnny ran his fingers through his hair and gave a weak smile. "Night."
"Night." Roy finished his water and left the glass in the sink.
The following day, the second day of their shift, was excruciatingly quiet. The county was drenched with a long drizzle that lasted most of the day. Captain Stanley, facing a mountain of paperwork, decided to update the personnel files and passed that work on to each of his men, the word "delegation" currently one of his favorites.
"Forms!" Chet muttered disgustedly, looking over the records that needed to be updated annually. "Why don't they just shoot us and put us out of our misery?" They sat around the table, listening the light patter of rain, the endlessly monotonous questions in front of them. Roy had few changes to make to his form, since he and Joanne hadn't had any children born in the past twelve months, and neither his birthday nor his age had changed. He finished quickly and rose to put his papers back in the Captain's desk when the phone rang.
"I got it." He took his form with him, watched Johnny finish his own, and picked up the phone. "Station 51."
"Roy? It's Kelly Brackett."
"Oh, hi, Doc."
"Listen, that woman you brought in yesterday, Carpenter?"
"Yeah." Johnny started past him but Roy put his hand out and stopped him from leaving when he heard Carpenter's name.
"Her husband called this morning. Wants an autopsy. Thought Gage might like to know he got his wish."
"Thanks, I'll tell him." Johnny queried him with his eyes.
"If we find anything, I'll let you know."
"Thanks, Doc."
He hung up. "They're gonna do an autopsy on Jenny Carpenter." If Roy had known what to look for then, he would have seen it. But he was still operating on the assumption that all was normal.
"Good," John said and left, heading for the Captain's office with his papers.
"Who's Jenny Carpenter?" Marco asked.
"Run we had yesterday morning," Roy reminded them. "The one who didn't make it."
"Oh, right, with all those kids?"
Roy nodded.
"Why're they doing an autopsy? I thought she went into shock ..."
"Her husband requested it." He shrugged and followed Johnny into the office to deposit his forms. Johnny had left, was working in the bay on the drug box, and the Captain was fixing lunch, so the room was empty. And Johnny's form, listing relevant statistics and the raw data of his life, stared up at Roy from the In Box. His gaze flicked over the top form. There was something wrong about it.
A name, a date? An address? He couldn't figure out what, though, and without deliberately checking the old forms beneath the new one, he couldn't confirm the little tickle at the back of his brain.
There was something that just wasn't right, as if his partner had made a mistake somewhere.
With the quiet swoosh of rain in the background, he laid his papers down, tempted for just a second to check his subliminal impression.
Then Klaxons blared and Roy left the drudgery of bureaucracy behind as he prepared to answer a call for help.
It was a simple, if soggy, rescue, Roy remembered. A teenager had sped through an intersection, swerved to avoid the car that had right-of-way, and ended up bruised and battered. His car fared worse than he did, and from his reaction as Roy talked to him in the ambulance on the way to Rampart, he had a feeling the boy's parents weren't going to be lenient with the kid.
He stopped at the base station to check out supplies, greeted Dixie McCall, and left. Johnny had stayed in the ambulance lot in the squad car, just waiting. He'd moved out of the driver's seat and Roy climbed in.
"Kid was lucky," Roy muttered.
"Yeah," Johnny agreed. "Probably won't feel like it when his folks get here, though." He almost chuckled, then something passed over his face, a shadow from within, and he swallowed and grabbed the mike. "Squad 51 available."
The clues were stacking up, but Roy hadn't realized it was his task to collect and sort them; or to make sure, weeks later, that he had them at his disposal to save another life.
The third day of their shift brought the sun back to the county, and the guys set up a volleyball net in the rear parking lot and played off and on as the shift wore down quietly. The engine had three day calls and the squad responded to only four. Captain Stanley made mincemeat of the accumulated paperwork in his office.
The rest of the team made the station, engine, and squad shine like new.
"Hey, Johnny!" the Captain called once, while both paramedics were polishing their vehicle. Johnny looked up as the Captain walked out of his office, scowling at the paper in his hand. From the color, Roy could see that it was the personnel form. "Look, I know we're like family here," the man started, humor in his eyes, "but I think Headquarters needs a little more than just `Mom' under `Next of Kin'."
Roy chuckled as John took the paper and looked it over.
Chet and Marco, too, waited for a response.
"That's not `mom'," Johnny said quietly, "It's `none'."
The phone rang. Johnny glanced at his watch and yelled, "I got it!" as if he'd been waiting for a call. Roy watched him disappear behind the wall into the break room and saw Captain Stanley watch him vanish.
"What is it?" Roy asked, moving closer and listening with half an ear to the conversation on the other side of the room.
"Well, Johnny had his dad listed on the form last year," the Captain said, still looking after the paramedic. "Just wondered why he changed it." He looked at Roy. "He mention anything about his dad dying or anything this past year?"
Roy shook his head. "Nope." But Johnny rarely talked about his family, and upon reflection Roy realized that, had he been pressed, he wasn't sure he could even name anyone in Johnny's immediate family.
But it was Johnny's voice on the other side of the wall, through a door that kept normal conversations private, that had sucked the Captain's attention and Roy's.
"No! That's a load of – No, listen! I never said –"
Johnny's voice was loud enough now that even Chet and Marco were distracted by it.
"Then get down there now and start! – No way, man, he's not doing that again!"
"Who's he talkin' to?" Chet whispered, walking closer to Roy for a better seat in the wings.
"Dunno." Roy grabbed his polishing cloth and started back to work, hoping the others would follow suit. But the angry voice kept pulling their attention back.
"Look, I can't… No! Start now! Now!" And then there was a quiet string of expletives Roy had never heard Johnny use before and he slammed the phone onto the cradle.
Quickly, the rest of the team scrambled back to their duties. The Captain waited for Johnny to return, but when he took a look at the paramedic's face, he apparently changed his mind about pursuing the oddity on Johnny's personnel form.
Johnny grabbed his cloth and began vigorously rubbing the squad. After a minute, Chet said, "So, Gage, that your new pickup line you were practicing?"
Pulled from his own thoughts, the dark-haired man looked up and realized that everyone was waiting for an explanation of some form for the loud display. He took a deep breath.
"Guess none of you ever had to argue with a credit card company over a bill!"
It was a pathetic answer, Roy thought, but he put a little more muscle into his work and said, "Actually, Joanne and I had a bill a few months ago that we knew had to be wrong. We wrote them a letter and sent–"
"Squad 51! See the man at the corner of 21st and Penrose. Possible heart attack. Repeat: 21st and Penrose. Cross Street: Buena Vista. Time out: 1410."
"Squad 51, KMG-365." Hank Stanley handed off the paper to Johnny as he and Roy quickly dumped the rags and scrambled into their vehicle, helmets on. Johnny began scribbling the call log as Roy hit the lights and sirens, pulled out of the bay and turned right into the flow of traffic.
"Thanks," Johnny said, still writing the information from the run on the small pad on the dashboard, not looking at his partner.
Roy understood. "Sure." The sirens cleared their path. "That the same person you were yelling at the other night?"
For a moment, he thought Johnny had forgotten the late night incident. But the long silence turned too long, and when he glanced at the younger man Roy could see him trying to come up with a plausible explanation.
"Look, if it's none of my business..."
"Here it is! 21st and Penrose." Johnny pointed to a small bookstore at the corner they'd been told to go to. "Let's go."
Once again, Johnny elected to follow the ambulance in the squad car, and didn't come into the hospital himself. Roy delivered their victim and refilled supplies again: they were low on Ringer's and D5W, so he requisitioned them from the nurse at the base station and waited while she went to get enough to keep her own supply stocked as well.
That's when Alex Carpenter showed up, coming from the main entrance. He had not brought the children with him, and for a moment, as he looked at Roy, it seemed as if he didn't remember him. Then as he got closer, he did.
"Mr. Carpenter," Roy said, smiling and holding out his hand. "I'm Roy DeSoto. I was one of the paramedics–"
"I know," Carpenter said. He didn't take the offered hand. "Is Doctor Brackett here? He said he had the autopsy results for me."
"Uh, I haven't seen him..." Roy glanced around. Dr. Early had taken his latest patient into the treatment room. Neither Brackett nor Dixie seemed to be on duty. "His office is right down here, though," he said, and led the man in the right direction.
The door to the office opened and both Brackett and Dixie stepped out, their faces grim. Dixie smiled tightly when she saw Roy, and Brackett greeted Carpenter.
"I've been expecting you, Mr. Carpenter. There are a few things I thought you might want to know."
"Roy," said Dixie, "you got a minute?"
A sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach told Roy that even if he didn't, he'd better find one.
Dixie pulled him over to the chairs next to the base station, a step down in tension for Roy: had she taken him to the lounge, he'd have been more worried.
"What do you know about this Carpenter guy?" the blonde nurse asked, her voice very low and serious.
Roy shrugged and shook his head. "Nothing, really. We got the call to respond to a woman in distress at his house. Irregular heart beat and trouble breathing." He repeated details he knew Dixie was already familiar with: she had worked the base station on that run. "When we got there, it was a mad house. The kids were crying because they were scared: except the oldest one, he was just standing out of the way, waiting for help, I guess. Her husband was there, he said she'd lost consciousness after he made the call and he couldn't revive her. We checked her airway, got her started on oxygen, got her history and vitals..."
"And Johnny rode the ambulance in with her," Dixie interrupted.
"Yeah. Why, was there something in the autopsy?"
Dixie had looked grim before, but this time she looked more worried and puzzled. "I don't know what to tell you, Roy," she said. Then she met his eyes and said, "I'm not sure what I'm allowed to tell you."
Why hadn't Johnny come in yet? Why was he just sitting in the squad? It wasn't like him to miss the opportunity to socialize, try picking up a nurse...
"What's going on, Dix?"
Dixie sighed. "Keep this to yourself for now, okay?" Roy nodded. "Her husband thinks Johnny botched the rescue. And someone from a government agency's been up here to talk to Kelly about her. And the autopsy – wasn't as clean as we would have liked."
"The government?" Roy repeated, just a bit loudly. He cleared his throat and smiled with disbelief. "What, did she work for the CIA or something?"
Dixie hefted her shoulders and shook her head. "Beats me. But there's a lot of interest in her death and…" She paused and lifted one eyebrow. "Maybe it's just woman's intuition, but did you get the sense that Johnny knows these people? On the rescue, I mean, was there any sign that they'd met before?"
Roy remembered, now, that he'd asked Johnny the same question after they'd left the hospital two days ago. Johnny had never really answered it.
Johnny dropped to one knee at the woman's side and put a hand on her chest.
"What's her name?"
"Jenny."
He peeled back her eyelids and flashed his pen light in them. "Jenny! Jenny, can you hear me? Jenny?"
There was no response...
"No, there was no sign on the rescue, we just went in and did our jobs..."
"Well, my woman's intuition kicked in here," Dixie clarified. "Right at the end, when Johnny started demanding an autopsy and you finally got him to calm down and leave."
"Yeah, I saw it," he admitted. "But I think Johnny would've said something by now if he knew them. He's not real good at hiding things, you know?"
Dixie gave him a knowing look. "No, he just hides," she said, glancing around the base station area pointedly.
"He's just – waiting in the squad." Roy cleared his throat, stood and went to the station to retrieve his IV solutions from the nurse. "What you said about the autopsy..?"
"Keep it to yourself for now," Dixie said. "I may have said too much. And – keep an eye on your partner, okay? This'll probably all blow over, but if it doesn't..."
"Yeah." He patted her arm affectionately as he left, walking with his arms bundled around the IV packages.
In the past two days, Roy realized, he'd had to steer Johnny away from provoking a confrontation with Brackett, steer clear of two very strange and heated phone conversations, and now, apparently, steer himself and his partner through the possibility of a medical board of inquiry.
It was a lot of steering to do, given how steady Johnny usually was; not to mention that he was, without question, one of the finest paramedics in the county, if not the state.
Roy sighed and packed the IVs into the front seat next to him, and half-glanced at his partner.
"Any problems?" Johnny asked, almost disinterested.
"Not really."
"Squad 51 available," Gage reported into dispatch, and waited for the acknowledgement before he hung up.
"You know, I asked you a couple days ago if you knew Carpenter and his wife?" Roy reminded him as he pulled out.
"Hmm."
"He came in while I was in there."
"Collecting her body?"
Roy risked another glance at his partner: for a man who had been willing to run afoul of Brackett two days ago to get an answer to why the young woman had died, he was surprisingly detached now. Generally, when Johnny cared that deeply about an issue, he didn't let go of it easily.
"Getting the autopsy report. Brackett said he wanted to talk to him about it." That much he'd gotten without a word from Dixie, so he didn't feel he was speaking out of turn. But Johnny just grunted another, "Hmm," in response. He stared out his window and gnawed his thumbnail.
"You mind filling me in, here? There's something going on that you're not telling me about."
"What, with that woman?" Johnny asked casually.
"That woman?"
And that was when Roy had realized that whatever it was, it was more serious than he'd picked up on until that moment. Johnny never referred to their patients, living or dead, as impersonally as "that woman". It was part of what made him so good at his job, the fact that each person they rescued had a name, sometimes a job, friends, family; and between caring for the patient at the scene, taking them to the hospital, filling out the paperwork, and entering their logs, it was usually a long time before they forgot the names and faces of their rescues. Some they never forgot.
But never had he heard Johnny distance himself from a case with such callousness.
" `That woman' was Jenny Carpenter two days ago."
Johnny glanced in his direction, as if realizing he'd misspoken. "Yeah, I know, sorry. Well, I don't know what's going on with the autopsy. Did Brackett tell you what they found?"
"No." They were close to the station and Roy realized that, once again, Johnny had failed to answer his first question. It was either a very skillful deflection, or simply an oversight.
One more shot, Roy thought.
"So, had you met them before?"
Johnny shrugged. "I didn't know any Carpenters until two days ago," he answered. And then he propped his elbow on the open windowsill and stared out and away from his partner.
E!
"Gage! Phone!" Lopez handed the instrument over to Johnny, who leapt from the chair in the break room to answer it. He looked like a lifeline had just been passed to him, Roy thought.
"Thanks. This is John Gage."
It was the mid-afternoon slump period, and just about everyone was either in the kitchen, grabbing a snack, reading the paper, or sitting in the break room. Lopez was taking stock of the refrigerator in preparation for dinner, and Chet was playing a game of poker with Mike and the Captain, with a growing pot of M&Ms for the prize.
"Yeah, I know," John said into the phone. No one, Roy knew, trying to concentrate on the paper, was actively eavesdropping on his partner. But it wasn't easy not to, either, in the quiet room. "No." The monosyllabic half of John's conversation wasn't exceptionally revealing. "No!" he repeated again, a bit more forcefully. Then he glanced at the men around him and pulled the phone through the door into the bay to continue his conversation more privately.
Even though Roy couldn't hear the words, he could hear the tone: Johnny's growing agitation was unmistakable. When he finally came back and hung up the phone, he looked pale.
"Everything alright, Gage?" The Captain asked, glancing up from his hand.
"Oh. Yeah, Cap. Thanks." He came back to the break room, slid into the chair he'd vacated, and picked up a magazine, leafing through it, as if trying to find something to interest him. Or distract him.
Without consciously realizing it, Roy had picked up the obituary page of the newspaper, and started looking through it. He found the name CARPENTER, JENNY quickly, and glanced over the details.
"Here's the obit on Jenny," he said absently, to anyone who might care to hear. John glanced up, then looked back at the magazine with renewed interest. "`Jenny Carpenter, 27, died suddenly at Rampart General Hospital on Tuesday,'" Roy read aloud. "`She is survived by her husband, Alex, and five children: John, 10, Alex, Jr., 8, Sarah and Lisa, 6, and Michael, 5.' – That's odd."
"What?" Johnny asked.
"That their first son isn't Alex Junior."
"You know," Chet volunteered from behind him, "John is the second most common name in the country."
"That so?" Johnny asked. "What's the first?"
"Lee."
"So someone named John Lee would fade into the crowd?" Johnny asked, actually smiling with the question.
"Yeah, I guess."
"Didn't he look a bit different from the other kids to you?" Roy asked Johnny, not willing to be pulled away from the topic this time.
Johnny shrugged and turned the pages of the magazine, more slowly, as if he were actually reading something. "Didn't notice."
"He looked a lot like his mother. The others looked like their dad, but the oldest one – "
"Maybe they have different fathers?" Lopez suggested.
"Yeah, could be. That'd explain why the second kid got the Junior title. I'll see your three green M&Ms and raise you two," Chet said, sounding pleased with himself.
Roy glanced at the rest of the obit. The funeral would be tomorrow at the Congregational church not too far from Roy's house. Two o'clock.
He considered going. He considered whether Johnny would go.
His partner stayed deeply involved in his magazine and didn't look up, even when he had to have realized Roy was staring at him, waiting for eye contact.
The game continued at the table behind him. Chet won, to no one's surprise.
Roy finally gave up his efforts to force Johnny to look at him and put the paper on the sofa next to him. He got up, refilled his coffee, and spent a few minutes discussing dinner with Lopez.
"I should have stopped earlier for some green peppers," Lopez moaned, trying to make do with what they had in stock.
"Well, if we get another run before dinner, we can stop at a store on the way back," Roy suggested. It was always risky trying to get groceries during the shift, but some days it worked out.
Johnny continued to read through the magazine he'd picked up, trying to stay in his seat. But eventually, some internal pressure built up and he took a heavy breath and stood. He passed the couch, glanced at the paper, then headed out of the room, helping himself to a handful of Chet's winnings on his way.
"Hey!" Chet objected.
"You'll win `em back," Johnny chuckled, and stuffed half the candies in his mouth as he walked out of the break room.
"Yeah, from you!"
"Don't count on it."
Roy smiled and followed his partner, taking a quick look at Chet's hand on the way out: Johnny was right. He'd definitely win back the winnings John had eaten.
His detour to check the poker hand kept him far enough back from Johnny not to be noticed. In retrospect, he decided, that was probably fortunate. The younger man tossed the rest of the M&Ms into the trash can near the door on the way through the engine bay, then slammed the door open angrily and entered the locker room.
His entire demeanor had changed in less than three seconds, and Roy took a deep breath, treading more lightly.
It occurred to Roy that his own actions – following Johnny like a shadow – were abnormal. Then it occurred to him that Johnny's were even more so.
He stood in the bay and glanced through the door window.
Johnny had slumped on the bench in front of his locker, his head between his hands, rubbing the heels of his hands hard into his eyes. After nearly a minute, he turned, flipped one leg over the bench, and opened his locker. He pulled something from inside it and sat that way, his back to the door, for another two minutes. After that, Roy couldn't hold himself back any longer.
"Hey." Keep it light, he told himself. Don't corner him.
Johnny turned as he came into the locker room, and quickly shoved whatever he'd had back inside. He looked at Roy warily and sighed, not bothering to respond to the greeting.
"Listen," Roy said, sitting on the bench next to him, "I thought maybe – maybe I'd go to the funeral, you know. Just to see how her family's doing."
Johnny shrugged and stood up, locking his personal belongings away.
"Johnny, what happened in the ambulance?"
"What?"
"I just – I keep thinking back to how anxious you were to find out why she died, you know? And now – well, it's like you don't even care that we lost a patient."
"We didn't lose her, Roy. She died after I got her to the hospital, okay? Everything I did was by the book. So just drop it."
"Wish I could," Roy muttered, and sipped his coffee. It was fresh and hot, and a real treat.
Johnny started for the dormitory and Roy stood to follow him. Johnny turned, suddenly angry, and put his hands on his hips. "What's your problem, man?"
"My problem," Roy began uncomfortably, "is you."
"Hey, I don't have a problem. We lost a patient. She's dead. Now maybe I overreacted – a little – at the hospital, okay? I'm sorry. But you're always telling me to let go of things. So..."
"It's not that simple."
"Why not?"
The senior paramedic hated this: he hated getting Johnny angry, hated confrontations. He hated the stomach-clenching feeling he'd been getting off and on for the last two and a half days. He hated the feeling that a disaster was lurking right around the corner, and he wasn't going to be able to stop it.
"Because you won't give me a straight answer to anything I ask you. Because you're making weird phone calls in the middle of the night and getting weird ones in the middle of the day. Because you look like you're going to jump out of your skin every time I bring up the subject."
Johnny closed his eyes, then his mouth, and swallowed hard several times.
"And," Roy continued, very quietly, "because I know you. We've been working together a long time, Junior. You goof off a lot and you brag to the nurses. And you can't tell a good lie."
His partner opened his eyes and stared at him. For a few seconds, Roy wasn't sure if Johnny was going to belt him or just walk off. He did neither.
"Look, just – leave it alone."
"Not if it won't leave you alone."
Johnny shut his eyes again and took another deep breath. "Look, I'm sorry if I haven't been straight with you, okay? There's just nothing to talk about."
He turned then and started back to the dormitory. Again, Roy followed. This time they made it into the sleeping quarters before John turned back and glared at him.
Roy spoke first, preempting the imminent tirade he could see coming. "Look, I think you know this Carpenter guy, and I think he's got it in for you. He's going to try to make trouble for you, Johnny, and if he makes trouble for you, he makes trouble for me. I don't want to sound selfish, but if we're going to end up facing a board of inquiry over this, I'd like to know why."
Johnny considered the request for a long moment. Then the anger left his face. The fight went out of him. "I'm sorry, Roy. I've told you everything I can."
It was a surrender, of sorts. But not the one Roy had hoped for. "Johnny – "
"I've told you everything I can!" he repeated. His voice was gaining strength, but not anger. He was beginning to sound panicked. Cornered. Exactly what Roy had not wanted.
"Okay." He turned to go, hoping that maybe, if he backed off, Johnny would volunteer something, anything. But he didn't.
When dinner was ready, two hours later, Chet found him in the dorms, sitting on his bunk, staring blankly at the walls. He came and ate with the rest of the men, but his mind was somewhere else.
And Roy knew he didn't have a chance at finding out where.
E!
The middle of the night brought another late-night call.
Roy woke up without knowing why, until he saw Johnny's dark form retreating from the room. Some small sound his partner made must have woken him. That, or instinct working overtime.
Hating himself, and angry at Johnny as well, he followed at a distance, and waited just on the other side of the break room, engaged in the despicable activity of deliberate eavesdropping. And desperate enough to simply stand and listen.
"It's me," Johnny began. The caller was expecting the middle-of-the-night interruption. After a pause, Roy heard his partner's tired sigh. "I know. – No, I can't. – I – have something else I've gotta do."
Roy waited, trying to make sense out of what he heard.
"Look, I said I can't – No!" Johnny's voice went from exhaustion to pleading. "Please, I told you I – " he begged. Then there was a long silence. "Alright, alright. – Yes." And the tone went back down. "Fine. – Yes, I understand." He clipped off that last sentence with barely-controlled anger.
Roy was still listening when the Klaxons blared.
"Engine 51, Engine 36! Brush fire. Pecos Canyon..."
"I gotta go," John said rapidly, and hung up the phone.
Roy was trapped. The lights were on. The men in the dorm had jumped at the sound of the alarm, pushing their legs into their turnout gear. Johnny, trying to make it back to the dorm without being detected, came face-to-face with Roy, whose position right behind the door couldn't be misinterpreted.
The look in Johnny's eyes as he realized what had happened was one of the more frightening things Roy had faced in his life. But amidst the bustling, frenetic activity in the room as the rest of the crew got dressed to put out a fire, Roy figured the look would be lost on everyone else.
He desperately hoped it was.
"Hey, Roy, Johnny, what are you guys doing up?" Marco asked as he passed them. The Captain, too, shot them a quick, questioning look, but they were all moving too quickly to wait for an answer.
Which was good, because Roy wasn't able to think of one, and Johnny wasn't even breathing, much less paying attention to anything now except the invasion of privacy Roy had perpetrated.
In seconds, the engine was pulling out of the station and Roy stood alone and defenseless.
Without a word, without blinking or even seeming to breathe, Johnny passed him and went back to his bunk. He laid down, flicked off the lights, and threw his arm over his eyes.
Heart pounding and mouth now dry from guilt and anxiety and a hundred other things he couldn't begin to decipher, Roy sat on the edge of his own bunk, next to Johnny, and waited in the darkness.
"Go to sleep," Johnny finally said, obviously aware of his partner's stare, even without looking.
"Can't."
Johnny swallowed very loudly, and if there had been enough light, Roy thought, he might have actually seen him gulp, as if he were trying not to scream.
"Please tell me that wasn't Carpenter."
"It wasn't Carpenter."
"You're getting better, Junior," Roy said sadly. "That one almost sounded like the truth."
Johnny's chest heaved soundlessly. "Drop it."
"Johnny, I'm your friend. Least, I thought I was. If you're in some kind of trouble, let me help!"
"I'm not in any trouble," he said. He sounded defeated again. Tired and defeated. "And you are my friend, but – there are some things – I just can't talk about."
Roy considered his next words carefully. "Whoever that was, he sure knew how to scare you."
There was a long silence. Then, very firmly, Johnny said, "Good night, Roy."
As he lay in the darkness waiting for dawn, Roy realized that what concerned him more than anything else right now was the fact that, despite Johnny's fury at having been spied on by his best friend, he hadn't even brought it up. He'd let it go, as if he he'd already fought as much as he could fight.
As if he didn't have the strength left to fight. Or as if he had the strength for only one fight at a time, and it wasn't going to be with Roy.
It was with the person he called, alone in the darkness in the dead of night.
The engine company returned an hour later. The men dragged themselves back to bed as quietly as they could, assuming their two lucky mates were sleeping. But Roy listened with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling, knowing that sleep was impossible. And in the bunk next to him, when everyone else's breathing had calmed back to the rhythms of sleep, and Chet's quiet snoring filled the room, Roy heard sounds he knew he shouldn't have heard.
And something inside him broke apart listening to Johnny cry in the night.
E!
Johnny was in and out of the latrine and dressed before the rest of the guys were even up. Roy had waited with his eyes shut, not willing to interfere with his partner's need to compose himself before facing the rest of them.
He got up later, with the others, walked through his morning routine and listened to the muted grumbles as they described their late-night interruption. It was a minor fire: most of the time they'd been gone had been spent traveling to and from the scene, at the farthest edge of their jurisdiction.
Marco, Chet, and Mike left, almost on cue, and the Captain, who had just finished brushing his teeth, stood near the mirror next to Roy, who was shaving.
"By the way," the Captain said, "what was that scene all about when we were leaving?"
It would have been nice to have had Johnny's gift for deflecting a question, Roy thought, but he knew he didn't have that. On top of a mostly-sleepless night and his own confusion and worry, he didn't have much else, either.
"Oh, I just, uh, had to go get a drink of water, and I guess I surprised Johnny on the way." He shrugged. The Captain came closer to him and lowered his voice.
"Roy, I know we were all half-asleep. But even Stoker was laying odds on the chances of finding you still alive when we got back."
Roy winced and looked down as he rinsed his razor. "It was nothing, Cap, just – a little misunderstanding."
"Uh-huh. So was World War I. Look, if you two are having some kind of personal problem..."
"No, it's nothing like that, Cap."
"Okay." The man sighed, the sigh that meant he was about to launch into his next approach. "You two have been on edge all shift. If it's not personal, then it must be professional, right?"
Roy finished his task and grabbed a towel to wipe his face off. "I guess we're both upset about that girl, Jenny?" The truth, Roy had found, was always best. Well, almost always. "It's got Johnny on edge, and I guess – I'm just worried about him." He smiled half-heartedly at the Captain and shrugged. "Couple days off, we'll both feel better."
"Mmhmm." Translation: And I've got ocean-front property in Nevada! "Well, if you want to talk or if you think there's something I can do, let me know."
"I will, Cap, thanks."
"Okay. Enjoy your days off."
Roy nodded and waited until the Captain had gone before he sighed with relief. The first arrivals to relieve them had come in, and Marco and Chet had left by the time Roy got to the kitchen.
"You guys are early," he remarked, stifling a yawn and heading for the coffee pot. It was half empty already.
"Oh, we were bored," Brad Singer said, looking thoroughly refreshed from his own days off.
"Yeah, just can't wait to get back into that engine and feel grit and sweat and soot all over us," added Mark Dempsey. The two were cradling their coffee at the table and the Captain had made himself some toast and grabbed a cup of coffee for himself.
Johnny sat in the break room, reading through the paper.
Roy decided against joining him, though that would have been normal. Instead, he sat with the others at the table, watching the clock, chatting about the previous shift, even casually mentioning Jenny Carpenter. If Johnny were listening, he gave no indication.
When their replacements arrived, Johnny left as quickly as possible after going over the checklists of drugs and supplies and the squad log.
"Looks like you might need an oil change this shift," Roy commented, realizing he and Johnny should probably have taken care of that yesterday when things were quiet.
"Will do."
Johnny wouldn't meet his eyes, didn't speak to him, barely acknowledged his presence. Roy began to feel the impact of his actions last night, more than he had at the time. Like being in a vehicle accident, he thought, when you don't realize how much everything hurts until the adrenaline wears off the next day.
When Johnny made his escape, heading for his locker to get his keys and personal belongings, Roy excused himself and followed.
"Listen," he said boldly, as Johnny put his wallet in his pants and grabbed his keys and jacket, "I thought I might grill some steaks tonight. Wanna come over and have dinner?"
Johnny didn't quite look at him. He produced the polite flash of a smile and said, "Thanks, but I'm busy." He walked past him, out the door to the engine bay, and Roy grabbed his keys and slammed his locker in frustration.
In the parking lot, as Johnny unlocked the door to the Land Rover, Roy gave it one more shot, not liking the idea of spending the next three days without a resolution.
"Johnny, look, I'm sorry about ..." Boy, this was hard. It was harder when Johnny finally looked at him. His reddened eyes were heated with anger and he waited silently, the same terrifying look on his face that Roy had seen hours before. "I'm sorry," he repeated stupidly.
"See you Monday," Johnny said after a few seconds. He got into his car, put on his sunglasses, and backed out of the lot.
E!
"You ever have one of those gut feelings?" Roy had spent the last two hours trying to explain to Joanne what was wrong: the way it came out made him sound paranoid and delusional, and he realized he was failing miserably as a communicator on all fronts.
"All the time," Joanne said, wiping the sink down as she finished cleaning up from lunch. "We call it women's intuition when it doesn't have a lot of testosterone attached."
Roy chuckled. "Well, then that's all I guess I can chock this up to."
"I don't think so." She had finished her own clean-up detail – which Roy knew better than to interfere with by offering to help – and came to join him at the table. "How often in the past few years has Johnny gotten up in the middle of the night to make phone calls?"
"I don't know, maybe I always slept through it before."
"How often has he repeatedly refused to answer a simple question?" she continued. Hearing her piece it together for him, it was actually beginning to make sense again. Roy's concern about being admitted to the psych ward diminished.
"He hasn't."
"And how often has he demanded an autopsy for someone you've lost on a rescue?"
"Never."
Joanne shrugged and patted her husband's arm. "See? All you needed was a clear-thinking, logical woman to put things in their proper perspective. You get rid of all the `jumpy, on-edge, irritable' subjective terminology and focus on facts, and it's pretty clear your boy's in trouble." She smiled sweetly, got up and grabbed herself a cup of coffee. "So, are you going to the funeral or not? You'd better get showered and changed if you are."
"You think I should?" It was the reason he'd dragged her through his excruciatingly muddled thoughts to begin with: coming home after three days on duty and announcing that you were going to a funeral wasn't something that would sit well with a lot of wives.
"I think you'd be stupid not to. Johnny's sure going to be there."
And Joanne, as usual, was right. As Roy pulled into the First Congregational Church's parking lot, he spotted Johnny's Land Rover almost immediately. The church was small and so was parking lot. He took one of three empty spots, got out, buttoned his suit jacket, and went around the front of the church.
There was nothing like the smell of funeral flowers. They cloyed at the nostrils and penetrated the lungs with a sickly scent that tried to mask the odor of death. The flowers around Jenny Carpenter's casket were minimal, but enough to fill the air. The moment he walked in, Roy spotted Johnny, and it was less the fact that he was there (as Joanne had predicted, and Roy's gut had told him) but where he was in the church that made Roy's stomach churn with nausea.
John Gage, who had presumably met the dead woman only hours before her demise, sat in the front pew, the family pew, next to her husband. Beside Alex Carpenter were the children, the smallest one nestled against him, the eldest at the far end, sitting alone, separated just a bit from his siblings. As Roy entered the church and accepted a funeral program from one of the ushers, he saw the smallest boy climb onto his father's lap, and Johnny turned to the child for an instant.
Johnny didn't see his partner, and Roy was glad he'd slipped in just as the service began. He took a seat at the back of the congregation, near the door, so he could leave quickly, as soon as the casket was carried out.
The service was mercifully brief. The minister made a few generic remarks about eternal life, motherhood, and dying young. Obviously, he hadn't known Jenny Carpenter any better than Roy had. When the program indicated it was nearly time for the service to end, he stood with the rest of the small group of mourners, and waited as the pall-bearers stepped forward to carry the casket out to the waiting hearse.
Predictably, Alex Carpenter took the front right position. Unpredictably, Johnny took the left. There was no missing the expression on his face as he walked down the aisle, passing within inches of Roy, his shoulder bearing the burden of Jenny Carpenter's death, his soul bearing much more. He averted his eyes, refused to look at Roy or anyone. He was pale and looked as if he were going to be sick at any moment. Roy looked down, closed his eyes, and wished he had a prayer handy that he could say for his friend.
He hung back, waiting until the end of the hymn and for the last of Jenny's friends and acquaintances to leave before he left the church. The hearse sat out front, and nearby was the Carpenters' tan Ford, Alex standing outside to shake the hands of those who weren't going on to the cemetery.
Roy walked around to the back parking lot. The windows of the Land Rover were down and Johnny hadn't turned on his engine yet. He stared out the windshield as if he were in a trance. Roy came up to the passenger side and leaned in.
"Guess you'll be going to the cemetery," he said. Johnny didn't face him, didn't seem surprised by his presence. As if his partner had been waiting for him, Roy thought, but that again was just a gut feeling.
"Yes."
"Mind if I hitch a ride over with you?"
"Yes." More firmly.
"Okay." Roy rolled the program between his hands into a tube. "Guess I'll see you over there then."
"Don't."
"What?"
Johnny turned to him and said, "Don't go to the cemetery, Roy. Please."
Johnny's face was red, his eyes were red, there were tears on his cheeks, and he didn't seem to care. Roy fought hard not to yank his partner from the car and demand to know what was going on!
"Please, Roy, don't – go – to the cemetery." He gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white with pressure. He was shaking. He shut his eyes. "Please," he whispered again.
"Sure," Roy said. "Sure, I got errands..." He didn't bother to continue. It was a stupid need to fill silence. He reached into the car and put a hand on Johnny's arm. "Take care of yourself, Junior."
Johnny didn't respond.
Roy left him, waiting from a distance, until he saw the tension go out of his friend and the trembling in his arms stop.
When Roy moved away, Johnny started the engine.
Roy went back to the front of the church and found Alex Carpenter ushering the twin girls, both of whom had been crying throughout the service, into the back of his Ford. The last of the well-wishers were either in their cars, waiting to join the cortege, or had left.
"Mr. Carpenter," Roy said, foregoing both the smile and the offer of a handshake this time. The man looked at him and his eyes glinted with the same type of hatred he had seen in the hospital. "I came to offer you and your family my condolences on your loss," said.
"Thank you."
"I know it's normal to be angry at a time like this. To look for someone to blame. But I don't think you want your anger to end up hurting someone else, do you?"
The man smiled, and Roy felt his skin crawl. "Whatever do you mean?" he asked silkily.
The need for even a pretense of civility suddenly died and Roy stepped a little closer and lowered his voice. "You know exactly what I mean! Johnny and I did our best out there for your wife, and her death wasn't our fault. So don't try to destroy a decent man over something he couldn't control."
Alex Carpenter's smile lingered, and then turned to a twitch. "Did Mr. Gage imply that I had done anything to – destroy him?" he asked pleasantly.
A host of words Roy never used suddenly leapt to his mind, and he shoved them back. Hardly appropriate outside a church. Or in the presence of four devastated children.
And then, as Roy did a double-take, he noticed that the eldest child was not in the car. He wasn't in view anywhere. Maybe he'd left with another relative.
"I don't intend to get into it here with you, Mr. Carpenter," Roy said, trying to control his temper. "I've said what I had to say. I wish you and your family the best."
He turned and left quickly, wanting to get away from the man as quickly as possible.
He walked back to his car and watched the cortege leaving, headlights on, the police motorcade escorting them through the traffic. And as Johnny's Land Rover pulled out of the lot, he saw the eldest Carpenter boy in the seat next to him.
E!
It was a long two days that followed. Roy called Johnny several times, never getting an answer. He stopped by his place once, on his way back from an errand with the kids, just to see how he was doing, but the Land Rover was gone and so was its owner.
It was almost a relief to get back to work on Monday, though he tried not to communicate that to Joanne. Fortunately, his wife seemed to be psychic when it came to him.
"Don't take this wrong way," she said, as she handed him a jacket for the brisk morning air, "but I didn't think Monday was going to get here soon enough for either of us. Did you?" And the way she smiled he knew it wasn't a trick question.
"No."
"Give me a call later?"
"Sure will."
He got to the station early, checked his watch, and waited until just before 8:00 to go in. Then, with his standard lateness, Johnny roared into the parking lot, slammed his brakes on hard, and jumped quickly from his car.
"Morning."
He turned, smiled, and said, "Morning. – You're late?"
Roy shrugged and walked in with him. "Misjudged the traffic," he said.
Johnny chuckled. "Cap'n doesn't care for that excuse any more."
"I've never tried it!"
By the time they made it to the locker room, where nearly everyone else had already dressed or was waiting for roll call, Roy felt much better. He could look forward to calling Joanne.
"Roll call!" The Captain called, jutting his head into the locker and catching Johnny and Roy both hastily changing. "Roy, Brackett called a few minutes ago. He wants to see you and John when we're done with roll call."
"Sure, Cap, thanks." Roy turned to Johnny. "What do you think that's all about?"
Johnny chuckled. "Probably some new PR program he wants us to try out."
"So," Roy started awkwardly, sitting on the bench and pulling on his shoes. "How'd it go?"
Johnny glanced at him, then finished buttoning his shirt while he answered. "They put the casket in the ground, covered it with dirt, said a few more prayers, and we left." He shrugged.
"So – is it over?"
Johnny straddled the bench and wrapped his equipment belt through his pants loops. Then he looked up.
"What did you say to him?"
"Me? I just told him we were sorry for his wife's death. Why?"
Johnny studied him for another minute, then shook his head.
"Come on, guys, stop yammering and get a move on!" Stanley called again.
Johnny hopped into his shoes and Roy grabbed his wallet and they left the locker room.
Roy pulled latrine duty, which the rest of the team found very amusing.
"Gee, Roy, it's been so long. You think you remember how to find the place?"
"Forget that. Does he remember what everything's for?" Johnny teased.
"Very funny," Roy smirked back. His internal relief was growing by leaps and bounds.
"Gage, you've got the dorms. Kelly, break room..." The Klaxons went off. "And the rest of you get yours when we get back."
"Engine 51, fire in an alley, 1600 block of Wayland Avenue. Repeat: 1600 block of Wayland Avenue. Cross Street: Lombardy. Timeout: 0805."
"Engine 51, KMG-365," Roy responded and handed the call sheet to the Captain as he mounted the truck.
Roy waited for the engine to pull out, then turned to Johnny. "Guess we might as well see what Brackett wants," he suggested.
"Anything to put off latrine duty, right?"
Roy grinned and hopped into the squad. It was the difference between night and day, he realized. And without a siren or light, they pulled out into traffic and headed for Rampart Hospital.
