There were multiple voices behind the door, real voices, not the voices he expected and not the filtered, professionally smooth voices one heard from a television set but the rough-edged murmur of men like those with whom he worked. It sounded much like the station did when he came in before the start of a shift, muted voices filtering from the bay or dayroom as he changed into his uniform.

He pushed open the hospital door. Two men were sprawled in armchairs that looked as if they'd been pilfered from an office or conference room. Or maybe the charge nurse on the third floor was a soft touch for firemen. Both looked familiar, their names elusive. He bet he'd know them in a helmet and turnout coat.

"It doesn't make a damn bit of difference, Hank," the one with a full head of gray hair was insisting. "If you'd done a top-down search and started on five, it would've taken you just as long to get to the fourth floor, and it wouldn't have made any sense to start on five when their last reported position was three."

He walked fully into the room and was hit with that all too familiar hospital room smell: a mixture of disinfectant-mopped floors, Betadine-soaked bandaging, unshowered patients sweating out medications and sagging floral arrangements. And like most times when there were visiting firefighters in the hospital room, there was a top note of smoke. In this case, it was the faint smell of burning wood, plaster and paint, hard to banish completely even after showering or changing to civilian attire.

"Hey, Cap."

Three men's heads rotated towards the door and the two that weren't Hank Stanley smiled a little sheepishly.

"Force of habit," said the man in the chair closer to the door, the one whose brown hair was only streaked with gray and whose squint lines weren't quite as prominent as the other man's. Worry lines, Captain Stanley usually called them, something that he swore he never had until he pinned the bugles on.

"Come on in, Mike," Stanley said with an easy, welcoming grin. "You know George Higgins and Marty Cunningham, don't you?"

And with names to go with faces, Stoker nodded. Higgins was 95's A-shift Captain, Cunningham was 43's; he and his crew had fought the fire with them. They stood and he shook hands with both men.

"Pull up a chair and join us," said Higgins, the most senior of the three Captains in the room.

There was a visitor's chair on the other side of the two-patient room, on the far side of Marco's bed, which was empty, sheets and blankets folded over midway on the bed. He carried the chair towards the gathering of off-duty Fire Department Captains and joined them.

"More X-rays and tests," Stanley said, answering the question Stoker had been about to ask. "He left about fifteen minutes ago, and then he has that follow-up with the Pulmonologist. Not sure exactly when he'll be back, Mike."

He placed his chair near Cunningham and Higgins so that Cap didn't have to shift position in the hospital bed to see all of them. Propped up by the inclined back of his hospital bed, Stanley looked better than he had two days ago, which was substantially better than he had a week ago, which still looked nowhere close to normal. At some point in the last few days, he'd traded the white hospital gown for a pair of dark green pajamas and Stoker wondered how someone had managed to get the pajama shirt on over the cast without destabilizing the shoulder.

"And yeah, okay, Truck 86 was an option, but I still don't think it was good one," Cunningham said, picking up a thread of the conversation that Stoker had interrupted. "That would've been a hell of a long way for you and your guys to climb down and based on how things turned out, you would have been on it when the fuel tank blew." He shrugged; words were not necessary to convey that probable outcome. "The Snorkel was the best available means of egress and waiting for it was the right choice."

Stanley frowned and Stoker wasn't sure if his Captain was even open to being convinced that he'd done everything possible to get everyone out safely.

"Look." Higgins heaved a sigh. "You know and I know…" He paused. "Stoker, this doesn't leave the room…" He turned a fierce gaze on Stoker who nodded, realizing that he'd been included in something that wasn't just a social visit. "We all know that if 22s had updated the IC when they moved to the fourth floor…"

"HT trouble," Stanley interrupted. "When we found them, Dan said he'd tried checking in a couple of times on four and got an earful of static every time."

Higgins shook his head. "You went up the same staircase and made contact on the fourth floor without any problem."

Stanley's shrug was an automatic response and he immediately grimaced, his right hand crossing his body to grip his immobilized left arm. "On different equipment. His might have had a low charge. Maybe the antenna connection came loose. Who knows? It happens."

"Hank's right," Cunningham said with a glance at Higgins. "Dan checked in more than once from the third floor. There's no reason he'd stop when they went up to four unless it was something outside his control."

Higgins leaned forward and rubbed both hands over his face and Stoker wondered how long they'd been at it, this unofficial postmortem. Cap usually led them through something like this at the station after a bad call to reinforce what worked well, pick apart what could have been done differently, how they could have achieved the same results with fewer risks, make sure they worked an incident both safely and effectively so that no matter what, everyone went home to his family at the end of a shift. No one ever wanted to have to carry their own guys out of a building.

"Okay, you're right, the both of you," Higgins conceded reluctantly. "Let me ask you something. When you took your men inside, Hank, how many HTs did you carry?"

"You already know what I'm going to say," Stanley said. "I had the only HT."

Cunningham groaned and slid down in his chair. "You really think the Department is going to spend the money to equip every man with an HT?"

"I think it should be raised during the inquiry. It's a hell of a hard way to make a point, but maybe this will be what it takes to get the Department to consider doing just that. If even one of the other guys from 22s had been carrying an HT, 51s would've gone straight to the fourth floor and we wouldn't be sitting in Hank's hospital room right now."

It occurred to Stoker that he might be the only one in the room that knew Kelleher had carried an HT. He opened his mouth and then hesitated, trying to remember who'd told him Kelleher had carried an HT. Ferrara? Wozniak?

"Too bad HQ will be interviewing Hank, not you, George."

"You're damn right it is. Hank, you're going to have to make that point for all of us when they come to get your statement for the inquiry."

Stoker recognized that particular shift of expression on his Captain's face but wasn't sure if the other two men would as well.

"Oh, hell," Higgins said. "I hope you stuck to the facts and didn't spend the whole time trying to figure out how you could have pulled off some goddamn miraculous rescue. Those guys'll come up with enough what-ifs on their own without any help from the guys who actually have to do the job. There's not a decision you made where I wouldn't have done the same damn thing myself, which is exactly what I'm going to say when we do the training committee review."

Stanley shifted on the bed and Stoker ran a quick assessment: the lines around Stanley's eyes were more pronounced and he was clenching his jaw as he moved, as if trying and failing to find a comfortable position. Mike glanced at his watch.

"It wasn't just staff guys," Stanley said. "Chief Conrad sat in on it and kept things focused on the facts of the scene, what information I had going in, my familiarity with the pre-plan…"

"That's 36's area," Higgins said. "Not 51's."

"…tools, safety equipment, manpower..."

"I know for a fact that wasn't entirely your call," Cunningham said.

"…location and extent of fire, layout of the third and fourth floors, special hazards, how the interior wall had come down, how we cleared it and packaged the guys from 22's." He shrugged again, this time using only his right shoulder. "Normal stuff."

It was the exactly the type of thing they'd review at the station after the more challenging calls, only this time someone had died, one of their own, and the expressions of every man in the room reflected that immutable fact.

"Chief Miller didn't sit in?"

Stanley shook his head and there was a long moment of silence as eyes flickered and the three Captains exchanged glances. Stoker leaned back in his chair, assuming that they were deciding whether to pursue that particular point with him in the room.

"They talk to Dan?"

Stanley's jaw shifted. "No idea. I tried to see him yesterday but the nurse said he wasn't up for visitors."

"Still?" Cunningham's voice conveyed the puzzled alarm that Stoker saw on Higgins's face as well. "Has anyone seen him? Besides his family, I mean?"

"The doctors won't tell me anything," Stanley said. "I did hear that the swelling's down and the cord is intact. He'll walk again, eventually, but that the fractured vertebra is hellishly painful, even with the brace." His expression twisted and sagged. "But with the news about Kelleher…"

Heads dipped and nodded.

"Still," Cunningham said, "you'd think if he'd see anyone…" He trailed off and sent a glance at Higgins, as if looking for support, but Higgins was looking at the floor, jaw tight, massaging his right temple.

Stanley sighed. After a few moments of staring in the direction of the empty corner of the room, to his left, he finally said, "Any word on the funeral?"

Higgins cleared his throat but he sounded hoarse when he answered. "Tuesday. "

Stanley chewed at his lip, gaze still distant, and Higgins and Cunningham exchanged a look.

Higgins cleared his throat again. "So, the doctors give you any idea of when you're going to get out of here?"

Stanley blinked as if thinking about the question, and then turned his head back to his visitors. "Monday at the latest. Possibly as early as tomorrow, depending on today's test results," he said almost absently.

Higgins raised an eyebrow and looked at Cunningham.

"Tell me you're not sitting there thinking about attending the funeral," Higgins said, in that firm but compassionate tone that Stoker assumed the Department taught in some kind of Captain's training class. "The Department's not going to want you riding the Engine, not on sick leave, and you're in no shape for all the standing that's involved in the procession or the service."

Stoker agreed wholeheartedly but unhappily recognized a familiar rigid set to his Captain's jaw, as if the decision had already been made. And while Stanley was no longer tethered to an IV and the nurses had him up and walking the hallway, a Department funeral was another thing entirely. Mike kept his silence, but he didn't like it.

"Dan's not going to be able to be there," Stanley said, as if that explained everything.

"But Harrison, Ferrara, Ostrander and van der Heijden will be," Cunningham said. "Along with half the department, representatives from every county in the state and a fair amount from surrounding states."

Stanley looked directly at Stoker, and Mike nodded.

"Yeah, Cap. Johnny, Roy and I'll be there, along with the guys from B shift."

He hoped that was sufficient representation from 51s. Everyone would understand if the three members of the crew who'd done their best to save Kelleher's life were not in attendance. He really didn't want to have to take this to a higher authority to convince Cap to sit this one out and for all he knew Karen might feel the same sense of obligation to be there that Cap clearly did.

The room door swung open and the pretty dark-eyed nurse who entered scanned the room and sighed.

"Three's too many," she said, but her tone was more amused than scolding. She unwrapped the stethoscope from around her neck and Stoker was relieved to see a small cup of what he hoped were Cap's pain meds in her other hand. "How about you gentlemen clear the room while I check on my patient and then two of you can come back and visit?"

Her voice lilted as if it was a question but her expression said that there was only one right answer.

Higgins and Cunningham immediately pushed to their feet.

"I need to get going anyway…" Cunningham said.

"Think about what I said," Higgins insisted.

Stoker followed them out to the hallway, surprised when they lingered: Cunningham unsure, hesitating, and Higgins sizing him up.

"Talk him out of it, Stoker," Higgins finally said in a tone of voice that left no doubt it was a command.

"Jesus, Mike, you were at the scene," Cunningham said. "When that fuel tank blew, I honest-to-God thought we'd lost Hank and the rest of your crew."

Stoker swallowed and couldn't find the right words so he simply nodded and let Cunningham read it in his eyes.

"Stop being such a girl, Marty," Higgins growled. "Stoker's going to think that your wife is the man in the family."

"Now, why would he think that? I made absolutely certain that she wasn't related to you before I married her."

He leaned against the hallway wall and watched the two Captains walk towards the elevator in companionable silence, as if they'd used up all their words.

It was quiet in the hallway, with less traffic than he'd expected for an early Friday afternoon. Halfway down the corridor, he could see one or two nurses coming and going from the nursing station like worker bees from a hive, but there was little other activity.

He'd expected more activity, more visitors. Every other time he'd stopped by, the room seemed to overflow with members of the Lopez and Stanley families, both immediate and extended, particularly but not exclusively in Marco's case. Cap's wife had been a fixture, a book or magazine in one hand and her husband's right hand in the other, as if anchoring him in place. Cap's parents and in-laws had been in and out of the room, along with his kids. But not today.

He spent an unknown number of minutes staring blankly at the neutral tone of the wall on the other side of the corridor, not thinking about anything specifically, just turning off his thoughts and letting his mind drift.

The door swished open again and the dark-eyed nurse smiled up at him, a real smile, not a strictly professional one.

"He should be a lot more comfortable once those meds kick in," she said.

Stoker blinked, coming back to awareness sluggishly and then he nodded, aware that she was expecting some kind of response but unsure what was appropriate. "Thank you," he said finally. "I bet that shoulder hurts pretty badly."

It was definitely not Gage-level repartee with a pretty nurse so he wasn't all that surprised when she just gave him a closed mouth smile and a nod and went on her way. Sighing, he pushed back into the hospital room.

The nurse had adjusted the back of the hospital bed to something less than a forty-five degree angle, which he took as a subtle hint that Cap was supposed to be resting, not entertaining.

"You know, when I asked you to call a plumber for me," Stanley said, "it was because I knew that bathroom sink was driving Karen crazy and my brother-in-law's a great guy, but a menace to indoor plumbing. It was not a request for you to fix it yourself."

Stoker noticed that the visitor chair he'd carried over had been returned to Marco's bedside and one of the armchairs had been tucked in the far left corner. Busy little nurse. He repositioned the remaining armchair to his own satisfaction and sat.

He shrugged. "You would have done the exact same thing I did if it was one of us who got hurt. Besides, Johnny helped too."

"Well, thank you for taking care of it. She'd been after me to fix that for a week and then…" He breathed in and out and settled back against the bed. "Hair?"

"Oh yeah," Stoker agreed, grimacing at the memory.

Stanley sighed. "Long haired females are a hazard to sink traps. Remember that when you eventually settle down and do the family thing."

Stoker nodded and then said, "You're never going to get your dress uniform jacket sleeve over that arm, you know."

Stanley glanced at his left arm, still immobilized against his chest, the cast on his forearm and the splinted fingers, and frowned.

"So we're back to that," he mused. "You're probably right, but Karen's got a seam ripper. I bet she could use that and then baste the sleeve to fit over the cast."

Or maybe you should just stay home and let your body heal so you can come back to 51s sooner rather than later, Mike thought.

"What did the doctors say?"

"Everything's healing fine, right on schedule. A couple of weeks at home and then I'm on light duty until this," he twisted his head towards his left arm, "completely heals."

He'd completely sidestepped the real question of course.

"When do you start PT?"

"Depends on the shoulder. I have an appointment next week and we'll see how that goes."

It was all stuff he wanted to know but it was also filler, chitchat.

"How's Marco doing? Everything okay?"

That was the right question to ask; Cap visibly brightened.

"Yeah, he's doing great. He sounds like hell, like he ate the smoke yesterday instead of last week, but from what he told me, the docs say his throat and lungs will be fine. He'll probably be back before I am."

Stoker let out a relieved exhale.

"And before you ask, he's planning on being there Tuesday too. He said he's going, AMA if need be, but his throat and his breathing are good and if his visit with the Pulmonologist today goes well, he might go home tomorrow too." Stanley paused and then said, "We'll all be there."

"Why?"

He hadn't planned on blurting it out; it was pure reaction. He'd already known that Chet was planning to attend the funeral; he wouldn't march of course, not on crutches with his knee in a brace. He wanted to say 'don't you think you guys did enough' or 'what else are you trying to prove' but it wasn't really about that. He felt a sudden surge of pointless and irrational anger at Kelleher for splitting off from Ferrara and not telling anyone he'd gone to the fourth floor.

Stanley's expression contorted, his brow furrowed.

"What do you mean 'why?' Why are we planning to attend?" Stanley sounded incredulous and then he paused, looking at Stoker in patent disbelief. "For the same reason you are. The same reason B-shift is going and as many guys from the Department who can be there. The same reason there will be representation from the rest of the state and all of the surrounding states."

Stoker sighed and opened his mouth but Stanley, slightly flushed, kept talking, leaning forward, his voice slightly raised and edgy.

"Because Matt Kelleher was one of us. Because we go to honor his life and his sacrifice. Because we're there for his family, to show that his life had meaning and value as a Firefighter and as a man and we won't forget that or him. Because it could have just as easily been any one of us and we're there to acknowledge that too."

Stoker waited until his Captain stopped to draw breath.

"Cap, you know you did everything possible to get Kelleher out of there, right?"

Stanley's mouth snapped shut and his eyes narrowed. In the abrupt silence, Stoker was uncomfortably aware of his own chest rising and falling more rapidly than usual.

"Jesus, is that what this is all about?" Stanley's voice was still incredulous but now his expression was stunned. "You think…" he stopped and stared at Stoker. "I went over that search and rescue from every possible option, rehashed every decision, and I made my peace with it last week. We located 22's guys as quickly as anyone possibly could have done and we got them out of there faster than most might've and into the hands of people who could and did provide the immediate medical intervention they needed. We did our job and we did it well, especially considering the conditions that we had."

Stoker drew a deep breath, relieved and confused in equal measure.

"But the…" he gestured at the chair that the nurse had moved to the corner and then at the door. "The stuff with Higgins and with Cunningham and with trying to figure out how it could have been done faster."

Stanley sighed and sagged back in the bed, his expression softening into something rueful.

"We got the guys from 22s out quickly and safely," he said in a quiet voice. His lips tightened and his Adams apple bobbed. "It was my own guys I didn't get out fast enough."

Oh.

Stoker felt himself slump mentally, fumbling for a response, a reassurance, but his mind had gone utterly silent, no words, no thoughts, just a vast emptiness. He swallowed. "Okay," he said. Higgins would be disappointed in him but that wasn't really the opinion that mattered.

Stanley leaned back against the bed. He looked tired, cheekbones in sharper relief than normal against eyes that looked bruised in the odd hospital lighting.

"You guys do the debriefing?" he asked. "The Critical Incident Stress thing?"

Stoker sighed in recollection and nodded. "Yeah. Last Thursday."

"Did it help?"

He knew what he was supposed to say and maybe it had helped and he just didn't realize it. He wasn't having nightmares or acting out, at least as far as he knew. As a matter of fact, he was sleeping fine, even getting more sleep than normal. He shrugged.

"Gage talked a lot but didn't really say anything." He inclined his head, eliciting an amused half smile and a nod of reluctant acknowledgement from his Captain. "And DeSoto didn't say all that much but he listened when everyone else talked and agreed with a lot of what was said."

Roy's expression had still looked raw and pained, as if things hurt too much to put into words. Even before Kelleher had died, Roy's eyes held the hurt close to him, as if it was a personal thing.

"They know Kelleher well?"

Stoker puzzled over the question. As far as he knew, Gage and DeSoto knew Kelleher like he knew some of the other Engineers in the county. They covered for guys who were out on vacation, occasionally attended some of the same specialized training seminars, but knew each other mostly through word of mouth and reputation. It wasn't as if they worked together. He frowned, and reconsidered. Gage and DeSoto could have worked with Kelleher on overtime for all he knew.

"They knew him, not sure how well."

Not that it mattered. It was more about the knowledge that it could have just as easily been one of them than it was about Matt Kelleher specifically. And of course for Roy, the knowledge that Kelleher had a wife and a couple of kids raised a mirror that no one really wanted to see. From the brooding expression on Cap's face, Roy wasn't the only one who'd looked in that mirror.

"Was it true that Kelleher had an HT?"

He didn't know why he'd asked that. It wasn't as if it made a difference at this point.

Stanley pursed his lips and seemed unsettled.

"I heard that he did. I didn't see one." There was a pause and from the distant look in his eyes, Stanley was mentally revisiting the Switching Control room, clearing the drywall and framing off 22s men, and searching for something he'd missed. "It was dark, there was a lot of debris. The smoke wasn't as bad as it was on three but it was bad enough. We were using our flashlights to see how badly they were hurt, figure out how to get them out…" He shrugged, again just one shoulder. "Kind of irrelevant at this point, don't you think?"

It wasn't, not at all. It was the type of thing that would definitely surface in the inquiry, even if the answer was not widely broadcast across the Department. Of course, that wasn't what Cap meant though, was it?

"Captain Higgins had a valid point," he said, stubbornly perseverant in the face of his Captain's hint to drop it. It wasn't irrelevant; not by a long shot, especially if it made the difference between his guys getting hurt or not.

"George usually does," Stanley said mildly. "I'm just not sure where you're going with this, Mike."

"I just…

He wasn't all that sure where he was going either. The point he wanted to make was elusive, just a flash of a notion that vanished as soon as he tried to make it concrete, something he could explain or describe. When he previewed the words about to come out of his mouth, they seemed petty, throwing blame on the one person who'd paid the ultimate price for a mistake that might not even have been his.

"I'm not really sure either," he said in a small voice, gaze downward. "It's just that from what I can see, what I've heard, you – you, Chet and Marco – did everything right and it was the stuff that you couldn't influence… If Kelleher had an HT and used it to tell Captain Wozniak, or his partner, for Christ's sake, where he was going or if one of the other guys from 22s had an HT and used it to let the IC know they were up on four, or if we'd managed to keep that fuel tank cooler, longer..." He tried to rein in his rambling thoughts, tried to make something coherent out of them. "I don't think it's your fault that that you guys didn't get out before the fuel tank blew."

None of that came close to conveying the thoughts still flitting around inside of his brain but words weren't really his forte anyway and Cap knew it.

"It's not about fault or blame," Stanley said, slowly, as if he was still trying to figure out what Mike had been trying to say. "It's about responsibility. I am completely responsible for the safety of my crew, especially when I take them inside like I did at that fire."

A half-memory of overheard firefighter gossip, of pieces of a rumor so fragmented that it left far too much room for interpretation, surfaced in the churning sea of his thoughts.

"But you didn't make the call to take them inside after 22s," Mike said. "That was Chief Miller."

And now he remembered. It was two guys from headquarters who had been talking in the back of the room where they'd held the CISM debriefing the previous week, and a lot of what he'd heard sounded like what Gage had overheard in the men's room shortly after the fire was contained.

Stanley sighed. "Don't believe every rumor you hear. It's Hausler's job to ask those questions."

Stoker tried to maintain a poker face that he knew didn't fool Cap for a second. It was no great secret that Deputy Chief Hausler was more of a micro-managing control freak than a leader in any sense of the word. He'd earned his rank but Mike couldn't name a single firefighter who'd willingly follow Hausler into a fire.

"So Hausler's not going to hang Chief Miller out to dry?"

Stanley frowned and was silent long enough that Mike wondered if he should just change the subject.

"It's a hell of a decision to have to make," he finally said. "We size up a scene and decide on a strategy and we send men inside who are trained and equipped to handle the fire or the rescue or the chemical spill and you don't always have the time on the scene to second guess the decision or even time to worry, but the worry's there, right underneath your awareness of everything that's happening." He paused. "And for all of that, the hardest decision isn't always to send men inside. It's unspeakably harder to make the call to not send anyone inside." He licked his lips and finally turned to look at Stoker. "Especially when the decision is to not send anyone else inside."

Stoker didn't know what to say. He finally just said, "Okay."

"I can tell you that if I'd been in Chief Miller's shoes, I would have made the same decision he did. The building was essentially structurally sound, and even though the fire wasn't contained, it wasn't encroaching on our position. The fuel tank was a known risk, but 127s had water on it. I would've made the same call the Chief made. I would have sent us inside."

There was silence again, the unspoken hanging heavily in the air between them, and Stoker remembered more of the overheard conversation from the CISM debriefing, remembered one of the HQ Captains bemoaning that he'd missed out on a "once in a lifetime fire."

"So we went in, we all went in. Ferrara and Kelleher after the missing employee, and then Dan and his crew after Kelleher, and then 51s after 22s, and in the end, it didn't make a damn bit of difference." Stanley sighed heavily. "What a dreadful waste."

And Stoker didn't know if he'd meant the man that Ferrara and Kelleher had gone in after, or Kelleher himself. Could be either. Probably both.

"So, would you have done anything differently?"

Stanley smiled, a grim little twist of the mouth and shook his head. "Not a thing, Mike. Not a goddamned thing."

Finis