Ellery Mountain 1 -The Fireman and the Cop Read Online Free Page B

as he’d been told, and he slept.
Chapter Three
    Finn slid lower in the chair at his friend Kieran’s house and placed his boots on the small scratched table in front of him. Today was Friday. Every week he and Kieran and the currently missing Daniel would meet up for beers and boy talk. Three days out of hospital, he’d finally been cleared for going back to work this morning and his shift started in a little over an hour at freaking ten p.m.. At least he’d get a couple of hours with his friends. He couldn’t help feeling pissed, though, that he was on what Chief Mayfield had called light duties.
“It’s the death watch. All you can do there is filing,” he near whined.
    “Filing at night is better than going up against men with guns and drugs in the daytime,” Kieran pointed out helpfully.
Friends since kindergarten, he and Kieran had seen a lot in this town—men with guns and drugs were not something that had ever happened in either’s memory. In fact, the most exciting thing to happen in Ellery for years had been the fire at the station and Finn had been slap bang in the middle of that one. Kieran grinned at his own joke then swallowed the remainder of his beer in three swallows.
“Ass,” was all Finn could manage.
Kieran had plagued him in the hospital with his stupid jokes and never-ending teasing. Finn had grumbled back at him but at the end of the day what Kieran had done was take Finn away from the nightmare of nearly being burned to death trapped by a table in a collapsing police station.
A noise outside the window made both men turn first that way and then to the clock on the wall.
“He’s early,” Kieran commented. “That’s a first.”
The throaty roar of the Ducati silenced and Finn imagined the third of their weekly gathering climbing the steps to Kieran’s property and walking in with beers in hand and a ready grin. He wasn’t disappointed. Daniel Skylar, Finn’s first crush—windblown knight of the road—dumped beer in the fridge then pushed Finn’s feet off so he could replace them with his own as he lay back on the sofa.
“You okay?” he asked Finn.
Finn just nodded. There was no point in rehashing it all—they’d already covered most of it when Daniel had paid a couple of visits to his friend in hospital.
“Roads out of the city were shit,” he said to change the subject. “So I took the back way up past the cabins.”
“There’s some kind of car show in town. Watch for the…”
Kieran and Daniel talking faded into background noise as Finn regarded his friends closely. They were good people and he felt any tension in his body drain away as he relaxed. Maybe dying had made him realise he took them for granted, maybe he was just maudlin now he had reached twenty-five, he didn’t know, but tonight he looked at them differently. They were all the same age, product of the same school year. Where Kieran was the blueeyed blond with the grin and the glass-half-full attitude, Daniel was the bad boy with the dark hair, shades, the bike and no specific career that anyone could pin him down on.
Daniel was an ex-Marine, only six months back from his last tour of Afghanistan, and he had yet to settle to one thing as a replacement except for helping his mom around the cabins with Kieran. Finn could see changes in Daniel since he’d returned from his last tour. His friend always had a sense of freedom and living for the moment, but recently he had appeared much quieter than Finn was used to. Still, he remained directly opposite to Kieran who had a much more certain view on life. Kieran was the steady one. The one you could rely on.
Which made Finn what? If on the surface Daniel was the typical bad boy, with Kieran being the good guy, where did that put Finn? Maybe he was the not-quite-anything-inparticular guy. Not as catchy a title, he guessed. The three men had been meeting every Friday for six months. Daniel had started it. He’d come home with the bad-boy label he had earned at