Into the Inferno Read Online Free

to Dr. Brashears for what he described as clinical depression. Beebe came back with a prescription for Zoloft and seemed better after that.
    As titular head of the fire department, it would be my duty to send him back for more treatment if this current depression he seemed to have fallen into became incapacitating. Even if you weren’t listening to what he said, you could hear it in his voice.
    “Jim?” he said. “Anything happens, I want you to look after my wife and kids.”
    “Nothing’s going to happen.”
    Before we could finish, the bell hit and the pagers on our belts fired. We jogged down the stairs to the apparatus floor. Normally there were five responders in the station, but the medic unit had driven to Overlake Hospital with a patient, so there were only three of us.
    Although most of the other small towns in the area contracted their fire services from the county, North Bend still ran its own department, the mainstay of which had always been the volunteers. Currently there were only six paid members.
    Beebe drove the aid car while I got behind the wheel of the pumper, Karrie, who was still in her probationary period, alongside me. Technically, with our two senior officers, Harry Newcastle and Joel McCain, out of the picture, the mayor and I were running the department, but the mayor seemed uninterested, so I was running things myself.
    North Bend Fire and Rescue had always been shorthanded, but these days we were limping along like a three-legged dog, depending heavily on the cadre of volunteers Newcastle had recruited and nurtured during the five years he’d been in command.
    The report for our alarm came in as “man choking.”

5. EVERYBODY KNOWS BRAIN DEATH FROM LACK OF OXYGEN OCCURS IN FOUR TO SIX MINUTES
    Chief Newcastle’s oft-repeated dictum on response speed through town was clear: “There’s no point in killing a carful of kids on your way to a Dumpster fire.” Everybody followed the precept except Click and Clack, who were usually too wired on caffeine, adrenaline, and do-goodism to slow down.
    Siren whirring, we lumbered through traffic as we headed for a small subdivision just east of town on property that, until ten years ago, had been a golf course. Bulldoze the flora and fauna and slap up houses, bring in new citizens by the busload, sell them a car and two trucks apiece, and pave any greenery that’s left. It was the standard urban recipe. No planning. Just cram us rats in until we’re all giving each other the bird at every four-way stop in town.
    As soon as the house number came across the radio from the dispatcher, I said, “Joel McCain lives in that cul-de-sac.”
    Karrie looked at me. “That his house number?”
    “Couldn’t tell you.”
    Karrie was a tall, slender young woman who had decided to become a firefighter when she was six years old, after taking a school field trip into downtown Seattle, where she’d spotted a woman riding a fire rig.
    “You realize your girlfriend is following us,” Karrie said.
    “What girlfriend?”
    “How many girlfriends do you have chasing you around town?” I glanced into the tall rearview mirrors on either side of the cab but couldn’t see beyond the boxy aid car behind us. “She’s back there.”
    “Don’t worry. She’ll go away.”
    “How much do you want to bet?”
    Watching the town slide past, I tried to let it go. What the heck did Holly want now? I decided she either was pregnant or had a bug. Not from me, though. Not a sexually transmitted disease, at any rate. I was clean on that score. However, it was just possible she was pregnant. On top of all my other bills, all I needed was a child support payment. Christ, maybe she’d come to tell me
she
had given
me
a bug.
    To my way of thinking, North Bend was one of the ugliest little towns in the state, a prime example of what happens in a municipality when what little vision there is becomes polluted with second and third and fourth opinions bought and paid for by