Kade's Rescue (Detroit Heat Book 1) Read Online Free

a five-minute response time and adrenaline did nothing good while you sat in a fire engine traveling to a call. It made you antsy en route and it clouded your mind once you got to the scene.

    But now I’d begun to dread the tones. My fellow firefighters would call out encouragement and some of the younger guys would cheer. To them, they were a football team coming through the tunnel into the spotlight. It was their bowl game. To me, it was like reliving the memory of that terrible night right from the beginning.

    I would let out a sigh of relief when we found out it was a false alarm or the fire turned out to be popcorn burnt in a microwave in an apartment building. When it was a real fire, I had to swallow my fears and do my job. I could do that, but it was getting harder to hide it from the brothers around me.

    A few days after my first session with the shrink, we had a big call. It came out as a second alarm; we were called to assist a nearby station with a fire they were already battling. A fire had started in the basement of an apartment complex unit, and by the time the neighboring department got there, it had traveled up into the attic.

    I was riding in the seat just behind the officer, facing back and watching the rain-soaked world disappearing into the distance. I heard the radio traffic, but my mind wasn’t with it.

    “Looks like we’re fighting this one from the inside out.”  

    I turned from the window to my partner for the shift. Young and far too eager, Rico Baggiowas a green as they come. He’d only been with the DFD for a little over a month, and it showed in just about everything he did. Rico thought of himself as Superman, which got probies killed more often than anything else. He spoke like he’d not only seen every episode of Rescue Me and Chicago Fire, but like he knew what the fuck he was doing. That was a serious problem.   The kid could be good someday, but he had to learn his place.

    I mumbled, mostly to myself, “Just stick with me. We’ll do what we’re told.”

    Rico didn’t seem to hear, he was too caught up in himself, “The Dirty D: the only place where the water shoots out of the house instead of in.”

    I rolled my eyes and turned back to the window. We had another two minutes and I was trying to keep myself calm.

    The red lights were flashing from the trucks already on scene before we slowed to a stop. I could hear the clamor of the truck warning that someone wasn’t wearing their seatbelt. Looking to my right, I saw that Rico was already loaded up with his air pack and he had the door open.

    I shook my head. He’d stand outside our truck for five minutes before being given an assignment, wasting energy and air from the bottle. You could talk until you were blue in the face, but the kid wouldn’t listen. I’d make sure the battalion chief knew about it so Rico could hear it from on high. Then it might sink in.

    Pulling the handle below my seat, I released the SCBA bottle built into the backrest of the seat. Pushing the door open with my foot, I slung the air tank over one shoulder and stepped out of the truck.

    When I shut the door, I saw the thick, black smoke was rising into the night sky. Every light seemed to be trained onto the apartment, making the whole thing look like a sinister hot air balloon. Hoses stretched in every direction toward the house. I could see the first department’s truckies had already set up ladders, but the fire was still growing.

    It was a three-story apartment and it looked abandoned. It was May all over again. A woman was screaming in a nightgown, oblivious to the rain falling down around her. The battalion chief came up to my crew, his jacket already soaked through with rain.

    “The place is supposed to be abandoned, but we’ve got multiple witnesses saying a family was squatting. Our guys have ladders set up for egress, but we need eyes inside on two and three.”

    Clay, the shift commander, looked to me. “Grab the rook