The Fireman Read Online Free

“His name is Nick. Do you want to walk Nick to the back of the line?” he asked Harper. “And then I can carry on my conversation with this lot?”
    “I think you should both come with me,” she said to the Fireman, but she took the boy’s hand. Her rubber glove squeaked softly.
    She could see the child wasn’t well. His face was waxy beneath his freckles and he swayed on his feet. Also she could feel a troubling heat in his soft, child-chubby fingers. But then a lot of people with the spore ran fevers, and the spore itself was often two to three degrees above body temperature. No sooner, though, had the Fireman set him down than the child bent at the waist with a pained grimace.
    The Fireman crouched before the child and leaned his halligan against his shoulder. He did an odd thing then: he closed his hands into fists, showed them to the boy, then made an odd patting gesture, as if he were imitating a dog pawing at the air. The boy made the grimacing face and a funny teakettle sound, unlike anything Harper had ever heard from a child in distress; it sounded more like a squeak toy.
    The Fireman craned his head to look back at Harper, but before he had a chance to speak, Albert Holmes moved, closed a hand around one end of the halligan.
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the Fireman said.
    “Sir? Let go of the weapon.”
    The Fireman tugged on it. Al tugged back, harder, pulling him off balance, and then he had an arm around his throat. The Fireman’s bootheels squealed on the tiles as he kicked for purchase, tried to get his feet under him.
    Harper observed their wrestling match the way she might’ve glimpsed the passing scenery on an accelerating carousel. She was playing back what she had just seen—not only the odd way the Fireman had swatted at the air, but the way it looked as if the boy were straining to lift a weight beyond the limits of his strength.
    “You’re deaf,” she said to the child, but of course she was really only talking to herself. Because he was deaf.
    She had, at some point in nursing school, had a single day of instruction in American Sign Language, of which she remembered nothing. Or at least, she didn’t think she remembered anything of what they had taught her. But then she found herself pointing her fingers at her ribs and twisting them, as if she were hand-screwing something into her own sides. She patted low on her abdomen. Does it hurt here?
    Nick nodded uncertainly. But when she reached to feel beneath the hands cupped over his abdomen, he stumbled back a step, shaking his head frantically.
    “It’s all right,” she said, enunciating slowly and with great care, on the off chance he could read lips. She had picked up, somewhere—maybe in that one-day class on ALS—that the very best lip-readers could only understand about 70 percent of what they saw, and the majority of deaf fell far short of that. “I’ll be careful.”
    She reached once more, to probe his midsection, and he covered up again, backing away, a fresh sweat glowing on his upper lip. He keened softly. And then she knew. Then she was sure.
    Al tightened his arm across the Fireman’s windpipe, cutting off the air, choking him out. The same move had killed Eric Garner in New York City only a few years before, but it had never gone out of style. His other hand had pulled the halligan down and in, trapping it against the Fireman’s chest.
    If Harper had been able to focus, she might’ve found the Fireman’s reaction peculiar. He didn’t let go of the halligan, but he wasn’t struggling to free himself from Albert’s chokehold, either. Instead, he was biting the fingers of the black glove on his left hand. He was pulling the glove off with his teeth when Harper spoke, in a clear, ringing voice that caused them both to go still.
    “Nurse Lean? We need a gurney to get this child into a CAT scan. We should prep for abdominal surgery. Maybe there’s someone in pediatrics who can handle