"He's a total crisper," Ron announced from the doorway. "House fire, completely involved. This guy didn't know a thing."

Finally, thankfully, Barb strolled in to start her shift, her coat still thrown over her shoulder.

"What's coming in?" she asked, leaning in the door.

Timmie traded Barb's coat for a laryngoscope. "Crispy critter. House fire. And you're up to bat."

Barb nodded. Sucked in a huge breath, the laryngoscope drooping in her hand like unwanted flowers. "Don't suppose a helicopter's handy to just turf this puppy east?"

"Not for another forty minutes."

"Well, then, let's be ready to do gasses and a carboxyhemoglobin. How are you on these things, Timmie?"

"I hate 'em. You?"

"Yep. Me, too." Then she snapped the laryngoscope into place and headed for the crash cart.

The patient was every bit as bad as they'd feared. Charred and hairless and rasping for breath, an indistinguishable hunk of protoplasm that reeked of charred meat, his clothes singed tatters of blue and white that hung off like sloughed skin. The team chose up tasks, Mattie doing assessment, Ellen at the cart, and Timmie working on starting IVs, which would be the only way they could medicate the patient if he decided to live past that evening. Trying her damnedest to find an inch of uninvolved skin, Timmie didn't think he stood much of a chance.

"His airway's as black as a chimney sweep's face," Barb pronounced as she suctioned for a better look. "He's been sucking bad shit."

"He was drinking," the paramedic offered as he helped hook the patient up to monitor and oxymeter. "We damn near killed ourselves on the beer cans in there."

"Let's get an ETOH, too," Barb suggested. "Was he smoking?"

"Nah. Fire jockeys found cans of kerosene in the garage he was evidently using to clean machinery with. They think it was spontaneous combustion."

Half-listening as she dug for an already collapsed vein, Timmie suddenly stopped. "Spontaneous combustion?" she asked.

"Yeah. There was plenty of stuff. Rags and shit. Once it went up, it went up quick."

"You said kerosene?"

Bent over the other side of the cart where she was trying to get breath sounds, Mattie shot Timmie a warning stare. "What is it you tryin' to say?"

Timmie looked at her. Looked at the paramedics and shook her head.

"His 0₂ Sat's only fifty-six percent," Barb announced, oblivious. "I don't think this camper's gonna make the final singalong. Get X ray in here for his chest films. You got a CVP line for me?"

"His pressure's dropping," Ellen added, her voice tightening. "It's eighty over forty."

"Timmie, you got a line? Dial up the fluids. Hyperventilate him on a hundred percent. Let's start with some sodium bicarb and a Dopamine drip, huh? And somebody call the helicopter back and tell them to hit the afterburners."

Timmie was so busy with the sudden pop of a vein at the edge of her needle that she barely took note when a burly, red-headed cop walked in the room.

"You sure you should be taking care of him?" he suddenly asked.

Everybody else looked up before Timmie.

"Why not?" Barb asked, her pocket Merck Manual open in her hand like a hymnal at a Sunday service. "You want him to die?"

"No. I don't. That's why I don't want you taking care of him."

That even got Timmie's attention. "Why?"

"Don't you recognize him, Dr. Adkins?" He pointed at the patient's face, but it was already hidden beneath ET tape and saline packs. "That's your ex-husband, Victor, you're taking care of."

Chapter 9

Murphy really shouldn't have been here. He probably wouldn't have if he hadn't been so frustrated. It was the one thing he hadn't counted on when he'd gone into hiding. That the kind of normal, everyday life he'd been so intent on recording for posterity, now that he wasn't going after real news anymore, was so damn boring.

So here he was sifting through the ashes of a house fire, just because the guy involved had given him a hard time.

If this had been a movie, the sky would have been overcast. The leaves would have already been off the trees so that the limbs looked skeletal and threatening to match the destruction they surrounded, and the air would have been as heavy as the smell of smoke. There would have been yellow police tape stretched across trees and neighbors clustered together on the grass talking in hushed tones.

But the sky was gem-quality blue, the yards empty, and the trees still flaming with a dozen colors that flickered in a brisk breeze, which made the lumpy, soggy remains of Victor Adkins's house look almost surreal in their midst. A rotten tooth in the midst of a carefully tended, rigidly blue-collar mouth.

The remains were real enough. Murphy could smell them, the unmistakable roux of ash and smoke and melted plastic. A cheap, small, prefab house that had once had Colonial blue siding and white shutters, and now wasn't much more than toxic waste. It had lasted, from all accounts, a full twenty minutes from the first sighting of flames. A good ten minutes past the moment a neighbor had braved the heat and smoke to drag an unconscious Victor out the family room window from the eviscerated couch Murphy could now see through the maw that had once been a window.

It was a mess. Murphy stood there with his hands in his pockets staring at the evidence of mortality and couldn't think of a damn thing to say but that. A mess.

Well, thank God, he thought with black humor. And here I thought I'd lost my talent.

That was when he saw her. Straight through the gaping holes that lined up through the walls like rifle sights into the backyard. There was a picnic table back there, regulation cedar with benches, the kind a family bought for barbecues and kids. She was sitting on the table with her feet on a bench, wearing a pair of lurid pink scrubs and a black leather jacket, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands, considering the house as if it were a painting in the art museum. And she was laughing.

Murphy found himself wanting to smile and didn't.

It took him a good few minutes to pick his way through the debris in the yard to get to her.

"You know, there were people who worked with you in that ER at L.A. County I didn't see as much as I see you," he greeted her.

She didn't bother to look away from whatever had her attention. "Shut up."

He reached the table and followed her line of sight, but he didn't see anything other than the flip side of what he'd been studying in the front yard. A little more trash on the back lawn than the front, a good view into the kitchen that had once been decorated in gingham and eagles, a gutted roof and exposed garage. Tumbled bachelor furniture and tattered, black-singed walls.

Murphy returned his consideration to his surprise companion. "What's wrong with this picture?" he asked.

For some reason, that made her laugh again. "Exactly."

Which was when Murphy realized she wasn't laughing because something was funny.

Murphy waited, but that was all he got. He did notice, however, those four earrings she wore, like dime-store constellations, right up the curve of her ear. Four simple, multicolored stones in an arc. All he could think of was how they fit her. And how long her neck was. He liked long necks even more than tight little bottoms on the kind of self-reliant women who'd have the gall to teach a renowned reporter manners. Which Murphy knew didn't bear thinking about, since he only thought about those things in the abstract these days anyway. So he sat down alongside her on the table and watched the house, too.