“Did you call to tell me about your charmed life? Skipped multiple ranks to be fire chief, and you and Kathleen have six beautiful, blonde children?”
“That’d be fast work. We got divorced, finalized five years ago. No kids. I called to ask if you’d be interested in a job.” With Williams’s mood, Noah kept the conversation short and on topic.
“I have a job,” Williams said flatly.
“I talked to Alan Hastings in Operations. His contacts in FEMA said you were nearing the end of your Cadre On-Call contract and hadn’t yet renewed. Thought you might consider coming home.”
“What’s the job?” Williams wasn’t going to waste his words either.
“Captain. It’s Firehouse 15, Soto’s old station.”
“Your rookie station?”
Noah was surprised Williams even remembered. “Yes, for a year. Learned to firefight and some Spanish back then. Mostly ‘Deja a mi sobrina solomente.’” (Leave my niece alone)
“O te castrare con tijeras de trauma?’” (Or I’ll perform a vasectomy with trauma sheers.) Now Williams felt like having a sense of humor? Probably best for Noah not to mention said niece destroyed a fire engine last month.
“And ‘corre mas rapido, novato. Con mucho gusto, jefe,’” Noah tried. (Run faster, rookie. With much pleasure, boss.)
Williams decided to ignore the joke. “You can fax me the information. I’ll give it a once over and get back to you.”
Noah said, “My secretary will fax your offer bright and early tomorrow. I want you because you were an excellent captain despite everything, and you’ll be even better now with your ability to coordinate disparate groups through FEMA. That’s what I need for rebuilding this department. I want solid people. The best.”
“I’ll think about it. “Williams hung up without preamble.
That went well.Sometimes people hold a grudge if they think you’re responsible for the death of their wife.
There was nothing he could do to solve that. Noah hadn’t solved it the year Williams had stayed in Cleveland, and it didn’t seem like he was going to solve it tomorrow either. Fortunately, Williams was a professional, and, if the package Noah offered was generous enough, he would consider it.
This would be an ideal time to talk to someone who liked him.
He initiated a video call to Milwaukee.
A blonde, smiling teenager greeted him cheerfully, “Hi, Uncle Noah.”
“Annabelle, you put that phone down!” a voice screeched from the background. That would be his sister, Abigail.
He watched the phone get tossed to an older boy. Nathan, his seventeen-year-old nephew, greeted him. “Mom wants the phone, Annie!”
“Don’t call me ‘Annie.’ It’s ‘Annabelle!’”
Abigail retrieved the phone from her eldest. “These teenagers are killing me. You were never near this much trouble, little brother.”
“You told me I was more. All the time,” Noah said. They were fifteen years apart because Noah had been quite the surprise when his mother was forty-nine. Their parents had passed over a decade ago.
“They eat so much,” Abby complained. “You would think a seventeen-year-old and a thirteen-year-old would know when to stop eating, but they don’t.” Abby’s blonde hair had gone gray, the same gray infiltrating his hair.
“At least they got the Baker metabolism, unlike Hank’s.” Henry ‘Hank’ Finster was Abby’s husband, a construction contractor. Where the Baker genes ran lean and blue-eyed, the Finsters’ ran dark and broad.
“Thank goodness he’s a kicker and not a lineman,” Abby said. “Football practice has started, and now I get to watch all the heat indexes. How’s the weather where you are?”
“Sweltering. A solid humid ninety every day.”
“Should have stayed in Wisconsin. A hot day is eighty. It’s not like you moved somewhere with less snow.”
She was referring to the lake effect snow which regularly pummeled Cleveland, making it equally snowy to Milwaukee. “I have the Cleveland Browns here.”
“They were bad when you left home, too. I can’t believe you ditched the Packers for them.”
