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I should've radioed Val. I've known it all night, the whole shift, like a pebble riding in my boot. Come to me first, she said, me first, and tonight the survivor turned up at a third fire and I knelt down in front of her and gave her my phone number on a coat-check stub instead. There's a word for that and it isn't loyalty, and I'm going to have to look at it eventually, in the morning, in the shower, somewhere with better light.

It can wait until morning.

Because underneath the dread, where I can't reach it with procedure, my whole body is sitting up like a dog that heard keys. She kept the blanket at the warehouse. She put the stub in the same pocket she took it from. She said I always do, and I believed her.

6

ZARA

Her number has been in my phone for two days, and I've opened the contact eleven times without typing a word.

I know it's eleven because I count. Counting is the discipline that's kept me alive, margins and minutes and exits, and now I'm spending it on this, standing at my window at one in the morning with the city burning its ordinary electric light below me, looking at a contact I saved under the letter D. No surname, because she didn't ask for mine and I returned the courtesy.

Each of the eleven times, I composed something. I have a writer's discipline when I want one, and over two days I've drafted and discarded a thank-you that sounded like a hostage statement, a joke about buses that wasn't funny, and one sentence at three in the morning that I deleted character by character with my heart going hard, because it was true. The original stub with her number is in the drawer with my passports, which is a filing decision I made without consulting myself and refuse to review.

That's the frame I keep returning to, more than the fire, which was mine, and more than the building coming down on schedule, which was just work going right. She knelt in front of me in the strobe of six different vehicles, red, white, red, and she took my jaw in two bare fingers and tipped my face to the light, and her eyes were doing a paramedic's sweep of my airway while her own pulse beat away in plain view above her collar. She was checking me for damage and hammering like a girl at a dance, both at once, and she said swallow, and I did, and watching her watch my throat was the most honest conversation I've had in years.

I close the contact. I have work.

The work tonight came in at eleven through the usual channel, a draft folder on a server in a country with no extradition and worse weather, and it's good, a file I'd have waited months for once. It's Bellamy, the money man, the one who moved the settlement funds after Linden Court, the name I found eleven years ago in a file I wasn't supposed to survive reading. For a decade, he's been a closed door, his paper firewalled behind attorney-client privilege at a firm downtown called Hartwell Pace, the same firm that sealed the Linden settlement in nine days flat, and now my source is telling me the firewall has a date. The firm is digitizing its dead files. The originals, the ones with signatures, the ones a forensic accountant could build a cathedral on, sit in a records floor on Camden Avenue for six more weeks, and then they go to a shredding contractor owned, with the city's usual sense of humor, by one of Bellamy's shells.

That gives me six weeks. I read the index twice, and it's everything, the indemnity side letters, the inspection sign-offs, the wire records routing hush money through three foundations. One line of the index reads structural claims, Linden Ct., units 401-612, withdrawn, and I sit with my hand flat on the desk until that line stops being a hallway with a small door at the end of it, because 604 was ours, and the ration is one block on a run by the river, not here, not at this desk where I need my hands steady. My whole adult life is in that index, and I should be feeling the cold clean lift I always feel when a door opens.

What I'm feeling is the ghost of two fingers on my jaw.

I close the laptop harder than it deserves. This is becoming a fault line, and I don't build on fault lines, and to prove it I take a shower that solves nothing, and lie in the dark not sleeping, and at four I get up and beat the sunrise to the garage on Dunmore Street, because the meet is at five and I'm useless for anything else.

Level B3 of a parking garage under a dead mall is the place the movies promised me, sodium lights the color of old nicotine, concrete pillars sweating, my footsteps arriving a half-second after my feet. Petra is early, because Petra is always early. She's parked nose-out in a gray sedan with a dent she's never fixed, and she looks like what she is, a retired claims adjuster in a quilted coat, a woman whose hobby could get us both buried, and whose niece had a bedroom on the sixth floor of Linden Court.

We don't do names in the garage. We barely do words. She hands me a grocery bag with a phone and a folder in it, and I hand her a grocery bag with bread and a phone in it, two women trading sourdough at five in the morning, and we stand in the cold long enough to be polite.

“You're being looked at,” she says.

“By whom?”

“Internal Affairs opened a file on the fire department.” Her breath fogs and hangs. “Don't smile. It's not the gift it sounds like. They're not looking at your men, they're looking at leaks around the marshal's office, which means subpoenas, which means everything anyone's photographed near three fires gets a second viewing.” She lets that sit. “And Mercer is running her own look. Off book. No file number, no partner, just the chief asking quiet favors of old friends in records.”

The cold finds the gap at my collar. Valentina Mercer, who I can't read, whose station is the immune system of everything I burn, is conducting a private investigation with no paper trail, which is either a chief protecting her department or a queen protecting her board, and I've never been able to find out which, and the difference is my life.

“That's interesting,” I say.

“Here's what's more interesting.” Petra reaches into her coat and unfolds a printout, holding it by the corner like it's wet. It's a photo, off somebody's social media, telephoto-grainy, timestamped the night of the gala. A firefighter kneels on the asphalt in front of a woman seated on a curb. The firefighter's glove is off. The woman's face is angled away, a pale crescent, unidentifiable, and I spent two years building a life around being unidentifiable, but none of that is the problem. The problem is the firefighter's face, which the lens caught clean. The problem is what's on it.

“Four hundred likes,” Petra says. “Caption says hero stuff. It's nothing. Unless somebody who knows her face sees how she's looking at you, and then it's not nothing.”

I make myself study it like evidence, which is what it is. The kneeling firefighter has her bare hand raised toward the seated woman's jaw, not touching yet, asking first, and her face is tilted up into the scene lights with an expression no caption writer would know what to do with, too grave for flirtation, too hungry for protocol. I want the printout. I want it the same way I wanted the shock blanket, which is a want I've already decided not to examine, and I keep my hands in my pockets.

“She was checking my airway.”

“Sure.” Petra refolds the printout and puts it away, and her eyes, pouchy and pale and kind in a way I've never once relied on, hold mine for longer than the garage usually allows. “I had a husband, you know. Before. I know what an airway check looks like.” She gets into her car and rolls the window down a last inch. “You're the most careful person I've ever met. Be that. The fires they can't prove. A woman they can photograph.”

She drives up the ramp and leaves me in the nicotine light with a folder full of Bellamy and my own pulse going entirely the wrong speed for five in the morning. I stand there longer than tradecraft allows, listening to her engine fade into the city, and I take stock the honest way, on my fingers. Internal Affairs is one. Mercer's quiet favors are two. A photograph with four hundred likes is three, and the fourth is the worst of them, because the first three are out there in the world where I can manage them, and the fourth one is in my chest, counting to eleven.

I go home, draw the curtains on a gray day, and sleep in pieces. Then I work the file the way I work every file, and by dark I have the spine of a plan and a date circled inside the six-week window, and there's a satisfaction in that, the old kind, load-bearing. The plan has an address on Camden Avenue, a records floor, and a door starting to swing open.

I pour the good scotch at ten, one measure, and I stand at the window. The glass is cold in my hand, and the city glitters all the way to the water, and I last eleven minutes.

Then I pick up the phone and type, do firefighters make a habit of personal attention for every stranger they drag out of buildings, or should I feel special?