Bear The Heat (Mating Call Dating Agency Book 3) (2 page)

“Best part of our job,” Daniels said, “aside from the saving and the helping.”

He cranked the truck’s air conditioner to high fans, and dialed down the temperature to fifty-six. As soon as the chilly air hit
BEAR THE HEAT

Breaker’s scorched, singed, smoke-covered face, he took a deep breath and laid his head back on the headrest. “Damn right,” he said with a sigh and a smile. “Nothing better.”

“Yeah, we’ll see about that,” Daniels said. He took the card from his breast pocket, and looked at it for a moment before sticking it back in. Mating Call Dating Agency, it read, Yvette Lorraine, Matchmaker. “We will see.” He patted his pocket with the card inside, looking forward to both Breaker’s reaction, and the possibility that his old friend would finally find someone.

“Sure,” Breaker said, eyes still closed. “Only thing better would be if there was a giant pot of chili waiting at the firehouse.”

He opened his eyes halfway, looking over at the chief without moving his head.

“It’s a firehouse, ain’t it?” Daniels said. “What the hell kind of firemen would we be if there weren’t chili?”

The two of them laughed, Daniels roundly and loud. Breaker coughed when he was finished, then he wheezed a little. After another big pull of air into his lungs, and another few coughs, he was cleaned out.

But it was all he could do to force himself not to think about that family, about their tearful embrace and how badly he wanted that exact same thing.
I’d give up all the chili in the world for just a
second, just a moment of feeling like that
, he thought. Breaker bit down on his lip, grimacing.

“Something wrong?” Daniels asked. “We need to get the EMTs after all?”

“Nah,” Breaker said. “Just some heat burns on my back. I’ll be fine.”

The burns, he knew, would heal before the next day came.

The pain in his heart though? That would probably never be fixed, unless something really crazy happened.

Little did he know,
crazy
was exactly what Daniels had planned. For a bear with an all-consuming, dangerous-as-hell job, he figured there wasn’t going to be any easy way to find someone.

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Especially if that bear wasn’t much for the bar scene, or the dancing scene, or any other scene at all. Even if firemen were maybe known to do a little panty-melting when they graced a calendar, Breaker wasn’t that type. But, Daniels knew, if anyone could help his friend get what he needed, Eve would do the trick.

As they pulled into the station house, minutes ahead of the two firetrucks, Daniels switched off the ignition and sighed as he opened the door. “Come on,” he said to Breaker, “chili’s waiting.

Something else, too, but I’m not going to tell you what until you have a full stomach and take a handful of Advil.”

“Bad news?”

“No, really good news,” Daniels said. “But I know you well enough to know exactly how you’re going to take said good news.

So, yeah, first we eat, and then I tell you what I’ve got in mind. I think you’ll be happy, but you’re going to act irritated, then embarrassed, and then defensive.”

Breaker smiled. “You do know me, huh boss?”

The older man nodded. “And you’ve got to trust me. You do, right?”

“Sure, I guess. If I didn’t I probably woulda been dead a long time ago. You better not have bought me an inflatable woman or something, because I’m gonna be really pissed.”

“Oh it’s nothing like that,” Daniels said with a grin. “As hard up as you’ve been lately, you’d get too excited and pop her wide open. I wouldn’t let that happen. Too dangerous.”

Breaker finally laughed out loud. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

For a second, the older firefighter stared at Breaker’s face.

Then, like a thunderclap, the two old friends erupted with laughter. The two made their way to the door, walked inside and slumped over Firehouse 3’s table. Rogers, the guy who stayed behind to finish the food, popped up from the window in the kitchen. “Back already?” he asked. “Or did you two skip the fire to get a head start on dinner?”

BEAR THE HEAT

“You know us,” Daniels said. “But no, this idiot here charged into a burning building without any equipment and saved a pair of raccoon kits.”

“Well son of a bitch,” Rogers whistled. “I guess that deserves an extra bowl of chili, don’t it?”

Before anyone could answer, Rodgers plopped four ladles full of steaming, spicy, meaty chili into a bowl most people would use to mix a cake. For Breaker, it was a bowl for breakfast cereal – Cap’n Crunch, thank you very much – or a single serving bowl for whatever else came in a bowl. Rogers plunked the bowl down on the table. A few drops popped up and landed on the varnished oak, but Breaker just swiped them up with a fingertip and sucked the delicious liquid off his finger.

A low, long, satisfied groan escaped his lips. “How do you do this, Rogers?” Breaker asked, talking around a mouthful of chili so spicy that it burned his lips and made his tongue tingle in the wonderful way only a near-overload of capsaicin can.

“The chili? Easy. I empty a whole bunch of Wolf Brand into a bowl, and then I put a bunch of cocaine in it. Old firefighter trick. How the hell do you think we stay up all night waiting for calls?”

“I wondered why my lips were numb,” Breaker said with a smile. “But thanks – this is the best. I can’t think of anything better than being here with a couple of friends and still being alive.”

Except that I can think of one thing better
, he thought.
But
that’s one thing I may as well not bother with imagining. I’ll just
end up making myself crazy for something I can’t ever have.

“Oh, I can think of one thing better,” Daniels said, almost mirroring the big bear’s thoughts. “And that’s what I have to talk to you about.” He fished the card out of his pocket.

“What’s this?” Breaker asked, again muffled with chili.

“Mating Call? The hell is—oh no, oh no, no, no. No way.”

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“You’ve already got an appointment,” Daniels said. “You go in tomorrow at eleven. I figure that’ll give you enough time to rest up and be presentable. I hear Yvette has quite a terrifying interview process.”

“You can’t... no way,” Breaker said. “I can’t do this, I’m—”

“Pitiful,” Daniels said. “Pitiful is what you are. And anyway, I’m your boss and you trust me, right?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Good, then you show up there at eleven tomorrow. That’s an order.”

Rogers and Daniels exchanged a quick glance – a wink and a smile – as Breaker grumbled into his bowl. “Fine,” he finally said.

“But I’m not gonna like it.”

“We’ll see about that,” Daniels said with a grin. “We will certainly see.”

“Well ain’t this a hell of a thing,” Lorelei Roberts, Rory to her friends, was busily shaking a test tube. The liquid inside turned first red, then blue. “Can something be both acidic
and
alkaline?”

she asked. “And if it can, does that mean we’ve got some kind of trace evidence, or does it mean I just screwed up the test?”

“Probably the latter,” her colleague, Monte, intoned in his standard monotone gravitas. “Are you sure you used the chemicals in the right order? Forensic science is a science after all, not just cooking a stir fry.”

Rory blew a puff of air out between her lips that sent her straight black hair up in an Alfalfa-like spike before it fell squarely back down across her face. “When the hell did this become more about the process than about detective intuition?”

“As soon as it was invented.” Monte’s smooth, eastern European accent had a natural twist of constant irritation to it, but beneath his constantly vexed exterior, he was a sweetheart.

“You are thinking that when you test the ash, you’re going to find evidence of burn powder? Accelerant? I don’t understand.

There is no hint of arson here.”

Rory squinted, and adjusted her glasses. “No,” she said, “I did it right. Look, I can read the directions, okay?”

Monte curled his lips in a smile, but didn’t look toward Rory – that would give him away – as he did. “The test won’t show the alkalinity of—”

“It will if there’s burn powder there, because cured pine shows up acid,” Rory cut him off. “I’m not as stupid as I look.” She
12

stuck the pencil she was using to note the pH of her experiment, back into her hair. “So what are you going to say when I show you this?”

She held up a chart, with peaks and valleys of acidity and alkalinity intended to show the presence or absence of a very powerful flame accelerant – something commonly used by arsonists to make sure whatever they were trying to burn went up in flames. The test chart which came with the testing equipment, matched exactly the one she’d made with her test.

“Looks like I’m right,” she said in a sing-songy kind of way.

Her voice lilted to match her mood, which oddly was quite good, although she was investigating an arson that could have killed a whole family. “Something tells me I’m about to get an onion bagel with cream cheese and a large black coffee, and something tells me that my good friend Monte is going to go get it for me because I won our bet.”

“Give me that,” he snapped, this time the disbelief in his voice was actually real. “I don’t believe... I’ll be damned, look at that.”

The two partners stared, mouths agape, at the chart. “What’s this peak here?”

“That’s the temperature, I think,” she checked the instructions again, once again adjusting her glasses to see. “Just over two thousand centigrade. That has to be...” she fell silent.

“No, it can’t be. How could someone in White Creek get—”

“Rocket fuel? How in the hell did...” Monte was, maybe for the first time since they met six years before, devoid of any sort of sarcastic comeback.

“I’m betting they ordered it,” Rory said. “But holy shit, that’s some serious business. That’s not like garden variety idiot trying to burn down a house to get the insurance payment stuff, that’s sophisticated.”

“Too sophisticated for this backwater burg,” Monte said. His sarcasm was back, which was good because that meant his brain had straightened itself out. “My question is more of a concern of
BEAR THE HEAT

who
rather than
how
. This was someone who wanted that family dead.”

“Or at least they wanted to make sure we didn’t have any evidence they were ever there,” Rory posed. “Maybe they’d done something
in
the house? Or they were planning to, and it went bad?”

“Too many questions, not enough evidence,” Monte hissed.

“Too many questions.”

His serpentine tongue flicked out of his mouth and circled his lips, and his eyes narrowed to slits. “Who would want to hurt a family like that? This town isn’t making much sense lately.”

Ever since they’d been together, getting used to Monte’s snake-like features was a challenge for Rory, who had never much liked snakes. Then again, she couldn’t think of many mink shifters who did. Something about people feeding baby rats to pet snakes had always been a real nasty worm in her guts. She’d gotten over it though. Partially because Monte was one of the best forensic scientists she’d ever known, who had an almost Holmesian ability to sift through mounds of evidence and come up with a solution, but also because in the five years she’d worked at the White Creek Police Department, they’d gotten so close as to be inseparable. He’d taken her under his wing and showed her all sorts of things she’d never known. And for her part, she helped him be just a
little
gentler and more human.

Then again, he
could
be a real prick sometimes.

“Do the test again, but be more careful this time,” he said.

“There shouldn’t be purple tendrils in the water. That means you used too much sample and not enough testing chemical. And in the meantime, I’m going to take a nap.”

“Mean time?” Rory hissed. “What are you talking about? We just got a break on this stupid thing we’ve been working at for a week! You’re going to take a—”

“Nap, yes,” Monte said with a smile. “I work best when I’m rested.” His ‘s’ sounds were always drawn out in something of a
14

snake cliche, but it worked for him. It always gave what he said a little bit of a sinister twist that really fit the old snake.

She sighed in resignation. “Well fine. I guess I’ll get some lunch if you’re not going to do anything useful.”

“Sleep
is
useful,” Monte said. “It keeps me fresh and spry and vigorous.”

Rory went to respond, but he was already asleep. She had no idea how he did this, but was never less than amazed when she saw him with his head slumped slightly forward, and his hands spread on his knees. Somehow, he could fall asleep in any situation at any time, frequently when it was least convenient.

Still though, he
was
the best. Something to be said for being so good at something that you can behave in pretty much any obnoxious way you want.

Rory climbed to her feet and bent over from the waist, letting her fingertips dangle to the tops of her fuzzy-shoed feet. When she was in thinking mode, she needed to be as comfortable as possible, and for this girl, that meant pajama pants, house shoes that barely passed safety requirements, and frequently not bothering with a bra. At first it had been weird to be in such a state around Monte, but after his continued insistence that she wasn’t his “type” she finally gave in and found him to be completely and totally uninterested.