Edge of the Heat 2 (Westwood Harbor Corruption)

Edge of the Heat 2

by
Lisa Ladew

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons
or organizations, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright ©
2014 Lisa Ladew

This is book 2 in the Edge of the Heat Collection. It is not necessary to read b
ook 1 to enjoy book 2, but it is recommended. Book 1 is here:

http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Heat-Westwood-Harbor-Corruption-ebook/dp/B00HYEMAFI/

Think Emma, think! Calm down and breathe.

Emma forced herself to take a second to relax and formulate a plan. She was still holding on to the bathroom door, eyes frantically darting around the small Westwood General hospital room to be sure Norman wasn
’t going to jump out at her from some hiding place. Which was silly, there
were
no hiding places in this tiny room. Still, she was learning it was better to be safe than sorry with her ex-husband, who she knew was a dirty cop, but who also just might be a sociopath.

Norman was probably the one who ha
d bugged her house. He for sure was the one who chased off every man she had tried to date over the last several years. She was starting to suspect he was really the one who told Reece she ‘liked it rough’, prompting the scumbag doctor to try to rape her but pretend she really wanted it that way. And if the horrible feeling she got when he had mockingly said “Who is going to throw me out, your boyfriend?” was correct, he may have done something horrible to Craig. She couldn’t be her usual naive and rose-colored glasses self anymore. Her eyes were open now, at least when it came to Norman.

She took some deep breaths and tried to think what she should do first.

Call Craig.

Yes, call him first. Maybe she would get lucky.

She felt her pockets for her cell phone. She didn’t have it. Maybe she had lost it in the fire last night. She grabbed the hospital door and whipped it open, intending to go down to the nurses station.

Wait! They are going to give you a hard time about being up. They are going to want to disch
arge you and that will take forever. Or worse they will want you to stay. Best if you do this subtly. Remember you came in on a helicopter last night after being unconscious for 10 minutes in the middle of a wildfire. Nobody is going to let you just walk out of here if they can help it.

Briefly her mind flashed to the man she had saved, wondering how he was. No time for that now.

She walked over to the phone by the bedside and dialed the number for the nurses station. A cool female voice answered.

“
Hi, it’s Emma in 412. Did I get any visitors while I was sleeping?”

“
No, Emma, none.”

“
Ok, thank you.”

Emma broke the connection without replacing the handle and then dialed 9 for an outside line and Craig
’s number.

She sucked in her breath, counting the rings and
silently praying he would pick up. After 7 rings his voicemail answered.

She slammed down the phone, biting her tongue to keep from swearing or screaming, she wasn
’t sure which.

What now? Call dispatch and ask where he is.

It was a good idea, but she had to get out of the room before a nurse came in and saw her looking like she was just going to walk out of here, which was in fact what she was going to do.

She went to the door and opened it swiftly, walking towards the exit without hesitation. If anyone ch
allenged her she would just keep walking. They weren’t cops, just doctors and nurses.

She made it to the stairs without anyone even looking at her. Yanking the door open and swiftly stepping inside she sighed in relief. Once she was off this floor nobody w
ould pay her any attention.

At the bottom floor she looked around for a pay phone. Why weren
’t there any around? Sometimes cellphone batteries die or are left in cars!

The emergency room had pay phones! She broke into a run, feeling like time was already r
unning out for Craig. She had just gotten Craig back last night. She couldn’t bear to think she had lost him again already.

She found a pay phone in the lobby and dug in her firefighter
’s uniform for a quarter. She called dispatch. Lindy answered.

“
Lindy, it’s Emma Hill. I need to know when the last time you heard from Firefighter 465 was.”

“
Hi Emma, how are you?”

The concern in Lindy
’s voice was obvious, but Emma didn’t have time for it right now.

“
I’m great Lindy, please look quickly, I’m really worried about him.”

“
Um well, he hasn’t been heard from on the radio since his in service last night, but the scene commander already knows that.”

Emma was confused.

“What do you mean he hasn’t been heard from on the radio?”

Now Lindy sounded con
fused. “Emma, don’t you know that there’s a search on for him right now?”

Emma
’s heart sank. Her worst fears were confirmed.

“
No Lindy, what is going on?”

“
Well he disappeared last night on the line. One minute he was there and the next he wasn’t. They’ve been searching for him since 5 this morning. The helicopters are up and everything. They just called and asked for police dogs, but those are going to take 6 hours to get here from Brickersville.”

“
Thanks Lindy,” Emma said weakly. She replaced the handset, but held onto the phone still. She felt like she was going to fall to the ground in a heap if she let go. She couldn’t get enough air.

Oh Craig, Craig, where are you? What happened?

Emma’s vision went black around the edges. Her life spiraled out of her control in one sentence. She loved this man and he didn’t even know it. Never would know it if he was … she couldn’t say it - couldn’t even think it. He was fine, where ever he was - he just needed to be found.

She was going to help search. What else coul
d she do? But how? She didn’t have her car. How was she going to get up there?

As she thought, her eyes tracked movement in the E.R. doors. A worker bringing lab samples in. He had a car! And it was probably still running outside the doors - those guys we
re on a very tight schedule.

Emma Hill, are you considering stealing a car?

Emma thought about it hard. Was she really considering it? Well, yeah, anything else would take too long. Every second she spent here was a second Craig could be dy-
Don’t say it! He’s fine!

Emma could actually feel her brain starting to crack under the strain. The need to be on the move right now felt so great she was surprised she was still standing stock still thinking and not running around in circles or pulling out her hair in
a cartoonish display of angst.

There was no one here at the hospital that she could think of who would lend her a car without a lot of explanation. What about the courtesy cars in the garage? She knew where the keys were kept - in the volunteer
’s office near medical records. She’d once helped a volunteer walk an elderly person out to one of the cars and had thought how cool it was that the hospital had them.

So how to get the keys? She knew a few of the volunteers from coming in and out of the hospital so
often but she didn’t know any of them well. She was in uniform, so that gave her a certain air of authority - maybe she could just bluff her way in and act like she had been ordered to take a car.

She mulled this over as she walked towards the volunteer
’s office. When she got there, the desk in front was empty and the door behind was open. Yes! This would make things so much easier!

She slipped behind the desk and walked in the office, turning to the peg board on the left behind the door. 2 sets of keys sto
od there. She grabbed the one with the stall 3b marked on it. As her hand touched the cool metal her heart skipped a beat in her chest. She’d never stolen anything in her life.
Borrowed, I am just borrowing
. She slipped out of the office, face red and eyes darting over the lobby. She walked quickly towards the parking garage, thinking
I swear I will return these as soon as I can, please don’t let anyone need it or notice it missing.

She found the stall in the parking garage and slipped into the small white
hatchback, cranking the ignition as soon as she got inside. Quickly, she pulled out of the stall and headed to the exit, strapping on her seatbelt as she drove.

A short line of cars formed in front of her. Damn! What was the exit security guard going to do
? Was she caught already? She was no good at this clandestine stuff. A sheen of sweat covered her forehead and back. She felt nausea spike her empty stomach. Her mind played a silent film reel for her of the security guard dropping the gate down in front of her, looking suspiciously at her, then picking up the phone and making a call. In her mind’s eye she pressed her lips together and lowered her head, gunning the engine. She saw herself ramming the gate and breaking it like in the movies. Her mind showed her fleeing up Crystal Mountain Road with police officers on her tail, shooting at her tires.

Emma grabbed the wheel tight enough to snap it off and forced herself to take a deep, steadying breath. She tried to push the images away. They wouldn
’t go. She brought in a new image. Craig. Craig’s dimpled smile. Craig kissing her outside his truck on their first date. Craig rushing to pick her up at the Coronado after the fiasco with that asshole doctor.

She pulled up to the guardhouse and tried to smile at the
guard. He smiled at her and raised the gate, giving her a small salute.

Emma let out a shaky breath and waved two fingers at him. She pressed the accelerator a little too hard making the car jerk forward.
Oh man, better get out of here quick.

She forced he
rself to take a few more deep breaths and headed left in front of the hospital. She could be to the fire scene in 40 minutes if she hurried. Time to see what this little car could do.

Once out of the city
limits Emma pushed the little car to its limits, no longer concerned about police. As she drove she started wondering about Norman. Had he done something to Craig? And then he came in to gloat about it to her? But that didn’t make sense. Wouldn’t that be stupid of him? Because if Craig had been assaulted or something, now Emma would know who did it? Maybe he just had heard that Craig was missing and that’s what he was gloating about. That things always seemed to fall apart for her and the men she tried to date, whether he had any part in it or not.

Emma tried to push the thoughts of Norman out of her head. Even after Norman had hit her, she still hadn
’t hated him. Hate was not one of those emotions she liked to nurture. She thought hate was too dangerous. Even after Norman had chased off all the men she’d tried to date she still never thought of him hatefully. She just kind of gave up, went numb, stopped trying.

But now, now she was starting to feel hate for Norman. And she didn
’t like the feeling. It was like acid in her body, burning her from the inside.

She tried to think of a strategy instead. Craig had come up to fight the wildfire last night just like she had yesterday. She was certain he would have been assigned a partner, and then sent out with a shov
el to put out spot fires and maybe do some back burning. This is much trickier at night, but it had to be done still with a wildfire that was threatening homes.

They were probably doing a police call kind of search, where everyone walked in a line a few fe
et apart and looked straight at the ground. They probably expected that he had been overcome by smoke or maybe had tripped and hit his head (like she had the night before, with help from that big, falling tree) and so be passed out on the ground somewhere.

She heard the whoop whoop of a helicopter and leaned over the steering wheel, searching for it. There - she saw it circling in the distance, past the green, intact forest she currently saw on her left, over the blackened, charred hillside. He should be fa
irly easy to spot from the air in his orange fire suit, unless he was in the trees somewhere. The Crystal Creek Wildfire seemed to be out, at least in this location. She saw only the faintest wisps of smoke here and there.

She passed her first empty, parke
d fire vehicle pulled to the side on the two-land blacktop so she started watching for the scene commander. The commander today would probably be Captain Lane. Emma really liked Captain Lane, but she was also worried. Captain Lane was tough and Emma didn’t know if the captain would give her a hard time about being there or not.

There - she saw her. Captain Lane was not your typical fire captain. She was a woman, for one, and she looked like she belonged on a movie set, not a fire scene. She stood 5 feet, 11
inches and had an hourglass figure even bulky turnout gear couldn’t hide. Her flaming red hair sometimes made her seem made for the job though. She was standing with her foot on the back of a tanker, wearing a dingy gray t-shirt, firefighter turnout pants and boots, and a wildfire helmet on her head with all of her hair tucked inside, although a few long strands had escaped and made her easy to spot. She had a clipboard in one hand and was barking orders into the radio in her other hand.

Emma parked the ha
tchback and got out, running over to the captain. She had no idea what she was going to say; she was just glad to be here finally.

She waited until the captain was done speaking and then said “
Captain, put me to work, I want to help find Masterson.”

Capta
in Lane’s eyes narrowed. “Hill, aren’t you supposed to be in the hospital?”

“
I was released this morning. I got a clean bill of health and plenty of sleep so I’m back to work.”

Captain Lane eyed her clipboard. “
Nobody told me you were coming.”

“
Well I was scheduled to work today before my, uh, my accident.”

“
Yeah, you were, but you were also yanked from the roster once you got med-evaced out of here last night in a helicopter,” the Captain said tersely. Then she warmed up a little, “Good work by the way, I heard how you saved that hunter.”

“
Thanks Captain, but I’m here and I’m fine and I want to go to work.” Emma tried not to shout, but her low-level anxiety was ratcheting back up to high level anxiety. She tried a different tactic. “Where are we searching for him?”

Captain Lane appraised her intently, seeming to peer inside Emma
’s eyes.
She’s
p
robably checking my color
, Emma thought.

The Captain turned to the south side of the road and waved off to the right. “
We have 6 bodies and a heli searching this hillside right here. If they don’t find him we head into the forest. If they still don’t find him we have dogs on their way.”

“
When did he go missing? And how?”

“
Shortly after 5 a.m. Tanner, his partner, noticed he just disappeared. He sounded the alarm and we did a spiral from their area. Nothing. Since then we’ve searched every sector on the south side of the road except the far forest. We haven’t found anything.”

“
Why aren’t there more bodies up here searching? And another helicopter? We could cover twice as much ground.” Emma tried not to sound accusing, but it had been 6 hours already. 6 bodies and one helicopter was ridiculous!

“
I asked for more bodies and got denied. I asked for another helicopter and got denied there too,” the captain spit out.

Emma chose
her words carefully. “Maybe we should go to the chief.”

Captain Lane moved in close to Emma. “
Don’t you think I tried that! Those denials came straight from the Chief’s mouth. He said he checked the manpower himself and there was no one to spare.”

Emma
’s eyes widened. It was daytime, there were probably 20 firefighters working on this fire in other areas. All of them could come over here. No houses were currently being threatened. What in the world?

“
What about the volunteers?”

Captain Lane sighed. “
Look Emma, if this gets out, it’s going to get me fired, but I’ve already made my bed so I’ll tell you. I asked the chief for volunteers and he said the last thing he needed was 5 volunteers going missing because one paid firefighter couldn’t tell his ass from a hole in the ground. He denied that request too. I didn’t like his answer so I put the word out an hour ago that if some volunteers happened to show up to the fire there might be some jobs for them. I expect them to start showing up any minute now, and when they do I’ll put them to work. And if any of them get lost or hurt I will certainly be fired. But that’s better than just standing around.”

Emma couldn
’t believe the chief wouldn’t pull manpower from anywhere else and he wouldn’t send up the volunteers. It was almost like he didn’t care if Craig was found or not.

Emma thought hard. “
What if there was foul play? Like what if someone hit him over the head or something? Shouldn’t the woods be the first place you looked?”

Captain Lane eyed her carefully again
. “Why would you think there was foul play?”

Emma didn
’t know whether to spill her guts or not. Accusing a Vice Captain in the police department of making someone go missing was serious business. And she didn’t have anything to go on, just a mockingly-said sentence and a gut feeling. So she made something up.

“
Craig told me last week that he had gotten a threatening letter and didn’t know who it was from, so maybe someone took advantage of the fire to get some sort of revenge,” she said, haltingly. She was a horrible liar and she knew it.

Captain Lane looked out over the barren hillside, and then over to the forest, which was over a mile away from where the current search was on.

“But Craig is a big guy. How would someone get him over to the forest from where he was working last night?” she asked, almost to herself.

“
I don’t know. But I want to go search the forest,” Emma replied.

“
Ok. When the first volunteer gets here you go with him.”

“
No, I don’t want to wait. I’ll go in now. Just give me a radio and a flare gun.”

Captain Lane looked at her reproachfully. “
You know better than that Emma, no one goes in without a partner.”

Damn. Now she had to wait? The thought made her bounce up and down on her heels, impatiently. “
Pull someone from the current search and send them in with me.”

Captain Lane stood still, considering. “
I should go with you myself, but if I did there would be no one here to tell the volunteers what to do when they start showing up. Ok - I’ll give you Tanner. He won’t go home anyway.”

Emma sigh
ed with relief. Her heart was still hammering and she didn’t feel any better about anything - wouldn’t feel better until Craig was found - but at least she would be moving again.

Captain Lane yelled into her radio. Emma started searching vehicles for spare
aid bags, wildfire kits, water bottles, radios, and flare guns. When she found what she needed she strapped it all to her back and started towards the woods, looking for Tanner. She saw him cutting across the charred hillside and waved a big wave, then kept moving. As she passed the Captain she said, “Tell Tanner to switch to channel 18.”

She jogged the 3/4s of a mile to the start of the forest. She was sure Tanner was exhausted but she didn
’t need him to keep up with her. Her nervous energy would do the work of two of them anyway. She tied off a length of orange tape on a tree where she entered and plunged ahead. She’d always had a pretty good intuition when it came to this kind of work. When she got in the zone she just ‘knew’ where she should be going and what she should be doing and most times exactly what was wrong with her patient even if it wasn’t obvious. She shut down her thinking mind and started to feel around for her sixth sense, hoping desperately it wouldn’t fail her today when she needed it the most.

Her radio crackled. “
Emma where are you?”

“
Follow the orange tape Tan, I’m already looking.”

She placed another orange strip quickly and kept moving.

The forest was dark and cool and eerily still. There were no squirrels or birds or chipmunks to be seen or heard. They had all fled the night before when the fire threatened so close, she was sure.

A picture formed in her mind. A hunting shack. The shack from last night where she had found the hunter? Or another? She cast her eyes around the forest lo
oking for any sort of a building. “Craig!” she called suddenly, startling herself. No answer.

She kept walking, feeling a kind of deja vu from the night before, except this time the forest wasn
’t on fire.

The forest opened up into an unnatural clearing. S
he saw a deer blind up in a tree, camouflaged well. She placed another piece of tape, then picked up her pace, thinking there would be some more hunting buildings around this area. The smell of old smoke mingled with fresh pine trees, creating an inviting aroma that didn’t mesh well with her situation. Every step felt surreal. The unnatural quiet allowed her to hear every footfall she made and the sound of her own swishing heartbeat in her ears. She didn’t like it. She wished something, anything would make a noise. Weren’t there even any bugs left here?

The forest got too thick ahead of her to continue that way so she placed some tape and veered to the left. She walked for at least a half-mile. Soon she would come to the far end of what was left of the non-
burnt forest. And then what? Would she circle around and find another place of entry and just walk like she had here?

She came upon another unnatural clearing. All the trees had been cut down, but there was a charred pile of wood on the far side of it. Ha
d that been a hunters shack? She ran up to it. The big planks of wood were ashy and sooty, some of them burned more than halfway through. Her heart pounded harder. Someone had set this wood on fire, certainly - had it once been a building? Was she going to find a dead body in the middle of it? “Please no please no please no” she started chanting under her breath without even realizing it.

She tested the first board. It was cool to the touch. She pulled it off the pile and threw it off to the side. Frantical
ly now, she dug at the boards, heaving them as fast and as far as she could. The wood at the bottom started to change. It wasn’t quite as burnt. Some of the pieces didn’t look burnt at all.

There! A flash of orange! Emma whimpered and made a low keening s
ound, like an animal. He was dead. She knew it. Someone had put him in this little shack and set it on fire. “Craig!” she screamed, whipping into a frenzy. She heaved the planks off him with all her might, uncovering his boots, and then his hips, and then his chest. He wasn’t moving. She kept digging and when the final pieces were flung away she took in the sight of him.

He was lying, face down, helmet still on, in a pool of his own congealed blood. His turnout gear was charred on the back in places, but no
t burnt through anywhere. The fire hadn’t gotten him when the building collapsed in on him. He must not have died immediately because she saw he had dug a little hole in the dirt by his mouth with his fingers. A sob escaped her. She dropped to her knees next to him, eyes filled with tears. He had saved her. She could not save him.