“I had a guy with a gun open the door the other night,” I say.
“No?” she says, appalled.
“Yes,” I insist.
“What did you do?”
“I played it cool, he thought he was James Bond. Bit bloody frightening.”
“My God, did you tell Charles?”
“No, it was my very first night, I didn’t want to sound highly strung, you know?”
“If it had happened to me, I think I would have resigned on the spot,” she says, laughing. I sit in my chair and she plays with the cheese, stringing it from the plate to her mouth, completely unself-consciously.
“Ten o’clock, we better get back to the others and their tales of woe,” Amber says.
I go outside as she dashes to the bathroom. I watch her through the window. On the way out, she flashes her smile at the pizza man and he grins at her and comes around the counter to open the door. In the moment when he’s obscured by a pillar she deftly puts her hand in the tip jar, takes out half the notes, and puts them in her pocket.
“Thank you,” she says breezily, as she leaves.
We had walked nearly the whole way back to the rendezvous point when Amber noticed black spirals of smoke coming from the stoner kids’ house.
“That’s not pot, is it?” Amber asked.
“No, it’s not, their fucking house is on fire,” I said, and began to run.
We got to the house in seconds, but now the fire had taken hold. Sheets of flame coming from underneath the front door, a side window buckling from the heat — all the neighbors bloody oblivious.
“Amber, go to the closest house, call nine-nine-nine,” I said.
“What’s nine-nine-nine?” Amber asked.
“Jesus, whatever it is in this country, the fire brigade, call the bloody fire brigade.”
“Nine-one-one,” Amber said in a daze.
“Yes, just fucking go.”
I had to physically shove her in the direction of the house next door.
It looked bad. The wind and the open windows had really stoked the fire and as I got to the front step I was hit by a wall of heat. I staggered back, put my jacket over my arm and head. I pulled my shirtsleeve down over my fingers and pulled the screen door. The front door was unlocked, the handle searingly hot. I pushed it open.
A horrible sight.
The kitchen was on fire at the back of the house and the walls and carpet were burning. Jets of orange flame shooting up the stairs.
The living room was in to the right. Stairs to the left. Impossible to breathe. I ran down the hall, got about two feet, dropped to a crawl, fumbled for the handle, and shoved my way into the living room. My lungs aching, sparks falling on my back and hair.
Both kids lying on the living room floor, unconscious. The room wasn’t on fire yet, but thick black smoke poured in from a door to the kitchen. I stayed down on my knees, breathing. Behind me a huge tube of fire came hurtling down the hall, and I slammed the door. Something crashed down in the back room.
A couple of breaths of that smoke could knock me for six. But I had no choice. I got to my feet, picked up the TV set from off an upturned wooden crate, threw it through the front window. I kicked away the rest of the glass, got to the floor again, breathed. Stood. I picked up the first kid in a fireman’s lift, hoisted him on my shoulder, ran with him to the broken window, tossed him out.
The second kid groaned.
“It’s going to be ok, you little shit,” I said, and picked him up too.
My legs buckled, but I managed to get him across the room. I tossed him out and leaped after him into the garden. The street full of neighbors now. They dragged the boys out of the garden, helped me to my feet and down the path. A couple of them clapped and patted me on the back.
I dry-heaved and spat, someone gave me a water bottle.
I saw Amber. She ran over and threw her arms around me.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” she kept saying, over and over.
Two fire tenders arrived and in a couple of minutes they had the blaze under control and out. An easy one for the fire department, considering the number of wildfires they were increasingly having to deal with in this second summer of drought.
A cop showed up and paramedics took the kids to the hospital. They both had suffered smoke inhalation but would be fine. A paramedic asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital but I said no. He gave me a hit of O2. I coughed and heaved and he gave me Gatorade instead. Amber helped me up.
“How did you do that, how did you know how to do that?” Amber asked, incredulous.
I knew, but I didn’t tell her. My cop training had taken over. I’d been a cop for six years, not six months. It wasn’t me, it was automatic pilot.
“I don’t know,” I said, “it just seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Are you ok? Are you hurt? Maybe you should go to the hospital? What do you think?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
While I recovered, we sat there on the curb with all the other onlookers. Amber held my hand and give me sips from a water bottle. A couple of minutes later a police officer came over to interview me. Tall, skinny, alert, he looked a little like trouble. I got to my feet. He asked me if I was ok. I said I was. He asked what exactly had happened. I began to tell him as simply as possible. He wrote everything down and in the middle of a sentence he suddenly stopped me.
“I know you,” he said.
“You do?”
“Yeah, I know you from somewhere, I can’t quite place it.”
“Well, I don’t think I know you,” I said, guessing that the cop recognized me from the bloody artist’s-impression wanted posters down at his station house.
“Yeah, it’ll come to me in a minute. What’s your name?”
“Um, it’s Seamus Holmes,” I said.
Amber looked at me, startled, but said nothing.
“Where do you live?”
“Uh, two-oh-eight Broadway, apartment twenty-six,” I said.
“Ok, Seamus, what kind of accent is that?”
“Irish.”
“Irish, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Not Australian, right?”
“No.”
“Hold on a minute,” he said, and walked off.
He went to his car and said something into his police radio. I was getting quite scared now. He walked back slowly. His face expressionless, giving nothing away.
“Just something I had to take care of there,” he said.
“Ok,” I said.
“And what do you do for a living?” the cop asked.
“Uh, I’m a schoolteacher, I coach, uh, soccer,” I said, the first thing that came into my head. Also a stupid thing. If he asked what school I was at, I was sure to blunder.
“What school you at?” he asked.
“Kennedy,” I said.
“Is that near Washington High?” he asked.
“Reasonably near,” I said.
“Yeah, I know it, ok, and you just saw the fire and went barging in?”
“Yes,” I said.
He nodded, was about to ask something else, and then his face lit up.
“Sheeat, I remember now, you play in the Cherry Creek Soccer League, right? I knew I recognized your face from something.”
“I play soccer,” I agreed.
The cop grinned. “I knew I knew you from somewhere.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I better cancel that radio call,” he said to himself.
“What?”
He looked at me. His face much more relaxed.
“Oh, nothing, it was to do with something else. I knew I knew you. Shit. And, hey, man, before the fire department gives you a lecture, which they will, I just want to say you did good getting those kids out of there.”
“Thanks.”
A TV crew from Channel 7 showed up searching for people to interview. They were getting in the way of the fire crew, and the cop looked distracted.