He watched Andy all the way to the scene, riding in the front with Matt, his eyes locked on the rearview mirror. She’d obviously had some kind of training. Andy had her bunker gear on and her fixtures fastened quicker than he’d ever seen it done, and her hand went automatically to the pussy bar on the ceiling as she hauled herself into the seat behind his, like she’d pulled herself into a fire engine just that way a thousand times in her life already. She sat beside Engo, listening distractedly to whatever he was shouting in her ear, never once meeting Ben’s eyes in the mirror. Ben couldn’t hear Engo over the siren, but he could guess the older firefighter was giving her the same speech he’d given Titus and Ben and Jakey when they’d joined. Two sales points: First, that Engo was the real alpha on the team and that new members should defer to him on everything.
And second, that you don’t talk about September 11 around Matt.
Not for any reason.
Not ever.
Dispatch had been vague about the callout. Male, fifties, trapped in a roof cavity. Ben counted five security cameras as he walked up the steps of the four-story brownstone with potted topiary on the spotless porch. The double doors opened into a foyer with a twenty-foot ceiling that was hung all over with mistletoe. A live Christmas tree sat in a giant pot in the corner, filling the air with the scent of pine.
“What the hell is all this?” Matt said, towering over the small woman who had greeted them at the door. She was dressed in a bloodred skirt suit. Pearls and French-polished nails. She was in her sixties and scowling. “Lady, it’s August.”
“Not in this household.” The woman thrust back her shoulders. “I’m hosting an early celebration with my grandchildren. And I’m afraid, despite my intentions, that things have gone slightly awry.”
Ben turned and spotted two children in the room off the foyer, sitting on a chaise lounge. They’d obviously been told to stay put, but to them that meant butts on the seat and nothing else. Every part of the young blond boy and girl seemed to strain toward the door, their eyes bulging from their heads, trying to take in the arrival of the fire crew. The little girl was leaning over so far Ben thought she would topple off the couch.
“My son announced last week that his family will be spending the coming holiday season alone this year, in the Maldives,” the woman was saying. She spotted Engo’s paunch and grimaced. “It was my daughter-in-law’s choice, of course.”
“Sorry to interrupt.” Andy raised a gloved palm. “But is there an emergency here or not?”
“I’m getting to that.”
“Get there quicker,” Matt demanded.
“It’s the gentleman I hired to play Santa Claus.” The woman twitched indignantly. She raised an unsteady finger toward the roof. “He assured me the chimney was wide enough.”
Ben and Andy took the fire stairs in silence to the roof. It was a nice view. To the south, a slice of downtown. To the east, a sliver of the river, storm gray and moving between two other blocks of brownstones. He dumped his gear on the concrete and went to the chimney on the southwest corner. There was a double black iron grille leaning against the chimney stack. Only darkness inside. Andy leaned over beside him and bellowed down the hole, “Saint Nick! You in there?”
The reply was downtrodden and muffled. “Yeah.”
“Can you breathe?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d tell him to hold tight, but I think he’s got it covered,” she said, leaning back. Ben watched her dump her own gear bag and unzip it.
“Are you a firefighter?” he asked. She didn’t answer, kept unrolling gear. “Hey. I’m talking to you.”
“Don’t start. We’ve got a job to do.”
“Oh, I’m starting.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her up, held her, so she had to face him. “You are not undercover here as a goddamn Walmart checkout girl, Andy. This is life-and-death shit. You can’t be doing this.”
“Keep your fucking voice down. There’s a civilian down that hole and Jake and Engo will be getting set up right underneath us.”
“You can’t—”
“I can do it, and I am doing it, Ben.” She pushed him off. “Jesus. Why do you think it took me a week to come on board this case? Huh? I was retraining, that’s why. I was researching and I was training, and I’ve had better-quality training for this role than you got in the academy, I can tell you that much.”
“Who trained you?”
“A guy out in Delaware. You want his number? You want to call him, see if he covered ‘Try before you pry’ with me?”
“Have you ever done this before?”
“I was on an undercover job maybe five years ago,” she said. “The marines. I took the full course at the academy, then served for six months. They were trying to catch a commander for raping a seaman recruit.”
Ben squinted at her.
“That set me up for this role in two ways: I got a shitload of firefighter and search-and-rescue training, and I learned how to shed body fat like a fucking cancer patient.”
“That was five years ago.” Ben shook his head. “Look, I don’t care how much experience you have. A lot has changed in half a decade, and you’ve never served in the department. There’s a big difference between putting out fires on a navy ship and putting them out in warehouses and apartment buildings.”
She grabbed a flashlight from her vest and flicked it on, shone it down the chimney. Ben just stood there with the warm, heavy breeze stirring his discomfort.
“Who are you?”
“You keep asking me that.” Andy clicked the flashlight off. She started unrolling rope and tackle from her gear bag. “I don’t know what kind of answer you’re looking for that you haven’t already got. I’m an undercover investigation specialist. People hire me to go places, take up an identity, get deep inside the lives of other people. I dig around. I find stuff out. It’s really very simple, Ben.”
“Who do you work for?”
“Right now, the FBI. I told you that.”
“But other people hire you sometimes?”
“Yes. We’ve talked about this.”
“Were you there the other night?” Ben asked. When she didn’t answer, he stepped closer. “At the jewelry store. The dog walkers.”
“I wasn’t there, Ben.”
“You can’t bullshit your way through this with me,” Ben said. “You said it yourself. We’re supposed to be working together. I want to know why you do this. I want to know your real name.”
“Ben!” It was her time to stand and take his shoulders. “Wake up, would you? There’s a fucking dude dressed like Santa Claus stuck ten feet down a hole.” She gestured to the chimney beside him. “Can we talk about this later?”
He didn’t get to answer. She went back to the chimney and leaned over and looked in while she clicked the radio on her shoulder.
“Chief, Andy on the roof,” she said. “I’ve got eyes on. He’s pretty wedged. All I can see is beard and wig. I’m gonna see if we can get a rig around him and haul him up.”
“B Team’s good to go here if we have to cut the fucker out,” came Engo’s voice. “Looks like the chimney’s only single brick with no liner. We can cut through the side and pop him out into the attic.”
“Don’t try too hard on the haul up, Andy,” Matt said. “Part of me thinks this rich bitch deserves to spend some money having her chimney repaired, and I know a contractor who might give us a taste.”
“Aye, aye, Matt,” Andy said.
“We’re ready to make a mess,” Engo said.
“Sounds like you’re adjusting to the five-man situation with grace and ease, Engo.” Matt’s voice on the line was crackly.
“Well, it’s really only four and a half, right?”
Andy rolled her eyes. She tossed Ben a heap of rope, which he caught against his chest. “It begins,” she said.
He stayed the hell away from her for the rest of the shift. It wasn’t hard. He guessed she was trying to do the same thing, demonstrating to Matt that “Andy” wasn’t going to jeopardize her new job by continuing her thing with him. Ben hid in the storeroom doing the equipment count Matt had threatened to cut his head off if he didn’t do a whole three months earlier. He glimpsed Andy now and then. She was covered in a thin sheen of sweat and engine oil, traversing the hall or the bay row with Engo trailing after her.
Jake slipped into the equipment room sometime in the late afternoon and closed the door behind him.
“If you’re about to give me a tip on the next jump at Belmont Park: Don’t,” Ben said.
“I’m not.” Jakey sat on a crate of oxygen filters. “I want to know what’s going on with the new chick.”
“Last I saw she was changing the oil in bay two.”
“No, I mean like, you and her.” Jake’s blue eyes were swimming with good intentions. “How are you gonna be together without Matt finding out?”
“Jake,” Ben sighed. “Everybody’s going to forget what happened Friday night, me and Andy the fastest of all. Okay? In fact, I think I already forgot. By accident. I was pretty drunk.”
“So you’re not gonna, you know.” He waved a hand. Ben’s heart was lightening by the second.
“No, Jake.”
“Would you have?” he asked. “If she hadn’t ended up being the new guy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You’d been texting.”
“Yeah.”
“So all that’s over now.”
“Jake, are you trying to get my permission to go after her?”
“No, no—”
“Because you might have to go toe-to-toe with Engo on that.”
“She’s not my type.”
Ben marked off a row of boxes of gloves he’d just counted. “Then what’s your sudden interest in my romantic life? You got a hard-on for me, Jake?”
“I just think, you know, it’s sad.” He stared at his feet. “Maybe you coulda had something.”
“I’ll get over it.”
“What did you tell her?” Jake said. “About your apartment.”
Ben remembered the last time Jake had been there, maybe two weeks earlier, the kid swinging by to drop off a fifty he’d bummed off Ben so he could get phone credit. The quiet dismay in his face when he saw the place was still arranged as it had been when Ben’s pseudo-family was there.
“I didn’t tell her anything,” Ben said. “It didn’t come up. Maybe she figured I was married with a kid and they were somewhere else that night.”
“What are you gonna tell her?” Jake asked.
Ben stopped counting boxes of gloves. He stared at the clipboard in his hand, the numbers in columns, his “atrocious” handwriting.
“The truth,” he said. He looked over at the young probie with his Barbie-blond ponytail hanging over his shoulder, his eager, upturned face full of secondhand unrequited angst. “They ran out on me.”