He didn’t call either of them. Not Andy. Not Jake.
Matt and Engo seemed to take his word for it that neither were answering. They stood in Matt’s office, and Ben looked at the bare walls and listened to the sound of the fire station beyond the door, knowing it was the last time he was ever going to do that. Guys were laughing in the TV room. Probies were gossiping in the engine bays, leaning on brooms, playing shitty hip-hop. Everything was lit with sickly fluorescent tube lights, and that humming paleness falling on the walls and hall threatened to usher Ben right back into the most tenuous of realities, waiting to do the worst job of his criminal career with two men who had buried his girlfriend and her son, hoping the undercover he’d brought in to bust them all was out there somewhere too busy trying to find that woman and her child. Not really caring if she even was.
And then there was Jake, who might show up here any second, Jake who’d destroyed his family, or who Matt and Engo said destroyed his family, but for all Ben knew was lying in the same grave as Luna and her son, put there for some reason by Matt and Engo. It was all so fucked up, Ben couldn’t keep his mind straight, was fascinated instead by the wood-veneer patterning on the walls of Matt’s office.
Matt went round the desk and yanked open one of his drawers and pulled out a burner phone.
“Fuck it,” the big man said. Ben knew the tones for 9-1-1. He’d dialed those numbers a dozen times before his balls even dropped, punched them into pay phones, burner phones, home phones. A car phone once. It made him feel tired, listening to them.
Matt made the call about an explosion in an apartment building on Eighty-First near the park. Ben knew it. It was right at the edge of their jurisdiction, as far from the station as anybody from their station could go on a direct assignment. An explosion would mean engine and ladder, maybe a second-due call for the 98s. Lots of rich apartments. Ben thought he heard Jerry Seinfeld lived up there somewhere.
Matt ended the call and Engo popped the door to the hall open, folded his arms and leaned there. They heard the bells coming in fast. A couple of guys even crossed the doorway at a jog.
A guy from the truck, Whistler, got curious about Engo and looked in the door as he went past, shrugging on his turnout coat.
“What are you assholes doing here?”
“Setting up something for Jake,” Matt grunted, shutting the burner phone back into its drawer. “Kid’s got to graduate sometime. What’s the job?”
“Explosion on Eighty-First. Flames in the windows.”
Matt sucked air down the side of his teeth meanly, like Fuck the truck team and their real-ass fires.
“Watch the stove for us, will you, Engo?” Whistler slapped Engo’s arm, turned and jogged on.
Matt jutted his chin at Ben. “Try your girlfriend again.”
“I just did,” Ben lied. “Jake’s not answering either.”
“Maybe they’re together,” Matt said humorlessly.
“Don’t tell me Jake’s nabbed another one from you, Ben,” Engo chuckled. “The Pussy Pilferer strikes again!”
Matt worked his jaw, his wedding ring rapping on the desktop like a wrought-iron door knocker. Ben could see the calculations being made in his mind, about how it would look to the top brass if they attended a suspected gas-leak call while off duty and riding short by two whole crew members. About whether that even fucking mattered, because keeping his job and his reputation meant less than nothing to Matt. Had for years. No man could ever think worse about Matt than he thought about himself. And from here on in, what he was staring down the barrel of was a quiet life trying his best to give himself skin cancer by the backyard pool and dealing with Donna and the baby’s mood swings. Before all that, right in front of him, lay a three-way and not a five-way cut of whatever he sold the baseball cards for; minus the fencing and logistics and shut-up money for Andy and Jake. The boss looked at Engo, and then he looked at Ben.
“Fuck it,” he said again, and shrugged. He went to the drawer and grabbed the phone, and dialed those numbers.