Leslie Glass - Burning Time

Emma looked from one to the other. “He was going to—” Her blue eyes filled with tears.

“Yeah, but he didn’t get to.”

Soot covered the drawings on Emma Chapman’s face. April could hardly see her through the stinging smoke. It looked like Emma had a clay mask on. That was all right, the woman probably had mud packs all the time. It looked as if her features were still perfect. They hadn’t been damaged. April put a hand to Emma’s hair. It was matted and dirty, but at least she still had it.

“I shot him,” she told April. She was in shock.

April nodded. “Probably saved your life. Come on.”

The stakeout cop was on his feet. The four of them slowly started moving. Only minutes had passed since the explosion. Three firemen in hats and rubber coats came into the garage to help them out. Outside, people were already gawking at the devastation, and the ferocity of the fire. Fire engines and police sirens wailed.

Fire equipment, police cars, three ambulances with their lights flashing were already on the scene. With the help of a fireman twice her size, April hobbled out into the chaos. The first thing she saw was a kitchen sink and part of its cabinet crashed onto the hood of a car in the street. The unmarked car from the Two-O was rubble.

It was dusk. In the fading light, people drawn out of their houses by the blast were complaining, pointing at the fire, shaking their heads. One woman with her hair in curlers rushed toward them shrieking, “Help me. Oh, God. He had a heart attack. He’s in the house. He won’t get up—” A black female fire fighter went to help her.

“Oh, God,” April muttered. It was a mess. What would her mother say about her job now? Never mind the cuts and burns on her hands and feet, or the sprained ankle—if she was lucky. Sai Woo would look on dark side. She wouldn’t say her daughter big hero for saving Noblewoman Trapped in Cave. She would say her daughter strong enough to blow up whole neighborhood. And still not married. Pah.

“I’m fine,” she protested to the fireman, who wanted to deposit her in an ambulance. She wasn’t getting into any ambulance. She turned back to Emma.

Emma’s fireman had put his coat on her and carried her out because she had no shoes.

Sanchez touched her arm. “You okay?”

April nodded. “What about you?”

“Fine.” He nodded, too.

She knew he wasn’t fine. She could see the blood from many small cuts through the holes in his clothes. His face looked burned and one of his ears was the color of raw hamburger. Well, her ankle hurt like hell and was beginning to swell. It was his fault for falling on top of her, but she didn’t want to mention it now. Maybe some day she’d tell him he wasn’t good in close.

“Thanks,” was what she said now.

“Yeah, what for?”

“Everything.” She saw a car from the Two-O and turned away to help clear the street for the ambulance that was coming in for Emma.

The fireman stood there holding onto her. “Could you put me down? I need to call my husband.” Emma still looked stunned.

“No, you’ll cut your feet.” The fireman cocked his head at the ambulance driver, a guy with a ponytail and a thick gold hoop in one ear.

The ambulance stopped and a white-jacketed medic jumped out of the front seat. “Who’s first?”

“She is,” April indicated Emma.

“Can she stand?”

“Not without any shoes, she can’t. Hurry it up, will you. I got things to do.” The fireman looked back at the fire.

The medic opened the back doors and held out some white cotton blankets to wrap Emma in so he could give the fireman back his coat.

“My husband’s a doctor. I can’t go to a hospital. Call him. I want to go home.” Emma resisted being put in the ambulance.

“Got to get in, lady. It’s the rules.”

“Don’t worry,” April said quickly. “I know where he is.”

Emma stared at her.

“I called him. He’s on his way. He’s the one who helped us locate you. He’s a great guy.”

Emma started to cry again.

“Come on, it’s okay. In you go, and then I’ll find him for you.”

April helped the two paramedics put Emma into the ambulance. When they exchanged the coat for the cotton blankets, no one commented on the artwork on the woman’s body.

April could hear the shouts of police and fire fighters, yelling at curious people not to cross the lines, not to try to go back to their houses yet. April got out of the ambulance.

Sanchez stood with Sergeants Joyce and Aspiranti, describing what happened, by the look of it. Down the block near the diner, Jason Frank was trying to argue his way past a roadblock.

April hobbled down the street toward him. “She’s over here,” she shouted to Jason. “He’s a doctor, let him through,” she ordered, flashing her ID.

Jason pushed through the uniforms, his face white with fear. “Where is she?”

“She’s in that ambulance.” April pointed at it. She tried to reach out and stop him, so she could tell him what to expect, what happened to Emma and what she looked like. But he didn’t stop. He wanted to get to his wife and didn’t hesitate, not for a second. April stood there on one foot, staring after him until Sanchez came to get her.

Epilogue

By April’s watch it was nearly eleven o’clock. The lights were on in the two-patient room, and her hospital bed was still cranked up in a sitting position. A male nurse had been in a few minutes before to tell her not to push the button that made it go down. They wanted her to sleep sitting up. Several pillows served as a prop for her ankle, which had a small makeshift splint on it instead of a heavy cast, because of the burns. Puffy bandages covered patches of her feet, ankles, hands, wrists, and head. There were none on her face but two on the top of her head, where the odds were good, she’d been told, that her hair would eventually grow back.

The other bed as empty. There was no way of telling if the lights were on for the expected arrival of another patient sometime soon, or simply because no one had thought of turning them off. April wanted out. She felt as naked without her gun as she did without her clothes. For four hours different doctors and technicians had poked and prodded and x-rayed her. An Indian with a turban had covered her burns with various kinds of antibiotic grease and dressed them with the special gauze pads that weren’t supposed to stick. There was an IV needle embedded in her arm. She saw no reason for the IV, or for staying the night, and told the balding doctor whose ID tag said he was the orthopedist that all she needed was a cane and a release. But he had not been interested in her opinion.

In fact, she was all too well aware that the hospital staff could do anything to her, and no one from the department would stop them or complain. The police yielded their authority in hospital zones. They stood outside doors marked Do Not Enter, waiting endlessly for treatment and information just like anybody else. It really pissed her off.

Who had taken her things away and locked them up—her badge, her gun, her handbag? Her notebook with her important telephone numbers? She didn’t like this. The steady ache of the burns made her feel feverish, but that didn’t bother her as much as the pulsating pain in her ankle. The ankle was badly swollen and couldn’t support any weight at all. She didn’t have the feeling she’d be using it anytime soon.

Outside in the hall it had grown quiet. April knew that quiet, when the hospital carts had finished dispensing juice and medication and the graveyard shift was about to come on. When she’d been in uniform, she had guarded suspects in hospitals, sat outside their doors all night long. She’d taken people to emergency rooms for any number of reasons many times over the years, even crazies to Bellevue to be locked up in the middle of the night. It always took hours. This was the first time she had been in the hospital as a patient. She didn’t like it.