Tin City Tinder (A Boone Childress Mystery) Read Free Page A

get in the truck. “Then let’s not keep the old boy waiting. You know the rules. No passing. No tailgating. And son?”
    “Yeah?”
    “I drive fast. Try to keep up.”  

    3
    The dilapidated house sat atop a slight rise, next to a man-made pond. The pond had once been used for irrigation, back when the overgrown lot had been part of a family farm. Past the pond and up a rise, a half dozen tobacco barns and a derelict chicken house had been left to rot.
    They were no longer rotting. They were on fire. All of them. The barns. The chicken coup. The farmhouse.
    Eight plumes of smoke drifted into the cloudless sky.  
    The only structure not ablaze was a rusted out Airstream. The white and blue trailer had a tattered canopy, a picnic table, a TV antenna stretched thirty feet into air.
    By the time I drove down the long dirt driveway to the fire, the roofline of the house was engulfed in flames. If the roof was gone, the rest of the house would be lost.  
    A stack of spent kindling.
    The air smelled like fire, a mix of ash and burned fat that left me with a sweet taste in my mouth and a sick feeling in the gut.  
    I loved it.
    The rest of the Allegheny VFD was already on the job. The six-person squad had set up hoses to the pumper engine. The engine drew water from an abandoned cow pond. Otto and Jimmy had trained hoses on the roof of the house, and Julia was manning the pumper.
    The only woman in the crew, Julia was a fitness instructor and adrenaline junkie. She stood over five seven, had the shoulders of an Olympic swimmer, and could kick harder than a pissed off mule. The other firefighters knew that because she won every mud-wrestling match in the county.
    Two other Allegheny firefighters had containment detail. They were busy smashing the windows on the left side so the hoses could reach inside.
    “Lamar!” I parked beside the tanker. “Hey, Cap!”
    Lamar was the captain. He was also my stepfather. He stood fifty feet from the tanker, talking to the captain of Galax VFD and Sheriff Hoyt, who had beaten me by a good three minutes.
    “Julia! I’m here!” I pulled on my fire pants. Grabbed my jacket, gloves, and helmet. “What’s my duty spot?”
    “Ask Cap!”
    “He didn’t answer me!”
    “You know the procedure!” Julia shouted over the mechanical clunk of the pumper. “Unless you need help getting dressed!”
    “Very funny!”
    I knew the procedure. But knowing it and doing it automatically were two separate things.  
    Lamar had preached the same sermon all during training: Firefighters had to know procedures so well, they could react without having to think. When a two-thousand-square-foot roof was collapsing on your head, there was no time to consult the manual.
    “Lamar!” I ran over to Hoyt’s cruiser. “What’s my post?”
    Lamar Rivenbark was my opposite. He stood barely five feet, eight inches tall, a solidly built man with cropped brown hair and hands as thick and coarse as cinder blocks. His hair was almost completely gray, like the stubble on his cheeks. A lifetime of farming had given him a deep tan and a slight gait, a gift from a runaway hay baler.
    “Slow down now, no need to huff and puff,” Lamar said. “You don’t just rush into a fire.”
    “Yes sir.” I took a deep breath. “Now, what’s my post?”
    Lamar scratched his head. “Maybe you got a genius IQ, but you’re still thinking like a soldier, all nerves and guts. Like you could huff and puff and blow out the fire all by your lonesome.”
    “Sailor, not soldier. I didn’t shot people in the Navy.” I surveyed the damage. Flames poured out of the windows, the doors, and through the roof near the chimney. The rafters had collapsed there, opening a gaping hole. “I can help. I’m ready.”
    “Back up Julia on the pumper engine.” Lamar snapped his chinstrap. “You’ll be feeding out the lines.”
    “I was hoping to work the attack.”
    Lamar slapped me on the shoulder. The blow was hard enough to knock me