Trial by Fire Read Free Page B

heart to fight the fire anymore, but still he put his mask back on and plunged back into the smoke. He had a job to do whether it looked possible or not, but he knew as soon as the fire was put out, the real work would begin.

Chapter Five
    I ssie couldn’t get Nick off her mind as she finished her shift that afternoon. In an uncharacteristically busy day, she had transported another fireman for smoke inhalation, then Miller Henderson over on Spencer Circle had gone into cardiac arrest. Apparently, he had been the carpenter who’d made the pews and pulpit for the church, and had keeled over at the thought that his work had all been destroyed. She’d revived him before she had gotten him into the ambulance, and the last word was that he was stable. Then there’d been a wreck over on the highway, and a teenaged boy escaped with his life.
    It had been one of those days. But it was precisely because of the busyness of the afternoon that Issie found herself too tense to rest now. She was filled with nervous energy, and her thoughts kept gravitating back to the preacher. Nick had been diagnosed with smoke inhalation, bruised ribs, and second-degree burns that would keep him in the hospital overnight. The receiving physician had dealt with his airway first. Because both sides of his lungs sounded good, he was able to rule out a collapsed lung and determined that he was ventilating and oxygenating properly. He rushed him into the X-ray room and saw that there was no significant damage to the lungs. He had decided to take the tube out and administer oxygen through a mask. The medics had done the right thing, he told them in a rare compliment passed from doctor to paramedic. The chances of his airway closing en route had been high.
    Because the doctor seemed reasonable, she had bucked protocol and stayed with Nick while he debrided the top, blistery layer of his burned skin. She’d made sure they gave him pain medication before they started the excruciating scrub-down with the antibacterial solution. He’d clung to her hand, his grip almost crushing her fingers, and yelled without inhibition as they ministered to his wounds. She had stayed, talking him through it like a Lamaze coach, until they applied the Silvadene, an antibiotic ointment which gave some relief. She had left him as they were dressing the wounds, knowing that someone back in Newpointe might need her again.
    All the way back, she and Steve had been quiet. They’d kept the usually loud radio station off, and had both been lost in their thoughts. She couldn’t get Ray and Ben out of her mind. Daily, they witnessed tragedy, sometimes were active players in it. It rarely made sense, and this made the least sense of all. Tragedy and death were no respecters of persons. They happened to good and bad people alike. Living the “good life” was no protection against life’s blows, she thought, so what was the point in walking the straight lines?
    She wasn’t hungry enough to eat when she got off duty, and it was too early to go to Joe’s Place, the bar where so many of the protective services employees hung out, so she decided to go back to the hospital in Slidell to see how Nick was doing. She donned a pair of blue jeans and a pink blouse. Her uniform was so colorless and bland that she tried to wear bright things as often as possible when she wasn’t on duty.
    As she took her hair out of its binding and shook it out, she wondered why she was making such a fuss. It wasn’t like she was trying to impress Nick Foster, of all people. He was as different from her as the east was from the west. That was a quote from the Bible, she thought with a smirk, though she had no idea of the context. She doubted it had anything to do with personalities.
    She touched up her makeup and applied lipstick to match her blouse, then stood back and took a look. She was still a pretty woman. She knew that because men’s heads turned