Page 76 of Faking the Heat

Sixty feet. That is the distance. I have run into buildings that were actively coming apart and I have crawled down hallways I could not see the end of, and I have never in my life wanted to cross sixty feet of open street as badly as I want to cross this one.

I watch her chin come up.

That is all I get. I do not hear a single word of it. There is a diesel engine idling ten feet from me and a radio going in my ear and the whole avenue is full of noise, and I stand in a doorway in a borrowed coat and watch a man I despise say something to the woman I love, and I do not get to know what it is.

“Hayes.” The probie, at my elbow. “Two more coming down.”

Here is what six years of this teaches you, and what it apparently took me until tonight to learn.

You do not get to be everywhere. There is always another door. Every single call you have ever run has been somebody else’s worst day and you have never once been able to be in two rooms at the same time, and the entire architecture of the man I have been since I was seven years old is built on pretending otherwise.

She does not need me to cross the street.

That is the actual thought, arriving with the clarity of cold water. She has never needed me to cross the street. I have needed to be the man who crosses it.

“Copy,” I say.

And I turn back to the stairwell, and I put my hand out for the next person coming down, and I count.

Three hundred and sixty-three.

Chapter thirty-three

What the Sister Knows

Mandy

Somebody has put a blanket around my shoulders. I don’t know who. It’s grey and it smells like a truck, and I’m holding it closed at my throat with one hand and my clutch in the other, and I’m standing on the wrong side of Michigan Avenue watching a hotel not burn down.

That’s the strange part. It looks fine. There’s smoke coming out of a vent at street level in a lazy grey rope and a lot of very loud machinery, and four hundred people in evening dress standing on the pavement like the world’s most confused wedding, and the building itself just sits there being a building. Whatever is happening is happening underneath it, in some room none of us have ever seen, and men I have been drinking wine near for two hours are down there dealing with it in their good shoes.

I’ve been looking for Sterling for eleven minutes. I find him on the fourth pass, and I only find him because I know the shape of his shoulders.

He’s in a doorway about halfway down the block with a coat on over his dress shirt that clearly belongs to somebody four inches wider, and he’s putting his hand out to people coming out of a stairwell, one after another, saying something to each of them that I can’t hear. There’s a young guy next to him who keeps looking at him instead of at the door.

I could get closer. There’s a gap between an ambulance and a ladder truck and I could be over there in twenty seconds.

I don’t. He’s working. I’ve spent a month learning what it costs him to be the person in that doorway, and I’m not going to be the thing that pulls him out of it.

So I stand on my side of the street, and I watch him do the job, and I think: that’s it. That’s what I’ve been trying to name for three weeks. He isn’t a rescue. He’s a man in a doorway counting people, and I have been so busy being one of the people that I never once stood far enough back to see him.

“Mandy.”

I don’t have to turn around.

There’s a specific way Derek says my name. It has a little downward turn on the end, like the answer is already agreed and he’s only saying it aloud as a courtesy.

He’s crossed the street. Of course he has. There is a working fire in a four-star hotel and Derek Marx has walked through it the way he walks through everything, and his coat is over his arm, and he isn’t even slightly out of breath.

“You’re shaking,” he says.

“It’s forty degrees and I’m wearing a blanket somebody found in a truck.”

“Come and sit in the car. It’s on Delaware. I’ve got the heater going.”

“No, thank you.”

He does the thing with his mouth, the patient one. “Mandy.”