Page 7 of The Kiss

Erin again.

ERIN

Okay forget dinner. But the school play is Friday night. It's for charity, Alex. Just come sit in the audience for one hour. For me.

Sawyer's voice showed up the way Sawyer always did. Without knocking.

You've been different since the divorce, Cap. More closed off. The guys have noticed. I've noticed. At some point you have to ask yourself what you're protecting.

I took a breath and picked up the phone.

ALEX

Fine.

CHAPTER 3

The Stranger in Edinburgh

JANINE

Abbott was on the radio again, and he was already talking over me.

"Engine 19, I need you to confirm your position before I can dispatch additional units to your⁠—"

"Yeah, we're on it. Moving to the second floor."

He'd keyed up before I finished. I took a breath, held it, let it go. "Copy, Engine 19. Be advised, second unit is en route, ETA three minutes. Confirming you have two lines laid?"

Nothing. He'd switched channels without acknowledging.

Captain Soren Abbott ran the opposite shift at Alex Holloway's station, and working his calls was a different job than working Holloway's. Holloway listened. He waited for dispatch to finish before he responded. He followed the protocol that existed for a reason, so that I knew where his crew was, what they were facing, and what they needed, because if something went wrong, that information was the difference between sending help to the right place and sending it to a guess.

Abbott treated the radio like a suggestion. He talked over me, skipped confirmations, changed channels without warning, and his crew had to compensate for the gaps he left in the communication chain. I'd flagged it twice to my supervisor. Nothing had changed.

Twenty minutes later, I was in the middle of giving a second crew the information they needed for the call when Abbott's voice came through over mine.

"—fire is on the second floor, first crew is entering through the front⁠—"

"Yeah, we're going to the roof."

The radio only carries one voice at a time. The crew I was briefing had just lost half of what I was telling them because he couldn't wait for me to finish. I started over from the beginning.

"Fire on the second floor. First crew is inside from the front of the building. You'll be coming in from the back."

The firefighter on the other end repeated every detail back to me on the first pass.

"Copy. Second floor, coming in from the back."

The call ran another twenty minutes. I tracked both crews on the radio, updating each one when the other reported in. Abbott's crew put out the fire on the second floor while the second crew cleared the first floor and confirmed the building was empty.

Abbott never once asked me for a status on his second crew. I gave him updates anyway, because if he wasn't going to keep track of his own people, someone had to.

Working Holloway's calls, I could trust that the person on the other end had the same information I did. Working Abbott's calls, I was the only one holding everything together, and if I missed something, his crew paid for it.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and took a breath.

Something I wish more people understood about 911 dispatch is that even though we aren't on scene, we carry the responsibility for every person who calls us and every crew we send to help them. For a long time, dispatch wasn't even classified as first responder work. It was considered administrative, which wasn't completely wrong, but it meant nobody was paying attention to what the job did to the people doing it.