be able to. His voice even felt more robust. “Ma’am, can you hear me?”
A gasp of relief came through the door. “Oh, thank God. Yes! I hear you.”
Hallelujah!
“Please…help me.”
“We need to get you to the front window. But you’ll have to crawl to stay under the smoke. Can you do that with your broken arm?” Would he remain audible if she came out? Maybe…if he obscured her vision, had her keep a towel over her head so she never realized no body went with the voice.
She hesitated before answering. “I don’t know. It’d be slow. Don’t you have oxygen or something so I can walk to the window?”
Slow would be bad. Though he saw no smoldering around the floor to indicate the fire breaking through up here, the floor could be hot and he had no way to know. She needed to move fast. “I’ll go for a rescue team. You keep pounding on the wall.”
She paused again. “Keep pounding? Why, when you’ve found me?”
Cole kicked himself. He should have expected that. “To…tell me you’re still all right. I’m going now but we’ll be back shortly.”
Not if he left it to her pounding, though. It sounded half-hearted compared to before. Her life depended on him telling someone about her.
He ran to the front window. Below, uniformed officers pushed onlookers to the far sidewalk and, with the pumper truck hooked up to the hydrant down the block, a hose team was coming in the front door. Could he make them hear him?
He ran down to the second floor and stood in the flames at the top of the stairs, again feeling the incredible flow of energy into him. “Hey!” he shouted. “There’s a woman trapped upstairs!”
But no one in the hose team reacted.
“HELP!”
Still no one responded. Hearing him would be tough even if he were alive. Damn! If only they could
In a foot chase, when his legs began feeling leaden and his throat and lungs burned, he dug for emotion to keep himself going…anger at the perpetrator he chased, hatred of losing a race, whatever lay handy. Now Cole grabbed at his sense of urgency, at his worry and the guilt over what might have happened to Sara…funneling it all into the will to be seen.
Suddenly he felt… different, heavier.
“Holy shit!” yelled the firefighter holding the hose nozzle. “Is that someone up there in the hall?”
They saw him! “Get the ladder!” Cole shouted. “There’s a woman trapped in her bathroom on the third floor!”
“Sir-!”
Cole lost the rest as he raced up to the apartment. At the front window, he waved his arms vigorously. To his dismay, the weight sensation started fading. No! Not yet.
Then someone outside pointed up. Okay! They saw him. The firefighter breaking out the second floor window signaled to the man on the ladder controls. The ladder began lifting.
Cole headed for the bathroom, feeling lighter by the moment. He gritted his teeth, trying to hang on long enough to make sure they found the woman.
Behind him, glass shattered.
“Back here!” he called, and through the door: “Ma’am…we’re coming for you.”
The firefighter appeared out of the smoke. Behind his face shield and above his breathing apparatus, he gaped in disbelief and alarm. Naturally, seeing a man standing there apparently breathing smoke. “
“Don’t mind me. Get the woman in the bathroom!” To give him no choice, Cole let go. As if a plug had been pulled, the last of the weight drained away.
On the ground a short while later, watching the old woman being checked out by a paramedic, he listened to the firefighter recount the incident. “…and he disappeared. I swear to God. One minute he was standing in front of me, and then he…dissolved.”
Another firefighter snickered and tapped his respirator. “You sure it was air you were breathing there?”
The woman wrapped herself tighter in the blanket they had thrown around her. “I’d been praying to be found. Maybe he was an angel.”
The firefighters’ faces went politely blank. “This guy had a suit and tie, not wings.”
She sniffed. “Who says they have to have wings?”
An angel. Cole smiled wryly. That was the last thing he deserved to be called. “But thank you very much, ma’am.” At least he had finally done something constructive.
The question was…how he managed to make himself material enough for everyone to see him. Pull that off at will would be a huge help.
Cole turned back to the burning building, where a firefighter on the ladder shot water in through the second floor window. Red said that when the ghost back home appeared, the room ended up a deep freeze. So… materializing needed beaucoup heat. Which the fire sure gave him. He remembered that energy pouring into him.
Did he need a fire’s worth for materializing? He hoped not. What about using ovens and boilers? A possibility, but hunting for one of those when he needed it would also be a drag. Cole shook his head. He needed something readily available anywhere 24/7.
The rumble of the pumper truck’s engine caught his ear. He moved toward the truck, remembering the invigorating sensation of vehicles running through him last night. Could internal combustion be his answer?
Closing his eyes, he waded into the pumper’s engine compartment. The staccato jolts of firing cylinders felt even better than he remembered…not the flood of heat the fire brought but an exhilarating riff like a string of firecrackers going off in him.
Then the engine began missing.
Cole leaped free, swearing at himself. Stupid…kill the engine and shut down the hoses. He should have realized that would happen after the way the flames died in his space. In assessing himself, though, he found a respectable level of energy, considering how little time he spent in the engine. This might work.
There just remained the question of
Line-of-sight took him to Sara’s window, where he passed inside and found Hamada in latex gloves, going through the middle drawer of the desk.
Hamada pulled out a spiral-bound book with index tabs. After flipping through it, he laid it on the laptop. “Got an address book.”
Since he doubted Hamada meant the comment for him, Cole checked the bedroom. Where he found Razor laying boxes from the closet shelf on the bed.
Cole waved at him from the doorway. “I’m baaack.”
To his dismay Razor showed no reaction, not even a flicker in his eyes as he brought the last couple of boxes to the bed.
Cole moved over to the bed and ran a hand front of Razor’s eyes. “Hey, partner. Have you stopped seeing me?”
Apparently. Razor opened the first box and lifted out a wool shawl.
Oh-kay…reminder time. Cole walked through Razor. “Heads up!” And grinned at Razor’s intake of breath and jump in heart rate. “Can you see me now?”
“That was cute.” Razor stuffed the shawl back in its box.
Cole sat down on a corner of the bed. “It could have been worse. I thought about grabbing your nuts.”
“Not a good way to stay friends.” Razor opened another box. It held a vaquero-style hat. “Have you been lurking since we came in? Do you see anything suggesting Sara didn’t pack?”
“No and no. But…” Cole told him about the fire and materializing. “Now I need to see if I can pull it off again. Do we know yet whether this alleged Sara Benay boarded the plane?”
