The toluidine-stained string spun through the air like a gut bola, covering twenty feet of lab space, barely missing the heads of another lab group, and landed with a squish next to my dissecting tray.

They stayed there until my lab partner, Luigi Hasagawa, returned from hitting the head. Luigi was not his real name, of course. He was an exchange student from Osaka, Japan, and his parents named him Ryuu, after the Japanese god of thunder. The American tongue couldn’t wrap itself around two U's, so he nicknamed himself Luigi after his favorite video game. We had met at the beginning of the semester and now I was his shinyuu, another word with two U’s.

“Hey, Boone-san. Nice job on—Gero gero!” Luigi pointed at the intestines. “How did that get there?”

“Ask the person who threw them.” Testicle removal was delicate work, so I had no time for some dumb ass prank.

Cedar, though, wasn’t about to let the assault go unanswered. “Don’t be an jerk, Loach,” she said. “You’re not in high school anymore.”

She speared the mass with a stainless steel probe and fired it back at a redneck named Dewayne Loach.

The rat guts sailed high and splatted on the window behind him. They slid down slowly, leaving a trail of purplish ooze.

“You’re the lab assistant!” Dewayne yelled. “You can’t do that!”

“I just did.”

“I just did.” Luigi laughed and drew a picture of the dissection in his notes. His hair was so black, it was almost blue, and he had it cut into spikes so that his head looked like a sea urchin. His wardrobe was an eclectic mix of Japanese mode-kei fashion and cowboy couture.

The biology professor, Dr. Krzyzewski, tapped the graphic on the projection screen. “And you see here, the first step is to hold the sac gently but firmly with force—Mr. Loach! Why are intestines on the window. Again?”

“It wasn’t me.” Dewayne pointed at me. “Childress threw it!”

“The hell I did,” I said without looking up. “Luigi, forceps.”

Cedar slapped them in my palm. Then she stalked across the lab. Using an empty dissecting pan, she swept the guts off the window and dumped them into a biohazard bag.

She dropped the bag in Dewayne’s lap. “Don’t be such a wuss.”

“Thank you, Cedar,” the professor said.

“You’re very welcome, Dr. K.” She returned to my lab station. “Jeopardy category for the day: Things Without Balls.”

“Would that be,” I said, “Dewayne Loach and this rat?”

“Right you are!”

Bzzt! My pager sounded.

I clapped the forceps into her palm. “Hold this for a sec.” I unclipped the pager. “And don’t flinch. You’ll turn Ratatouille into a eunuch.”

“Wasn’t that the idea?”

“Yes!” I pumped a fist and hugged Cedar. “It’s a fire!”

“Boone Childress!” Dr. K pointed to the lab safety rules on the wall. “No cellphones in the lab.”

I held up the pager. “Allegheny Volunteer Fire Department, professor. I have to respond.”

“Go you, Longneck!” Luigi lifted a scalpel in salute. “Chikushou! There goes the gall bladder.”

“What about the lab?” Cedar asked. “You’re leaving me—I mean, your partner—hanging.”

“How about lunch?” I stripped off the latex gloves, then slung my backpack over a shoulder. “Or dinner?”

“Are you asking me out? When I’ve got rat guts in my hands?”

“It’s okay. You’re wearing gloves.”

“Childress,” Dr. K called as I exited. “If you leave before the experiment is finished, I’ll be forced to give you a zero on the lab. Department policy. It’s in the syllabus.”

I had been Honor Graduate in A-school, C-School, and Command School. I had pass all my Qualifying Exams in half the usual time, and I had made Petty Officer Second Class in just over eighteen months, so I knew all about rules and regs.

A man’s word was more important than rules.

“Yes ma’am. But I still have to go. I made an oath as a firefighter, and I always keep my promises.”

Dr. K puckered up her face.

Cedar caught up to me in the hall. A strap of her sundress slipped over her tanned shoulder.

“Don’t worry.” She stood on tiptoe and whispered in my ear. “You do the hero thing. I’ll take care of the professor.”

The mix of her husky voice and smell of her perfume set my head spinning.

All I could say was, “Thanks. I owe you one.”

“Sure do, and I’m not going to let you forget it.”

2

“Hey, Julia,” I said into the radio as I climbed into the seat of my pickup. “Where’s the fire?”

Julia Poteet, the only female Allegheny firefighter, was working dispatch. “Use the codes, rookie.”

The Allegheny Volunteer Fire Department still used the old radio codes for communication, called “ten-codes.” The feds were slowly getting rid of the codes because every county or district had its own confusing version of them. A 10-33 meant a fire call, but in other counties, it meant a road kill. The Allegheny department, though, was slow to change. Most of the firefighters were over fifty, and they saw no reason to learn a new system.

“I’m 10-76 to the 10-33,” I said, indicating that I was en route to the fire site. “What’s the location?”

“Tin City. It’s a wide place in the road near the county line. Know where it’s at?”

“That’s fifteen miles away.”

“Better put the metal down then, or you’ll be last on site. You don’t want that.”

“Why?”

“If you have to ask, you don’t want to know.”

I pulled the red light out of the glove box and stuck it on the roof. Backed out of the slot, slinging gravel into the air, and bounced onto Deems Landis Road.

A quick right at the next stop, and I hit Highway Twelve headed for Tin City. It was near the county line, which meant the fire would be burning hot when I arrived. It also meant that I was probably as close as any of the firefighters, and if I put the peddle to the floor, I could be the first on scene.

First responder on my first fire. Imagine the look on the captain’s face.

Though my truck was an automatic, I dropped gears to climb the steep grades. Allegheny County was in the Appalachian foothills. To the west were the Smokey Mountains. To the east was the Piedmont, a plateau that stretched all the way to Raleigh and beyond.

The highway wound up and around, and even in third gear, I passed truckers grinding up the grade. The side of the hills where the road cut scars in the sedimentary rock was decorated with fallen chunks of shale. As big as my arm, but not quite as hairy, they glistened in the sunlight.

I rolled down my window to get a breath of air, and the wind stank of diesel exhaust.

The old V-8 rattled like a pile of dry bones. My truck was a long bed ’72 Ford, painted white under the layers of dirt caked on the body. When I hit the steepest grade, the transmission started slipping, and I shifted to low.

The old girl could get me through just about anything. She just couldn’t do it very fast.

My mind drifted, and I found myself thinking not about the fire call, but about the last blaze I'd worked. A chemical fire had broken out on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, a carrier in the Seventh Fleet. All sailors worked fire crews, but mine was the first crew in. We rescued one sailor, but another, an officer in his rate, had died. His body was so badly burned, they had to ID him with DNA.

Even though the Navy had offered me a hefty sign-up bonus to re-enlist, I decided then to get out of intelligence and start a career as a fire investigator. I hated fire, hated her like the bitch she was, hated her for taking the life of my best friend on the Teddy Roosevelt. I had to find something to do with that hate, instead of letting it eat me up.

The truck’s eight cylinders roared as I stepped on it. The speedometer climbed.

Sixty.

Seventy.

Eighty.

Eighty-five.

The pine trees that lined the highway shot by. A national forest passed into and out of my peripheral vision. The wind caught a plastic bag inside the cabin and whipped it out the window before I had the chance to catch it.