Page 40 of Christmas with Three Firemen

Then the rigs are gone, and the building goes quiet.

I look out the window.

The street is white. Not the soft, managed white of a regular snowfall but something total and indifferent, snow driven sideways by a wind that makes the station’s old windows shudder in their frames.

The streetlights are still on, but their light barely reaches the ground, swallowed up somewhere between the fixture and the street. I can barely see the outline of the brownstones across the way. Everything past the middle of the block has been erased.

They drove into that.

***

I stay at the kitchen table with my laptop and tell myself the crew doesn’t need me at the scene.

I only last twenty minutes before I make up my mind to do the opposite.

The thing is, I have no role at an active fire scene. Grant hasn’t authorized it, my kit isn’t designed for this kind of response, and the conditions outside are bad enough that adding an unqualified civilian to the equation would be actively counterproductive.

I know all of that.

I know it while I’m pulling on my jacket. I know it while I’m wrapping my scarf twice around my neck and pulling my hat down over my ears. I know it while I’m pushing through the side door into the cold that nearly knocks the shit out of me.

The scene is two blocks north.

I can see the light before I can see anything else. The red and white flash of emergency vehicles cutting through the white, a strange underwater quality to it with all that snow in the air. I walk toward it with my head down against the wind.

The perimeter is established at the corner. A NYPD unit on crowd control, though there’s no crowd, just two men in heavy coats standing a careful distance back. I badge my way through and find a position near the barrier where I have a clear enough line of sight.

The vehicle is a delivery truck, jackknifed across the intersection, its cab angled hard into a parked car.

The driver’s door won’t open. I can see that, from here, the impact has buckled the frame. Someone is inside. The crew is working the door with hydraulics, two of them braced against the wind, and I track the scene automatically the way I always do, reading positions and angles and where the risk is concentrated.

The fuel tank is on the driver’s side.

It’s close to the point of impact.

Grant is directing from the far side of the vehicle. Wes is on the hydraulics. Mateo is at the cab, talking through the window to the driver, one hand flat against the door frame, close enough to the heat coming off the engine that I can see the shimmer of it even from here.

The fuel tank is right there.

Mateo is right there.

I know the physics of this situation. I’ve worked enough vehicle fires to understand exactly what a compromised fuel tank in proximity to sustained heat can do, how quickly it can do it, and how little warning there usually is before it does.

Mateo says something to the driver, and the driver’s hand appears at the window, and Mateo takes it and holds on.

The hydraulics bite into the door frame.

The wind picks up, driving snow horizontal across the scene, and for three seconds I can’t see anything clearly. Just shapes and flashing lights and the sound of the hydraulics working.

Then the wind drops.

The door gives.

Mateo reaches in, and the driver comes out, one arm over Mateo’s shoulders, and they move away from the vehicle together, and Grant is already there on the other side, and they get the driver to the ambulance, and it’s over.

My hands are shaking.

I look down at them like they belong to someone else.