Page 66 of Into the Fire

“Stay down.” I pressed my hand flat against his shoulder blade. “Stay down. Let us look first.”

“The line,” he said. “The line let go.”

“I heard it.”

I heard boots moving toward us from every direction. Boone arrived and dropped to a knee across from me.

“Hollis. Call it in. Ambulance from Kessler and tell them tower fall, twenty feet, conscious.” Hollis was already moving. “Shep. Get the trauma kit off the wall in the ready room and bring the board under it. Ramirez, open the gate.”

They all scattered. Boone moved his hands over Nash. His breathing was shallow.

“Talk to me,” Boone said. “Where?”

“Wrist.” Nash breathed carefully. “Ribs, and an ankle’s not right.” He turned his head an inch and looked up at the platform and the dead line hanging off it. “That rig was inspected this morning.”

“I know it was.”

“I watched it go back together, Boone. I signed the—” He stopped and winced as he exhaled. “I was going to sign it.”

Shep came back with the kit and the board. Boone splinted the wrist against a rolled towel. The paramedics would move him onto the board. There was nothing to do but wait for the ambulance.

Nash lay looking at the sky. I sat on my heels next to him.

“Teller’s rope,” he said.

“What?”

“Somebody check it before tomorrow. He’ll tie the same knot again to prove he can, and he can’t.”

“I’ll check the rope, Nash.”

The ambulance took thirty-one minutes. Boone gave them the fall height and the mechanism in a flat voice. They took Nash through it, and Ramirez swung it shut.

The letdown station hung above us with the line dangling from it, swaying a little, touching nothing.

“Nobody goes up there,” Boone said. “Nobody touches the rig, the line, or the platform. Hollis, get tape or cones or both. Plant them around the base of the tower. It stays exactly as it is.”

“Copy.”

Shep still had the clipboard. He’d carried it through everything.

Hollis tipped his head back at the platform, at the rig he’d helped rebuild and clean that morning. “Why was Nash even on it? That cert was—”

“He took my turn,” I said. “I got called to the phone.”

“Dante was supposed to be up there,” Shep said.

Chapter seventeen

Boone

Nobody answered Shep.

Everyone stood around looking at each other. I set the next items in motion.

“Hollis, get statements while they’re fresh. Everybody who was in the yard writes down what they saw, where they were standing, and when. Do it in the next ten minutes, not tomorrow.”

The letdown line hung off the station where it had always hung, except that nothing hung from the end of it. The hardware that should have been there was in the sawdust at the edge of the pit, half-buried where Nash had come down.