There was an odd scent Connor couldn’t quite place lingering in the air, and for a second, he passed it off as some type of incense, but it bothered him. There was a heavy raspberry or floral odor, but something wafted underneath that—a curious odd tickle of a scent Con knew. Only when he spotted a man’s bare foot peeking out from under a corner of the rainbow-swirled curtain did he realize it wasn’t patchouli scenting the air.
Con saw the man’s foot poking out from behind the curtain just as his brain clicked on what he was smelling, and someone’s footsteps jostled the RV enough to send the candles toppling over, igniting the propane in the built-up space.
“Evac!” Con yelled into his headset. “Get out!”
He didn’t have time to give his team visual cues to hit the open door. A fireball erupted from the kitchen’s gas stove top, and the cop part of his brain kicked in the RV’s details. From their initial recon, the team was sitting on at least two long propane tanks, and if either one was full, the RV would blow sky-high once the flames ate through the lines and exposed the whole fucking mess to the open air.
Connor grabbed at the man’s foot and yanked, pulling him clear of the bed and into the open.
Unresponsive, the man was a dead weight in his arms, but Connor couldn’t risk checking the man over. The fire spread, the gases thankfully thinned from the team’s breakin, but the tanks were still a worry. Hefting the barefooted man up over his shoulder, Connor was the last to peel through the door—then the concussion blast of the RV’s demise hit his back, and he went flying.
Connor and his rescue hit the pavement hard, and Con rolled, wrapping his arms around the unconscious man’s limp body. Debris flew over them, and Connor’s head echoed from the rocking pings of things hitting his helmet. The heat of the blast covered them, scorching the air around them, and Connor felt gravel bite into his cheek as they tumbled. His limbs would ache from the uncontrollable cartwheels of their blast-propelled bodies, and he vaguely heard himself grunt when they bounced on the pavement, only to bounce down hard again.
His elbow went tingly when they struck and rolled to a stop. He lay there, smelling the acrid scent of his gear cooking on his body and sucking in as much non-fire-filled air as he could. Training for a fire kicked his brain into automatic pilot, and he’d expelled as much of his breath as he could when he’d jumped out of the RV. Without oxygen or propane in his lungs, it was as large of a fuck-you to the fire’s touch as he could give it at the time.
It did, however, leave his chest screaming for air, and his ribs shuddered painfully when he drew his first full breath. Stars clouded his vision, and Connor forced himself to roll off the man’s body, feebly calling for a med team to find him in the parking lot. His head still sang its song of sixpence from where he struck the parking lot, but other than his aching muscles and possibly singed eyebrows, Con was relatively sure he’d emerged unscathed.
It was just going to take him a moment before he could stand up long enough to take a full inventory.
“You okay there, Morgan?” Davis crouched over him, her hands busy at the fastenings of his vest. She sounded far away—almost as if underwater—and Connor frowned, wondering if he’d somehow gotten his headset shoved down into his ear or if his hearing was blown out by the blast. “Can you hear me, Lieutenant? How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Yeah, just… not a lot of hearing yet.” Connor slapped Davis’s hand away from his face. “And you pick now to flip me off?”
“Seemed like as good a time as any, sir.” She grinned at him from under her helmet. “Need some help up?”
“No, I’ve got it.” He rolled over, wincing at the pricks of pain along his back, but for the most part, all of his parts seemed functional. There was blood on his hands and a trickle of it winding down his face from where he’d scraped it. “Get to Marshall. See how he’s doing.”
“Yeah, about that, sir.” Evers popped his head over Davis’s shoulder. “You need to take a look at this.”
The medic crouching next to Connor’s rescue wasn’t working on Marshall—and it was definitely Marshall lying there in the pool of melon-hued light cast from one of Chinatown’s streetlamps. Connor recognized the man from his driver’s license photo even with the gray streaking his heavy, long beard. He’d been younger in the photo.
And considerably much more alive.
His arms were slack, lacking even the tension of muscles drawn against the pain of overextension. Flung out like an insect smashed against a wall with a fly swatter, Marshall’s body lay still and quiet, his slight potbelly hanging flaccid above worn gray sweatpants, and his chest, thick with a salt-and-pepper pelt, sported numerous holes. Deep holes Connor suspected punched right through the man’s chest and out his back, giving him the appearance of being riddled with numerous grotesque nipples.
The EMT brushed off his hands and began walking to his rig, not even stopping as he patted Connor on the shoulder and said, “Congrats, Lieutenant. You’ve rescued a dead man.”