"Sure," Annabel said. She turned toward the stairs and didn't watch him leave, but she thought she felt him glance back at her.
She had certainly shot him down in a hurry, she told herself as she climbed the stairs. And he had seemed like a pretty nice guy, too. But it didn't really matter. For all of her matchmaking where Vickie and Earl were concerned, the last thing Annabel wanted in her life right now was any sort of romantic relationship. They never worked out. Men were attracted to her because of her looks, but sooner or later they started telling her how she shouldn't risk her life fighting forest fires. They tried to take away from her the things that meant the most to her.
She wasn't going to let that happen again. Once burned, twice shy, that was how the old saying went, and Annabel knew that like most clichés, it had a kernel of truth at its core.
She would rather face a wildfire any day than a man who wanted to change her.
****
Later that evening, Annabel dozed off on the sofa with one of the books of poetry she had bought at City Lights draped across her lap. A shrill ringing woke her, and she sat up straight, thinking at first the noise was her doorbell. Probably Vickie, she thought fuzzily, wanting to tell her how the rest of the evening had gone.
As she put the book aside and stood up, she realized the ringing wasn't the doorbell at all, but rather her cell phone. She had taken it out of her purse when she got home and placed it on a small side table. She had to keep it with her at all times, as well as spare batteries, because that was the number her boss at the Forest Service used to call her.
And Captain Ed McPhee never called unless it was urgent.
Annabel scooped up the phone. "Hello?"
"Mount Diablo State Park," Captain McPhee's voice said curtly in her ear. "Practically in your backyard, Lowell. We're backing up the state boys. How soon can you get over there?"
"You don't want me to come up to Redding?"
"You can get there quicker if you go straight to the fire. You'll coordinate with the state firefighters on the ground."
"I'm not jumping?"
"Not this time. We'll be in the air by the time you get there."
Annabel felt a pang of disappointment. Most people would think it was crazy to want to jump out of a plane and parachute down into the middle of a forest fire, and Annabel agreed that it took a certain type of personality to do such a thing. But those who had never experienced it could never know the exhilaration of such a moment, either.
"What about your buddy Tabor?" Captain McPhee went on.
Annabel hesitated. It was almost midnight, and while there was a possibility that Earl might be across the hall in Vickie's apartment, Annabel didn't want to be the one to interrupt whatever might be going on. "I'm not sure where he is," she told the captain. "You'd better call him."
McPhee grunted. "All right. I'll radio you from the plane in an hour."
"Right. I ought to be there by then if the traffic's not too bad."
"Just be there," Captain McPhee said. He broke the connection.
Annabel thumbed the "End Call" button and turned to hurry into her bedroom, where she kept a spare set of all her gear.
Less than ten minutes later, wearing the yellow fire suit and black helmet, she trotted across the street to the parking garage where she kept her Jeep. She had her breathing apparatus and radio slung over her left shoulder and in her right hand carried her Pulaski, the half-hoe, half-ax that was every smoke-jumper's friend. Her long brown hair was tucked up underneath the hard plastic helmet. To anyone watching, she must be a strange sight, she thought.
As she pulled out of the parking garage a couple of minutes later, she saw Earl running along the sidewalk. He spotted her Jeep and waved his arms. When she pulled up next to him, he piled in.
"Can you swing by my place so I can pick up my gear?"
Earl lived on the waterfront, not far from the Embarcadero. It wasn't very far out of the way. Annabel nodded. "I see Captain McPhee caught you," she said. "Were you still at the restaurant?"
"Naw, we were at, uh, Vickie's place. You should've knocked on the door when you went out."
"I thought about it. I just hated to interrupt you."
"You wouldn't have been interrupting anything," Earl said grumpily. "I was just telling Vickie about the earthquake."
"The one in '89?" That catastrophe had been before Annabel's time on the SFFD. She'd still been in high school, in fact. Senior year.
"No, the '06 one. The big one."
Annabel shook her head. "That wasn't the big one. The big one's still down there somewhere in the ground."
"Yeah, but it was bad enough. Did you know that the quake busted all the water mains, so the fire department had to pump in water from the bay . . ."