Meant to Be Immortal (Argeneau #32) - Lynsay Sands Page 0,1

in bulky gear, what he supposed was the firemen’s protective wear, and then someone shouted, “Hello? Is there someone there?”

“Yes!” Mac responded with relief. “I am in the basement.”

“We’ll get you out! Just hang on, buddy! We’ll get you out!”

“Get somewhere where there’s less smoke,” someone else shouted to him.

“Okay!” Mac backed out of the room, his fascinated gaze watching the fire fan out from the window as the drywall around it caught flame. It would spread quickly now that he’d given the fire a way in, he knew. The smoke was already filling this room and pouring out into the main room, but he could deal with that. Smoke couldn’t kill him. Fire would.

Cursing, he turned abruptly and returned to the bathroom next door. There was no fire or smoke in the small room yet, but would be soon enough. Moving to the cast-iron claw-foot tub he’d had refinished before moving in, Mac plugged in the stopper and prayed silently as he turned on the taps. Relief slid through him when water began to pour out. The fire hadn’t stopped the water from working yet, and the taps and faucet were old enough not to have an aerator to reduce the speed at which the water jetted out. It gushed from the tap at high pressure, filling the tub quickly, or at least more quickly than his tub back in New York would have filled. There it would have taken ten or fifteen minutes to fill the tub; here it took probably half that, but they were the longest minutes of his life and fire was beginning to eat through the wall between the bathroom and the storage room before it was quite finished.

Mac didn’t wait for it to finish filling, but stepped into the quickly heating water in his pajama bottoms and T-shirt when it was three-quarters full, and submerged himself up to his nose. Smoke was coming into the room now, pouring through the air vents, making breathing hard, and the water was hotter than hell, the fire heating it in the pipes on its way to this room and the tub. But it was only going to get hotter. The one wall of the room was now a mass of flames, and the fire was eating its way into the two connecting walls as well. The linoleum tile on the floor was catching flame and curling inward toward the tub. The water he was in would be boiling soon, by his guess. He now knew how lobsters felt when dropped in boiling water. It was one hell of a gruesome way to die . . . But it wouldn’t kill him. As long as he didn’t catch fire, he would survive, but Mac suspected he’d wish he was dead before this was over.

One

The reception room of the police station was empty when CJ entered. Not a big surprise. Small-town police stations usually had minimal staff at night. The counter that ran along the back of the room had a bell on it, but she didn’t end up having to use it. Even as she started toward it, an older man stuck his head out of the door behind the reception counter and raised his eyebrows at her.

“CJ Cummings?”

CJ nodded. “Captain Dupree?”

“That’s me,” he assured her, and then added with no little bit of irritation, “I’ve been waiting on you.”

CJ allowed her eyebrows to rise slightly, but merely said, “It’s not quite midnight. We agreed I should be here at midnight when Jefferson got off shift.”

“Yes, we did,” Dupree acknowledged testily. “But when we made that plan, I didn’t know some firebug would take it into his head to burn down one of my citizen’s houses while he was still in it. Had I known that was going to happen, I’d have gotten a contact number from you. I’ve been stuck here waiting on you before I could go out there and walk the crime scene.”

CJ’s eyebrows had risen higher and higher as he spoke. Now she said, “I don’t really see why you felt you had to stay here, Captain. It’s Jefferson I’m here to interview. You don’t need to be present for that.”

“I may not need to be, but he’s one of my men and I intend to be,” he told her firmly. “But that’s no never mind anyway since Jefferson is the one who caught the call about the fire on his way back to the station. He’s out there now waiting for us