Head 01 Hot Head (6 page)

idiot. I love having you here, man.”

“Okay.” The word escaped Griff in a whisper. He half-shivered, conscious of his chest hair against Dante’s bare torso, of their damp skin sticking. Soft

stubble scratched Griff’s neck. He hugged back for a sec, patted Dante’s warm neck once. His cock shifted again, swinging free under the pleats. His questions would have to wait.

“Thanks.”

Griff stepped back and fled to find his shirt before he did something even more stupid than he already had.

BUT Dante never came by for the cash. And though he was on the schedule for the night tour, he didn’t show up at the firehouse at al.

The hel was that about?

Griff wasn’t worried and almost assumed he’d gotten the $500 somewhere else, except that he couldn’t get Dante to cal him back. At first he figured his best

friend had lost his cel or had food poisoning or was out getting his bone waxed by some girl.
No.
Griff’s gut told him something was going down, but the hangover realy kept him underwater.

It turned out to be a shitty night.

Griff had gotten to the station near six o’clock stil feeling like his head was a piranha tank. The engine was out and when he got upstairs to the breakroom,

the fixings for baked ziti were al over the counters and the long table in the kitchen area. Briggs and Watson were arguing over a potful of tomato sauce, so mad at each other that they didn’t even acknowledge his wave.

Watson stirred the sauce, tasting it carefuly and keeping his back to Briggs, who was holding a deep foil baking tray so tightly he’d mangled it. They were on rotation together and fought over this kind of shit al the time; the Chief said that it was just their way of channeling their aggression.

No thanks
. Griff’s sore, dehydrated brain churned and snapped at him.

Instead of going to the fridge for seltzer, he went to the urn and poured himself a cup of thick, rank coffee, steeling his stomach to the idea of pouring this toxic waste inside himself.

“You don’t wanna do that, Muir.” Siluski had come in just behind him, drying his gray-blond buzzcut with a bleach-stained towel. He threw it over his shoulder. He was in an undershirt and bunker pants. Their unit’s oldest lieutenant, he shot the squabbling cooks a disgusted glance. “That pot is from this morning.

More grounds than anything.”

Griff looked down at the cup, saw the sediment, and emptied it into the sink. The sharp stink made his gut turn over again. “Thanks, man.”

“Totaly selfish, kid. We get a cal, I don’t want you puking in my boots.” Siluski left him there and stepped between Briggs and Watson to fil an old plastic

Big Gulp cup from the faucet. He came back and pushed it at Griff. A scuffed New York Rangers logo wrapped around the cup. “Drink water. Water is the deal.”

Griff got a swalow of it down. He deserved a medal for doing that while standing up.

“Faggot!”

That fucking word.

Griff jerked and turned to see who’d said it. Over in the kitchen area, Briggs was slamming things inside the refrigerator, trying to bait Watson.

“I had a blast Thursday. Anastagio tels the best fucking stories.” Siluski had been at Dante’s to watch the start of the NFL season along with about fifteen

other guys from stations in the area, at least til the halftime. He always split early because his babysitter needed to get home. His oldest kid was eight and his wife waited tables weeknights, so his late nights and hangovers were long gone. “A real pisser, huh?”

Griff nodded at Siluski and blood rushed over his throat and face. He wondered what the lieutenant would do if he knew that while the gang was watching the

game, Griff had gotten a boner smeling his best friend—a big one. What if Siluski had seen him snuggling with Dante this morning or the wood he’d had from

perving on his unconscious body? The older man would lay him out with a hook to the jaw and piss on him once he was down. Griff felt his cheeks go hot and took another vile sip of the warm, metalic water to cover it.

“I saw your dad working a scene this afternoon. He seemed good.” Siluski was being nice.

Translation: your dad nodded hello.

As a fire marshal working under the Bureau of Fire Investigations, Griff’s pop was kinda like a firefighter with a badge. Officialy, it meant he investigated

serious fires and arson and fraud. Unofficialy, it meant he carried a gun and got to arrest people without having to deal with NYPD politics: instant license to be a hard-ass. He was a stiff old boot, but he took care of his kid when he got around to it. And when a nineteen-year-old Dante got busted for smoking weed on the Coney Island boardwalk, Griff had caled his dad, and the old man had gotten him cut loose in forty-five minutes.
Abracadabra
. Of course, from that moment on he’d hated Dante’s guts and ignored his son’s “other” family.

Griff squeezed his eyes shut. “Wait. You puled a tour today?”

Siluski dumped the coffee grounds out of the filter and rummaged in the cabinets. “I just finished the nine to six, but Anastagio caled for me to cover his tour.

Prick.” But he smiled and started putting together a fresh pot of caffeine so the crew could function for the night.

Shit and double shit.
Griff had been looking forward to hanging out for the shift. He took another gruesome swalow of water.

“Then
you
fucking do it, cocksucker.” Across the room, Briggs glared at the crumpled foil pan in his hands and tossed it on the counter. Watson had apparently won the ziti wars and was tasting his sauce. Briggs stomped back to the couch and pretended to watch a nature show about jelyfish.

Griff’s company was always like this: a greener crew, crappier hours, more bulshit. It was a slow house—porn and school visits, way melower than the

Nuthouse or the Bronx or any of the real shitholes in scary neighborhoods. Griff preferred it because he partnered with Dante. They could mostly share the same schedule. Otherwise they’d never see each other.

Griff realized Siluski was talking to him.

The lieutenant was asking him some damn thing, concern on his windburned face, his blond-grey eyebrows creased. Who knew what it was, but Griff felt

guilty for ignoring him.

“Goddamn tequila,” Griff covered. He tried to refil his water in the metal sink, but it was slow going. His hands felt like basebal gloves, his fingers like

sausages. “Any idea why Dante didn’t come in tonight? He sick?”

“Not a fucking clue,” Siluski huffed and scooped coffee out of a D’Amico’s bag into a fresh filter. “Pussy patrol, maybe.”

“Oh.” Griff knew that wasn’t it. His stomach rumbled a warning but held.

“Go rack out while you can.” The lieutenant held up the stained carafe. “Fresh poison waiting when you’re alive again.”

Griff found his way up to his bunk, by touch mostly. The building was old and wasn’t realy equipped to hold this many guys. Even after the World Trade

Center and al the speechifying by politicians, the city never seemed to find the budget to improve their setup. Stil, in a way Griff was glad. Early on, he’d won a bet with a veteran who was retiring upstate and inherited a tiny alcove in the bunkroom about the size of a closet. It meant that he had a little privacy and that he could steer clear of some of the middle-school drama that seemed to dog these guys.

After his divorce, he’d actualy slept here more than anywhere else, though only his captain knew it. That was back when Dante had first bought his condemned brownstone and there were stil holes in the ceilings that were open to the sky. Eventualy, Griff had given up the apartment he’d shared with Leslie and moved back into the Muir basement, buried alive in his childhood bedroom. But whenever he wedged into his little nook, he traveled back to the horrible months when everything felt like paper cuts and rubbing alcohol and this was a safe place to hide.

Griff kicked off his boots and set them where his jacket hung ready. He flopped on the little bed and battled his way toward queasy sleep.

THAT night they only had two alarms: a kitchen fire in the Red Hook projects and a wreck on the Gowanus Expressway.

The project fire had been mostly out by the time the crew elbowed past sleepy, wide-eyed families and did a sweep of the floor. What a shitty place to grow

up. The crowded, cluttered apartments reminded him how lucky he was to have a place to stay, even if it was with his dad. Looking at the bleary crowd standing on the asphalt, Griff felt guilty about how much he had. Dante’s fixation on his crazy fixer-upper made more sense.

People need space; families need air; love needs light. Like Mrs. Anastagio always said, “You need enough rooms to love someone properly.”

The Gowanus wreck was way worse. At about three in the a.m., a furniture delivery van had rammed at seventy mph into an old hatchback—two sophomores headed back to the Hofstra campus after a party. They had narrowly missed flipping over the rail to the street beneath.

On impact, the little car had crumpled against the concrete barrier, pinning the young driver painfuly behind the wheel while her boyfriend panicked in the

passenger seat. The delivery guy was fine, just scrapes and a lot of arguing in Chinese. The van had popped open, so there were wooden chairs broken and

scattered across al three lanes. First thing, Watson and the probie sprayed the exposed underside of the car, even though there were no visible flames or smoke.

Tommy and the rest of the EMS crew ran through options with Siluski.

The girl was calm in there, even with a head wound, but her guy was hysterical and screaming.

Dante could have defused the situation in ten seconds with a wink and a dirty joke, but he was some other fucking place.

Focus, Griffin.

Without his best friend there to lay on the charm, Griff spent more than an hour out on the Expressway cutting the panicked students out of the wreck with the big saw.

The EMTs had gone right to work, but it took Tommy ten minutes to calm the boyfriend down and get him out on a flatboard so Griff could reach the girl

safely. Tommy was a scrappy little bastard who’d grown up a few streets over from the Anastagios, volunteering with the EMS crews right after high school,

training first as an EMT-basic and then as an EMT-paramedic. Adrenaline junkie, but great in a pinch. He definitely knew his shit, wading right in, and Griff was grateful. While Griff and Siluski pried the girl loose, the rest of the crew gathered the chair bones in the road and set up cones to redirect traffic. Sometimes sweeping up was part of the job.

This kind of accident was always a lose-lose-lose: paperwork and stitches and nightmares. Al three civilians had gone to the hospital by ambulance, relatively unharmed but pissed off at the whole world. The cops had shown up to take statements and write up reports. Griff and Siluski and the other guys sat around

shooting the shit for a while. Dante’s younger brother Flip was a cop, and one of these guys knew his name. That kind of family connection always made everyone friendlier, greased the paperwork.

Griff liked cops. Truth be told, you saved way more people, did way more “good” being a cop than being a firefighter. The heroics ratio fel in their favor

easy; there were only so many burning buildings and bad wrecks, but in a shitty world, scumbags popped up like mushrooms.

The 9/11 attacks had made firefighters into the fuck of the new milennium, but in truth, a lot of FDNY hours were logged sitting around with your buddies

eating grease and gossiping about improbable pussy—Engine 333/Ladder 181 especialy. So Griff was nice to cops and always remembered the seventy-two

officers at the Twin Towers who had given their lives with a whole lot less fanfare from the world.

At the scene of the accident, the crew busted ass to beat the rush hour. The tow trucks showed to clear away the metal carcasses. Before the sky lightened,

they’d even managed to clear two lanes fuly before heading back to the house.

Riding backward in the truck, Griff felt a heavy lump in his lap and realized he stil carried that pimp-rol of five hundred dolars in twenties; Dante’s unclaimed cash sat sweating on his leg like another set of bals.

Why hadn’t he shown up? What kind of trouble was he in?

FOUR days later, Griff realized that Dante was actualy, consciously, trying to avoid him, and he had no idea why.

Actualy, Griff didn’t realize it until breakfast the third day after that Gowanus wreck while eating oatmeal in his father’s kitchen and staring at that $500 rol sitting on the table next to the maple syrup.

Hell
. Half the week had gone by with him holding a wad of cash. Dante had vanished off the face of the earth with no explanation.

Griff felt like an asshole carrying around that much money, but he didn’t want to redeposit it. He knew that Dante needed it and stil didn’t know how to get it to him. He drove to Dante’s brownstone, but it was dark. Freaky. He caled the Anastagios, but they were worried too because they hadn’t heard from their son.