Chapter 16: What a Captain Owes

Ansel's POV

What Calla wanted fit into four sentences.

Corey drives Bree to Lakeshore tonight, and he holds his daughter before anyone else holds anything.

Nobody follows the truck.

Dalton does not touch her son until she says he can.

And Engine 14's complaint is withdrawn, tonight, in front of me.

Dalton had said yes to all four before she finished.

Now it was nine o'clock, and I was standing in the day room of Station 9 because he had asked me to come up.

It was a plain room with a long table, a couch, and a coffee maker with a burned ring on the glass.

The window was the one Calla had described to me at the lake house.

I stood at it, and I could see her kitchen across the road, a black square with a board over it.

The distance was less than a hundred feet.

Dalton sat at the table with his captain's keys in front of him and his phone face up beside them.

The phone had lit up a dozen times since I came in.

Every one of them said Imogen.

"I'm calling your chief," he said. "You'll hear me do it."

He dialed, and he waited, and he said it in four plain sentences.

The complaint was withdrawn.

Engine 14's response time was the best anyone could have made from the east side.

The lot had been full of cars, and he had known it, and he had used the complaint as a stick.

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