“Is everyone out?” Penn shouted over then din, standing outside of the blazing apartment fire down on Rogalio Boulevard, in the heart of Los Angeles.
Residents of the apartment were fleeing the burning building, while firefighters fought to get inside. Out of the ten-story building, more than half of the floors were engulfed by flames. Ambulance sirens wailed as they transported the injured to the hospitals in the area. Penn’s attention was captured by a woman who was hysterical, and being dragged screaming, tears running down her face, from the apartment building.
“NO! You have to let me back in!” The woman screeched. The woman was about twenty-eight, with long blond hair, now singed and slick with blood, and extensive burns on her body. She was also quite obviously pregnant, at least six months along, Penn judged, and she was also obviously in a great deal of pain.
“Ma’am, we can’t do that.” Ivory was telling her.
“You have to! You have to!” She screamed.
“Ma’am, you have to calm down.” The other firefighter, a friend of Penn’s by the name of Rayne Hectoralis, added. “You might induce an early labor.”
The woman’s eyes darted frantically, and she struggled. Her eyes caught Penn’s. “HELP ME!” She appealed to him.
“Ma’am—” Rayne tried to calm her down.
The woman became more agitated when she heard the loud crash from above, in the apartment building. She cast her gaze up, and saw that three of the floors had just collapsed in on one another. She screamed in agony.
“My children! My kids are up there!” She cried out. “SAVE THEM! SAVE THEM!”
Ivory and Rayne tried to calm her down, but she was inconsolable.
“I’ll go get them.” Penn assured her. “How many?”
“Three! My little girls! We’re in apartment 926!” The woman told him, hope appearing in her eyes. “Please!”
“I’m going in.”
Ivory left the woman to Rayne and grabbed Penn’s arm. “It’s suicide. All of the men are already out. The chief declared that no other firefighter go back in. You heard him!”
“Yeah, well I’ll be a murderer if I let the kids just die up there.” Penn retorted.
“It’s on the ninth floor! You won’t make it!”
“I’m gonna’ try. You take care of the mother.” Penn put on his helmet and pulled on the special face mask and goggles which allowed him to see better in smoke.
“HUNTER!” Ivory roared as Penn ran into the house. “As your superior I am ordering you not to enter!”
Penn’s response to that was to hold up a gloved hand, with only his middle finger pointed up. Ivory, about to go in after him, was stopped when, just behind Penn, a burning fragment of the ceiling above him fell, blocking the entranceway. Penn, absorbed in his mission, didn’t even realize it. Ivory cursed in frustration. Penn was now trapped inside.
Montana walked down the hall to Colleen’s apartment; his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and his shoulders slumped. He was despondent, having not been able to find Tequila. He was just coming to tell Colleen he hadn’t found the little girl, dreading how she would react to the news. He put his hand on the doorknob, and was shocked when the door opened under his hand. He entered the apartment quietly, and noticed that the apartment was in shambles, with papers and strewn on the floor, and furniture moved; it looked like there had been a break-in.
Automatically, Montana reached down and pulled the knife he always carried with him from where he kept it strapped against his lower leg, in his left boot. It was a practice he’d picked up from his father as a child, growing up on a ranch in Texas. Why his family chose to name him Montana, he had no idea. With his free hand, Montana picked up a few of the papers littering on the floor, and skimmed them. They seemed to be medical bills for Colleen, Tequila, and Margarita.
The sound of glass shattering caused Montana to quickly straighten up, the papers falling from his hand. When he looked up, a familiar looking man with close-shaved black hair and medium height and build was standing only a few feet away from him. Startled, recognizing the man as the social worker who’d been giving Colleen a hard time, Montana almost dropped the knife.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Montana demanded.
Jayson’s lips curled upward in a malicious smile. “The fiancé? Montana?”
“Yeah, so?”
“I came looking for Miss Saccharine.”
“I’m sure. That’s why you broke into her home when she wasn’t there?”
“Au contraire. I did not ‘break in’ as you put it. The door was left ajar. It was an open invitation, and fully lawful.”
“I’m sure a judge will think differently.”
“Oh, you’re going to sue me? See, now, that’s really amusing.”
“And why would that be?” Montana asked, adjusting his grip on the knife.
“Well for one, I’ve found some documents that will make sure your beloved Miss Saccharine will never be able to come within ten miles of those kids.”
“You’re bluffing. You must be fabricating some documents, you mean.”
“If they look official, the court will side with the social worker, for the ‘good of the child’.” Jayson smiled once again.
“You don’t know anything about Colleen.”
“But I know much about you.”
Montana was confused. “Excuse me?”
“You even set foot in the courtroom for Saccharine’s custody hearing and you’ll be taken into custody.”
“What are you talking about?” Montana asked, but a sick feeling was brewing in the pit of his stomach.
“Let’s see.” Jayson looked down at a clipboard he clutched in his hands. “Skyes comma Montana Justice. Age twenty-eight. Born on June 26, 1973 at Tellison Memorial Hospital in Corpus Christi. Raised in San Marcos at the Skyes Ranch, a ranch passed down through the Skyes family for generations.”
Montana struggled to hide his surprise. “So you know where I’m from. Big deal. You could’ve found that out on the internet or something.”
“I could have. But I didn’t.”
“What does this all have to do with Colleen? ‘Cause I think you ought to leave now.”
“What does this have to do with her? Everything. You think the girl will be able to kept those kids when they find out the rest of the results of my background check.”
“I have nothing to hide.”
“Do you now?”
Montana gestured with the knife at the door. “Get out. Now.”
“Easy now. Wouldn’t want you to get all riled up and commit another murder, now would we?”
Montana balked. “I didn’t commit any murder.”
“That’s what all true murders say.”
Montana advanced on Jayson, who made no motion to move. “I am not a murderer.”
“Sure you’re not.” Jayson replied, sarcastically. “You’re the prime suspect in the deaths of Rosaria LaManta, Aguacienta Michelle and Vegas Connor; your wife and kids.”
A small gasp from behind Jayson caused Montana, whose face had drained of all color, and Jayson to turn around. Little Margarita was standing in the doorway to her bedroom with shock and fear written in every line of her face. Her eyes wide, she looked from Montana to Jayson, then back to Montana, her eyes lingering on the knife.
“I’m telling my mom! You kill people!”
Montana made a motion toward her, but she shrieked and ran back into her room, slamming the door closed and locking it. Overcome with emotion, Montana lost control of his temper. He dropped the knife and lunged at Jayson, grabbing him by the front of his shirt and hoisting him up, into the air. He turned and in one quick motion threw Jayson out of the apartment, literally. Jayson landed in a heap in the hall. He straightened up and faced Montana, his eyes blazing with anger.
“You’re going to pay for that.”
“You have no proof that I just threw you, nor do you have any proof that I murdered anyone. GO TO HELL!”
Montana slammed the door shut in Jayson’s face.
Penn leaped over piles of flaming debris, his heavy uniform dragging him down, as he fought his way through the apartment building, making his way up to the ninth floor. Many times, he was almost hit in the head by falling fragments of walls, ceilings, and furniture. His fireman’s uniform had been ripped in parts where it had snagged against various objects, and the exposed skin had blistered. Penn, however, ignored the pain he was in, focusing on getting to the pregnant woman’s trapped children.
Suddenly, the plaintive cry of an animal in pain reached his ears. Penn, listening to his heart instead of his brain, veered off to the left where he had heard the cry. There, in an apartment where the door had been burned to ashes, trapped in a pile of rubble, which had once been an entertainment center, was a small white kitten, bleeding and covered with soot. It was mewing, expressing the pain it was in. Penn shoved the rubble off of it, and picked up the small animal, tucking it into the pocket of his heavy-duty jacket. He was just about to leave when he saw the three other animals it had been trapped with: a puppy and two other kittens.
The animals were limp and Penn thought they were dead for an instant, but then he saw their chests move slightly. Penn put the two kittens in his other pockets, then took off his hat and put the puppy in that. Then he left the apartment, and continued on his search for the three girls. What could he say? He had too big a heart to leave those animals to die.
Lark came out of one of the ER’s trauma rooms, after stabilizing a little six-year-old boy and his father who’d been in the car pileup down on Coriena Avenue, only to be whisked into another trauma room, to help another child who’d been caught in the pileup, this one a ten-year-old girl. The child’s name was Mei Chang, and her mother had been in the accident too, but she hadn’t been badly hurt, from what Lark heard. Currently, the child was in cardiac distress because she had apparently been sitting in the front seat when the airbags had gone off and the windshield had exploded inward, sending glass shards into her skin. Lark rattled off some orders to the attending physician, and the assembled medical staff got to work.
Colleen had paced outside of the trauma room that Alanna had been brought into, until a doctor with a hint of a Russian accent told her she must go to one of the waiting rooms. Instead, Colleen went to the bank of payphones in a corridor filled with vending machines. She managed to scrape the sixty-five cents it cost to make a call from her almost-empty wallet. She picked up the phone and dialed her house, hoping that Margarita would pick up.
“Margarita! Come on out.” Montana pleaded with the child, but to no avail. The door to the girl’s room remained locked. “Please, Rita, I just want to talk to you!”
“You lie!” Margarita shouted. “You’re gonna’ kill me!”
“I’m not going to kill you!”
“Yes, you are!”
“No, I’m—” Montana began, but realized how childish he sounded. “Come on Rita.”
“NO!”
The telephone rang. “I’ll be right back, Margarita.” Montana hurried into what passed for Colleen’s kitchen and picked up the phone. “Hello?” Montana asked.
“Montana!” Colleen’s voice exclaimed. “Did you find Teq?”
“No, I looked but—” Montana began, but was interrupted by Margarita, who had come running out of her room.
“Mommy, don’t listen to him!” Margarita shrieked. “He’s a mur—” She began, but her words were smothered when Montana covered her mouth.
“Montana? What’s going on there?”
“Nothing!” Montana replied, a little too quickly. He struggled to restrain Margarita who was kicking and punching at him, fighting against his hold on her.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Where are you?”
“I’m at the hospital.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened to me, I’m fine. Alanna, the lawyer, she was stabbed. I’m waiting for the doctors to tell me her condition.”
“Do you want me to drive over there with Margarita?”
“Yeah, that would be great.”
“OK, I’ll see you soon.”
“OW!” Montana cried out, as Margarita bit his hand.
“What was that?” Colleen exclaimed, but the only answer she received was the sound of the dial tone, as Montana hung up the phone.