Free All the Wrong Moves by Merline Lovelace Page A

at me with his one good eye.
    Did I mention that in addition to running the only commercial establishment in Dry Springs, Pancho also serves as its mayor and a volunteer firefighter? If not, forgive me. It’s been an eventful few days.
    “We’ll go inside shortly to check for hot spots,” Pancho informed me.
    Sweat poured down his face and dripped from the ends of his mustache. A hot August night is a real fun time to rig out in full protective gear.
    “We notified the Fort Bliss Command Post when we got the 911 call. They have a unit on the way. Want us to poke around to see if we can determine how the fire started or wait for them?”
    Geesh! Shows you my state of mind. I hadn’t even considered jurisdictional issues until this moment.
    “Poke away.”
    He and one of his cohorts donned self-contained breathing apparatuses. To protect against toxic fumes that often resulted from electrical fires, I was informed. Switching on high-intensity search lights, they disappeared inside the lab.
    At that point I rallied my troops and mounted a belated raid on the fridge in the D-fac. We returned with bottles of water and a carton of cherry Popsicles from Pen’s private stash for the sweat-drenched volunteers. They carried their own re-hydrating supplies inside the pumper but seemed to appreciate the Popsicles.
    Engine #5 from the Fort Bliss range protection fire station arrived while Pancho and his buddy were still inside the lab. I identified myself to Assistant Chief Rodriguez and his crew, then one of the Dry Springs guys gave him a situational assessment. That basically boiled down to:
    “The fire’s out and we still don’t know the cause.”
    Nodding, Rodriguez instructed his crew to stand down. Helmets and and self-contained breathing apparatus went back in the unit. Fire retardant turn-out coats came off.
    When the team stripped down to boots, pants and T-shirts, I couldn’t help noting that, unlike the Dry Springs volunteers, these pros were almost as buff as Sergeant Cassidy. I was admiring the tableau they presented when Pancho stuck his head out the door. He’d removed his mask, so I had to assume the air inside the lab hadn’t registered any toxicity.
    “Lieutenant! You wanna come see this?”
    I didn’t. Not really. I knew I’d have to fill out reams of reports regarding damage to government property and dreaded what I might find inside. Consequently, my feet dragged all the way to the front door.
    My first, joyous impression was that the interior didn’t look all that bad. Then Pancho swung his high-intensity beam in a slow arc and burst my bubble.
    Water seeped from the scorched ceiling in silvery ropes and splattered onto the blobs of melted metal and plastic that used to be our computers. Our racks of test equipment hadn’t fared much better.
    “Look’s like the fire ignited over there.”
    My heart sinking, I followed the beam to Brian Balboa’s pride and joy. The mega-expensive data synthesizer would never gobble up gigabytes again.
    “Could have been a short,” Pancho mused. “Or . . .”
    “Or?”
    “I dunno.”
    He scrunched his lips and shifted them from side to side. His bushy black mustache went along for the ride.
    “The scorch pattern looks off to me. We’ll have to wait until morning for a more accurate assessment, but I’m thinking the guys from Fort Bliss may want to send out their arson investigation team.”
    “Arson!”
    I’m ashamed to admit it now, but the first thing that jumped into my head was a composite portrait of my team. Every member of FST-3, me included, had expressed a desire to nuke, firebomb or otherwise obliterate our forward operating location at least once. Some of us more than once.
    Hard on that thought came another. FST-3 had evaluated and rejected some really off-the-wall inventions. One that leapt instantly to mind was a body spray that was supposed to absorb the sun’s rays and convert them to energy pulses. After the spray raised blisters on my