Free 3000 Degrees by Sean Flynn Page A

which ones should be tapped for which addresses. “Will you get your head out of that fucking book,” Jay would yell at him. “Let's just grab a fucking hydrant and move.” Good fires were hard to come by in Worcester, and Jay didn't want to miss any chance to storm into the flames.
    “Yep,” Sully said again. “Big one coming.” He drew in another breath, his heavy black mustache curling beneath his nostrils, air filling his lungs, puffing out his chest. “Three alarms. You smell it? I smell it.”
    Jay snorted, shook his head. “Yeah, three alarms. And it'll be on the south side and we won't be going.”
    He turned Engine 3 onto the apron in front of the station, steered it into a loping turn, angling the rear toward the third door from the left. Joe, Doug, and Mark hopped down from the back, flanked the truck near the back bumper, and guided Jay into the garage. The door rolled closed. Jay cut the motor and climbed down from the cab.

7
    T HE MATCH SPARKED AND BLOSSOMED INTO A FLAME . J ULIE held it between her thumb and first two fingers, the nails chewed off and the tips raw, and touched the droplet of fire to a Christmas candle on the crate next to the bed. The wick caught, and an orange flower of light sprouted from a red wax stem. The darkness receded, but only a few feet; the edges of the room blurred into indistinct shadows.
    It wasn't very big, the room, about the size of a county jail cell or a small clerk's office, which is what it had been before the warehouse closed down a decade before. The clutter made it seem more cramped, but it was still better than the shelters. The bed was in the middle: a wooden pallet layered with blankets, two spread across the slats as a mattress, five more on top for warmth. To the right of the bed, near the foot of the pallet, was a kerosene heater that fought back the chill on the coldest nights. Most of the clothes, filthy sweatshirts and worn jeans, were piled against the left wall, but a few tattered garments were scattered around the room, jumbled with the trash, scraps of half-eaten food, cellophane wrappers, paper bags. Opposite the bed was a tiny closet, on the floor of which was a box overflowing with cat feces. The human waste was deposited outside the sleeping quarters, in the hallways and downstairs near the door that opened onto the loading dock of Worcester Cold Storage. The place smelled like a sewer. Julie had gotten used to it.
    She didn't live there anymore, not since she'd broken up with Tom. This was his place. He'd jimmied one of the doors last spring. Tom was good at that, finding places to squat. When he was with Celine, he broke them into a rusty trailer in a vacant lot at the foot of Grafton Street, on the edge of the old warehouse district. After she got sent to prison for drugs, he found his way into Worcester Cold Storage. It was supposed to be locked, sealed like a tomb, the few windows sheathed in plywood, the doors padlocked. But Tom could figure a way inside almost anything. He'd had a lot of practice, nineteen years of it, almost half his whole life living on the streets. Besides, no one seemed to care that he was living in there. Right after Halloween, a cop searched the building with his police dog. Part of it, anyway; the cop, gagging on the stench, left after a few minutes because he was afraid his dog would get sick.
    It was perpetually dark inside, so Tom kept a flashlight hidden behind a steel beam on the loading dock. He would follow a spot of light through the maze of meatlockers and corridors, sidestepping the rubbish and muck, up to the office on the second floor, where he'd arranged the furniture. Other than the filth, though, the warehouse was good shelter. Sturdy, much more solid than the trailer, or most any other building for that matter. The brick walls were eighteen inches thick, and the floors were held up with timber joists the size of tree trunks that rested on columns of lumber and cast iron spaced every twelve feet.