Fireproof

CHAPTER 8

Samantha Ramirez held the camera in position with one hand. With her other she swiped and tucked a strand of wild hair back up into her baseball cap. She’d already tossed off her coat, yet sweat dripped down her forehead. Another line trickled down her back. Being close to the flames for this long made her feel like the Wicked Witch of the West, melting inch by inch. They had plenty of footage, but Jeffery insisted she leave the camera running.

“You never know what might still happen.”

That’s what he always said. And usually he was right. That’s how they got lucky capturing an unexpected rescue off a rooftop after Katrina. Sometimes not so lucky, when they drew unpredictable rage. That’s how they ended up recording the skid marks and trail behind Sam as she got dragged into a crowd of young male protesters in the streets of Cairo. The latter should have been enough warning for her to say, “Never again,” if not for the additional footage that showed an equally enraged Jeffery Cole racing after her, grabbing a rifle right off the shoulder of a surprised soldier.

The machine gun had spit over the heads of the men who had their fingers dug into Sam’s arms. They already had her shirt wadded into their fists, ripping at her, grabbing, poking, by the time the bullets zinged overhead. It wasn’t until later, when Sam and Jeffery were safe back in the States reviewing the footage, that she saw the look on Jeffery’s face, the one that had made the men drop her to the ground. The look that told them the next round of bullets wouldn’t be in the air.

“I got your back, you got mine,” he told her that day, and she’d been hard-pressed since then to argue.

Her Spanish-speaking mother, who lived with Sam to help care for Sam’s six-year-old son, didn’t like Jeffery. She called him “Diablo.” Not to his face. Mostly she called him the devil when he woke the household in the middle of the night, like tonight. Her mother didn’t know any of the details about the danger zones they traveled, but she suspected enough that she lit candles at St. Jerome’s Catholic Church every single Sunday.

The longer Sam worked with Jeffery, the more she wondered if her mother was right. Sometimes working with Jeffery Cole felt like she had, indeed, made a pact with the devil.

This was the third fire in less than ten days, but their bureau chief had told them to back off.

“No body count,” he said. “Registers low on the sensational meter.”

He called it an “oh-by-the-way blip,” fifteen, maybe twenty seconds, tops.

Not even close to the feature spots Jeffery prized. Tallying seconds and minutes had become an obsession for Jeffery. He claimed he could find the feature in any news, peeling away the leaves like an artichoke until he got to the tasty heart.

That’s what a good investigative reporter did, he’d lecture anyone who’d listen. Usually it was only Sam, who was unable to shrug off his bravado and walk away because there was an invisible chain that bonded them together. A chain, like handcuffs … actually more like an umbilical cord, because her life, her career, had come to depend on Jeffery’s success.

She wasn’t exactly happy or proud of that fact, but she’d started living by the saying “It is what it is.” A bracelet she never took off, the leather worn and the pewter pockmarked, had the words engraved on it. It was a constant reminder. Maybe she couldn’t always control all the crap that was thrown at her, but she could damn well control what she made of it.

Her mother’s version was a little more colorful: “It’s your life. Only you can choose what you make with it, whether it’s chicken salad or chicken shit.”

She noticed that Jeffery had taken a break and gone off somewhere, either to find a responder to interview or to take a piss. She didn’t keep track of him when he was off camera. Often she simply got lost in the world through the camera’s viewfinder.

Now, suddenly coming up from behind her, he said, “Looks like we have company.”

She glanced around without stopping what she was shooting. A tall man in a trench coat and two women were headed their way. They were on the inside perimeter of the crime scene tape. The tall woman in the bomber jacket was definitely a cop. Sam bet the other two were feds.

“Keep the camera running,” Jeffery told her. “No matter what, keep me in the shot, too. Remember to get my good side.”

Sam wanted to roll her eyes. Instead she repositioned the camera.

Here we go again. You never know what might still happen.