Broken Places

by Susan Perabo

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Susan Perabo's short-story collection, Who I Was Supposed to Be, was named a Best Book of 1999 by the Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The Boston Globe proclaimed the debut "a stunning introduction to a fresh new literary talent." Now Susan Perabo returns with The Broken Places, her eagerly anticipated novel about love and honor and how the aftermath of one terrifying night -- and one heroic act -- affects a close-knit family. Twelve-year-old Paul Tucker knows his family is something akin to royalty in small-town Casey, Pennsylvania. His father, Sonny, is a dedicated career fireman, in line for the position of chief, long held by Paul's late grandfather, a local legend whose heroics continue to occupy the hearts and minds of all who knew and worked with him. Paul's mother, Laura, is a math teacher at the high school; Paul is sometimes annoyed by her worries over him (and her apparent lack of worry over his father), but his life is generally untroubled, his future bright, his time measured by sport seasons. But on a windy October day, the collapse of an abandoned farmhouse forever alters the fates and perceptions of Paul, his family, and those closest to them. Sonny and the other Casey firemen attempt a dangerous rescue to reach a teenager buried under the rubble, and when Sonny himself is trapped by a secondary collapse, Paul, his mother, and the crowd of onlookers believe the worst. The wait is excruciating; it's baby Jessica all over again, but this time the "innocent victim" is sixteen-year-old Ian Finch, a swastika-tattooed hoodlum who may have brought the house down on himself while building bombs. Still, when Sonny emerges from the rubble hours later, the maimed teenager in his arms, the rescue becomes a minor miracle and a major public relations event, a validation of all things American and true. Sonny is immediately hailed as a national hero. And Paul's life is suddenly, and irrevocably, changed. Beyond the limelight, the parades, and the intrusion of the national media into a quiet and predictable life, the Tucker household balance is upset. And Ian Finch's curious and continued involvement in Sonny's life creates a new and troubling set of hurdles for Paul to overcome. Somehow, though his father has been saved, he continues to slip through Paul's fingers. Secrets, lies, and changing alliances threaten Paul's relationship with his father and his mother and his understanding of what holds a family -- and a town -- together. The Broken Places is a brilliant meditation on the psychology of heroism, the definition of family, and the true meaning of honor. With pitch-perfect dialogue, subtle but stunning insights, and a dazzling ability to uncork the quiet power of each character, Susan Perabo's The Broken Places uncovers and celebrates the unsettling truths of human nature.

Release date: November 3, 2001

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 224

Sample

Chapter One

The wind was at his back. Heart pounding, Paul Tucker pedaled furiously through downtown Casey, soared past the firehouse, the barbershop, the drugstore, the post office. It was October, not cold, but plenty cool to chill his knuckles around the handlebars as he sped toward the Neidermeyer farm. An explosion! So far that was all he knew, but the word alone was enough to set his mind racing. Gas leak? Pesticides? Gunpowder? A gaping crater in the ground where the Neidermeyer home had stood for a hundred and thirty years? He hoped he wasn't too late. What if he'd missed all the good stuff? What if his father and the rest of the crew were already packing up their equipment, starting the engines, heading back to the station? He shifted gears, pedaled harder.

Paul had lied to his mother, claimed he was biking downtown to pick up a pack of gum at Dewey Drugs. He lied to his mother frequently these days, often for no other reason than to assert his independence from her, to prove to himself that he was his own man with his own life, a life full of rich adventures she had no cause to know about. He'd turned twelve at the end of August, and twelve had shifted something in him, something unnameable but unmistakable. Twelve was solid, just the sound of it. At ten you were still in elementary school, still prone to tantrums and tears. Then eleven, an unsettling and unsteady age, like you had one foot on the dock and one on the boat and you did everything you could just to keep your balance.

Then, at twelve, you got on the boat.

So here he was on his boat, a sturdy, well-made vessel that promised to sail him through adolescence with relative ease. He was well liked, athletic, bright enough for others to cheat off but not cerebral enough to be regarded as a nerd. His parents -- especially his father -- were respected and admired by everyone in town. And if they were a little tightly wound, if their brows furrowed even over matters of little consequence, it was nothing that could not be overcome, or at least dodged, with jokes and charm and innocent lies.

This particular lie -- biking downtown for Bubble Yum -- had been absolutely necessary; his mother did not believe in gawking, not at fights or car accidents or exploded houses or even funny looking dogs. Among the citizens of Casey she was pretty much alone in this distaste. Crossing from the final cluster of Main Street row house apartments and into the sprawling farmland, Paul ran smack into a traffic jam the magnitude of which the town usually saw only once a year -- second week of August, for the county fair. Casey was a town of nine thousand; tucked in a valley between the Kittatinny and Tuscarora mountains, the town was surrounded by innumerable miles of swaying corn and the sweeping tails of dairy cows. Pittsburgh was two hours northwest on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Harrisburg an hour east. Excitement was in short supply. And so it was that a quarter mile away from the Neidermeyer farm, cars and pickups were rumbling off the road and into the tall grass, entire families -- many still clad in church clothes -- piling out and heading west along the wide gravelly shoulder. Paul deftly wove his way through the pedestrians (some carried picnic baskets; most had cameras swinging from their necks) and stopped his bike at the foot of the long sloping dirt drive that led to the Neidermeyer house, which sat alone in the middle of six acres of unkempt brush. He had seen the house before, of course. It was hard to miss, a white clapboard two-story nineteenth-century farmhouse with a huge front porch, each weathered board of it a testament to simpler and sturdier days. Years before, Claude Neidermeyer and his wife had raised dairy cows -- for chocolate made in nearby Hershey -- in the vast pasture that was now nothing but uninhibited weeds. Three empty silos, their only silage the ashes of grain, towered over a ramshackle barn that had housed its last cow long before Paul was born. It was the kind of house people expected to see in the middle of Pennsylvania farm country, the kind of house that graced a thousand postcards, the kind of house tourists stopped to snap pictures of at sunset.

But what lay before Paul now was a photo opportunity of a different sort. An hour before, in the church courtyard after worship, word had spread of an explosion at the Neidermeyer farm and Paul had imagined the house would be totally destroyed, a massive pile of rubble that his father and the other firemen would pick through for clues to its demise. Instead, what he saw now was that the center of the Neidermeyer house had simply vanished. In its place, between the still-standing east and west walls, lay an enormous heap of debris -- concrete, wood, furniture, pipes, wires...

"Shit," Paul muttered, steadying himself on his bike. A hot lump rose in his stomach and he swallowed hard, let his bike roll back a few inches. Well, okay then, he'd seen it. He'd taken a good long look at the thing and not broken into a cold sweat, so there was really no need to get any closer. Maybe his mother was right about the whole gawking thing, anyway. Maybe the cool thing to do was to go home. Maybe --

But no. He would not be a chicken. Not today.

Two years before, on a sticky August night, the tire factory on Route 11 had gone up in flames. He'd been ten that year -- only ten! -- practically still a baby if you thought about it. He'd been sleeping over at his friend Carson's house, camping out in the backyard, and moments after the second swell of sirens rose (and Paul had managed to still the shudder in his knees) Carson's dad had appeared out back in his bathrobe and sneakers, car keys in hand. In Mr. Diehl's stuffy Lincoln they'd followed the wail of sirens, then the swirling cloud of gray smoke, then the slow procession of other cars down the winding factory drive.

At first it had been impossible to distinguish among the firefighters; there were dozens of them rushing around the perimeter of the factory, laying long lines from the pumper and the hydrants. Flames rolled from the roof; windows exploded. Then Carson had shouted "There's your dad!" and Paul had followed Carson's pointing finger to a man (a man shorter than any of the others, a man who moved with skillful speed) fitting a SCBA mask over his face. Briefly, for a brilliant split second, Paul was thrilled; he'd never seen his father in action like this before. He'd seen only the aftermath of his father's work -- scrapes, deep bruises, sometimes a broken finger -- but never the work itself. Standing on the factory grounds, his cheeks warm and his eyes tearing from smoke, he felt what he thought was pride swell in his belly. But then suddenly, unexpectedly, the pride stung inside him, burned his gut like the flames that licked toward his father as he approached the factory doors. Paul stumbled behind the Diehls' car and threw up.

Had that been the end of it, it wouldn't have been so bad. He could have blamed it on the Dr Pepper and Doritos he'd consumed at Carson's earlier, maybe even convinced himself he'd been sickened by the flat, thick smell of melting tires. But following the fire he'd had night sweats for two weeks straight, woken up chilled to the bone, drenched in perspiration and one unforgettable night in his own pee. The night he wet his pajama pants he curled naked at the end of the bed, away from the spreading stain, crying quietly and aching from head to toe with shame. Here he was, the only son of the bravest man in town, who himself was the only son of the previous bravest man in town, and he'd peed himself like a baby. Imagine if word got out! Imagine if somehow his secret was revealed (it could happen...gossip in Casey swirled from lips to ears like funnel clouds) and everyone would know the best quarterback in Pony football, one of the coolest kids at school, was a chickenshit bed wetter. He'd played sick the next morning, then laundered his sheets while his mother was at the grocery store, flung them back on his bed, still damp, when he heard her car in the driveway.

He took a deep breath, gripped his handlebars with sweaty palms. Not today, he told himself. He'd toted around his shame long enough. Then his feet were on the dusty ground, his legs were moving, and he found himself walking slowly up the driveway pushing his bike. Surprisingly, there was something almost pleasurable about the sensation he was feeling, a kind of mad rush that came with the wooziness. It was a little like when his friend Joe Bower had shown him a grainy picture of the Elephant Man in a thick book from the study shelf in the science room. It had made him queasy, the giant, mangled head atop the twisted body, but in the days that followed he found himself returning to the dusty book again and again and opening to that page, willing himself to keep his eyes on the hideous man a little longer each time.

There were about three hundred people on the Neidermeyer property. Most of them were obviously townspeople, some of whom had portable video cameras (normally reserved for birthday parties and school plays) trained on the crumbling house. In addition to the town gawkers there were also several news vans, half a dozen fire trucks from neighboring communities, and more cop cruisers than Paul had ever seen in one place. Yellow police tape was wound around the ancient oaks bordering the lawn, so no one in the crowd could get closer than a hundred yards or so to the wrecked house. Men and women stood along the edge of the tape, talking chipperly with neighbors and snapping pictures. Beyond the lawn, in shin-high pasture weeds, a large group of boys and a few girls were playing Frisbee in the long shadows of the silos. Paul scanned the lawn for his father, then spotted Black Phil at the edge of the yellow tape, talking to a newswoman.

Black Phil had been Kittatinny County fire captain for six years, and was one of the few men remaining in the department who had worked alongside Paul's grandfather, the legendary Captain Sam. Phil had earned his nickname when another Phil -- a white man -- joined the department sometime in the mid-seventies, and Sam took to calling them Black Phil and White Phil to avoid confusion. White Phil was long gone, but Black Phil continued to go by his nickname even when identifying himself to strangers, half out of habit and half to get on the nerves of sensitive people -- black and white -- who thought the nickname was just a tiny bit in bad taste. He was a burly guy with a thick gray mustache and hands large enough to palm a basketball. He lived in the black section of Casey, four square blocks just east of downtown, with his wife and three teenage girls; sometimes in the summer Paul and his parents went to their place for barbecues and Black Phil would tell long and -- after the third or fourth beer -- extremely loud stories about Captain Sam's quarter of a century on the force. To hear Phil tell it -- really, to hear most any of the firemen tell it -- Sam fell somewhere between Jesus and Superman in the order of heroes.

A familiar hand clapped down firmly on his shoulder.

"Busted," Sonny said, when Paul turned.

Paul feigned confusion. "Busted for what?"

ardSonny grinned. "You gonna try to tell me your mom knows you're out here? Next thing you'll be tellin' me she's out here herself."

"Don't rat, okay?" Paul recognized he needed to play up the team aspect of this particular lie, get his father to choose a side. In a family of three, alliances were weighty, crucial matters. "I'm just here for a minute."

Sonny raised his eyebrows. "Okay, but you owe me."

He was a small man, Sonny Tucker, only five feet eight inches tall, but a hundred and seventy pounds of just about pure muscle. In a suit and tie he looked unassuming, unthreatening, a man unaccustomed to danger. But in jeans and a T-shirt, or in his turnout gear, Paul thought his father looked like a first-rate ass kicker, the kind of guy other men would cross the street to avoid after dark. Sonny still pumped iron at the station four days a week and could make it up the eight-flight training staircase at the fire academy in Pittsburgh faster than any other man in the department, even the rookies who were now ten years younger than he. Sometimes he bench-pressed Paul in the middle of the living room, one hand set between the shoulders and the other at the small of the back. He did this, Paul had noticed, only when his mom was around, sitting on the couch pretending to be unimpressed as Paul counted off his father's reps -- 28, 29, 30, 31...

Now Sonny gestured to the house. "It's something, huh?"

"What happened? Gas leak?"

Sonny shook his head. "Good guess, but no. Gas was shut off months ago, after the fire."

Six months before, eighty-six-year-old Claude Neidermeyer had fallen into a deep sleep in his recliner while heating tomato soup on his stovetop; by the time the firemen were able to drag him to safety and extinguish the blaze, the entire first floor of the house was gutted. Mr. Neidermeyer (an accident just waiting to happen, according to the town grapevine, left to teeter around that old house all by himself) had been sentenced to the local nursing home by his two grown sons. The house had been condemned by the fire department, but the Neidermeyer boys -- perhaps lazy, perhaps nostalgic, most likely a little of both -- had yet to clean out what items were salvageable, and so the house had sat there on the outskirts of town, empty -- so everyone thought -- of any life but carpenter ants and feral cats.

"So what was it?" Paul asked.

Sonny took off his sunglasses and wiped them with his T-shirt. "Water and fire damage, probably termites on top of that." He shrugged, ran his fingers through his hair. "Or maybe the old girl just decided she'd had enough, wanted to go out with a bang, give us all something to do on a Sunday afternoon."

"So what do you do?"

Sonny humphed. "Nothing but stand here. The whole place'll probably be down by nightfall...don't expect there's much holding it up anymore. So we're just gonna watch it crumble."

"You're not gonna try to save it?"

"Look at it," Sonny said. "What's there to save?"

"I don't know," Paul said. "I just thought -- "

His father's buddy Ben Griffin appeared in his typical manner -- out of nowhere -- and smacked Paul sharply on the back of the head with an open palm. This was his usual greeting, one that occasionally brought tears to Paul's eyes that he'd quickly blink away. Ben was tall and broad-shouldered, had a square chin and a thick brown mustache that he was fond of combing. Unlike Sonny, Ben could wear just about anything and still look like a firefighter.

"That as hard as you can hit?" Paul taunted, squinting up at him.

Ben took a drag off his cigarette, raised his right eyebrow. "Want me to give it another try? Then we can add your head to that pile of crap over there." He flipped his cigarette to the ground; smoke wafted lazily through blades of dead grass. "Fire," Ben said, pointing. "Fire, fire...for Christ's sake somebody call a fireman."

Sonny stepped on the cigarette, ground it snugly into the dry earth with his boot. "Bored?" he asked.

"Nah. I've been having loads of fun letting kids try on my helmet." He set his helmet on Paul's head. "See there? A thrill a minute."

Ben had moved from Pittsburgh to join the Casey FD only a few years before and -- following his divorce six months later -- had become a regular guest at the Tucker house. At least once a week he came for dinner, then stayed and washed the dishes, tagged along for the nightly walking of the dogs, finally plopped down on the couch with the family for an evening of television. Sometimes Paul would find him curled up on the living room couch in the morning, an afghan bunched around his legs and a horseshoe of empty beer cans on the coffee table. Once, after a week of substance abuse education in the fifth grade, Paul had asked his mother if she thought Ben had a drinking problem. She'd considered for a moment, then shaken her head. More like a lonely problem, she'd said.

"Mama know you're out here?" Ben asked.

Sonny put a finger to his lips. "It's a secret."

Ben grinned. "A secret, huh? I can keep a secret -- for the right price."

Paul took off the helmet and tossed it to Ben. "Your helmet smells like cigarettes."

Ben yawned. "Best ashtray I got, worm." He nodded toward the house. "Well, boys, we're gonna be in papers all over the state tomorrow. For about five minutes everybody in PA will be talking about Casey. Then somebody in Philly'll fart and we'll be forgotten again."

"Or somebody in Philly won't fart and we'll be forgotten," Sonny said. He gazed up at the broken house a little sadly, and Paul figured his father was sorry there was nothing to do, nothing and no one to save -- yet again -- and that all he'd be in newspaper photographs tomorrow was part of the scenery, another anonymous guy in T-shirt and shades, aimlessly hanging around. Except for the tire factory incident, there had been little drama, little genuine disaster, during his twelve years in the department. Every few months there was a pileup on the turnpike, an eighteen-wheeler in flames, a car to be cracked open with the Jaws of Life. Occasionally there were forgotten cigarettes, faulty wirings, leaf burnings gone awry, kids with lighter fluid and too much time on their hands. But mostly, Paul had learned, the life of a small-town career fireman was a never-ending series of false alarms, training exercises, fender benders, safety lectures, and fire drills.

"Think it'll be on TV?" Paul asked.

"Hell, yeah," Ben said. "Phil's been talking to cameras all morning, probably already called home to set the VCR."

"You should go now, quarterback," Sonny said. He touched the seat of Paul's bike. "Before your mom starts -- "

Then the booming voice --

"Tucker! Griffin!"

-- came from across the lawn. Black Phil was standing beside Casey Engine 14 with two grungy teenage boys. Paul recognized them from downtown, where they and their grungy friends -- a handful of creepy teenagers who wore trench coats and heavy black boots -- hung out in the abandoned lot behind the Hess gas station. They were the closest thing Casey had to a gang; mostly they just smoked cigarettes and leveled malevolent glares at passersby, but occasionally they'd knock a kid off his bike, shout lewdly at women, pick fights with jocks or black kids. One day, when Paul was six or seven, he and his mother were driving past the abandoned lot and his mother had shaken her head in disgust and said, "See those boys over there? They're goners, every one of them." From that point on Paul had always thought of them by that name: The Goners. It wasn't until a couple years later that he discovered the title was his mother's own, apparently drawn from a dozen years of teaching ninth-grade algebra at Casey High, and that not everyone referred to them that way. But the name had stuck in his mind.

"What rock they crawl out from under?" Ben asked.

Sonny shrugged. "Let's go find out."

They walked off without saying goodbye. Paul threw a leg over his bike and turned it around, started toward the driveway. He reached the crest and was about to begin his coast toward the road below when he heard voices behind him rise in expectation. He turned back and saw that the small group beside the fire truck had dispersed, that his father and Ben had put on their helmets and were walking across the lawn toward the house. They didn't look in any particular hurry, but even so all the gawkers were struggling for a better view, cameras at the ready. Paul considered -- stay or go? His mother would be starting to wonder, perhaps even to suspect that he'd come out here to join in the unseemly gawking, would be all frowns and furrows when he arrived home. But so what? No, really...so what? He wasn't smoking dope, for Christsakes. He wasn't busting windows or stealing lawn ornaments or harassing girls.

He turned his bike around.

"What's up?" a newsman yelled at Sonny and Ben, as Paul squeezed in through the crowd to the line of reporters who were pressed against the tape. Sonny turned and waved, smiled the broad, toothy smile that Paul knew was usually saved for kindergarten classes who toured the station. Clearly, something was wrong. To the untrained eye his father's gait might have looked casual, but Paul noticed tension in the backs of the thighs, a stiffness in the upper back; this was the way his father walked when someone was in trouble, when one of the dogs had chewed up the mail, when a fire hose was stowed carelessly. Both Sonny and Ben had their chins tucked toward their chests; they were talking, intently, but they didn't want anyone to know this. Paul felt his heart quicken; the goners had told them something that had sparked renewed interest in the house.

"You getting all this?" a lady reporter beside Paul said to her cameraman. He was standing directly behind her, the lens of the camera bobbing above her shoulder like a giant horsefly. Paul recognized the woman -- she was tiny, no bigger than the girls in his class -- from the eleven o'clock news, one of the Harrisburg stations. "This might be something."

"Maybe there's gas after all," the cameraman said. "Maybe they're smellin'."

And they did look like they were smelling. At the edge of what had once been the front porch and was now the edge of the pile of debris, Sonny and Ben got down on their hands and knees. Paul could feel the heat of bodies pressing in behind him.

"What're they doing?"

"Looking for something, I guess."

"They're smellin'," the cameraman said knowingly. "They're smellin', all right."

Paul rolled his eyes: another know-it-all. That was about the last thing Casey needed, another guy with his head up his butt thinking he knew all about somebody else's business. Paul watched his father remove his helmet, then bend down and lay the side of his head against a slab of concrete at the foot of the rubble. Ben followed suit. Neither man moved a muscle, and the crowd fell suddenly still, hundreds of breaths held in, the only sound the whir of video rolling.

"They're listening," someone whispered.

"What for?"

"Maybe there's somebody down there."

"Under that?"

"No way. Be dead by now even if there was."

Then Sonny and Ben abruptly stood up. They exchanged a few words, stole a brief glance at the curious crowd, then started back down the lawn toward Black Phil, strolling casually, as if nothing but the weather occupied their minds.

"False alarm," someone said.

"They're bored," someone else added. "Just lookin' for something to look for, I bet."

Paul knew better. Before he could talk himself out of it, he laid his bike on the ground and ducked under the yellow tape, then crept around the back of Engine 14, out of sight from his father and Ben and Phil. He gently eased himself down on the wide silver bumper, his hands under his thighs to block the chill, and listened to the conversation.

"...a loser," Ben was saying. "All the cops know him. Said he's some kind of Nazi or something."

Paul recognized his father's scoff. "Cops think every weird kid's a Nazi these days."

"Maybe," Ben said. "But not every weird kid has a swastika on his back."

"You kiddin' me?"

"I heard it too," Phil said. "Sixteen years old and he's got a damn swastika tattoo. All these little boys playin' at Nazi."

Nazi? The image in Paul's mind was from a video they'd seen at school the year before, black-and-white footage of tall men in steel helmets pulling dazed old women from sooty train cars, nudging them into long lines with the butts of machine guns, spitting into dirty snow.

"He's trouble," Ben said. "Building pipe bombs down there, I bet. Or mixing drugs. Like that guy, that comedian, blew himself up. You guys remember that?"

"His friends said they were just hanging out," Phil said. "Drinking beer, listening to music."

Paul peered around the corner of the truck to get a good look at the crowd, see if he could catch sight of those boys, the two goners, but they had vanished. They were always doing that, disappearing and then reappearing -- like shadows or ghosts -- in store aisles and school halls and darkened alleyways.

"You buying that?" Ben asked. "You think they're gonna tell you they got a friggin' bomb factory in the basement? I'll bet the wad that asshole brought the house down on himself."

"He'd be dead," Sonny said, "if a bomb blew in his face. He wouldn't be making all that racket. I'm telling you, Phil, he's banging like crazy on something down there. We're lookin' at a big dig."

"Backhoe?" Ben's voice had gone up half an octave. Paul smiled; he knew the truth about Ben, about his dad, about all the firemen in Casey, maybe all the firemen in the world: most of them sat around day in and day out just hoping something like this would happen.

"No way," Sonny said. "No bulldozer, no backhoe, no heavy equipment, unless we want the rest of the house coming down on our heads. We get a construction crew out here ASAP to shore the standing walls, then we go at it with our hands. Saws, axes, air chisels. We set up a cage over the dig spot to protect our guys in case anything comes loose upstairs."

"You did the training course," Phil said. "Last year?"

"Two years ago," Sonny said. "I know the drill. All we need is a passage big enough to fit one man through."

"I'm guessing that would be you," Ben said.

Paul leaned forward, peered at them around the corner of the truck. Ben and his father had their backs to him, and Phil wasn't taking any notice, his eyes narrowed with plans and expectation.

"I'm guessin' it would," Sonny answered humorlessly. "Since I took the course. Plus I'm the smallest. Listen, we know he's alive, and he's got enough strength to be making all that noise. No gas, no live wires, no water, probably plenty of air. We take our time and do it right, by the book, and then we go in and get him. Once we start digging we'll find some voids along the way, I guarantee it. The kid'll be out by nightfall."

Paul grinned. He remembered when his father had come to his fourth-grade class for a fire safety lecture, how he'd held all the kids spellbound, read them the riot act about lighter fluid, paint thinner, and aerosol cans so that even the most ill-mannered boys listened intently, mouths agape. These were the times he admired his father most -- no hesitation, no doubt, and only a single viable option: his, the right one. At home, his mother always made the calls, overrode his father's decisions about sleepovers and vacations and meals and bedtime, often with no more than a word or a single well-placed expression. But out here, out in the real world, his father was boss.

"Sounds good, Sonny," Ben said. "I can only think of eight or nine hundred ways that plan could fuck up."

"You got a better idea?"

"Yeah -- call in some guys who know what they're doing. No offense, but this ain't a job for the Kittatinny County boys."

"I took the course," Sonny said.

"In a conference room, right?" Ben asked, smirking. "Watched a slide show or something while you're drinking coffee and eating jelly doughnuts? I say we call the rescue response team in Pittsburgh, tell them -- "

"They're two hours away!" Sonny interrupted. "And that's if they leave right now, which they won't. You want us to just sit around all afternoon waiting on 'em, looking like a bunch of assholes?"

Ben shook his head. "This isn't about how we look, Sonny. Those guys in Pittsburgh are experts. They do this stuff all the time." He turned to Phil. "Think about it," he said. Then he added, pointedly: "It's your call, Phil."

But it wasn't. Paul knew it wasn't, and he knew damn well the three of them knew it too, though they stood there in the dusty drive pretending otherwise. Phil may have been the chief on paper, but when something this momentous lay in the balance it was going to be Sonny -- the blood of Captain Sam coursing through his veins, thirty years at the station imprinted on his face and hands -- who'd have the final say.

Phil scratched his head and frowned thoughtfully. For a moment it looked to Paul like old Phil might actually make the decision on his own, might suck it up and pull rank. Then his eyes darted quickly to Sonny. "Wha'dya think?"

"You know what I think," Sonny said firmly. "I think we can do it ourselves. I know we can do it ourselves."

Phil nodded. "Then we do it ourselves. I'll call the construction guys. We can have a crew here in fifteen, twenty at -- " A broad grin spread across his face; his eyes had locked with Paul's. Paul jerked his head back, but he knew he was too late.

"Just like your daddy," Phil shouted. "Come on out from there, pal."

Paul hopped down and sauntered around the corner of the truck, hands in his pockets. They were all staring at him. Phil and Ben were grinning, but his father looked mystified, as if Paul were a character in a movie he'd seen once, a long time ago, that had now inexplicably materialized in the real world.

"Time was," Phil said, "I'd be standing here talking to Captain Sam and your daddy'd be lurking around in the shadows just like you are now