Seconds passed. Ethan’s sanity balanced on a razor’s edge. Then a long quivering breath dragged agonizingly through his chest. “All right,” he breathed. “All right…”

“Sir, let the firefighters do their job. They’ll find her. If she’s in there, they’ll do everything they can to bring her out.”

But will it be in time? Will everything be enough? “Yeah…okay. All right…”

The bands around him eased. He drew another excruciating breath; his heart was racing, every beat torture. Dazed and shaking like a sleepwalker woken up too suddenly, he pulled away from the Secret Service man and looked around. But it was another few seconds before he was able to make full sense of his surroundings, and when he did, realization slammed him in the chest. Pivoting, he clutched a handful of Tom Applegate’s shirt.

“Where’s Rupert Dove?”


There were some advantages after all, Doveman thought, to being old. Old age made a person invisible, especially to the young. Young folks concentrating hard on doing a worrisome and difficult job paid no mind to an old black man-not until it was too late. He heard the shouts that followed him up the steps of the corner row house, but he paid them no mind. Then he was inside the burning building, and couldn’t hear them, anyway.

The noise of the fire filled his ears, filled his head, filled his mind, suffocating thought. Ahead of him through the swirling, billowing smoke, he could see the stairs. Pulling the tail of his shirt over his face, he focused on them, held his breath and began to climb.

He knew just where she’d be. He’d spotted that third-floor window, the first one on the side, the one with the crumpled ledge and the remains of a broken balcony hanging off the bricks. The one where that boy’s poor momma had died. Doveman knew his Joanna. If she’d gone after the boy, that’s where she’d look for him. If she was alive, that’s where she’d be.

And she was alive, Doveman was sure of that. The Lord wouldn’t have brought her all this way to take her now, not when she was so close to the Promised Land…


Momma? Where are you? It’s dark, and I’m scared. I can’t see you, Momma…

I’m here, baby. Put out your hand…see? Just hold on to me. Everything’s going to be all right…

“Momma? Momma!”

“It’s okay, baby, I’m coming,” Joanna shouted. Coughing racked her again as she crawled along the floor, feeling her way through the choking darkness, but it was mixed now with sobs of sheer relief. “Keep calling, Michael. Keep calling so I can find you…”

“Mom-ma! I can’t see you!” The voice was closer now. And angry rather than afraid.

“I’m coming, Michael, I’m coming…” And all at once she could see him, over by a window-a dark head-shape in a backward baseball cap, silhouetted against the flashing lights from the emergency vehicles outside. “Here I am, Michael, I see you.” And she was laughing…coughing, choking and laughing with relief and joy. “Put out your hand, see? Just hold on to me. Everything’s going to be all right…” She felt a hand creep into hers, like a little lost thing seeking shelter. She reached out, and a pair of thin arms wrapped themselves around her neck. A cheek came against hers, leaving it wet with tears. “It’s okay,” she croaked, patting the child’s shaking back. “Okay.”

Trying to peel the boy’s arms from her neck was like bending wire. “Michael, now listen,” she said firmly. “We have to crawl now, okay? Like this…and hold your breath as long as you can-like when you swim underwater. Okay? Let’s go…”

But out in the hallway the smoke was thicker, taking up all the space, even down near the floor. Michael began to whimper. “I can’t breathe…I can’t…breathe!”

Joanna tried desperately not to breathe. Then she was desperate to breathe…and found that she couldn’t. It was just like her nightmare-there was no air for breathing.

With her last ounce of strength she gathered Michael into her arms, lurched to her feet and staggered toward the stairs. Darkness closed in, and she was falling…falling…

Then…as in her old nightmare, just when she was sure the darkness would take her forever, she felt strong arms around her, and a cracked voice murmuring comforting words in her ear: “It’s okay, baby-girl…you gonna be all right now. Doveman’s got you under his wings…”


Ethan was standing on the edge of the chaos, hugging himself and shivering in the muggy night, hearing his teeth chatter as he stared through glittering, flickering patterns of light and darkness. When a cry went up from someone in the moving crowd of emergency personnel, he started upright, his body tensing as if it had received a powerful jolt of electricity. Cheers followed, and a smattering of applause, and the crowd surged forward as one body toward the entrance of the burning building. Ethan felt himself moving with them, with no idea how he’d come to be.

A small cluster of people had appeared at the top of the steps, seemingly disgorged from the doorway along with billows of smoke and the snapping, creaking, cracking sound of collapsing timbers. A strange-looking assembly it was-two firefighters in breathing masks and full protective gear supporting one elderly man, who held cradled in his arms a woman-who carried in her arms a child-and all of them barely recognizable, covered from head to toe with soot.

As paramedics rushed forward to relieve the exhausted firefighters of their burden, Ethan struggled to join them.

“Please,” he croaked, looking into Tom Applegate’s eyes.

The Secret Service man hesitated only a moment, then nodded and let him go.

He got to Joanna just as a paramedic was fitting an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. She struggled against it, eyes blazing like pieces of a sunny day in her blackened face, until Ethan, down on one knee beside her, laid a restraining hand on the paramedic’s arm. She spoke to him, then, in a voice like blowing sand, and he had to lean down close to hear.

“Help…them. Doveman…”

Something fierce and bright exploded inside him. It rushed through his chest and exploded from his lips in a sound-not words, just a gust of breath, as if someone had punched him hard in the stomach. He felt himself shattering, saw his heart and soul and every preconceived notion he’d ever had of goodness and character and courage and strength lying in glittering shards all around him. For the first time in his life he felt that he was seeing things clearly, all those things and one more: Love. There they were, all laid out before him in one ravaged, smoke-blackened face. Joanna’s face.

“Doveman…” she whispered again, pleading.

“I will, I promise,” he said, forcing the words through the terrible ache inside him.

He nodded to the paramedic, who replaced the mask. Joanna’s eyes drifted closed.

Dragging in great gulps of air, Ethan surged to his feet. He stood for a moment, swaying slightly, trying to slow the frantic pace of his heart, trying to orient himself in a world that seemed suddenly to have spun out of his control. The only concrete thing in his life just then was the woman lying at his feet. The only thing he knew for certain was that leaving her just then was the hardest thing he’d ever done.

He touched the paramedic’s shoulder and croaked, “Take good care of her.” Then he went to find Michael and Rupert Dove.

Michael he found with no trouble. All he had to do was follow the racket, because his aunt Tamara was hovering over the paramedics who were trying to tend to him, sobbing and scolding at the same time with the shrill ferocity of overwhelming maternal relief. “Boy, what were you thinkin’? I’m gonna skin you alive-what am I gonna do if you get killed? What’s your momma gonna think? Don’t you ever do that again, you hear me?”

Ethan stopped long enough to assure both himself and Tamara that the boy’s condition was far from life-threatening, which in the latter case took some doing. It was only when she realized who she was talking to that she finally stopped her agitated pacing to whisper, “Dr. Brown…he’s really gonna be okay? You sure? Praise God, he’s gonna be okay…” Then she sank to the curb and began to rock herself and her baby back and forth, back and forth, crying in soft, exhausted whimpers.

“Where’s the other one?” Ethan quietly asked the young female paramedic who was checking Michael’s vitals. “The old man-the one who brought them out.”

The paramedic jerked her head. “Over there, last I saw.”

“Thanks…”

In a quiet eddy behind an EMS wagon he found a little knot of people working in grim and frenzied silence. Wading through them, he crouched over the still body of Rupert Dove. “What’ve we got?” he asked hoarsely.

Kenny Baumgartner glanced up at him and pulled the stethoscope out of his ears. “Lost him once,” he said tersely. “He’s back now, though. We’re ’bout ready to roll.”

Ethan nodded. “Let’s go.”

Kenny gave him a surprised look as he got to his feet. “You coming along, Doc? I didn’t think this was your night-”

“I’m coming,” said Ethan softly. He looked down at the haggard and blackened face of the old piano man, mostly hidden now behind the oxygen mask. “You know who that is?”

“Well,” said Kenny, “I hear he’s one helluva hero.”

“Yeah. He’s also Rupert Dove.”

“The Doveman? You kiddin’ me?”

Ethan shook his head. “We’re not losing him.” He felt calm in his mind for the first time since he’d climbed out of the dark sedan back there in the street, and filled with a tense resolve. This was a battle he was used to, a battle he was trained to win. A battle he was determined to win. Because there was just no way in hell he was going to let the Doveman die. Not here, and not now.