"Help me!" she shrieked, coughing violently as the black smoke filled her lungs. "Marcus! Help!"
I looked to the driveway.
Marcus and the two Apex guards were standing by their black tactical SUV. They weren't running toward the fire. They weren't pulling out fire extinguishers.
They were staring at the burning garage with wide, terrified eyes. The heavy propane tanks were still inside, hissing loudly, threatening a second, much larger explosion.
Marcus made a split-second decision. He didn't get paid enough to burn to death. He turned, shoved his two men toward the SUV, and jumped into the driver's seat. The engine roared to life. The tires squealed against the pavement as the three heavily armed, "elite" security guards abandoned the woman who paid them, fleeing down the street in an absolute panic.
Karen saw them leave. Through the smoke, I saw her head drop back against the concrete. The screaming stopped. She was trapped, the heat was rising, and the people she had bought with her money had left her to die.
She was completely alone.
CHAPTER 4
The heat from the burning garage was already radiating across the property line, drifting through my broken window and warming the skin on my bare chest.
I stood in the silence of my own shop. My ribs throbbed with a dull, rhythmic agony. Every instinct of self-preservation screamed at me to stay exactly where I was. To wait for the fire department. To let the woman who had tried to steal my home, who had ordered me beaten, who had poured coffee on my chest and called me trash, face the exact consequences of her own arrogance.
If I stayed in my garage, the fire would consume her. The HOA plot would die with her. My house would be safe.
I looked down at my chest. The flaming skull of the 47th Rescue Squadron stared back at me in the dim light. We didn't ask who was in the fire before we went in. We just went in.
"Dammit," I muttered.
I grabbed a heavy, four-foot solid steel breaker bar off my workbench. It weighed a solid twenty pounds. Gripping it tightly in my right hand, I hit the button for the garage door.
As the door rose, the roar of the fire hit me like a physical wall. The flames were licking up the white stucco siding of Karen’s mansion, the thick black smoke blotting out the Sunday morning sun. Sirens were beginning to wail in the far distance, but they were miles away. They wouldn't make it in time. The secondary propane tanks were already beginning to whistle—a high-pitched scream that meant the metal was heating up and expanding.
I broke into a run.
Every step across my lawn sent a blinding spike of pain through my ribs, the athletic tape biting into my skin as I forced my body to move. I crossed the property line, ignoring the mud Karen had sprayed earlier, and charged straight into the thick, choking black smoke pouring out of her garage.
The heat inside was unimaginable. It felt like walking into a blast furnace. The oxygen was being violently sucked out of the room by the flames.
"Karen!" I shouted, coughing as the acrid smoke burned the back of my throat.
"Here!" a weak, ragged voice choked out.
I dropped to my knees, getting under the worst of the smoke layer. My eyes were watering so heavily I could barely see. I crawled forward across the burning concrete until I found her.
She was trapped under the massive oak structural beam. Her red high heels had been blown entirely off her feet. The red silk dress was scorched black along the edges. Her face, usually so perfectly made up, was smeared with ash, soot, and blood from a cut on her forehead.
She looked up at me. When she realized who it was, her eyes widened in absolute shock. The man she had just ordered beaten into the dirt was the only one standing between her and a terrible death.
"Arthur," she whispered, her voice cracking. "The beam... I can't move my legs."
"Don't move," I ordered.