Absent Friends by S. J. Rozan

fire and help. Jimmy's dad musses Jimmy's hair and smiles. His mother smiles, too, but then she looks at him without saying anything, just looks and looks at him.
     
    Now, when the smoke is whipping and the flames are roaring, someone still has to hold Jimmy back, someone senior screaming, No! some soot-streaked face in his, yelling, Don't play Superman, kid, just do your job, that way you make it out and all your brothers, too. What Jimmy wants, what he wants, is to go howling in, come out carrying everyone in his arms.
    But Brother: they're calling him that already.
    So he nods through the smoke, follows his orders, shrugs when his captain shouts to him, What the hell's so funny? Jimmy's seen the same grin, the one he can't keep back, flash across his captain's face, and some of the other guys', too, as they're piling off the truck, eager, one more time, to cheat the dragon.
    Jimmy's happy.

L AURA ' S S TORY
    Chapter 2

    First In, Last Out
    October 30, 2001
    Laura was on the street, blundering through the scattering of midtown pedestrians. End-of-the-day rush hour, but no crowds; mostly office workers, residents, people who had to be here. Finally, on a corner, a cluster of defiant tourists, pointing cameras at the Empire State Building because it was still standing.
    Laura barely noticed any of these people, or the sun, or the softness of the air. She was thinking about other afternoons, and nights, mornings, too, about the dry rough feel of Harry's hands and the taste of gin when he kissed her.
    Leo had been too smart to try to send her home, to try to give Laura Stone some time off. But a dazed, hollow-eyed reporter isn't much use around a newsroom, in fact gets in the way. Too many others feeling like they have to say something, too much swampy thickness in the atmosphere. What Leo had done instead was rearrange the week's Metro sections, pulling someone's piece on the teachers' union from Friday to tomorrow, pushing Laura's SoHo merchant story to later in the week, maybe even Monday or Tuesday. Because the teachers' union piece was more timely, he'd growled as she stood in his doorway, and she should goddamn know better than to even ask.
    So when Laura left soon afterward, she could have been assumed to be working: seeking out more sources, interviewing Prince Street businessmen she'd skipped in her rush to deadline, taking the extra days to dig deeper. No one really did assume this, but Laura's dry-eyed fierceness and the rigid lock of her shoulders set up enough of a barricade that the sympathetic glances and kind comments were mercifully few. As Laura jabbed and jabbed again at the elevator button—slowest frigging elevator in New York, Harry always said, especially when thirsty reporters needed their beer—Georgie appeared and stood sadly, but Laura, her focus inward, living again an afternoon not so very long ago, did not turn his way.
     
    Harry Randall's explosive piece on the real James McCaffery—the third story, following by two weeks the one Leo had assigned as a soft feature on the Fallen Hero, a heartstring-tugger (and assigning it to Harry, the newsroom knew, was further proof of how far Harry himself had fallen)—had been brilliant, and Laura had told him so.
    But Harry had not been so easily bought.
    It was the trailing edge of an afternoon in late October. Harry had discreetly absented himself as she sifted through his copy. She ran through it once, then again, was on it for a third time when he brought his worry and his gin back with him into the bedroom.
    “Terrific,” Laura told him, scooting over to make room. “Jesus, Harry, this'll light the fuse. It's fabulous.”
    Neither of them was on that day, and they had not left Harry's apartment. While Harry hunched over his desk, the clicking of keys stopping only when he was rifling through papers, flipping notebooks open and shut, or shifting folders from pile to pile, Laura kept herself mostly to the bedroom. Once or twice, pulling her robe