"I Never Said That"

Following an afternoon of nonstop runs, firefighter/paramedics, John Gage and Roy DeSoto, finally returned to their quarters.

The two exhausted men exited their rescue squad and dragged themselves into L.A. County Fire Station 51’s dayroom.

“Did I get any phone calls?” John wondered, as the weary pair made their way over to the coffeemaker for a much-needed jolt of caffeine.

His crewmate, Chet Kelly, was standing in front of the stove, cooking a bubbling brew—of some unrecognizable sort—in a large, stainless steel kettle. He stopped, right in mid-stir. “As a matter of fact,” the cook set his long-handled spoon down on the kitchen counter and crossed over to the closest phone, “some chick has been trying to get a hold of you for the past three hours.” He ripped the top sheet off the little notepad, that was resting on the shelf beneath the telephone, and passed it to the paramedic. “She sure has a sexy voice…”

Gage ignored the message-taker’s unsolicited remark and read the note. ‘Call Margo at 873-4421 about some party Friday night. URGENT!’ “Margo? I don’t know any Marg—” he stopped talking and cringed, in sudden remembrance. “Oh. That Margo.”

Kelly had gone back to his stirring. He stopped again and turned to stare at Gage. “She must be a real dog, huh.”

“On the contrary,” John corrected and crumpled the piece of paper up. “She’s darn good lookin’! Sort of a cross between Ferrah Fawcett and Ann Margaret.”

“Something must be wrong with her,” Chet reasoned, “or you wouldn’t have crumpled the note up.”

“I promised Max Reynolds I’d work C-Shift over at 8’s for him this weekend. So I can’t go ‘partying’ Friday night.” The paramedic paused to take a sip from the steaming cup his partner had passed to him.

“Station 51…”

Gage set his untouched coffee down on the kitchen table and tossed the crumpled note into the nearest wastebasket.

The two rescuers then turned around and started trotting back over to their recently vacated vehicle.

“…Construction accident,” the dispatcher quickly continued. “…Two men trapped on a platform rig…1211 East Graham Avenue…One-two-one-one East Graham…Cross-streets: 7^th and Washington Blvd…ambulances responding…Time out: 16:22.”

“Station 51. KMG—365,” Captain Hank Stanley calmly acknowledged. He replaced their call station’s mic’ and passed his paramedic team a copy of the address, before crossing the apparatus bay and climbing up into Big Red’s cab.

Once out of the fire station, the rescue vehicles veered right and headed off down the street, with their warning lights flashing and their sirens wailing.

Station 51 arrived at 1211 East Graham Avenue in less than eight minutes. Both firetrucks screeched to a halt and their occupants bailed out onto the boarded up site of a fourteen-story building that was still under construction.

The firemen tilted their helmeted heads back and then stood there, staring up the building’s steel-beamed skeleton.

A gentleman in a bright-orange hardhat came jogging up to greet them. “Am I glad to see you guys! Two of my men fell four floors and landed on a platform rig! We tried to raise the rig up to the top, but the cable’s jammed! Can’t get it to lower, either!”

His crew began gathering up the requested rescue gear from their engine’s side compartments and the rear of the Squad.

Gage and DeSoto quickly donned some life-belts. The paramedics then pulled what equipment they figured they’d be needing from the side compartments of their rescue squad.

“Four floo-oors?” John repeated, as the pair came jogging up. “Has anybody seen any movement?”

Gage and DeSoto exchanged grim glances and got some firmer grips on the handles of their heavy cases.

The foreman led the equipment-laden firemen over, and onto, one of the construction site’s open-air elevators.

The safety gate was slid into place and the caged lift began to ascend.

“What caused these guys to fall, in the first place?” Hank wondered on the long ride up.

The site foreman shrugged. “Who knows? Everybody’s quitting for the day. The men are in a hurry to get home. People get careless.”

John Gage wasn’t buying into any part of the foreman’s spiel. The fireman’s father had once worked the high steel.

Guys who walked the high girders couldn’t afford to ‘get careless’—no matter what time of day it was.

One workman falling was improbable enough, as it is. But two? And, both at the same time? Nahhh. Something had to have gone very, very wrong, in order for that to occur!

“We’ll lower you two down from the top,” Stanley proposed, as the lift proceeded past the floorless level the stuck platform rig was located on.

His paramedic team acknowledged his plan with a couple of quick nods, and kept their concerned gazes locked on the two non-moving fall victims.

A brisk breeze was blowing across the construction site’s uppermost staging platform.

There was a rather large crane mounted to the steel-girdered building’s front left corner, and the wind was whistling through the trolley runway on its lowered jib arm.

John set his heavy equipment cases down and went trotting over to the very edge of the staging platform. The paramedic peered down at the ridiculously narrow walkway on the platform rig, dangling four floors below. There was no way they were gonna be able to treat those guys down there. He stepped back from the edge and turned to his Captain. “Cap, that walkway looks awfully narrow. How ‘bout we bring ‘em up here to work on ‘em?”

The Captain took a couple of cautious steps toward the edge of the platform and glanced down. “I see what you mean. All right, Roy, you stay up here. Chet, you go down and help John.”

Roy placed his equipment cases down on the staging platform. “I’ll start setting things up,” he optimistically informed his partner.

John pulled his leather gloves on. Upon noting his Captain’s ‘All set’ nod, the paramedic crossed back over to the very edge of the staging platform and turned to face his friends. The fireman got a two-fisted grip on the rope and then quickly dropped to his knees.

The engine crew continued to lower their comrade. Suddenly, they felt two sharp tugs on the rope.

John’s lifeline was secured and their energy was re-directed, toward lowering Chet.

Kelly quickly backed off of the staging platform and his helmeted head also vanished from sight.

By the time Kelly reached the platform rig, the paramedic had already completed initial patient surveys on both fall victims.

Gage raised his grim gaze to the roof. “Send down the O2, the Trauma box, a backboard, and the first Stokes!” he called up to his Captain.

Less than a minute later, the requested equipment was lowered to their position, strapped inside a wire mesh stretcher.

Just a measly three minutes more and the pair had the trauma patient ventilated, splinted, completely immobilized and all set to be transported topside.

John tipped his helmeted head back, pointed his right index finger skyward and twirled it around in circles a few times, in the universal sign for ‘Okay, take ‘er away!’

Kelly manned the stretcher’s anchor line and their packaged patient was hoisted up to the staging platform.

Stanley gave them a ‘thumbs up’ signal and, within moments, the second stretcher started to descend.

The paramedic respectfully draped a bright-yellow drop-sheet over the dead workman. His broken body was strapped into the Stokes, along with the Trauma box, and pulled back up onto the staging platform.

His partner had already established an IV, administered the necessary drugs and gotten the go ahead from Rampart to transport.

Gage gazed down at the staging platform, at all the scattered, open cases. "I'll collect the rest a' this stuff and then catch up with you at the hospital."

Stanley, Stoker and Lopez hauled Kelly up onto the roof and released his lifeline. Then they each latched onto a corner of the critical patient’s stretcher.

Roy retrieved their Bio-phone and their Drug box and followed his fellow firefighters onto the crowded lift.

Station 51’s Commander quickly realized that they were going to have to make two trips. “Chester B.!”

“Mike and Marco will be back up in a bit, to help you and John bring the other guy down,” the fire officer informed him. “In the meantime, you two can start gathering up the gear.”

Instead of ‘gathering up the gear’, Chet stepped back over to the very edge of the staging platform for one last long look down. “Didn’t it strike you as strange, that neither one a’ those guys had their life-belts on?”

The paramedic snapped another equipment case shut. “Yeah. It did,” he confessed. Gage glanced up and saw that his fellow ‘gear gatherer’ was still just standing there, staring down at the platform rig four floors below. “Shouldn’t you be coiling ropes up, or something?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’m just trying to figure out what must a’ happened, yah know…”

Just then, a strong gust of wind came up and blew the roof crane’s jib arm inward. Which, in turn, swung the crane’s counter jib outward.

The counter jib’s ballast struck Kelly in the back and he was knocked off the edge of the staging platform. “Ahhhhhhhhh!”

John watched—in abject horror—as his friend was suddenly swept right off the roof. The rather large pile of loosely coiled rope at his feet was rapidly growing smaller. He snatched a section of the dwindling rope up and twisted it around the open clip on his life-belt a couple of times. Then he wrapped his arms and legs around the base of the nearest girder and held on, to both the rope and the steel beam, for dear life!

The falling fireman’s dead weight slammed the person on the other end of the rope into the steel beam he was hugging. “Gahhh-ahhh!” the paramedic cried out in agony, as the air was forcibly expelled from his lungs, in a sort a’ steel girder version of the Heimlich Maneuver. His life-belt pressed painfully into his lower back and the rope bit into the palms of his hands.

John felt the rope in his hands suddenly go slack and—for a few horrifying seconds—he feared that it had snapped. But then the tension returned to it—full force! Gage grimaced as he was, once again, rammed into the steel girder he was embracing. Just as his vision was beginning to ‘tunnel out’ on him, the rescuer’s twice traumatized lungs began functioning again. “Oh-oh…gawd!” was the first thing he said, once he had regained the ability to speak. “Ah-ah…shit!” was the second. The paramedic closed his watering eyes and then sat there, wishing that that damned elevator wasn’t so damn slow.

All eyes in the lowering lift had widened in horror, and all hearts had skipped a few beats, as the fireman’s falling body suddenly shot past them.

Four audible sighs of relief could be heard, when Kelly’s unscheduled flight abruptly ended—well short of the ground.

Stanley, Stoker and Lopez exchanged amazed glances. They knew that Kelly’s lifeline was no longer secured. So what had stopped his fall?

“Ga-age…” Hank realized aloud and turned his attention to the foreman. “Can you stop this thing?”

“I can stop it, all right,” the man grimly replied. “But we still gotta go all the way down, before we can go back up.”

“Damn!” the Captain angrily exclaimed, and stood there, wishing that the damn elevator wasn’t so damn slow.

John heard the lift’s safety gate go up…and then the sound of footsteps rapidly approaching his position. He felt the tension on the rope ease and then someone’s reassuring hand on his right shoulder. He exhaled a silent sigh of relief and forced his eyes open.

Gage’s crushed ribcage was really killing him, as were the contused muscles in his upper arms and thighs. It hurt like hell to draw a deep breath. So he just summed his initial assessment up into a simple nod.

“What the hell happened?” was his somewhat relieved, and more than a little skeptical, boss’ second inquiry.

“The…gears…in the crane’s…slew mechanism…must be…shot, Cap,” John breathlessly informed him, through teeth clenched tightly in pain. “Cuz’…the wind…swung the jib arm…around…and the ballast…on the counter jib…knocked Chet…off…of the…staging platform.”

Hank gave the obviously hurting paramedic’s right shoulder a sympathetic squeeze. “Think you can hold on a little longer?”

Once again, Gage was relieved to be able to answer his Captain’s question with just a nod.

Gage watched his fellow firefighters haul back on Kelly’s rope, hand-over-hand-over-hand.

It seemed to take another eternity for the Irishman’s helmeted head to appear above the staging platform.

As Kelly was hoisted back up onto the roof of the fourteen-story building, he exhaled an enormous—and very audible—sigh of relief.

The Captain personally escorted his engine crew clear of the roof crane’s deadly reach.

Kelly dropped to his wobbly knees, whipped his helmet off, and breathlessly inquired, “Did my hair…turn white?”

Gage’s grimace instantly transformed into a grin and, in spite of the moans and groans it produced, he just had to chuckle.

Kelly’s light inquiry caused their Captain to grin, as well. “No. Your hair did not turn white…yah twit,” he affectionately added.

“I think I might a’ had a heart attack on the way down. But I’m okay now, Cap. What the hell happened?”

The Captain quickly returned to his obviously injured crewmember’s side and prevented him from rising. “Did you break anything?”

Gage checked himself out—again. His ribs were badly bruised. But nothing ‘felt’ broken. There was no real restricted movement in his arms or his legs either. “Nope.”

Stanley accepted the paramedic’s self-assessment with a gi-normous grain of salt.

The corners of the young man’s mouth and eyes were pinched in pain, and his respirations didn’t seem quite ‘right’.

The Captain offered his hurting young friend a hand. Warning bells went off, when Gage didn’t immediately grab onto it. “Let me see your hands.”

The paramedic reluctantly proffered the requested appendages, palms up and open.

Hank winced and motioned for Mike and Marco to help their injured shiftmate to his feet. “Kelly, I want you to drive Gage, here, over to the hospital, and then I want you both to get yourselves completely checked out. Understood?”

Stoker and Lopez grabbed Gage under his bruised arms and he was hauled up onto his unsteady feet.

John just stood there for a few moments, hunched over and hurting. “I’m…okay, Cap. Honest. I can drive the Squa—”

“—Here’s the deal,” the Captain interrupted him, his eyes narrowing into no-nonsense slits. “Chet drives you over to Rampart. And, when you get there, you are going to…”

Chet spent the first half of their journey to the hospital thanking Johnny—profusely—for saving his life.

Kelly spent the rest of the ride in to Rampart, grilling Gage about ‘that Margo chick’.

Odd thing was, John didn’t seem to mind being interrogated…so much. In fact, he seemed downright eager to satisfy his prying pal’s curiosity.

Chester B. backed the Squad up to Rampart General’s Emergency Receiving. Then he bailed out and hurried around the front of the truck, so he could open the door for his pained companion.

John winced, seeing that his partner had been closely followed by two orderlies—towing a hospital gurney.

“C’mon!” DeSoto ordered. “A deal’s a deal. Cap’ let you ride in in the Squad. Now, you need to get on the gurney.”

Gage’s shoulders sagged in defeat and he unwillingly placed his posterior down on the stretcher. “This is stupid,” he grumbled and gave his bossy buddy an irritated glare.

At the same time, Kelly carefully picked their pouting patient’s long legs up, and then, even more carefully, swung them over and onto the stretcher as well.

“This is stupid,” the now completely horizontal paramedic repeated to a passing cloud.

In fact, ‘This is stupid’ sort a’ became the injured fireman’s mantra, as he was wheeled through the hospital’s Emergency entrance, around a corner, down the hall, and into the nearest Treatment Room.

“What do we got, DeSoto?” Mike Morton pondered, as he pushed his way into Exam One.

“Apparently, my partner, here, got ‘up close and personal’ with a steel girder,” Roy eagerly informed him. Perhaps a bit too eagerly, he realized, as his ‘partner’ aimed another irritated glare his way.

“The front of him hit the flat side,” Kelly solemnly replied. “His arms and legs hit the channel side. Yah see, he was sort a’ ‘hugging’ it.”

The young doctor stepped up to the treatment table John had been transferred to. He tilted his head and ‘beamed’ an anticipatory smile down at his unhappy patient. “I can’t wait.”

Gage grimaced and shut his eyes, effectively blocking the physician’s smug face from his view.

“He, uh, also has some dandy rope burns on his hands,” Roy further volunteered.

“Well?” Morton impatiently pondered. “There are obviously very good reasons for why you were ‘hugging a steel girder’ and not wearing your gloves. So now, why don’t you share them with me….”

Since his injured friend wasn’t immediately forthcoming, Kelly filled his physician in on everything that had transpired.

Morton turned to address them. “Nancy, contact radiology. Tell them I want a complete spine and chest series. Sharon, we’re gonna need to clean and dress these abrasions. Bring me some meparadine and a syringe.” The physician turned to the nearest vertical fireman and barked out one more order. “Roy, get his clothes off.”

The doctor’s last two orders had apparently gotten the horizontal paramedic’s attention, because he suddenly propped himself up on his elbows. “Doc, I don’t nee—”

“—Look,” Morton interrupted, easing his antsy patient back down onto the table, “even ‘bionic’ paramedics need to ‘bite on a bullet’, now and then.”

“But,” his patient pouted, “if you shove that drug in my veins, I’m not gonna be able to return to duty!”

Morton smiled smugly down at him. “Trust me, Gage. You won’t be returning to duty—even without the drug in your veins. Besides, by the time we get through running all the tests I have planned for you, your shift will prob’ly be over and done with, anyway.” The doctor stepped up to one of the treatment room’s many glass-doored cabinets and returned with a clear plastic jar. “I’m gonna need you to pee into this cup for me. There is a strong possibility that your kidneys may have been compromised. We have to check your urine for blood.”

John Gage exchanged a glum glance with his partner. Then he exhaled a weary sigh of surrender…and promptly re-closed his eyes. ‘Chet takes a header off a fourteen-story building, and I’m the one who ends up in the hospital? Humph. Go figure…’

Roy DeSoto whistled his way across Station 51’s apparatus bay.

That morning, Gage was going to be back on duty, and that was definitely something to whistle about.

His partner had suffered bruising to both his ribcage and his kidneys. However, it was the severe rope burns to his hands that had caused Johnny to miss the last couple of shifts.

“Yeah!” Kelly sarcastically exclaimed. “It was just ‘hunky-dory’! I didn’t really mind her coming to pick me up, so much. But, when she opened the car door for me—”

Gage fell back into his open locker and then sat there, clutching his bruised ribcage and laughing—hysterically.

Roy couldn’t help but grin. “What’s so funny?” he wondered, as he stepped up to the bench in front of his own locker and began unbuttoning his shirt.

Kelly gave Gage an annoyed glare. “Why don’t you ask that lying partner of yours?”

The hangered shirts in Johnny’s locker parted and his grinning face appeared. “I never lied, Chet!”

Johnny’s head disappeared behind his blue uniform shirts again, and he began laughing harder than ever.

His partner’s laughter must’ve been contagious, because Roy found himself chuckling right along with his friend.

“I never…said…that,” Gage corrected, when he’d regained enough of his composure to speak. “I said that…she was…unbelievable,” he somehow managed to blurt out, between fits of giggles.

“Okay,” Kelly was forced to concede. “But you can’t deny that you said that the two a’ you had a really terrific time!”

Johnny fell out of his locker and onto the floor. He was now laughing so hard, he could barely breathe. He knelt there, doubled over the bench in front of his locker, laughing and laughing and laughing. “I never…said…that,” he finally managed to get out, between guffaws, gasps and groans. “I said…it was an evening…I would never forget!” he quickly squeezed in, and then cracked up all over again.

Chet remained un-amused. In fact, he was looking downright miffed. Just as his mustached mouth opened to speak, the Station’s alarm went off. The fireman finished tucking his uniform shirt’s tails in and snatched up his helmet.

Kelly gave his still-giggling, extremely aggravating shiftmate a parting peeved glare, before disappearing out the locker room door.

“…refuse fire…2147 South Polomar…cross streets: Garfield and Ames…Two-one-four-seven South Polomar…Time out: 07:53…”

Johnny stifled a few last snickers and then started getting stiffly to his feet. “Chet took Margo…to a party last Friday night. Well…actually, Margo took him,” he corrected and commenced chuckling—again.

“That man-hating chairm—person of the local Women’s Liberation movement?”

Gage dropped back into his locker and began tugging off his shoes. “Hey, I didn’t tell Kelly to call Margo,” he stated in his defense.

Johnny sat there, looking very pleased with himself. “I mean, it’s not my fault that Chet has such an overactive imagination.”

“You realize he’s gonna wanna get even with you. Don’t you. He’s gonna use that ‘overactive imagination’ of his, to figure out a good way to get back at you.”

Gage looked thoughtful, and maybe even a teensy bit nervous. He gave his smug partner a grumpy glare.

Station 51’s paramedics were returning to quarters, following their sixth run—in as many hours.

Johnny suddenly leaned forward in his seat, so that he could look up at the sky. “Know what happened the last two times we got called out to replace 36’s?”

“Johnny, that was just a coincidence. The weatherman is calling for sunshine and blue skies—all day. Honestly, how can you remember all that nonsense?”

John gave the Squad’s doubting driver a ‘We’ll see…’ look. “Under ‘I’,” he calmly corrected, “for interesting.”

“Correction. What Chet did to himself. Maybe, just maybe, this’ll teach ‘im not to steal another man’s dates.”

The two famished firemen climbed wearily out and started heading for the rec’ room.

Mike Stoker was seated at the kitchen table, scribbling something on a pad of paper. As their missing shiftmates came strolling into the room, the engineer stopped what he was doing and locked gazes with Gage. “One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand. I figured it out,” he added, upon seeing the paramedic’s look of complete confusion. “Two-and-a-half seconds was all the time you had to save Chet’s life. That building was about 180 feet off the ground, and Chet was falling at an accelerated rate of 32 feet per second. So in the first second, he fell 32 feet. In the second second he fell another 64 fee—”

“—I, uh, believe what Michael is trying to say,” Captain Stanley suddenly interrupted, upon noting that Stoker had lost Gage right at around ‘I figured it out’, “in his own inimitable ‘engineer’ way, is that…Yah done good, pal!”

“Oh,” John gave his grinning interpreter a grateful glance. Then he locked gazes with the engineer again and beamed a grin back at him. “Gee. Thanks, Mike.”

“So-o,” the speedy rescuer patted his grumbling belly a couple of times, “anything leftover from lunch?”

Lopez glanced up from his crossword puzzle. “There’s some sandwiches and salads in the fridge.”

DeSoto’s right hand had no sooner touched the handle on the refrigerator’s door, when their Station’s tones sounded.

The dispatcher's words were nearly drowned out, by a sudden, unbelievably loud 'Boom!' of clapping thunder.

So Chet didn’t get a chance to converse with John again, until the two of them were assigned to get the kitchen cleaned up the following morning.

“When did you ditch Margo, Gage?” Kelly wondered, and passed the paramedic another dripping plate.

“I was gonna get out of her car at the first stoplight,” John confessed, as he toweled the object dry. “But I hadn’t eaten anything all day. So I let her take me to this really swank restaurant, where she insisted upon picking up the tab, and ordered the most expensive thing on the menu. I tell yah, I ate like a king. After dinner, she had planned to take me to this exclusive club. But I told her that I was too tired to dance. So then she suggested that we go back to her place. I told her I wasn't the kind a’ guy who kisses on the first date.”

Gage placed the dried plate down on the counter. “Margo ended up dumping me, actually—onto the sidewalk in front of my apartment building.”

“We-ell…I let her take me to the party. I let her pull my chair out for me. I even let her fetch me a drink. But, when she started showing me off to her friends—like I was her latest ‘boy toy’, I told her I had to go ‘powder my nose’…and left.”

Suddenly, Kelly’s grumpiness returned. “Because a’ you, I’m out ten bucks cab fare!”

The paramedic just stood there, smiling unrepentantly. He set his soggy dishtowel down, picked up the stack of dried plates and went to put them away. "I was sort a' hopin'," he said, as he cautiously pulled the cupboard door open, "that the Phantom would give me a free pass." Nothing sprang out at him, so he set the dishes down and closed the cupboard door. "On account a' how I saved his sorry ass the other day."

The paramedic appeared to be both pleased and relieved to hear that and immediately headed off, in the direction of the locker room.

Just as he was about to exit the locker room, his partner entered, closely followed by Kelly.

Johnny stepped up to his locker and jerked its door open. Instantly, his ears registered the dreaded 'sprong' sound. The paramedic cringed and closed his eyes, as a panful of water was flung in his frowning face. The fireman slowly forced his soggy eyes back open. He blinked the liquid from his lashes and aimed an annoyed glare in Kelly's direction. "I thought the Phantom was going to give me a free pass."

"I never said that," Chet nonchalantly replied. "I said, 'That sounds reasonable'."

Gage exhaled an exasperated gasp and then attempted to shake some of the water from his hair.

Roy flashed his flustered friend a smug 'What'd I tell yah?' smile. Then he stepped out into the apparatus bay and went strolling off in the direction of his car…whistling all the while.

Chapter One

“Station 51…”

Roy DeSoto whistled his way across Station 51’s apparatus bay.

Kelly gave his still-giggling, extremely aggravating shiftmate a parting peeved glare, before disappearing out the locker room door.

The End