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in a few places where the scar tissue had prevented hishair from coming back in. I was thinking about getting him several toupees. Like me, Sirius had lost a lot of weight. One of the things about severe burns is that you almost always lose weight.
    We finally made it to the front of the room, but my torture didn’t end there. I had to stand while the chief offered up more platitudes. Finally, at his signal, I lowered my head and he placed the medal around my neck. Chief Ehrlich didn’t dub me with a sword, but the ceremony still felt knightlike. I found one more use for skin grafts. No one could see me blush. As the medal was draped over me, applause filled the big room.
    After the chief was finished with me, he dropped to a knee and draped a similar medal around Sirius’s neck. The crowd went crazy over that and then went even crazier when Sirius extended a forepaw for the chief to shake. I didn’t tell him to do it. Sirius acted on his own volition, but the chief must have thought I directed him. As the moment was captured by the media, the chief was smart enough to know that the picture of top cop and hero dog was going to land him on the front page of every newspaper in the country. He could also count on the spot getting him two minutes on local television, and thirty seconds on national.
    In the glow of that coup and while basking in the applause, the chief put his arm around my shoulder and whispered to me, “When you come back, Gideon, whatever position you want, you’ve got.”

CHAPTER 2:

HAIL TO THE CHIEF
    The goddamn fire kept reaching for us. The blast furnace was every-fucking-where. A frustrated tear escaped my eye; the droplet sizzled on my cheek. I tried to hold my panic in check; my partner was bleeding out and I didn’t know where to go. The fire seemed to be chasing us. We moved away from the worst of the flames but couldn’t escape the smoke. It billowed, writhed and constricted; the black snake squeezed my lungs. Seeing anything was next to impossible. My eyes felt as if they’d been punched out. I struggled for air and it seemed as if I was only swallowing fire. My insides burned; my flesh was burning. In my arms my partner wasn’t moving. With one hand I slapped at Sirius’s fur, trying to put out a fire fueled by his coat. With my other hand I held him tight, along with my gun. If the Strangler made a run for it, even hell wouldn’t stop me from shooting him. And then, from all sides of us, a wall of fire rose up and dared us to pay the price of passage.
    My partner’s muzzle pushed at my face, and my first thought was that he was still alive, thank God. And then I realized that Sirius was there at my side to deliver me from my after-fire. The jolt of awareness that came with knowing I was in the here andnow made me feel as I had just jumped into ice water. My flesh stopped sizzling and I gasped, taking in air.
    And then there came to mind the image of me standing in front of Chief Ehrlich. What I saw and felt didn’t make me feel any better.
    I looked at the clock. It was 3:07. In less than seven hours I had an appointment with the chief. I patted Sirius to show him that I was all right. Because of my dreams, he always slept on the floor next to my bed. Drained from my fire walk, I tried to go back to sleep. I never dreamed of fire more than once a night, or at least I hadn’t so far, and maybe because of that I slept again.
    At half past seven I was up for good. Physically, I was almost back to where I’d been before the fire. For more than a year I had never missed a physical therapy session, and I worked just as hard on my own. To a casual observer, the scarring on my face was the only telltale clue of my injuries.
    I had thought that my physical recovery would put an end to my burning dreams, but my dreams hadn’t cooperated. There were times when I didn’t wake up burning for two or three nights in a row, but every time I began to hope that my fires were behind me my dreams