“Give me the truck keys.” My brother flipped Christmas dinner onto the floor when I refused, while Mom screamed that I had “made him do it” and Dad ordered me out. Gravy dripped down the wall as Trevor called me selfish. I didn’t argue. I called my accountant and canceled every bill I paid. Then the real panic finally began....

“Do not spray water on the units!” Trevor screamed as Engine 42 came to a halt with a shudder of air brakes. He sprinted toward the rig, waving his arms like a deckhand on an aircraft carrier. “The thermal shock will trigger a panic cascade!”

Miller dropped down from the officer’s seat, his boots hitting the slush with a solid, authoritative crunch. He didn’t look at Trevor. He looked at the trailer, where gray smoke was now leaking through the slatted wood siding with increasing enthusiasm.

“Bennett,” Miller barked. “Grab the water can and the thermal imaging camera. Barnes, pull an inch-and-a-half line just in case these morons lit something structural.”

“It’s not structural!” Trevor yelled, suddenly realizing who was stepping down from the crew cab behind Miller. He skidded to a stop on the ice, his eyes bulging behind his wool beanie. “Oscar? What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m working, Trevor,” I said, walking past him with the metal pressurized water extinguisher in one hand and the yellow TIC camera in the other. “Which is what people do when they don't have someone else paying for their cell phone.”

“You cut my service!” Trevor shouted, following me like a yapping terrier. “I was in the middle of a logistics routing update! My navigation dropped in the middle of the bypass! I had to follow Randy’s Honda by visual contact alone!”

“Who is Randy?” Miller demanded, pointing his heavy leather-gloved finger at the man in the ski goggles.

Randy stepped forward, lifting his goggles to reveal bloodshot eyes and a patchy goatee. “I’m the Chief Agricultural Officer of Goat-Vibe LLC.”

“Randy,” Miller said flatly, “your goat trailer is on fire.”

“It’s not *on fire*,” Randy insisted. “It’s an auxiliary heating malfunction. The ambient temperature in the cargo bay dropped below forty degrees. The units were shivering. If they shiver too much, the fainting mechanism activates prematurely, and you can’t reset them for client engagement without a twenty-minute rest cycle. We rigged a diesel space heater to a marine battery under the straw.”

I brought the thermal imaging camera up to my face and pointed it through the slats of the trailer.

The screen lit up in bright, violent shades of yellow and purple. The marine battery was reading four hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit. A pile of soiled hay directly above the jury-rigged exhaust pipe was smoldering, slowly cooking the wooden deck from the underside.

“Get the latches off,” I said to Barnes, who had trotted up with an axe and a halligan tool.

“Wait!” Trevor shrieked, lunging forward to grab Barnes’s coat. “If you expose them to direct daylight without the sensory blinders, they’ll lock up! I have four thousand dollars in client deposits for a New Year’s Day mindfulness retreat in Shaker Heights!”

Barnes—who weighed two hundred and forty pounds and spent his off-days framing houses—didn't even turn his head. He simply extended his left forearm, caught Trevor by the chest, and shoved him back four feet into a snowdrift.

Barnes drove the pick of the halligan into the rusted padlock on the trailer door, popped the hasp with one sharp twist of his shoulders, and wrenched the double doors wide.

A wall of thick, sweet, straw-scented smoke rolled out into the winter air.

Inside, stacked in three tiers of wooden produce crates, were thirty-odd miniature black-and-white goats. Every single one of them was standing completely, rigidly upright, their eyes wide with catastrophic terror.

As the cold air hit them and the siren from the responding police cruiser echoed down the block, a strange, collective clicking sound rattled through the trailer.

Then, in perfect, domino-like synchronization, all thirty goats tipped sideways onto their flanks, their legs sticking straight out into the air like stiff wooden pegs.

Silence fell over the driveway.

Miller took off his helmet, scratched his graying temple, and looked at me.

“Well,” Miller said. “At least they aren't running around.”

I unhooked the hose of the water can, stepped up into the straw, and buried the nozzle directly into the smoldering nest of hay under the battery box. Two sharp pumps of the handle, a hiss of white steam, and the fire was out.

The goats remained horizontal.

Behind us, a second car pulled up to the curb. It was my father’s silver Buick LeSabre. The engine was pinging, and the passenger side window was smeared with condensation because the defroster had evidently failed.

Dad got out of the car. He looked at the fire engine. He looked at the smoke. He looked at Trevor sitting in the snowbank. Then he looked at me holding a fire extinguisher in the back of a trailer full of unconscious farm animals.