Firetrap (21 page)

40. IT'S STILL IN MY LOCKER IF YOU WANT TO SEE IT

CAPTAIN FRANK ZIMMER, ENGINE 13, C SHIFT
>

I hope you don't mind if I smoke, because I really don't think well without a pipe in my hands. The guys say it's Freudian, but they say that about everything I do. As I was saying, we're going to miss Chief Fish. It took a while to figure him out. He's always been kind of an odd duck. Even back when he was a firefighter, the old guys tell me he never quite fit in. He admitted once he barely knew his wife when she was alive, that he spent all his spare time in the basement shop and he'd never met half of her friends and didn't pay attention to the other half. All I know is he treated us like kings. He worked here almost five years, and I don't think I saw him angry once.

As far as the Z Club goes, Engine 28 was out of service when the call came in, so Engine 33 was first in and we were second. Engine 30 showed up behind us. First thing, he had us mask up and go through the doorway on side A. We went in, but there was too much smoke to see much, and Voepel and I got tangled up in all this wire. Must have fallen out of the ceiling, is all we could figure. That was scary, because for a few minutes we were really tangled. We were looking for this Mexican girl who, it turned out, was outside the whole time.

Ladder 12 was in there with us, and that was when Vernon Sweeting went missing. We left the building first, so I don't have any idea how that happened.

After the first search, we were assigned to set up two lines on the A side. It took us a while to stretch the lines and get water to them.

It was about then that Fish asked me to do a three-sixty of the building. So I go around to side D, where Engine 33 is. Engine 30 has come in behind them and is setting up. Three guys are on Engine 33's line. They're in the foyer of the building, and the whole thing is orange. They've got their line on straight stream, and nothing the line hits seems to have any effect. We know the arsonist used Molotov cocktails, and we know he threw at least one on the main floor through the front door, because Marshal 5 found the telltale char pattern on the floor afterward. Man, it was really burning. I went around to the C side, and at that time—I think Engine 28 was just arriving—it was all dark back there. Just a row of cars parked up alongside the building. No windows that I could see. Hardly any smoke.

When I get back to the A side, there's these two trees on fire on the parking strip next to the building, but my guys are getting water on them. And I'm hearing some civilian saying there are people inside. We ask them how they know, and they say they just know. No reason. Well, we'd just established that there wasn't anybody inside. Right about then McMartin comes out the front door alone. I think, like a lot of firefighters in that position, he couldn't quite believe he'd really lost his partner.

So flame is coming out of the lower windows along the street on side A, and we're pouring water through them when some guy up on the second floor flags us down. Turns out there are people inside after all, but they're on the second floor. We put up a ladder and take ten victims out the window. That was when Voepel and I thought we'd better take a line through the window and look for more victims.

We get the line up, and you know how much work it is to take a charged line up a ladder. Me and Voepel go through the window, which puts us in this little room, and we open the door, and it is just nothing but this really hot black smoke and fire. Melted my helmet shield. It's still in my locker if you want to see it.

We were only up there a few minutes before the chief made us come back down.

Losing Sweeting goofed us all up. Sweeting…Jesus.

41. WHEN YOU READ PEOPLE LIKE I READ PEOPLE

VINCENT TULLEY, Z CLUB FIRE WITNESS—NOW DECEASED
>

It's Friday night, and I'm getting ready to take Barney Fife for a walk when I spot a man loitering across the street in front of the old dance hall on the corner. Sensing trouble, I grab my cell phone and give the cat a little pat before hooking up Barney's leash. It is a beautiful night, and if I'm heedful, we can get back before the start of the
Frontline
piece they're doing on airline safety.

Sure enough, down on the corner the young man continues to loiter in front of the old dance hall. Barney's watering a maple tree, and then I look up and the guy's talking to some kid on the front steps of the dance hall. I don't know what this guy's game is, but I didn't work the ferries for thirty-five years without cultivating the ability to read strangers at a glance. In my sixty-two years I've witnessed several crimes and been to court to testify against people twice, so I'm always on the alert for nut jobs.

Barney's doing his business, and all of a sudden there's a fire across the street, by golly, right in front of the young man, who just stands and looks at the flames, and then pulls out a cell phone and starts waving it around.

Except, when I get closer, it's not a cell phone after all. I'm pretty sure it's a gun. Probably a toy. I have a sense about these things. So I get on my cell and call 911 and finally get put through to fire, and they ask me a bunch of questions, and by this time he is walking away, and I'm thinking, What the bejesus. You're a witness. Get back and do your civic duty.

You let people get away with the little stuff, next thing you know they're up to their eyeballs in the big stuff. I don't let people cut in front of me in checkout lines, and I don't let people talk during the opera, and I'm not planning to let this young man get away without giving a full report to the fire department.

So Barney Fife and I do a quick jog-trot across the street and intercept him in a spot where it's particularly dark because not all the streetlamps are working, even though I sent in a complete list of the outages in our neighborhood more than six months ago. I catch him quickly because his pants are halfway down to his knees, like they wear them these days, and hobbled like that, he can barely walk, holding up his trousers with one hand.

I find it best to get right to the point with malefactors. If you're as tall as I am, you stand close, too, because that intimidates them. Especially the young, who are easily intimidated by my deep basso voice.

“Hey you, mister. You've committed a crime leaving the scene,” I say.

“Fuck you!” he says.

“Go back and make it right. You can't just walk away.”

“Watch me, motherfucker.”

“That's just…you know, that kind of talk…that's just not necessary.”

There's a busload of witnesses in front of us when I tug on his jacket trying to get him to stop, and he turns around and whips out the toy gun and sticks it in my chest. “Outa my life, motherfucker.”

“That language is just…”

And then there's an explosion and something hits me in the face, and as I lie there I realize the object that hit me in the face is the sidewalk. And that's when I hear the bus drive past. It just drives away as if I'm not lying here on the germ-laden sidewalk with Barney licking my ear. Could it be that I've had a minor stroke like my brother, Ambrose? I'm going to need a shower before
Frontline,
because there are millions, if not billions, of germs on your average sidewalk.

I don't know how many minutes have gone by, but I'm trying to get up when I hear the siren. A vehicle door opens and closes. I hear what sounds like a police radio. A man is next to me on the sidewalk, his voice laced with command. In a small way, it helps cut through the confusion. “You awake, buddy?”

42. TREY SPILLS NO TEARS

JAMIE ESTEVEZ
>

Somehow, miraculously, Trey and I have come to the conclusion that the best thing to do tonight is to dine at my place over a plate of pasta while we talk things over. He's drawn a series of maps and graphs, intricate scenarios of the building and the fire ground on Mylar sheets so that one sheet can be laid on top of another: a timeline of sorts, each sheet in ten-minute increments in the beginning, and then thirty-minute increments for the duration of the fire. It's incredible work and gives me a picture of the fire as it unfolded, and as I glance at it in the car, I wonder if he might not have made a good living as a graphic artist. Along with the Mylar drawings, he's composed a list of every firefighter who was at the fire and carefully charted their positions, as far as we know them. All I can figure is he's been up all night working on this, because much of this information we gleaned only yesterday. And I thought he wasn't taking our work seriously.

Wednesday night we visited the partially demolished Z Club, a pilgrimage I'd been putting off almost as sedulously as Trey, for we'd been passing within two blocks of it every day. The Z Club was in Columbia City, a multicultural neighborhood, originally a mill town, which had fallen into disrepair by the seventies but had recently been undergoing extensive renovation and rebuilding.

As would be expected, all that was left of the Z Club was a mere shell, the tallest standing walls on the west and north sides. The east side, where the front door and the stairs had been, was leveled almost to the street, so that it resembled a burned-out garage rather than a building that had once been fully enclosed. The only intact portion of the roof was tilted at a crazy angle. Astonishingly, even after three weeks the area reeked of smoke and char.

The parking lot was filled with pyramids of debris and three enormous Dumpsters heaped with charred wood, burned furniture, and artifacts from the fire. Yellow crime-scene tape surrounded what was left of the building, as did a temporary Cyclone fence. What really surprised me, even though I'd seen the news reports, was the plethora of flowers, cards, and beribboned trees. Offerings of teddy bears, dolls, carnations, helium-filled balloons, handwritten notes, gift cards, and other paraphernalia overflowed the site like an infestation, filled up most of the small parallelograms in the Cyclone fencing, and even showed up a block away on telephone poles, trees, and parked cars. Everywhere, we could smell flowers along with the char.

We got out of Trey's car and stood looking at the rubble, neither of us moving. Finally Trey said, “It's overwhelming, isn't it?”

“I thought you might feel differently, since you were here when it happened.”

“Why would that be?”

“I just thought there might be something else in your head.”

“My head is full of dead bodies. That's what my head's full of.”

“Hard to believe so many people have visited.” Even as I spoke, a large Ford cruised up the narrow street, the occupants craning their necks to view the wreckage of the Z Club. They stopped in the intersection for a few moments, noticed us, and moved on. They were white. We were black. Maybe that had something to do with their leaving. Everybody we'd spoken to in the past two days had mentioned the black-white thing. Every morning in the papers there were angry letters to the editor on both sides of the issue, and the local radio talk shows were buzzing with it.

It had rained, and the sky was damp with clouds.

Trey walked me around the building, showing me where the command post had been, where Engine 33 came in and set up the first hose lines, where Engine 13 parked, and where Engine 28 had ended up in the rear behind the parking lot now filled with debris.

“We came in from Rainier,” Trey said. “Clyde was driving pretty fast. Usually we do a search, but on one side of the building they couldn't get through the flames and on the other they were driven out by the heat. Then there were all those parked cars behind the building. I wasted a minute or two trying to get some cops to get the civilians out of our hair. They'd been harassing Engine 33, but the smoke started coming out that door and it pushed all the civilians toward us. Finally I told this one guy it was a federal offense to hinder a firefighter at a fire scene.”

“Is it?” I asked.

“I don't think so. He thought his brother was inside. He said he was either in Wenatchee or in there. I called the IC and asked if anybody'd searched the second floor, but I couldn't get through on the radio. Too much air traffic. That's the way it is at a big fire. One person gets on the air for whatever reason, nobody else can use the channel. It's like a big party line where only one person can talk at a time.”

“What'd you do?”

“You want it all now, standing here in the dusk, maybe rain coming on?”

“If you're ready to tell it.”

43. THE DEAD MAN IN THE WINDOW

CAPTAIN TREY BROWN, ENGINE 28, C SHIFT
>

I'm working with my regular crew, Clyde Garrison and Kitty Acton. The bell hits at 2225 hours, an aid call a few blocks north on Rainier Avenue: man down.

When we arrive, bystanders are staring at a man on the sidewalk, a yapping dog next to him, a large puddle of blood under him. I kneel beside the man, white, in his sixties, Kitty and Clyde behind me with the aid kits. Nobody seems to know what happened to our patient, although several onlookers thought they heard gunshots.

I radio the dispatcher to send us a medic response.

After we put a cervical collar on him, we roll the patient over, cut off his shirt and expose two bullet wounds in his chest; we find no other wounds except for a hematoma on his forehead, probably from falling to the sidewalk. He's moving good air but only on one side. We assume one of his lungs has collapsed.

As we load our patient onto the stretcher and trundle him into the back of the medic unit, Engine 33 comes roaring up Rainier Avenue and turns west half a block behind us. The two men in the crew cab are dressed for action, in full bunkers and masks, which means it's a fire call. It should be ours.

A police car pulls up, and one of the officers looks at my captain's bars and asks what happened. I tell him it's a shooting, two holes to the chest. He tells me they may have the shooter in the backseat, just as Engine 30 comes racing up Rainier from the north. I hear more sirens in the distance. Clyde yells that they have a fire around the corner.

From the medics I get the okay to go in service, and as we roll, Kitty is already masking up in the crew cab. A fire. A shooting. An arrest. All within blocks of each other. It's crazy.

I contact the dispatcher and they add us to the fire call.

We drive around the block and arrive at the fire building, where Engine 33 is scrambling to get water on the fire. Two firefighters have masked up and are trying but failing to fight their way into the entrance.

I announce to dispatch and Chief Fish that we're on scene. The street is full of men, women, children, none with coats, all looking as if they've evacuated the building. On channel 1, Chief Fish orders us to go around to the rear of the building and establish Division C. At the back of the building, I dismount and throw a backpack and bottle onto my back, though as a division commander I probably won't use them. There's nothing showing on the face of the two-story wall in front of us. No fire. No visible windows or doors. Just a row of cars parked below the wall. Above us smoke is being pumped from under the eaves of the roof.

I spot a row of boarded-over windows on the second floor painted the same color as the wall. Although the parked cars are blocking access to most of the windows, I tell Kitty and Clyde to throw up a ladder between a pair of cars where there's enough room to squeeze one in.

I give a report to Chief Fish, telling him we've got no fire on this side. Heavy smoke out the eaves. No access.

While Kitty foots the ladder, Clyde climbs up and pulls the plywood off the window with the axe. Black smoke boils out the window frame, and Clyde climbs back down the ladder, coughing. He's halfway down the ladder when a man appears in the window above him, blind from smoke and panic. Despite my shouts for him to wait, he climbs up onto the window frame and steps into space. He catches a foot on the ladder and plummets to the ground, doing half a somersault and brushing Clyde, who is still on the ladder, so that he lands on his head at the base of the ladder.

“Backboard and C-collar?” Clyde asks, but by this time there's another man in the window, and I tell Clyde to go back up and get him. The broken man at our feet is in semiformal clothes, good shoes, and an expensive watch, and it worries me. He's dressed for a party. People don't usually go to parties alone. I call for a medic unit and more manpower for rescues, but I can tell by the bonking tone my portable radio makes that my transmission isn't getting through. I wait and try three more times before my transmission is received. The delay makes me crazy.

By the time I get the message across, Clyde has helped a heavyset young man onto the ladder and I've spotted two more heads in the smoky window, each of which disappears. Now I'm wondering how many people are up there. And then deep inside the building, I see the oily dark orange express train that signals heavy flame. It will roll across the ceiling until it builds up, and then it will descend and wither everything in its path.

To my left, another window pops out and another body falls toward a parked car with the jagged motion of a bird that's been shot out of the sky, almost striking two firefighters who are probably on their way to report to me. I don my face piece, activate my air supply, put on both gloves, and race up the ladder just as Clyde and his victim clear the bottom rungs. Clyde is hacking from the smoke, and the victim is limp from it, a male dressed as if for a night out—gold chains, a gold watch, and his best Nikes. Kitty is examining the man in the heap at the bottom of the ladder, who I suspect is dead.

“I'll pitch, you catch,” I say to Clyde as I scramble up the ladder and dive inside the window, landing on a pair of soft bodies. I'm wearing full turnouts, rubber boots, and a mask with forty-five minutes of compressed air in the bottle on my back. I can see the space is heating up and about to flash over. If memory serves me right, we are in a huge space with a high ceiling, so there is plenty of room above me for hot gases to build and produce a flashover larger than anything I've ever encountered.

“Fire department!” I yell so people can find me by my voice. “Fire department!”

I see nothing but smoke and some flame maybe twenty feet above my head and the dim outlines of the window I've just come through. I find a woman on her knees almost directly below the window. I encircle her torso with my arms and lift. I get her to the window and help her out. She is semiconscious, and I suspend her over the ladder while Clyde, still coughing, climbs up to assist. Even with Clyde's help, it's touch and go getting her out safely. I can hear the flame ripping behind me, can feel the superheated smoke blasting out the window. Can feel another body on the floor bumping into me repeatedly like a trapped bumblebee slapping the sides of a jar.

I reach down for the victim at my side just as somebody else crashes into me. “Where's the fire department?” she says, and continues on.

“Back here,” I call out. “Right here.”

The body I've got in my hands now is a male, but he's too big to lift. He's probably too big for two people to lift. I try, but it's like trying to pick up a three-hundred-pound bag of Jell-O. He's been crawling but has collapsed in place. Meanwhile, the woman comes back and embraces me. I help her to the window and she's saying, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” I put her on the ladder just behind Clyde and the first victim, who have made little progress.

“Move it!” I yell. “This place is loaded with customers.” Behind me I hear women screaming.

“Over here!” I yell at the two screaming women, now three screaming women, now four. “Up here! Fire department.” The screams are coming from a lower level of the little theater. I hear footsteps on the wooden floor, lots of footsteps. There are more people than I expected. I can't hear any firefighting efforts, only a dull roar from a rapidly approaching fire overhead. I've never been in a situation with this much potential fire above me or so many people to rescue, but I know this: the larger the space, the larger the flashover, so that the puny residential flashovers I've survived in the past by flattening myself on the floor will seem like nothing when this thing melts me into a puddle of wax and teeth.

“Up here!” I shout.

A woman crashes into me, mumbling, and without stopping to think, I hoist her out the window. She shrieks with the suddenness of it. There are already three people on the ladder, and they're moving slowly. “Get another ladder,” I shout to a firefighter who's shown up in the parking area below us, even though I have no idea where he might place another ladder, and even though it will be too late for the woman in my arms.

The woman begins to slip from my grasp. I lean out the window and lower her as far as the combined length of our arms can reach, so that her toes are only seven feet or so from the hood of a Honda. I let her go and hear the crumpling of sheet metal as she slams into the car. Another woman is at the window beside me. I pick her up and drop her onto a second car.

I call out, grab a man shuffling past in the smoke, manhandle him out the window, and drop him as delicately as you can drop a man out a second-story window. It is starting to get really hot.

I drop another victim. And another. I begin to lose track. I am breathing heavily with the work, sweating so that I'm soaked in my turnouts. Some of them resist, but they are blinded and incapacitated by the smoke. Somebody grabs me in a stranglehold the way a drowning victim grabs a rescuer, but I head-butt her to the floor, readjust my face piece, which she's knocked ajar, and drop her out the window. She lands on the hood of a car, where her head cracks the windshield.

Feeling around in the smoke, I listen to footsteps pounding on the wooden floor in distant sections of the building. We have less than a minute before I will be forced to leave. Maybe less than thirty seconds. I'm taking a risk just being here. I don't want to be here when it flashes. But then, neither do these people.

I call out and then fumble for more bodies and sling them out the window as quickly as possible, placing only one or two on the ladder, which seems to be full each time I need it.

And then I find myself engulfed in flame.

I've timed it badly and have been caught in the flashover, and I'm curled up on the floor below the window, at least I think I'm below the window. I'm disoriented. The only sound is the roar of the flame as it descends on me. Slowly I scoot backward, trying to wedge myself into the corner under the window, but the farther I scoot, the more I begin to suspect I'm moving in the wrong direction. Everywhere I look I see orange and black and nothing else. I'm being burned through my turnouts. Baked like a potato.

I crawl to where I hope the window is, reach up, but grasp only smoke, not even the wall. Now I've lost the wall and don't know which direction to go. I crawl another foot or two and bump into a body on the floor. For all I know, I'm heading deeper into the building. A quick touch tells me the body is the obese man I've been bypassing, the one who's too heavy to lift. He groans, “Help me.” Ironically, the position of his body acts like the needle on a compass, because I remember his legs were pointing toward the window. I follow his legs.

“Get up, buddy,” I yell, but he doesn't stir, and he's too big for me to move without his assistance. Flame comes down like a sheet blowing in the wind, and I can feel it through my turnouts, and then in one swift movement I squirm over the windowsill like an otter sliding into a pond and ooze down the ladder face-first, gripping the beams on either side and braking with my gloved hands, sliding two stories to the parking lot, a technique we've practiced in training.

When I get up off the pavement, flame is shooting out the window above me. I've got some minor burns under my turnouts, but I'll survive, which is more than I can say about the man I've been forced to abandon upstairs. How many others are up there with him won't be known for hours.