The Smoke Room (21 page)

29. WE’RE BUFFOONS

ROBERT JOHNSON,
Ted Tronstad, and I were waxing Engine 29 in the sunshine behind the station, a David Byrne tune blaring through the open apparatus bay as we took advantage of what we suspected would be one of the last sunny afternoons of the year. Just three multimillionaire murderers polishing a rig for the city.

Johnson was up to his old tricks, playing a joke on Tronstad by waxing his helmet while Tronstad worked on the other side of the rig. A dirty, battle-scarred helmet is a point of pride to any firefighter, so it was a testament to Tronstad’s state of mind that he didn’t react or comment at seeing his helmet, now shiny and clean, in Johnson’s hands, looking as though it had never seen any action. Not being able to get his hands on the bonds had put Tronstad in a foul mood; he’d been hectoring me about it all day.

There wasn’t much conversation, partially because the music was so loud—an infraction Tronstad committed to deliberately nettle the irascible neighbors—and because we were about talked out.

So far our shift had been relatively quiet, all the excitement and nightmares occurring in other people’s lives, which was the way it was supposed to be when you were a firefighter. You went to other people’s excitement and remained calm and unruffled because the trouble wasn’t yours, and because you’d been trained to handle it dispassionately.

As expected, Tronstad came in hung over and throughout the day took catnaps when he thought he wouldn’t be missed. The only reason Tronstad had come to work was to make sure I didn’t blow town with the bonds.

One way or another, we wouldn’t be working together again, and we all knew it. Tronstad would take his money and abscond. Johnson still hadn’t made up his mind whether to run or to stick around and attempt to fake normalcy. Me? I was going to get arrested. Whatever else happened, whatever I decided to do, they would be coming for me. Sometimes you just knew when the jig was up, and I’d lived with this premonition for some time now.

Our temporary company officer, Lieutenant Covington, was a dull man with a bald head and a passion for growing roses and breeding Scottish terriers. Covington had been with the department twenty-two years and spent most of his free time at work in front of the television.

It was almost three in the afternoon, and some of the neighborhood kids were walking past the station with a soccer ball. I tried to savor what was probably my last day on the job.

“We meet again,” came the booming voice.

I was alone on the officer’s side of the engine, feeling the sun warm my dark blue uniform shirt. Standing in front of me was the ex–FBI agent, Brown, his wife lingering behind him in the apparatus bay. As before, he wore a dapper suit and polished shoes. He didn’t stand close, the way he had the other day, but kept a good ten feet off. For reasons I couldn’t understand, it was just as intimidating. “I may have intruded the other day,” Brown said, squinting in the sunshine. “You men just coming back from a funeral and all. Thought I’d make my apologies and get the truth this time.”

“The truth about what?”

“Son, I’ve put away more snot-nosed ass-wipes like you than you could count in a month of Sundays.” He stepped closer, seven feet away now. “You just tell me what I want to know, and we won’t have any problems.”

“What would you like to know?”

“For starters, what time do you get off?”

“Tomorrow morning at seven-thirty.”

“Jesus. Don’t tell him that,” Tronstad said, coming around the front of the tall fire engine. “You’re just going to tell him whatever he wants? This guy’s an asshole.” Then to Brown, “Fuck you. And fuck that old bag.” Brown made a move toward him, but Tronstad began dancing backward like a bantamweight fighter in the ring, retreating until he disappeared through the bunk-room door. “Don’t tell him nothin’!”

I smiled a crooked smile at Brown. Funny how even when a man was trying to steal your life you wanted to be civil.

“You just tell me everything you know about Charles Scott Ghanet. Everything about that last night you were at his place. Everything you might know about whatever sparked your two buddies here to buy new vehicles shortly after.”

“You’d have to ask them.”

“Right now I’m asking you. Speak up, boy.”

In the apparatus bay, Brown’s wife began nosing into our supply locker, only to be intercepted by Lieutenant Covington, who said something I couldn’t hear over the music, then escorted her into our living quarters.

“Holy cow,” Johnson said, as he came around the rear of Engine 29 and spotted the old man. “Where did you come from?”

“Straight from the Federal Building downtown, son. And I’m here to tell you buffoons that if you don’t tell me what I need to know, you’ll be going there, in steel bracelets.”

“You’re not even official,” Johnson said, uncertainly. “You’re retired.”

“I can arrest you both. Oh, you bet I can.”

“I want to see my lawyer,” Johnson said.

“What about you?” Brown’s voice softened as if gentling a horse. “You willing to talk to the FBI?”

“I thought you were retired.”

“We’re not talking about me, son. We’re talking about some righteous fellas I know who pee battery acid and sleep with women got brass wire growing out of their cunts. Four of the toughest sons of bitches you’ll ever meet. They’re downtown right now, and if I give them the say-so, they’ll want to see you. Trust me, you’ll be sorry you met them.”

“I’m sorry I met you.”

Brown moved forward, five feet away now. “Don’t be sassing me, son.”

“Leave him alone,” Johnson said, stepping alongside.

“If you want to come back with your friends,” I said, “come back with your friends. For all I know, you’re a bank robber yourself.”

“Bank robber yourself,” Johnson repeated.

As we spoke, Tronstad, carrying a brown paper sack in his arms, opened the far door leading from the bunk room and sneaked across the front of the apparatus bay and outside through the open doors. I had no idea where he was headed, but I could tell he didn’t want Brown spotting him. Knowing Tronstad, he was going to egg the old man’s car.

“Just tell me what you three took out of that house. You do that and I’ll let you go.”

“Don’t say anything, Gum. He can’t arrest us. He doesn’t have that authority.”

“What’d you boys take out of Ghanet’s?”

Robert was beginning to get that deer-in-the-headlights look he took on when he went wrong on an address or when you tried to talk to him about it afterward.

Brown said, “I knew you sons of bitches had done something. It just wasn’t possible our people could ransack that house and come up with nada.”

“It was a standard welfare check,” I said. “A neighbor or relative gets concerned, and we investigate. If the place is locked and we think there’s sufficient cause, we break in.”

“You broke in
three
doors, son.”

“We couldn’t find him.”

“I saw your place. Down there off Genesee Playfield. Saw
your
place, Mr. Johnson, over off Seward Park Drive. Got yourself a nice little homestead. Nice little family. Nice little girl.”

“Are you threatening me?” Johnson asked. “Because if you’re threatening—”

Brown stepped forward, smelling of licorice and mothballs and something that might have been booze. “I don’t have to threaten you. You got the U.S. government on your tail.”

“We haven’t seen any U.S. government,” I said. “So far all we’ve seen is you.”

“I want that money back, son.”

“If you’re legit,” I said, “get the real FBI up here.” Brown glared at me. “I mean, if you think we did something. Which we didn’t.”

“We didn’t,” Johnson repeated.

Without taking his eyes off me, Brown said, “You got any idea what it’s like in a federal prison, son? You think about that when you’re congratulating one another on how you dusted me off, because that’s where you’re headed. Lompoc ain’t going to be pretty.”

“I don’t happen to think
you’re
pretty,” Johnson said.

“We’ll be in touch.” Brown pivoted and walked to his wife, who’d just stepped back into the apparatus bay, took her arm, and escorted her out of the station through the front doors.

“What was all that about?” Lieutenant Covington asked, after they were out of earshot.

“He’s just some weirdo,” Johnson said.

“His wife told me he was with the federal government. She said he used to be postal inspector before he joined the FBI. She also said she was a ballerina with the Joffrey. You believe that?”

“He
could
have been with the FBI,” I said.

“No, I meant the Joffrey. She’s kind of wide in the beam for a ballerina.”

“Maybe she gained weight after she quit,” Johnson said.

“She was a nice woman. Wanted to know everything there was to know about you three. You’re twenty-two, aren’t you, Gum?”

“Twenty-four.”

Covington was still talking when Brown’s Lincoln appeared at the front of the station, the power steering squealing as he motored through the apparatus bay. For half a second I thought he was going to run us down, but at the last moment he veered to the right and screeched to a halt.

“I’ll see you two again,” Brown said through his open driver’s window.

“You’re going to have to remove that vehicle,” Covington said, stepping toward the Town Car. “You’re on fire department property.”

Brown sped off, and Covington went back inside to watch TV. After a while, Johnson said, “That old fart’s been spying on us.”

“I bet he’s the one who tried to break into my place.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I’m thinking he’s after that money himself.”

“Brown knows Tronstad and I bought new vehicles after we found Ghanet. In retrospect, that doesn’t seem like such a great move.”

“You think?”

When Tronstad showed up with a broad smile on his face, Johnson’s voice was steeped in sarcasm. “Thanks for the help. At least with three of us we might have had a chance if he jumped us.”

“You afraid of an old man?”

“I’m afraid of
that
old man.”

Tronstad only grinned.

30. EDITED FOR BITTERNESS

AS WE LEFT
the station on an alarm, I spotted the black thermal column five or six blocks away, smoke rising into the cobalt sky with incredible rapidity, racing to the heavens as if pouring out of a deep fissure in the earth in a rapid series of interconnected bubbles.

In my two years in the department, we’d responded to any number of vehicle fires, and they’d all been like this, the smoke so thick that it looked like you could surf on it. A couple of hundred pounds of petroleum-based plastics lining the interior made it a fait accompli that almost nothing burned quite as hot as a car fire.

The dispatcher had sent Engine 29 on a single. Just the four of us. Before Tronstad even got to the apparatus, I had my heavy coat snapped tight, the collar up, and had pulled my Nomex hood around my neck for later deployment over my head. Though he was hyperactive in every other area of life, and as a kid had spent years on Ritalin, until Sears showed up and coached us Tronstad had been slower than ketchup getting onto the rig. Today he was back to his old habits.

When he finally climbed into the crew cab beside me, he was carrying his bunking coat instead of wearing it. He smiled as if we shared some delightful secret. I hated this sudden chumminess he was determined to inflict on me, as if now that we were killing officers together, we were
especially
good friends. I hated that he’d turned me into a co-conspirator and an accessory to murder, and despised myself for not being able to find a way out of this labyrinth. I didn’t want to be in the same city with him, and I certainly did not want him thinking we were buddies.

“Yahoo!” Covington said, as we sped up California Avenue toward the intersection with Admiral Way, the key intersection in this end of West Seattle. “Would you look at that?”

It was a large American car sitting askew in the center of the intersection, as if the driver had lost control at the last moment. Oily rafts of smoke and orange balls of flame boiled out of every orifice and roared out of the radiator, shooting so high the flames were melting the lenses in the stoplight above the car. Shards of window glass glittered on the street around the vehicle.

The intersection was jammed up in all directions, most of the occupants of the nearby vehicles standing next to their car doors so they could gawk. As we rolled up, a pair of elderly women made a dash for the sidewalk and two big-bellied men in T-shirts danced around the periphery, dumping portable extinguishers ineffectually. The heat was so intense, the men couldn’t get close enough to make their handheld extinguishers do anything but lay down a white film of chemical dust over the broken glass surrounding the car.

Before we stopped rolling, Covington turned around. “Preconnect, boys. Make sure you mask up tight. Earflaps down. I’ll get a bar for the hood.”

Tronstad should have been masked, covered, and gloved up when we came to a stop, but he wasn’t anywhere close, so I was on my own.

The preconnect was a two-hundred-foot section of hose, preplumbed, so that all we had to do was pull it out of the hose bed at the rear of the rig, stretch it out, and kick the kinks out of it so water would flow freely. A good driver would fill the hose line while you were still running, nudging flakes off your shoulder with the water pressure.

The Task Force nozzle gave us 165 gallons per minute, and the tank on Engine 29 held 500 gallons. That meant, discounting the water it took to fill two hundred feet of inch-and-three-quarters line as well as the plumbing inside the rig, we would have just under three minutes wide open. In theory it would give Johnson plenty of time to connect to a hydrant while I tapped the fire.

As we rolled to a stop, Covington gave a radio report while Johnson did his in-cab procedures and jumped out. Outside he would set the wheel blocks, give me water on the preconnect, then go to the hydrant with one end of a supply hose and hydrant wrenches.

Even though I was fifty feet away, I could feel the heat as I climbed down from the crew cab. I had my mask on, my gloves, my Nomex hood over my face piece, and my helmet: enough gear that I could walk through flame if I had to, at least for a few seconds. As I approached the car with the hose line, a front tire melted and blew out with a muffled
thump.

I heard the pump revving behind me, heard the sound of water under pressure as it filled the hose line, then took a good a grip on the heavy nozzle, ready to buck the pressure when I pulled back on the bale.

I opened the nozzle and moved in, getting closer than I probably should have, feeling the heat on my neck through the Nomex hood. The whooshing water made the burning materials inside the car crackle and turned the black smoke white. I kept at it, moving closer, waving the water stream in circles, bouncing water under the vehicle to put out the burning oil and gasoline on the pavement, and angling the stream in the windows.

In the backseat I saw something hunkered next to the door. It startled me because for some reason I’d assumed the car was empty. It was a body in semi-repose, arms upraised as if posing for a boxing photo. I recalled from training that burn victims frequently curled into a pugilistic pose after the fire shortened and tightened the tendons in their arms.

It was a female, hair and clothing burned off, charred beyond recognition. I couldn’t figure out what was on the left side of her torso until I realized she had one silicone breast that had boiled over and dripped down her front like a raw egg. A cancer survivor, I thought. To survive cancer and die here . . . The rest of her was all char and grimacing teeth and wisps of smoke.

Covington still hadn’t gotten the hood up, so I hit the flames through the radiator, then screwed the nozzle to straight stream and bounced water off the street under the car one more time.

Tronstad was behind me now, pulling the heavy hose line so I could move freely around the car. I couldn’t help noting he still wasn’t covered, his MSA face piece dangling off his chest, which meant as soon as we got near any smoke he would vanish.

The predominant winds were from the north, so as I moved around to the south side of the car and cooled the tires, I found myself in a wash of hot, oily smoke that permeated my clothing. In the smoke and steam, I could barely see the car. Not surprisingly, the driver’s door was open, a second body half in and half out, having apparently gotten tangled in his seat belt, possibly as he turned around to help the woman. He was burned, though not as badly as the woman. His hair was gone, his face blackened and unrecognizable.

A wave of depression swept over me. Perhaps because I’d already been depressed all week, or because I didn’t have enough years in the department to handle so many deaths in rapid succession. Life was supposed to be simple. You were conceived and born. You suckled and grew. You lived your life, and if you were lucky you left others behind who could take over where you left off. At the end of it all, and sometimes before the end of it all, you died.

Humans participated in this natural and inevitable progression, yet we spent our lifetimes trying to protect ourselves from the reality of it, society having worked out 1001 ways to buffer us from the truth: the quest for possessions, the lust for big houses, extravagant vacations, sex, big cars, stocks and bonds, gold, religion, spiritualism, yoga, belief in flying saucers, you name it. Five months ago I’d come up against the ugly bluntness of life when my mother told me she had less than a year to live. She was forty-one. I was twenty-four, and the last thing I wanted to think about was her death.

One of the first things you learn as a firefighter is to divorce yourself from sentiments you’d normally entertain in the presence of a dying man or woman or child. In that sense, we were like doctors and nurses, and maybe like executioners. The more death we saw, the easier it became, and until this past week I thought I was immune to death. Now, looking at these two corpses, I realized I was a child in a man’s job. I was a tyro. A ninny. I wasn’t immune to anything.

Tugging the door wide, I opened the nozzle in short bursts, watering down all the nooks and crannies I hadn’t reached earlier. When the driver rolled over, I couldn’t tell whether the movement was because I’d bumped him or because he was still alive. For a few seconds I studied him for signs of breathing, listening to the residual crackling of steel and glass cooling. I checked his carotid artery with a bare finger. His skin was hot and stiff.

When Covington was finished under the hood, I said, “You know we got a coupla DOAs here?”

“We what?”

“You didn’t see them?”

Covington walked around to the driver’s door, stopping six feet shy of the first corpse. “Fuck,” he said into his mask. “Fuck this shit.”

When the lieutenant told Tronstad to get a couple of yellow disposable blankets to cover the corpses, Tronstad got the blankets but handed them to me. I dropped the nozzle on the street and wrapped the driver, accidentally touching his face through the blanket as I tried to secure the material against a breeze that was ripping along the street, the same breeze that had fanned the flames and helped make the fire so hot. I couldn’t reach into the backseat, but I stuffed the second blanket through the window and more or less concealed the woman from gapers.

When I stepped back from the car, Tronstad said, “He don’t look so tough now, does he?”

“What are you talking about?”

“That asshole from the FBI.”

I looked at the car again. It was a Lincoln Town Car, the same vintage and color Brown and his wife owned. And the shoes on the driver. One was burned, but the other was outside on the ground, polished all to hell. The dead driver was Agent Brown; the passenger, his wife.

“You gave me a look when we left the station. You knew who it was before we left. That’s why you weren’t helping.”

“Don’t be stupid. I just now recognized him.”

“How?”

“It smelled like a burning asshole.”

“You bastard!”

“It sure was hot,” Covington said, coming up alongside us.

“Hotter’n a whoopee cushion at a farting contest,” Tronstad said.

Covington gave him a look and might have said something in the way of a reprimand, when a police officer spotted Covington and summoned him across the street.

After he left, Tronstad said, “Now, don’t be accusing me of this.”

“Why not? You did it.”

“You accuse me, I’ll have to release that videotape. And nobody can prove I did anything. We start accusing each other, chances are you’ll go to prison and I’ll fly like a birdie. You wouldn’t like that.”

“You lousy bastard. You put some sort of incendiary timing device in their car. Jesus, he was FBI. You don’t think his friends are going to be on us like white on rice?”

“
Was
he FBI? Did he act like FBI? Does the FBI go around twisting people’s digits?”

“Jesus, Tronstad. What about his wife?”

“You want to save her? Go ahead. Drag her out and initiate CPR.”

“She didn’t do anything.”

“She shouldn’t have been hanging out with an asshole.”

Tronstad couldn’t have seen it coming, because I didn’t see it myself. Even though the nozzle was turned off, the water pressure made the end of the hose stiff as a board.

Swinging the hose and nozzle with all my might, I whacked him across the side of the head, knocking his helmet off and sending him to the pavement.

“Jesus, you fucker!” he yelled.

He got almost to his feet, his hands still in the glass on the street, when I turned the nozzle on and knocked him down, holding it on straight stream. The intense water pressure pushed him backward and washed him up against the car. He held his hands up to protect his face, then yelped and rolled away from the still-hot sheet metal of the car, turning his face away from me now to protect himself, curling into a ball, trying and failing to get up or to crawl away while I bombarded him with the water stream.

He screamed as if in a great deal of pain, but I knew it couldn’t possibly hurt as much as I wanted it to.

“You motherfucker!” he screamed while I walked behind him, never once letting up. Each time he tried to scramble away from me, the stream knocked him off his hands and knees.

Then they shut the water off on me. When the hose went limp, Tronstad picked himself up, limped away, and said, “You goddamned motherfucking butt fucker.” I stepped forward to punch him, but a pair of burly cops came up behind me and restrained my arms. “You pimply cheese ass! You’re going to be sorry you did that. God. I think you took my eye out.”

While one police officer escorted Tronstad across the street, towing him by the sleeve of his wet bunking coat, two others held me. “You okay now?” Covington asked.

I removed my helmet, peeled off the Nomex hood, released the face straps, and popped off my face piece. “Yeah.”

“What was that about?”

When I didn’t reply, one of the police officers said, “You going to handle this in-house, or you want us to take over?”

Covington looked across the street to where Johnson and a couple of concerned civilians were attending Tronstad’s injuries. Dropping his hand on my shoulder, Covington said, “Why don’t we hold on for a minute? I’ll go see how bad it is.”