The Smoke Room (30 page)

47. THE KING OF NOT GETS KISSED AND SLAPPED

BY SEVEN A.M.
the fire has mostly burned itself out, so they send Engine 29 back to the station to clean up and exchange crews. Even though the medics want to truck me up to Harborview for further evaluation, I refuse and return to the station with Lieutenant Muir, Robert Johnson, and Oleson. I am dizzy and a tad spaced out but have no intention of lying in a hospital bed with doctors and nurses hovering over me while I brood about my dead friend.

So far, nobody except me knows there’s a body in the house. Oleson thinks Tronstad fled the scene and has said as much.

At the station I find the oncoming crew has put my bedding away, so I take a long, hot shower, hunkering under the spray until I’ve revived myself to the point where I can plan the rest of my morning. I am disoriented from the smoke and lack of sleep and from simple exhaustion.

I do not speak about the fire to anyone, not my crew, not the oncoming crew, and not the new chief, Mortimer, who tries to question me about the rescues. “It all happened pretty fast,” I tell him from the shower stall, when he comes into the bathroom to question me. Embarrassed by my anemic responses and the flashes of nudity he has exposed himself to, he withdraws.

I stand under the hot shower for a long time and eventually sense the rumble in the floor when Engine 29 fires up and retires from the building. The fire is tapped, but Marshal 5 is investigating, and they will need fire crews to stand by with hose lines and strong backs as a precaution against a rekindle, and to help with the removal of debris, which comes up layer by layer as the investigators ply their trade. After Tronstad’s body is discovered, they’ll be even more thorough. Engine 29 will be out all morning.

Under the hot spray, I hawk up gobs of gray phlegm, slimy souvenirs from my minutes in the smoke. My eyes are bloodshot, and when I screw a washcloth into my ear with one finger behind it, the cloth comes back sooty. Even after three shampoos, my hair reeks of smoke.

Johnson emerges from the restroom while I’m dressing and stands near my locker in flip-flops, a large white towel wrapped around his waist, with a puckered scar zigzagging the top of his chest. If he notices the bruises Tronstad has left on my shoulders and back, he doesn’t mention them.

“Tronstad set that, didn’t he?” Johnson said. “Just like he set Beach Drive. And the car the other night. And the Browns. Oleson said you saw him with a firebomb.”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t want to talk about this?”

“I took a lot of smoke. I’m pretty sick.”

“You should have gone to the hospital, man.”

“I don’t like hospitals.”

“Your mother. I forgot about your mother. You know, they found an empty five-gallon gas can in the yard. They were guessing he broke that front window and poured a couple of gallons of gasoline into the living room before anybody could do anything about it. You think?”

“Maybe.”

“No wonder it was burning so hot. I mean, you guys put that line into the living-room window, and it didn’t seem to have any effect at all. It musta been hot upstairs. You see a lot of fire up there?”

“Mostly smoke.”

“And all that ammunition. It sounded like the Fourth of July. You know, a bullet clipped our light bar. I thought I was going to get plugged. I’m surprised you didn’t catch a bullet yourself, inside. The homeowner said he almost shot you by accident.”

“Yeah.”

“You sound tired.”

“I am.”

“So where did Tronstad go? You see him leave? Oleson said they were fighting in the backyard. I wonder why Tronstad lit that particular house. That part has me stumped.”

“It belongs to Iola Pederson.”

“The house?”

“Yeah.” My short replies, general reluctance, and lack of eye contact are beginning to dim Johnson’s enthusiasm.

“Is that the woman you were banging? With the tits?”

“They all have tits, Robert.”

He laughed. “You know what I mean. You think he was trying to get even with you? Break up your relationship?”

“I think we were supposed to get there sooner. I was supposed to run in and grab the bearer bonds. Tronstad would then take them from me.”

“Are you saying the bonds were in that house?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“So who’s got them now?”

“Jesus, Robert. You saw that fire. I was busy dragging people out.”

“Tronstad got them?”

“Nobody got them.”

“You burned up our bonds?”

“Tronstad did.”

“Did you even tell him where they were?”

“I told him.”

“And he didn’t go in and get them out?”

“I lost track of him.”

“Maybe he got them out.”

“About the only thing I can tell you for sure is, that didn’t happen.”

“He sets the fire thinking the bonds are inside and we’ll get there in time for you to go in and grab them? The timing . . . I bet when we stopped halfway down the hill, it threw everything off.”

“The gasoline probably didn’t help.”

“No. But why the hell did you put the bonds in that woman’s house? That was just plain stupid.”

“That first day, he was following me. I had to ditch them. It was the only place I could think of that wasn’t my house. It only became a problem after Iola broke up with me.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Johnson said, grabbing his head. “This is too much. Sweet Jesus, Gum, tell me you got them out. Tell me you gave them to Tronstad and he’s going to meet us in ten minutes. Tell me something that won’t tear my gut in half.” His voice is cracking. He is near tears.

“I can’t say any of those things.”

Johnson wanders across the bunk room in a daze. I’ve never seen him so low. As I finish dressing, he drifts into the shower room and begins flossing his teeth with the energy of an old man petting a dog. When I come in, our eyes meet in the mirror.

“Maybe this is better,” he says. “I’ll take that Caddy back to the dealer, and Paula won’t be yelling at me anymore. Tronstad can come back, and the three of us will work together like old times.”

“It’ll never be like old times, Robert.”

EACH OF MY offenses has been birthed in passivity; each arrived through
not
doing something I should have done. Like everyone else, I have been of the belief that to be a criminal you need to be aggressive, violent, audacious, to pick up a gun and rob somebody, at the very least write a bad check. That you have to do something brassy. But becoming a criminal, I’ve found, is as uncomplicated as letting timidity overwhelm common sense. It’s also
not
doing something you should do.

I am the king of
not.
Inaction is my throne.

Not
getting on the rig when we were called to the Arch Place fire.

Not
confessing to my officer that I’d missed the call.

Not
betraying Tronstad over the bearer bonds.

Not
telling the truth the night Chief Abbott died. Or the night Sears drowned.

I am the maestro of inaction, the king of
not,
my mouth zippered by reticence.

Outside, I throw my personal gear into the backseat of my car, then fire up the engine and let it idle. After a few seconds, I realize Robert Johnson is standing beside my driver’s window. “You know, it’s probably just as well those bonds are gone,” he says.

“Absolutely.”

“If you want the truth, I was getting pretty unhappy.”

“Not to mention all the dead people.”

“Yeah.” Johnson stares down the street as a couple of schoolchildren carrying colorful knapsacks yell and laugh. “At least we won’t have to tell any more lies. That was the worst. Having to lie to my own wife. No more lying. Thank God.”

“Yeah. At least the lying is over.”

Instead of heading home, I hook a left on California and wend my way through the neighborhood to Bonair Drive, then coast down the hill to Hobart Avenue SW and the scene of our latest fire. Sunlight glints off the water in the Sound, dark clouds to the north, a high overcast beginning to squat on the city. The first inklings of winter are trickling into the region. I slow before reaching the carport where Tronstad’s truck sits untouched.

Engine 29 and Ladder 11 are the only crews still on scene at what’s left of the Pederson home. It is easy enough to see by the lassitude and the laughter among the firefighters that they haven’t discovered Tronstad’s corpse yet.

While the structural components of the first floor are largely intact, most of the second floor has collapsed onto itself. Tronstad’s body will be under the collapsed section.

The gritty, acrid smell of smoke lingers everywhere, tendrils from the roof doing a slow dance in the sunlight. All three cars are in the driveway, where they’d been earlier.

I stand at the corner of the house and watch as the fire crews go about their work. There isn’t much to do, and they seem in no rush to do it. The job now is to make sure the fire doesn’t flare up again and to assist the Marshal 5 investigators as they dig through the rubble.

When a pair of firefighters from Ladder 11 carry the remains of a sofa out the front door and off the porch, I pull on a pair of goatskin work gloves I’ve brought along for this purpose and lend them a hand. Even though I am in civies, everybody in the department knows who I am by now. After we dump the sofa onto the debris pile in the yard, one of them says, “Gum. I heard you made another rescue. Jesus Christ, you have got to be the luckiest son of a bitch in department history.”

I shrug. As I know better than anyone, luck is a matter of perspective.

“I think it’s so cool,” says Stanislow, who is working a debit shift on Ladder 11.

I know my answering smile is a sour miracle, a synthetic conglomeration of hypocrisy, deceit, and, as much as I detest myself for it, undeserved pride.

When somebody inside throws a handful of charred boards onto the front porch, I rush over and carry them to the debris pile. It is important to get people accustomed to seeing me carrying garbage away from the house.

“Gum. Hey, Gum.” It is a fire investigator, a man named LaSalle, a heavyset man with dark, bushy eyebrows, whose claim to fame is that his father was once mayor of Seattle. Spotting LaSalle pumps ungodly amounts of adrenaline into my system. “I talked to Oleson. I thought you were going up to Harborview, or I would have spoken to you, too.”

“I passed on the hospital.”

“You think that’s smart? You look like shit. At least get it documented on a Form 44.”

“I’m okay.”

LaSalle takes my arm and walks me out of earshot of the others. “We know this started with at least one Molotov cocktail. We got one of the bottles. Oleson said you saw Ted Tronstad throwing a bottle into the house. He said you guys had a tussle with him in the backyard.”

“That’s right.”

“You saw Tronstad throw a Molotov cocktail into the house?”

“I did.”

“You understand you might have to testify to that?”

“I’m ready.”

“I heard you and him had some sort of scrap at a car fire. What was that about?”

“I thought he was disrespecting the dead.”

“You sure that was all there was to it?”

“Ask him. He’ll tell you.”

“You have any idea why Tronstad would throw a Molotov cocktail? I mean, is this his ex-girlfriend’s house or something?”

“It’s my girlfriend’s house. And my ex’s.”

“She’s your girlfriend or she’s your ex?”

“They’re both here,” I say, even as Iola Pederson strides across the yard from the garage. Her presence depresses me. It is going to be almost impossible to steal back those three garbage bags.

Iola wears a bulky ski coat, which I assume she’s gotten from the garage.

She steps close to me and slaps me across the face like a slugger straining for a home run, hitting me so hard, it hurts her hand. Bernard Pederson has emerged from the garage, also in a ski jacket, in time to see her do it.

“What the hell are you doing here, you little bastard?” Iola says. “Do other people’s misfortunes tickle your funny bone?” On the far side of the yard, Iola’s stepdaughter exits the garage behind her father, sees what is happening, and starts toward us, only to be held back by Bernard, who grasps her ski coat from behind.

“You the girlfriend?” LaSalle asks, displaying his characteristic lack of tact.

“You say that again, I’ll sue,” Iola says.

“Funny way to treat the man who saved your life,” LaSalle says.

“What are you talking about? You saved me?”

“This man here is the guy who brought you out of the house.”

She turns to me. “You put me on that ladder?”

I nod.

“Crap!” Her eyes widen and I realize the startling blue I’d always admired is missing. “You really saved me?”

“Me and a man named Bob Oleson.”

“Gum saved your husband’s life, too. And that other gal over there.”

“Sonja?”

“Right. If I were you, I’d think about an apology.”

“The both of you can go fuck yourselves.” Angrier than ever, she storms away. People who lose everything have a right to be angry. I remember how pissed I was after my place was burgled.