Vertical Burn (16 page)

34. HAZARDS OF THE PROFESSION

Diana and Blanchett had been working the chain saws for almost two hours, cutting through the heavy car-deck planking of the vacant pier until they’d uncovered the smoldering creosote-covered pilings where somebody, probably a lost tourist, had tossed a cigarette stub. They sawed and dug, stacking the heavy planks to one side after soaking the burned areas with a pressurized pump can. Ladder 1 and Aid 5 were the only units still on scene.

It was a three-story warehouse, longer than a football field and empty, just tin walls, a roof, and the pier below, some of which was paved and some not. Several weary firefighters sat on piles of car decking they’d torn out.

Before they were finished, Robert Kub arrived and, after inspecting the hole, removed himself from the immediate vicinity of the chain saws and lit a cigarette. A few minutes after Captain Moseby rotated personnel in the hole, Diana found Kub standing outside on the pier squinting listlessly into a southerly breeze.

“How you doin’?” Kub asked.

“I’m hot and I’m tired.” Diana laughed.

“Now watch me throw this stub down here and start another fire.” He snickered at the thought. “That’d be just like me.”

“Robert, have you been in touch with Finney?”

“John? I’ve seen him.”

“Is he all right?”

Kub exhaled loudly. “If you mean is he all right health-wise, he looks like shit. But if you mean is his life going okay, that’s pretty much shit, too.” Kub snickered again.

“The way Reese turned him down was crappy.”

“Reese needs a new head.”

“There’s a rumor going around that G. A.’s after him for starting that fire where he brought out the homeless woman. Is that true?”

“It’s true all right.”

“That’s so ridiculous.”

“Until you start examining the evidence.” Kub inhaled on his cigarette and peered up at the overcast sky.

Diana took off her heavy bunking coat and let the breeze cool her sweat-soaked SFD T-shirt. “What evidence?”

“I wish I could talk about it, but I can’t.”

“Any chance he actually had anything to do with it?”

Kub watched a quintet of gulls riding an air current thirty feet away. “I’ll tell you this. When it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck . . . We came in together, me and John.”

Kub withdrew a crumpled packet of Camels from his windbreaker pocket and, cupping his hands, set about the ritual of igniting another cigarette. In Elliott Bay a ferry steamed toward the dock from Bremerton. They watched in silence, while behind them the racket from a chain saw reverberated inside the tin-walled warehouse. The air smelled of cigarette smoke, salt water, sawdust, and from somewhere among the tourist shops on Alaskan Way, cotton candy.

“Does he seem different to you?” Diana asked.

“You mean after Leary Way?”

“He used to be so . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Confident?”

“That’s it.”

“Yeah, well, one way or another, it’ll work itself out.”

“I wish I were that optimistic.”

“You ever notice when a guy goes nuts—I’m not saying
he’s
nuts—I was just thinking about this . . . you ever notice when a guy goes nuts, he’s always the center of the universe? He’s always the only one who can get the secret formula to the president on time. Ever notice?”

Whatever Kub was trying to say, it didn’t make sense. “John’s not nuts,” Diana said.

35. THE KNOX BOX KEY

Although nobody had made any requests, at 2100 hours Finney told Lieutenant Sadler he was taking Air 26 out to deliver bottles.

Sadler and Brinkley were draped in recliners watching a prizefight on cable television, Sadler making sniggering comments about the blond in the bathing suit who circled the ring between rounds holding up a sign. Jerry Monahan was half-asleep in the empty office near the front door, a book in his lap titled
Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance
. Finney still found it hard to believe he was involved in anything as sinister as arson. But then it was also hard to believe Monahan was a firefighter. Or that he’d made and lost several millions of dollars. Or that he’d been a semipro football player.

Finney picked up his hooded foul-weather jacket and went out onto the dark apparatus floor, where he stepped up onto the officer’s side of Engine 26, opened the door, and reached across to an orange light on the dash. He unscrewed the plastic lens cap and disengaged the bulb so that when the current was tripped it wouldn’t light up, then replaced the cap. He lifted the spring-loaded lid on the small metal box that he’d always thought would make a good rodent casket, removed the most valuable key any department rig carried, and closed the lid. With the dashlight disengaged, no one would be the wiser.

He was taking a calculated risk that Engine 26 wouldn’t receive an alarm while he was gone, and if they did, that neither Monahan nor Sadler would notice the disabled light or the missing key. Probably because it had never happened, the department had not concerned itself with people stealing Knox box keys. The administration assumed that most people didn’t know what a Knox box key was and wouldn’t know where to find one if they did.

A Knox box was a small metal security box holding a building key, which could be installed by a property owner usually on a wall near the front door. Once sealed, a Knox box couldn’t be accessed by the property owners or even the police—only the fire department. The department’s assurance to property owners was to use Knox boxes only when lives or property was threatened, allowing emergency access without costly damage to expensive doors and windows.

Finney drove Air 26 to Airport Way past the Makado Brothers buildings and around the block to Eighth Avenue South. The buildings were dark. Below the freeway on Airport Way there was almost no traffic.

It was doubtful there was any kind of night watchman, but he pressed the doorbell twice anyway. When he’d waited long enough, he opened the Knox box with the stolen master key, removed the property owner’s key, and unlocked the front door. Then he replaced the building key in the Knox box.

Uncertain what he was looking for, he followed the small cone of light from his flashlight through the offices and down the causeway into a warehouse. Fifteen minutes later he was back in the truck, no wiser than when he’d gone in.

The first warehouse area had contained rows of shelves, thousands of small boxes stacked on them. A smaller building was filled with various machining tools. He’d found three Rolodexes in the office area, but none of the names meant anything to him. Could it be that Stillman and Reese were investors, and this company was being solicited to put Monahan’s high-rise rescue contraption into production?

The wreck last night, the frame-up, Leary Way, Monahan’s peculiar actions the past few days—all of it had the feel of a jigsaw puzzle he’d been asked to assemble blindfolded.

As he considered the possibilities, his gaze wandered across Eighth Avenue toward an enormous lot with two large, interconnected buildings, the only other piece of property Patterson Cole owned in the surrounding area. There were no lights, just an empty parking lot and a lone Dumpster. Finney knew from the inspection cards these buildings were vacant.

In the distance a disposal truck worked its way up Eighth Avenue. Finney watched as it stopped at various occupancies, the clatter of falling glass, metal, and rubbish clashing in the night. The driver emptied the Dumpster across the street, rounded the corner, and disappeared without seeming to notice Finney. It occurred to Finney that if the buildings across the street were vacant, the Dumpster should have been empty.

Finney found the building key inside the Knox box bolted to the concrete wall near the front door. Moments later he was exploring the office areas, all empty except for a broken desk and a chair shoved into a corner.

The bathroom smelled as if it hadn’t been aired out in months. When he opened a third door, the light from his flashlight was dwarfed by an immense warehouse, vacant except for a workbench and a tall, portable screen in the far corner.

As he approached the workbench, he sniffed the odor of fresh paint and lacquer thinner. The screen was twelve feet high, thirty-five feet long. On the near side stood a red, cabinet-style tool box, open and promiscuous with tools.

On the other side of the screen he was both shocked and relieved to find a fire engine—large, red, damaged, and presumably the one that had run him down the previous night. “Damn,” he said.

He circled the vehicle slowly and saw where they’d already patched the fender, sanded and buffed it in preparation for the red spray cans of enamel lined up on the floor on newspapers.

Across the grille were large red numerals: E-10.

Twice he circled the vehicle looking for any subtle detail that would convince him this wasn’t an official Seattle Fire Department apparatus. It had decals on the doors, a map book in the cab, and every other piece of equipment one would expect to find on a Seattle rig. Yet he’d seen Engine 10 only hours earlier while making his air deliveries; it hadn’t had any front-end damage.

This was a clone.

He climbed up into the high driver’s seat, trying to figure out what it meant.

The glove box contained an elevator key and an air gauge, assorted paper clips, a couple of ink pens with teeth marks, and ear plugs in their cardboard envelopes. He found official fire department Notice of Violation forms and Form 20Bs for aid runs, one of which was arranged on a standard brown SFD clipboard the way it would be in a working rig—ready and waiting for the next patient. The radio bracket on the officer’s door held a portable radio, and when he turned it on and switched it to channel four, he heard fire department dispatchers sending Engine 39 on a call. There was a prefire book for the Columbia Tower along with a standard department map book of the city, marred by smudges and thumbprints, as if it had been in use for years.

This was the rig that ran him down last night.

He wondered how he was going to report this to the police without getting arrested for breaking and entering. The only windows in this part of the building were thirty feet off the ground, so he couldn’t say he’d seen it through the window.

He was pawing through the drawers of the tool box when his pager went off, a full response to Eighteen Avenue Northeast, a residential neighborhood just a few blocks north of the University of Washington.

“Air Twenty-six responding,” Finney said, after the dispatcher asked for confirmation.

The first unit was already on scene, reporting heavy smoke from the basement of a two-story house. The fire had started in the kitchen in a basement apartment and spread through heating vents. Nobody was hurt, but they lost most of the basement, along with several rooms on the first floor.

Ninety minutes later, when he was released from the scene, Finney drove Air 26 to Robert Kub’s house on South Ferdinand Street. A shiny black BMW with custom wheels stood in the driveway next to a battered gray Ford Tempo. Finney didn’t recognize the Ford, but the BMW was Kub’s.

36. OH, IT’S GOOD ALL RIGHT

“This damn well better be good,” Kub said, as he climbed into Air 26.

“Trust me.”

He had no hypothesis, just the splash of excitement that told him he was on the fringe of something big. The phony engine must have cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars, to think nothing of the incalculable trouble somebody had gone to in replicating Engine 10 down to the last detail.

“Drag me outta my home, away from a woman I been thinking about for two years. Sweet Jesus. She better be there when I get back. Lavernia. You see her?”

“This is important.”

“At least tell me where we’re going.”

“Just down the hill here. I’ll have you back in twenty minutes.”

“Before she gained some of that weight, Lavernia was in
Jet
magazine. I got close to poking her once, but she started thinking about the Lord and feeling guilty. This’ll probably be just enough time to get her feeling guilty again. You probably read about her husband. A Baptist minister, one of those righteous political activists who keeps Jesus in his back pocket.” Kub smiled, his teeth gleaming in the light from the dash. “Know what’s going on tonight? She caught him playing around. Guess what I am. The revenge fuck.”

“I’m going to need advice. This place I’m taking you to . . .”

“I get back and she’s gone, I’m going to be pissed. I never been a revenge fuck before.”

“I know,” Finney said, stopping on Eighth Avenue.

It was almost midnight and cold. Finney went through the ritual with the Knox box while Kub watched. “Come on, Robert.” Finney pushed the front door open with his fingertips.

“Not unless you own this place.”

“I hear an alarm. Let’s go investigate.”

“There’s no alarm. No way.”

“We’re on a street that probably won’t see another vehicle until seven in the morning. There’s something in here you have to see to believe.”

“What?”

“Like I said, you have to see it.” Clad in slacks, a dress shirt he’d hastily buttoned, loafers, and no socks, Kub was shivering. He glanced up the vacant street in both directions.

“What the hell!” He hopped up the four concrete steps and followed Finney inside and across the expanse of unlit, empty warehouse floor to the portable screen. “This better be good,” he said, cantering along several paces behind the beam from Finney’s flashlight.

“Voilà!” Finney said, stepping around the tall screen and raising his light.

Kub poked his head around. “What?”

They were gone—the engine, the newspapers, the tool chest, even the paint cans. Finney had been away only two hours.

“Okay, John. Quit dickin’ around.”

“It was here.”

“What the hell you talkin’ about?”

“They must know I found it. That’s the only explanation. Come on. Let’s talk outside.”

“Not until you tell me what we’re supposed to be looking at.”

“It was a mock-up of Engine Ten.”

“Say what?”

“A perfect replica of Engine Ten. Exact right down to the greasy rag under the driver’s seat.”

“You’re talking ’bout a plastic model?”

“Full size.”

“Out of cardboard, or something?”

“Steel and Fiberglas. You wouldn’t have known it wasn’t Engine Ten.”

“You kidding me?”

“Last night about half a mile from here an engine ran me off Airport Way and almost killed me. Tonight I found it right there.”

“So where is it?” When Finney didn’t reply, Kub said, “I don’t know which is worse, what you’re telling me you thought you saw, or the fact that you’re telling me you thought you saw it.”

“It was here. I swear.”

“Maybe they’re out on an alarm.”

“Not funny.”

Kub’s laugh echoed off the walls in the empty warehouse. “I think it’s hilarious. But let’s assume you saw it. It was probably some rich collector building a model so he can drive around in parades. God knows there’re enough firefighter freaks out there, and now with all these Microsoft millionaires running around . . .”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Maybe the building has a silent alarm,” Kub said.

“All I saw when I came in was the fire panel.”

“The best burglar systems, you don’t see them.”

At the front entrance, Finney turned off his flashlight and peeked out through the tall, narrow window alongside the door. They stepped outside and Finney pulled the door shut just as a brilliant light swept across the wall next to him. “You guys need help?”

“SPD,” Kub whispered. “Shit fuck shit! I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.”

Finney couldn’t see a squad car or the woman speaking or anything else except the light.

Traditionally the police and fire department in Seattle were amicable. Cops came into fire stations to use the telephones or the rest room, to write reports, and to bullshit, and if a traffic cop pulled over a firefighter for speeding, more often than not the firefighter was let off with only a warning. Until thirty years ago their unions had even negotiated city contracts together.

“I’m commissioned,” Kub said. “Marshal Five.”

“Hands on the wall. Step back.”

“I’m commissioned,” Kub protested.

“You heard me.”

They were frisked by two uniformed police officers, one male, one female. Though he couldn’t see much of her in the glare of the spotlight, Finney recognized the voice of the redhead who’d taken his accident report the night before. Kub knew them both.

“What’s going on, Robert?” the woman asked.

“We were out driving when we heard an alarm. Thought we’d investigate before the dispatchers sent out a full response.”

The male police officer said, “Monitoring company said somebody was on the premises.”

The female stepped to the front door while the second police officer kept his eye on them. The officer cupped her eyes against the dark window and tried the door handle. “Okay,” she said, turning around. “You two be careful. Some officers would get real jumpy seeing two guys in the dark like that.” She looked at Finney closely. “Ever find your fire truck?”

“Nobody reported an accident.”

A minute later when they were alone, Kub said, “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. They got here two seconds sooner and we’d be in their backseat sitting on our hands. I would have lost my job.”

“Sorry, Robert.”

“Turn on the damn heat.”

After they’d driven a mile, Kub said, “You really saw an engine?”

“I know how weird it sounds.”

“Do you? Somehow I don’t think you do. Goddamn! Lavernia better be there.”

The Ford Tempo was still in the driveway when they got back to Kub’s house. Finney said, “Do me a favor?”

“What now?”

“That night at Leary Way when we bumped into each other?”

“Not this.”

“I was changing my bottle. You were on the other side of the rig. Bill was over there talking to Stillman.”

“I don’t remember what they were talking about. Whatever it was, it was just talk. Bill went into the building and the next time I saw him he was dead.”

Loud music drifted from the front door as Kub disappeared inside.