Vertical Burn (17 page)

37. WE HAD THE BASTARDS FALLING OUT OF THE SKY ON US

Still clad in his department T-shirt and uniform trousers, Finney circled Engine 10 until he was certain it was the original, then reached into the rear wheel well on the officer’s side and used the tip of his Buck knife to nick his initials into the thick red paint above the dials. It wouldn’t be visible without squatting and then probably not without a flashlight, but he would be able to feel it anytime he wanted.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Paul Lazenby asked, his voice a low growl. Sheathing the knife, Finney wondered how long Lazenby had been watching.

Lazenby’s thick hair was mussed, his face puffy. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt with an SFD logo across the chest, the veins in his forearms and biceps as prominent as the noodling on his neck.

Diana appeared behind Paul, her chestnut hair plaited and trailing down the center of her back. Paul gave her a sour look and left.

“He seems a little on edge,” Finney said.

“The fire this morning didn’t go well for them.” It had been in a small, two-story office building located in a strip mall. Someone left a coffeepot on all night, and it caught the wall on fire and then spread to an attic space. Finney was there on Air 26, but he hadn’t spoken to anybody. “Michael made a mess of the hose at the front door, and when Paul charged it, it turned into a giant knot. Engine Thirteen marched right past them and tapped the fire. They were all whooping it up.”

“That’s what Paul and Michael do when they take a fire away from Thirteen’s.”

“They don’t like it so well when the shoe’s on the other foot. Paul’s furious at Michael for messing up the hose, and Michael blames Paul for charging it before he was ready. Balitnikoff says they’re going to drill all next shift.”

“What’d you guys do?”

“Put up a twenty-five and opened the roof. Haven’t done that in a while. Baxter and I cut the hole, and then Ladder Three shows up and cuts another one right next to ours, upwind. We were all wearing masks, but if there’d been any heat coming out, it would have been an ugly situation.”

“Why’d they cut a second hole?”

“I don’t know. In the beginning I thought they were racing us. They got off their rig and ran to the building. None of them had anything in their hands.”

“Violates one of the first rules of truck work. Never go to the building empty-handed.”

“When they tried to use our stuff, we told them to go get their own.”

“Second rule of truck work. Never give up equipment to another crew.”

She thought about it for a moment. “Used to be, every fire the truck went to the roof. Now we’re using those fans about eighty percent of the time. I kind of miss it. Going to the roof was part of the adventure.”

“I’d give anything to be back on a truck.”

“There’ll be a spot on Ladder One soon. Baxter’s going to retire this year. Now that his divorce is final, he wants to go back to Tennessee.”

Finney knew that even if Reese didn’t block a transfer, he could never work at Station 10 again. The memories were too painful and always would be. It was ironic that Reese, who had never much cared for the physical act of firefighting, would endeavor to punish Finney, who loved it so much, by placing as much distance as possible between him and any real chance to fight fire.

Before they could say anything else, Paul Lazenby came around the front of the rig again, opened the cab door, and began swabbing out the floorboards with a damp rag. It was clear that the floorboards didn’t need swabbing.

A moment later Michael Lazenby sauntered around the front of the rig with a dirty pike pole and behind him, Lieutenant Balitnikoff. “What the hell are you doing?” Balitnikoff asked, when he saw Finney.

“Came for the station tour. You out of coloring books?”

Balitnikoff glanced from Diana to Finney and back again, as if seeing the two of them together confirmed some pet theory of his. “Well, why don’t you just take your
tour
somewhere else?”

“Ease up,” said Diana.

“Ease up? What the hell does that mean? Ease up. Jesus!”

“Hey,” Finney said. “You guys are tired. Go home and kick your dog. Leave her alone.”

“You think you’re hot shit because you saved some old dame? Both of you? Is that what you think?”

“Come on,” Michael Lazenby said, stepping close behind his officer and placing a hand on his thick shoulder. “John’s right. Let’s go home and get some sleep.”

“Bill and me were eating smoke before you were out of fuckin’ diapers, either one of you,” Balitnikoff said. “Hell, at the Ozark we had the bastards falling out of the sky on us. Back in them days we fought more fire in a year than you’ll see in your lifetime. Bill was a good man. He was a friend of mine.”

“He was a friend of mine, too,” Finney said.

“Then why did you let him cook?”

“Come on,” Diana said, tugging on Finney’s arm. “Let’s go.”

“If you’d been a real firefighter, you mighta had the balls to drag Bill out of that room instead of just crawling off to safety and saving your own ass.”

The five of them lapsed into silence. Even Balitnikoff seemed in wonder at what he’d said, the words that until now nobody had dared utter, the words Finney knew were on everyone’s mind, just as he also knew that by noon Balitnikoff’s outburst would be quoted and discussed and dissected in every station in the city.

Finney was so angry he couldn’t breathe. It was ironic that Marion Balitnikoff of all people would be the one to say it, because he’d once rescued Balitnikoff, though the wily old bastard would never admit it. If it hadn’t been for Diana’s gentle tug on his arm, he probably would have taken a swing at Balitnikoff.

“That was uncalled for,” Diana said. “You don’t know what happened in there.”

“Nobody knows,” Michael said. “Come on, lieut. Nobody knows. Lay off, will ya? Bill was your friend, sure, but the fire killed him. Come on. It coulda happened to any of us. You know that. Lay off.”

Balitnikoff stalked off.

Michael Lazenby said, “We had a long night.”

“No, he was right,” Paul Lazenby said. “What sickens me about the whole thing is this dude comes out and pretends he can’t remember.”

“What’s wrong with you guys?” Diana asked, tugging Finney to the rear of the apparatus floor.

As they left, Paul muttered under his breath, “Can’t understand normal thinking.”

Diana walked over to the workbench with the service axe she’d been carrying, sprayed the gummed-up blade with WD-40, and began scrubbing nubs of tar off the metal.

“What was that last?” Finney asked.

“It’s an acronym.”

“Christ. That sorry bastard.”

“Don’t worry about him. Being a jerk is its own reward.”

It wasn’t Balitnikoff’s diatribe that had stung so much as it was the self-assured look on Paul’s face as he’d watched Finney’s reaction. He hadn’t been there to clean Engine 10’s floorboards. He’d gotten wind that Balitnikoff was going to tee off on him and had shown up for a ringside seat.

Finney took a few deep breaths and watched Diana polish the axe. “Engine Ten lose a map book recently?”

“I know they have a new one. They get beat up. You know how that goes.”

“What about a prefire book?” There had been only one oddball item on the mock Engine 10, a prefire book for the Columbia Tower.

“You know they don’t carry prefire books on board.”

“I thought maybe the station captains had changed the policy for the Columbia Tower.”

“No, we still keep that in the watch office,” Diana said. After a few moments, she continued, “All ready for tonight?” It took a few moments for Finney to realize what she was talking about. This was the thirty-first of October, Halloween. The costume party. “You can’t come?”

“No, my truck. I was in an accident. I don’t have anything to drive. I mean . . .”

“I’ll pick you up. A little before seven?”

“I’ll be ready.”

They both knew he’d forgotten all about it. Her gray eyes registered disappointment for a fraction of a second, but she was nice enough not to mention it.

38. THE CAT IN THE HAT

Finney’s day had been more tawdry than a two-dollar toupee, and although at first he’d regretted accepting Diana’s invitation, he found himself looking forward to the party as the day wore on.

Paddling off across the lake in the morning sunshine, he realized he’d become the houseboat equivalent of poor white trash, the neighbors dubious and gossiping as to when his remodel would be finished. It was hard to believe he’d drifted into this bog of neglect and procrastination, his days encompassed by one snafu after another, an endless mind-robbing syndrome of doubt and worry. He recognized in himself something he’d seen in the street people he assisted on the job: the beginning of a downward-sloping path toward the fringes of mental illness, toward total loss of self; and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

He paddled his kayak along the periphery of the lake and performed a series of sprints, trying to burn off his anger. Between efforts he basked in the sunlight glinting off the choppy water. He couldn’t help replaying Balitnikoff’s words. For months he’d lived in dread of an accusation like that, yet, amazingly, at the crucial juncture, he’d found himself unable to respond. Bobbing along in the lake, a thousand snappy comebacks sprang to mind, pencil-sharp rejoinders that had eluded him on the apparatus floor. Diana had been supportive and appropriately silent afterward, which somehow helped staunch his venom.

He couldn’t help thinking his ex-wife, Laura, never would have defended him the way Diana had. In his late twenties Finney had fallen in love with and married a woman several years his junior who, over the course of three years of matrimony, slowly dressed herself in the notion that she was born to be a citizen of the world, that life in Seattle was too restrictive and parochial, that her spirit needed the nourishment of travel, the taste of life in Europe or Russia, where she would write a novel or pen poetry or even compose music—although she’d never shown any inclination to write and everyone knew she had a tin ear.

Nothing he said dissuaded her, and after their divorce she made various sojourns abroad, eventually settling in Sweden. To date she’d penned six unpublished novels, sending each to him for his evaluation. Though he tried to be encouraging, they were uniformly horrid. She was living with a widowed proctologist who had six children, and she claimed she’d never been happier.

Late that afternoon Finney tried to nap, but after twenty minutes on the sofa, he gave up and made a telephone call to his auto insurance company and then to a couple of body repair shops. An hour later, the insurance adjuster arrived and snapped pictures of the Pathfinder.

Shortly after six Finney shaved and showered, climbed into his costume, and abruptly fell asleep on his face on the kitchen table. The house and sky were dark when he woke to the sound of knocking. It took a few moments to realize where he was.

Diana was dressed in a form-fitting black skin suit and wore a tall, red-and-white-striped hat, a floppy red silk bow at her neck, and four-fingered white gloves. Her cat whiskers twitched beguilingly when she smiled at Finney. Who would have thought the Cat in the Hat could look so seductively sexy? As far as Finney was concerned, this was Dr. Seuss’s finest hour.

“Listo, señor?”

Finney waved his black Zorro cape. “At your service, señorita. You look terrific.”

“You look suitably dashing yourself.”

“I hope I don’t cut myself on this sword.”

“I hope I don’t let all the little cats out of the big hat.”

“Wasn’t that Bartholomew Cubbins?”

“You might be right.”

“Nice houseboat,” Diana said, stepping inside.

“I’m remodeling.”

“So I see.”

Her Jeep, she explained as she drove, had taken her through college, several summer jobs, and twice to Alaska. It was now one year older than she had been when she bought it, a virtual relic on Seattle’s streets filled with shiny new SUVs and lightweight trucks.

Although the day had been clear and sunny, an evening chill had brought a dense fog that was beginning to trap airborne pollutants; the fog left a vaguely metallic tang in the back of Finney’s throat.

Seattle was experiencing an autumn inversion, one of several in succession in the past month, where warm air stagnated in the basin between the Olympic Mountains to the west and the Cascades to the east, trapping cooler air over the city. In the daytime the air warmed up enough to lift the ground fog, but at night it all came crashing back down like an intermission curtain. Ordinarily the pollution would be blown out of the region by southern winds and autumn rainstorms, but this year the wind and rain were absent.

They were headed for a Holidays for the Children charity ball, a benefit that was sponsored in part by the fire department. As a volunteer coordinator, Diana was invaluable not only as a hard worker but because of her family’s social connections throughout the Puget Sound area. In its seventh year, the event was becoming an institution in Seattle.

The party took up the entire seventy-fourth floor of the Columbia Tower. The event didn’t officially start until eight, but already several dozen people stood around admiring the decorations or gazing out the windows at the fog. Another half-dozen people scampered around on last-minute errands. On the floor were artfully arranged tableaus of brilliantly colored autumn leaves, cornstalks, sheaves of wheat, and candle-lit carved pumpkins of all sizes.

“Okay,” Diana said. “I need to make sure everything’s set. Back in ten minutes. Food’s over there.”

“Do I look that hungry?”

“Ravenous.”

“I get you anything? Green eggs and ham, perhaps?”

She laughed and disappeared.

Outside, only a few pink and purple vestiges remained from the sunset. The jagged ridges of the Olympic Mountains defined the horizon. Lights blinking, a helicopter cruised across the city.

Finney bought a hundred dollars’ worth of raffle tickets for a Dale Chihuly glass sculpture, knowing his cat, Dimitri, wouldn’t suffer a Dale Chihuly in the house for twenty minutes before knocking it over.

At the far end of the room the band was tuning up, each member made up like a famous musician from the fifties or sixties. Perfect for this crowd, Finney thought, mostly middle-aged, affluent, and nostalgic. First up was a Frankie Valli tune.

When Diana found him, she said, “I should have taken yesterday off. I’m beat. There were supposed to be two of us making all the last-minute preparations, but Angie’s suffering a personal crisis. Last Wednesday her fiancé announced he’s gay. I guess I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“I don’t even know Angie.”

“No, but she gets embarrassed for anybody to know. She thinks it’s a personal failure on her part.”

“Is that why you didn’t have a date until late?”

“Because I was afraid you would turn gay on me?”

He laughed. “No. Because you were jammed up doing the work of two people?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s why. Last year I didn’t have a date. It was a mistake, because once this thing starts, it more or less runs itself, and I found myself standing here gabbing with a succession of elderly married couples. Almost no singles come.” They were quiet for a few moments, unable to do anything but eavesdrop on a shrill conversation nearby. “You forgot about the party, didn’t you?”

“I’m afraid I did.” He smiled, discomfited by her candor. “You always just say what you think?”

“Usually. I do what I want, too.” She stepped forward, cupped his face in her hands, and kissed him on the lips. It startled him enough that he didn’t fully participate until it was nearly over, a mistake of timing he regretted immediately.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“The good-night kiss.”

He smiled. “I don’t get one later?”

“Who knows?” She laughed and glanced around the room. “I think we’re going to have a pretty good crowd. We had a lot of volunteers from the department this year.”

“What about Oscar Stillman?” Finney asked. “Or Jerry Monahan? Either of them take any interest in this? Reese?”

“Are you kidding? Reese’s contribution will be to show up just long enough to circle the room and allow everyone to shake his hand and congratulate him on becoming chief. I don’t think Jerry Monahan’s ever spoken to me, and Stillman’s favorite charity is the tip jar at the Déjà Vu.” The latter was a strip club just off Aurora in downtown. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”