Vertical Burn (25 page)

52. PARANOIA IN BED

At seven-thirty that evening Diana put John into bed, then took a shower and changed into fresh clothing she’d brought in her gym bag. All day she’d been posing as nurse and nanny. The doctors had told her to call if he showed signs of irrational behavior, ischemic attacks, a loss of consciousness, or anything else that wasn’t normal. They were clearly scared to death that he was going to collapse outside their care.

When someone was exposed to smoke, the carbon monoxide in the smoke bonded with the hemoglobin at a rate two hundred times faster than oxygen did, displacing oxygen in the heart, lungs, vital organs, and brain. To make matters worse, the half-life for CO in the blood was five to six hours, which meant concentrations took a long time to dissipate.

The carbon monoxide in Finney’s blood had been measured at a level that could easily have proven fatal. Several hours in the hyperbaric chamber on one hundred percent oxygen had brought it down, but the doctors were still worried.

Against medical advice, John had found some scrubs to wear, signed the release form, and walked out of the hospital into the cool morning air as if he actually knew where he was headed. Outside the hospital, where Diana caught up with him, he looked disoriented and helpless.

“You know where you are?” Diana asked.

“I guess I don’t.”

“Let me drive you home.”

“They find Gary?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Let’s go there.”

“Come on. I’ll show you where my Jeep is.”

Diana knew smoke inhalation produced various side effects, including short- and long-term memory loss; the doctors had warned Finney of the potential complications, stressing his need for continued treatment, constant monitoring, and lots of fluids. In the hours since driving him from the fire site to 26’s to pick up his things, and then to his houseboat on Lake Union, Diana had forced copious amounts of juice and water down him. Short of hog-tying him and dragging him back to the hospital, she’d done all she could.

Diana turned the lights out and went into the living room where she climbed into his recliner and pulled a quilt over herself. She watched the running lights from a cruiser easing quietly past the window.

She listened to his answering machine take another call, this from a local country-western radio station brazenly asking Finney to drive to their studio tomorrow morning for a chatty interview during the commute hour, as if he was in any condition to talk, or to drive. Or to be chatty.

Sadler’s body had been recovered under a stainless-steel tub. Hiding under a tub of pig guts didn’t seem like a good way to die, but then there was no good way to die in a fire.

Diana was washing dishes in the kitchen sink, up to her elbows in the hot, sudsy water when Finney called from the other room. Although his bedroom was not particularly warm, he was sitting up in bed, sweating heavily. Avoiding the postage-stamp burn on his neck, she touched his bare shoulder reassuringly. “Something to drink?”

“I’ve been lying here trying to think it through. I’m confused.”

Diana sat on the edge of the bed. “You went to a fire on Engine Twenty-six, down off West Marginal Way. You and Gary went inside searching for victims. Gary never came out.”

“No, that’s Leary Way. I’m talking about last night.”

“That was last night, John.”

“But I brought Gary out.”

Last night nobody believed him, and now she didn’t know if she believed him either. She didn’t think he would lie, at least not deliberately, but even after coming out of the hyperbaric chamber he’d been about as confused as a man who wasn’t drunk or on drugs could get.

“Where did you take him when you brought him out?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Two firefighters came over, so I went back in.”

“Earlier you said a doorway. Which doorway?”

“I don’t know.”

“John, why didn’t you talk to somebody when you came out? They would have told you the search had been called off.”

“I’d just spoken to two firefighters who said they’d seen victims.”

“Okay, what if he went back in himself? Isn’t that possible? Could he have been looking for you?”

“I saw somebody inside later. It might have been Gary. Did you know he saved my life? That’s the second time this month somebody’s saved my life.”

“John . . .”

“I was hiding from them. I thought they were trying to kill me. I guess I was hiding from Gary.”

“They found your PASS device near Gary’s body. Do you know how it got there?”

“I’m sorry. I really can’t remember.”

“John, nobody’s going to blame you for not recalling details the day after a fire.”

“You gonna be here in the morning?”

“I was planning on it. If that’s all right.” She handed Finney a drinking glass half-filled with water, then leaned over and kissed his forehead. “Go to sleep.”

“I need to tell you something.”

“Not now.”

“No, I need to say this. It’s about Leary Way. I have to get it off my chest. Bill called me over to look at the wall. When I saw it was coming down, I ran like a scared kitten. I can still feel the panic when I talk about it.”

“You did your best. You—”

“No, I didn’t do my best. I didn’t try to save him. I just ran.”

“There are times when all you can do is run.”

“I don’t think that was one of them.”

“Okay. Say you hadn’t. Where would that have put you? Under those bricks with Bill. What good would that have done? You did the right thing. It’s the same reason the airlines tell us to put that oxygen mask on ourselves first. If you’d slowed to help Bill, you would have both been trapped.”

“But the only thing in my mind was getting out.”

“As it should have been. You’re saying you feel guilty for running away from that wall?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. You want to hear my confession? At Leary Way when your mayday came through, we were in the basement. Our radios weren’t picking up anything. That’s why we didn’t have time to do much of a search. We weren’t supposed to be down there. We screwed up.”

“We searched the basement.”

“I know. We saw the tape on the door after we came back up. Maybe we could have found you and Bill if we hadn’t been messing around down there. Bill would be alive today. We never even looked at the door on the way in. We forgot to check it for tape. You think I don’t feel bad about that?”

Diana was still asleep in the easy chair when Finney’s parents showed up Tuesday morning and let themselves in with a key. It would never have occurred to her that nodding off in Finney’s living room would be awkward. There was some chitchat, a few avoided looks, a good deal of fidgeting on the part of Finney’s mother.

Looking weak and pale and grasping a morning newspaper, Chief Finney spoke gruffly. “How’s he doing?”

“Last night, not good. I haven’t seen him this morning.”

“He should be in the hospital.”

“I agree. He took a lot of smoke. It could take weeks for it to purge from his system.”

“If he ever purges it. Is he making any sense?”

“Well . . .” Even as she spoke, she regretted the bluntness of her statement. “He’s spinning fairy tales. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He thinks he does, but he doesn’t.”

“He usually tells a pretty solid story.”

“Last night he was all mixed up. I found it hard to believe anything he said.”

When the room grew quiet, Diana realized Finney was in the doorway in a robe and bare feet. It was easy enough to see he’d been standing there long enough to overhear her comments. He was staring at her, through her. This would be a good time, she thought, for the floor to open up and swallow her. She’d been defending John at every fire station she worked at, and the one time she was caught off guard and said something denigrating, he’d overheard it. “John. I’m not awake yet. I didn’t mean that.”

“Thanks for coming over, Diana.”

“I really didn’t—”

“Thanks for coming.”

She glanced at his parents and said, “I’ll get my things.”

On the way down the dock she passed a man lugging a television camera and a coifed woman in a long overcoat. They would have detained her if they’d realized she was a firefighter, but in civilian clothes with her hair down it never occurred to anyone.

53. POPPING MOTRIN

G. A. stood in the backyard popping Motrin and staring at the mountain of debris the firefighters had hauled out of the house. There was enough garbage here for an entire apartment building. The pile was sopping wet, mostly clothing—but there were also stereo components, mail-order catalogs, pieces of a television, hunks of broken furniture, books, magazines, old shoes, wallboard, and ceiling tile.

Typically an overhaul was performed to make certain the fire didn’t rekindle after firefighters left; anything that might spark up and start another fire was removed from the building, placed in the yard or on the street, and hosed down.

G. A. knew the building owner was planning to tell the insurance adjuster this junk had been in mint condition before the fire.

When the owner sauntered around the corner into the backyard, G. A. pulled his handcuffs off his belt and cuffed the man’s hands around either side of a vertical support of the porch. The owner, a man named Yassar Himmeld, made a face that implied he was guiltless and said, “What for is this? I do nothing.”

Yassar was short. He wore a suit and a starchy white shirt without a tie, and G. A. knew he owned two jewelry stores over on Jackson, as well as eleven houses spread throughout the Central Area. Yassar wore a Rolex and four gold rings. Gold necklaces clanked at his throat as he made futile efforts to free himself from the handcuffs. G. A. didn’t like anything about him.

“For what is this?”

“I’m going to make it simple for you, Yassar. You got a nice little duplex here. A day-care upstairs that your wife runs.”

“Dar is my sister-in-law. My wife is back in our country.”

“Sure. Whatever. You have offices downstairs. You have a safe that you say was robbed by the firefighters who extinguished the fire this morning. I’m going to let that one pass. You have this stack of shit here in the backyard.”

“Firemen do that. Firemen wreck my house.”

“No, Yassar. You wrecked your house.” G. A. lowered his voice. It was getting dark, and Yassar was shivering. “You set fire to this place and you trashed it.”

“I no set fire. How you say I set fire? Is accident.”

“Sure it was, Yassar. It was an accident just like the one you had three months ago over on Sixteenth. What you did here was, you splashed some flammable liquid around the basement, left the door open, and tossed in a match. I don’t mind that so much. The problem I have is that you did it while your sister-in-law was upstairs taking care of fifteen children, six of them in diapers. But never mind that you set this fire while those babies were upstairs. What bugs me about this whole thing is how greedy you are. It isn’t enough to collect for this house so you can remodel with the insurance company’s money, but you have to haul in a bunch of clothing from somebody’s rag bin so you can collect even more.”

“No, I no—”

“You’re going to prison, and when you get out, you’ll be deported.”

“I have not done this. What you say, I have not done. I swear.”

“We got a piece of the wallboard with gasoline on it. We got a witness saw you with a gasoline can just before the fire.”

Yassar Himmeld hung his head and collapsed against the support. G. A. looked up and saw Robert Kub gazing down on them from the back porch. “Wait out by the car, would you?” G. A. said.

“You going to beat me?” the handcuffed man asked, after Kub left.

G. A. spit into the wet grass. “Why should I bust my knuckles? They love you little Arabs in prison. You’re going to have a good time, Yassar. You get out, you’ll be wearing mascara and a padded bra.”

“I no do this.”

“What really pisses me off is that you did such a crappy job. You might have gotten away with that fire over on Sixteenth, but there was no way you were getting away with this. Even an imbecile insurance adjuster would be suspicious.”

“I can pay you.”

“Pardon me? I didn’t quite catch that.” G. A. put a hand behind one ear.

“I can pay.”

“For a lawyer, you mean?”

“For a lawyer. For my freedom. For you.”

“Is that a bribe, Yassar?”

“Yes, yes.” He nodded vigorously, hoping they’d struck a bargain.

“Yes, you’re trying to bribe me?”

“I don’t want to go to prison. Please. This hurts no one. I am a good businessman. One little misfortune for you and me to forget, eh? Why don’t you be a good businessman, too, and consider my money an honorarium?”

“And how much money would that be?”

“Five hundred dollar?” When he saw the look in G. A.’s eyes, he said, “No, a thousand dollar and you forget this. You agree? Now let me out of these. I am Christian. I know Jesus. I have converted three times. I have ten children. I have two wives. Does none of this affect your humanity?”

G. A. pulled a miniature tape recorder out of his pocket. “How much do you stand to collect from all this, Yassar?”

The man in the suit heaved a sigh and squatted on his haunches. “The house? Not very much. The contents? Another hundred. I have lost some gold and jewelry. I have lost—”

“Okay, okay. Let’s say three-fifty. Sixty percent of that would be two-ten. I’ll give you a discount here. Two hundred. You fucked up. Now you pay the piper.”

“I don’t understand. Who is the piper?”

“Me, Abdul. I’m the piper.”

“My name is Yassar. Yassar Himmeld. I am a good man.”

“There are plenty of good men in prison.”

“But how to repair the premises? You leave me with less than half of my losses. You leave me with—”

“Sixty percent is about what it takes to keep you away from those tattooed biker boys up in Monroe. It’s that or you shave your legs and dab on eyeliner. Your choice.”

“How do I know this isn’t a trap?”

G. A. popped a Motrin and chewed it, then held up the tape recorder, which was still running. “I don’t need to trap you, Abdul. I’ve already done that. What I need is some of that extra green you got coming in from Aetna.”

“Allah, help me,” Yassar said, sagging against the porch support.