Vertical Burn (3 page)

5. HOSPITAL LINEN LIKE BOARDS

The lights pierced his eyes like lasers, and his eyeballs felt as if they’d been sandpapered with #80 grit. The bedsheets might as well have been made out of boards. He knew his ears and neck and wrists had been daubed with something, and he could tell he’d been given medication, though he hadn’t asked what. In fact, he hadn’t spoken. Not for some time now. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t until his brother, Tony, a captain at Station 17, showed up that he felt any inclination to use his voice.

“You’re going to be okay,” Tony whispered, the way some people did in sickrooms. “Just take it easy. Right now your only job is to rest up and heal.”

Finney’s throat was dry and raw. “How’s Bill?”

“They’re going to put you into a decompression chamber to help get the carbon monoxide out of your blood. Fact is, they’re still a little worried over whether you’re going to make it. But you’ll bounce back. Just do what the doctors say and stay relaxed.”

“Bill. Where is he?”

“I’m not sure.”

“He okay?”

“You don’t need to worry about him.”

“Was his leg broken?”

“I don’t know. You just lie back and don’t think about anything but getting some rest.”

“Was I burned?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Bad?”

“Not too bad.”

“My ears?”

“Your ears’ll be okay.”

“I don’t feel any pain.”

“Don’t worry. You will.”

6. DODGING THE BULLET

In the rest area 150 feet from the fire buildings, the radiant heat on Diana Moore’s face felt like a fresh sunburn. Crews manning hose lines in the parking lot were directing water, tons of it, into the buildings. Some of the more alert firefighters on the hose lines tried to knock down embers so they wouldn’t drift out of the neighborhood and ignite secondary fires, but Diana could see it was a losing battle. Propelled by the tremendous heat rising off the buildings, sparks raced unhindered up into the night sky like antiaircraft rounds.

The structures to the north had taken off first, but now spirals of flame were shooting out the high windows on the warehouse. Electrical wires on nearby utility poles had burned off and were dancing in the street. Pools of water spread under hose connections in the parking lot and drained downslope toward the fire, where the water evaporated. When the moving vans outside the building burst into flame, one ill-fated firefighter was sprayed with hot rubber from an exploding tire.

Across the street the damp from the high hose streams drizzled onto a crowd of spectators. Water beaded up on parked cars and fire engines. Two women in bathrobes huddled under an umbrella watching the fire.

So many spaghetti lines crisscrossed in the street that in places the hoses were layered several feet deep. On the warehouse roof flames leaped fifty feet into the air. Engine companies manning deck guns shot eight hundred gallons a minute into the conflagration.

Diana wished she knew how a pair of experienced firefighters like Captain Cordifis and John Finney had gotten into so much trouble. She had been on the crew all day, had worked with these men, joked with them, and through some serendipitous order of events had escaped tonight’s catastrophe unscathed.

Eleven minutes after Finney came out, Battalion Chief Reese and Robert Kub were ejected from the building like corks popping out of a bottle. She’d never seen anything quite like it, and apparently neither had the newspaper photographers who captured it on film: two men running, ducking low, only a couple of feet in front of a fireball that obliterated everything else in the frame.

Moments after Reese and Kub emerged, Reidel approached the fiery doorway from the side, stooped low, and peered inside for signs of Cordifis.

Until she saw the stricken look on Robert Kub’s face as he plowed through the gang of reporters, Diana assumed Cordifis had been taken out another exit by a second team. But Kub didn’t resemble a man returning from a successful mission; he seemed like a man in need of a quiet place to cry.

As soon as he whipped off his mask, film and radio crews swarmed Chief Reese like flies on bad meat, pushing their microphones under his nose as they lobbed questions. Over the years Diana had heard contradictory stories about Reese, but it was amazing that he had so much command of both emotion and intellect at a time like this. He’d risked his life but had lost neither his equilibrium nor his composure. Diana watched as the battalion chief looked stolidly at the cameras.

“We went in and within a minute we found one firefighter wandering around alone,” Reese began. “He was in a panic and wasn’t any help at indicating where his partner was. We guided him outside and then went back down the direction he came from, but there wasn’t anything there. We searched as long as we could, but were finally forced out by the heat.”

“So who’s bringing him out?” one of the reporters asked. “There were two men lost, right? Who’s bringing out the other one?”

“To the best of our knowledge, he’s still in there.”

At that moment a section of the roof collapsed. Diana watched a thin tongue of orange shooting out the top of the doorway Cordifis and Finney had gone in, the doorway she herself had used earlier. It was inconceivable that anybody else was emerging alive from that tinderbox.

For a while Baxter stood next to her. Thomas Baxter was one of those people who talked out his problems, the nexus between his mouth and brain unencumbered by the normal barriers associated with self-censorship or second thoughts.

“How?” Baxter asked in his faded southern accent. “How in hell could he work thirty-six years and then have this happen? With all his experience. Christ! John must have killed himself getting out. You see his neck?”

“I saw it,” Diana said, shuddering to herself. Most firefighters didn’t think about getting burned because it didn’t happen all that often. But when it did, it was ugly.

“Bill almost went off a roof over on King Street last winter. House fire. His knees buckled. If John hadn’t been there . . . Last couple of years John’s been following Bill around like a mother hen. Cordifis should have retired a long time ago. Boy, we sure dodged the bullet tonight, didn’t we?”

Diana turned her back to the fiery spectacle. “I guess you could say that.”

PART TWO

OCTOBER:

FIVE MONTHS LATER

7. TOUGH TITTY

John Finney’s story was one of the first things the current batch of SFD drill instructors told probationary firefighters when they tried to spook them into quitting.

Finney didn’t know how specific the storytelling was, or whether the drill instructors mentioned that Finney was obsessed with Leary Way—that he’d grilled every member of every crew on the alarm, that he’d even constructed a miniature model of the complex as it was before the fire. Finney was well aware that some people thought he was losing his mind. But if people thought he was waging a futile crusade, tough titty.

Leary Way had ripped his life in half. Since that night in June he had not once gotten more than five hours of sleep in a twenty-four-hour period. Leary Way was all he thought about, and he knew it was all others thought about when they saw him. He wasn’t the same as before the fire, and he wouldn’t be until he’d tamed the fundamental conundrum. Would Bill Cordifis be alive if Finney had done anything differently? And had he panicked after leaving Cordifis?

Most people said nothing to his face, but his brother, Tony, relayed the rumors, the worst of which was that at Leary Way he’d been running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Chief Reese had publicly announced that Finney had panicked, and nobody could forget that. Nobody wanted to fight fire with a fireman who’d panicked.

But he hadn’t panicked and he knew it.

Still, not an hour passed without Finney wrestling to understand what went wrong. Heat stress and carbon monoxide poisoning from that night had blanked out much of his memory, and what he did remember he didn’t trust to be true. He knew he’d been hallucinating in the hospital but couldn’t be certain whether he’d been hallucinating during the fire itself. It was impossible to know in the confusion caused by heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation whether he had imagined telling Reese and Kub that they had to go twenty-eight paces to find the hole in the wall, or whether he’d actually told them.

Reese said Finney hadn’t told them anything. In dozens of interviews he’d implied that Finney’s primary concern was getting out of the building, not helping them find his partner. What Finney didn’t understand was how they’d missed Cordifis. Reese and Kub had been inside the building eleven minutes after Finney left them, plenty of time to find Bill, dig him out, and carry him to safety. Still, if they hadn’t known where to look . . .

Nobody blamed Bill’s death on him, not directly, but even so, the indictment floated about in the ether. If he’d been coherent enough to get himself out of the fire, why hadn’t he done as much for his partner?

Finney was beginning to believe it was not possible for a man to endure as many sleepless nights as he had without stepping over the precipice into madness. He had moods that nobody knew about, fugues that he hadn’t mentioned, even to the tight-lipped psychologist the department sent him to, a woman who gawked at him over the top of her tortoiseshell reading glasses and urged him to tell her what he was feeling. What did she think he was feeling? He and Bill Cordifis had gone into a burning building together. He’d come out alone. It didn’t get any simpler than that. He felt guilt. Grief. He felt incompetent. Dim-witted. Alienated. Evil, even.

It was bad enough to lose a partner. It was untenable to be the cause of that loss, unconscionable, and, ultimately, unendurable.

Leary Way was the sort of catastrophe that might happen to a firefighter at his first fire, yet Finney had been wading through smoke for eighteen years. Firefighting ran in the family blood. Finney’s brother had been in the department twenty-one years. And just a few months ago, after nearly forty-two years of service, their father had retired with the rank of battalion chief. Their grandfather had been a volunteer in his youth during the Depression in Michigan. Accounts of unexpected endings, ill-fated victims, and unimaginably bad luck had been ricocheting around the supper table since John Finney’s childhood, yet as far as he could tell, until now no one in the family had ever been the cause of one of those cataclysms.

He knew there was usually some permanent damage that went along with something like this. So far, aside from the skin grafts on his neck and wrists, he’d been left with an ineluctable and sometimes incapacitating depression. The possibility that he could no longer trust his own skills on the fire ground—or anywhere else—plagued and horrified him. First and foremost he was a firefighter. Losing that, even in spirit, was more painful than anything he could imagine.

Finney was, as always, obsessing on these thoughts in the officer’s room of Station 26 on a Tuesday morning in late October. He stared at his own reflection in the computer screen, trying to figure out who he’d become. The image he saw didn’t tell him anything new: dark brown hair, a relatively square face with only a few telltale lines to suggest his thirty-nine years, a blocky jaw. He saw a strong face, not quite handsome, with blue eyes his ex-wife had once called dreamy. Later, during the divorce, she’d decided they were vacant. Now they were underscored with dark circles.

Situated near the southern city limits of Seattle, Station 26 was the kind of sleepy little firehouse that Finney had discovered attracted misfits, misanthropes, bathroom philosophers, backyard mechanics, geezers on their way to retirement, or people who habitually reduced their life philosophy to a few words on a bumper sticker. Finney had been transferred here to be the acting officer while Lieutenant Sadler was on disability, but Sadler had returned unexpectedly, and now Finney was stuck riding the tailboard. He wasn’t particularly happy about it, but then he wasn’t particularly happy about anything these days.

In the officer’s room with him was Jerry Monahan, one of only a handful of firefighters whose attitude toward Finney wasn’t influenced in some manner by Leary Way. “Whatcha doin’?” Monahan asked.

“Trying to track down the last band member from the fire. I’ve talked to the others. This guy’s supposedly moved to Montana.”

“Don’t you think you’d be better off putting all this behind you, John?”

“No.”

“It was me, I’d move on and try to forget it.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

In his late fifties, Jerry Monahan was a roly-poly man with an ingratiating smile and rumpled clothing. His skin was so gray it looked like ash. There was always something a little off about Monahan; Finney regarded him as a real-life “what is wrong with this picture?” puzzle. This morning it was a brown shoelace in one of his black boots. Monahan overflowed with elaborate government conspiracy theories and was a frequent caller to extreme-right-wing radio shows. Finney had reason to believe he often went several days without bathing. He suspected Monahan was allergic to soap and the federal government in equal proportions.

While Finney stared at the computer screen, Jerry Monahan sat on Lieutenant Sadler’s bunk next to the desk and fiddled with a Teflon-coated cable on an aluminum spool, explaining how the spool fit into a contraption he’d designed to evacuate civilians from high-rise fires and how the whole thing was going to make him a billionaire. Finney had heard it all a hundred times before.

“Calling it Elevator-in-a-Can,” Monahan said. “What do you think?”

“Catchy.”

“All I need is a little luck. Just a little luck and two hundred grand for promotion. The potential with this dealybobber is staggering.”

“I’ll bet.”

Finney knew that plenty of people in the department called Monahan a crackpot to his face, and he found it easy to assume this latest invention would never work, much less make Monahan wealthy. It was an undeniable fact though that Monahan had already collected fortunes from two similar schemes. But then, true to his karma, he had never been wealthy for long and had quickly reinvested each of those fortunes in doomed projects.

“Quiet,” Monahan whispered, as an alarm came over the radio in the other room.

Finney followed as Monahan dragged the snarl of cable out into the watch office at the front of the station and stood next to the radio scanner. The dispatchers were adding Engine 38, Engine 17, and Ladder 9 to an ongoing incident in the Northgate area. There had been heavy radio traffic all morning, but this was the first time Finney paid any attention to it.

“All of the Fourth Battalion is tied up at that ship fire, and now they’re calling for more units,” Monahan said. “Two major alarms at once. There won’t be a rig in service north of the ship canal.”

The term
in service
referred to an apparatus that was ready to respond. A rig that was out of service was one already on an alarm or one that couldn’t be dispatched because of mechanical problems or some other reason.

“The whole town’s going to be jammed up,” said Monahan excitedly.

“A couple of fires aren’t going to overwhelm us.”

“You watch. This is going to be nuts.”

Even as he spoke, the bell in the corridor clanged.

Lieutenant Sadler came bustling down the hall from the beanery and immediately began tripping in the lengths of loose cable Monahan had left on the floor. He stood at the console waiting for the printout with the alarm information on it. Half a foot taller than Finney, Sadler had a thick black mustache that dominated his long face and a shock of salt-and-pepper hair he combed to one side. He spent much of his free time at the station talking on the phone to girlfriends, former girlfriends, prospective girlfriends, ex-wives, and women whose phone numbers he’d collected but whose names he’d lost or forgotten. Finney felt sorry for all of them.

“Four Avenue South and South Main Street?” Sadler said, scanning the run sheet on his way to the apparatus floor. “This has got to be a mistake. That’s nowhere close to our district.”

“They’ve got two working alarms in the north end,” said Monahan with an exuberance Finney found out of character. There were firefighters who responded to every fire call as if they’d just been handed a ticket to the World Series, but he knew Monahan typically reacted to each alarm as if he were about to have his ass sewn shut.

A mile from the station, turning off East Marginal Way onto Fourth Avenue South, Finney heard the radio crackle. “Engines Twenty-six, Twenty-two, Thirty-two, and Eleven; Ladders Twelve and Six; Aid Five, Medic Sixteen; Air Twenty-six, Battalion One: Four Avenue South and South Main Street, the Downtowner,” said the dispatcher. “Channel two. Engine Twenty-six?”

Lieutenant Sadler keyed the mike in his hand. “Engine Twenty-six, okay.”

“Engine Twenty-six. This was a pull station activated on floor seven.”

“Engine Twenty-six, okay.”

Sadler pressed the mechanical siren button on the floor. After all these years the growling of the old-fashioned siren still gave Finney a bit of a thrill. These days it was about the only thrill left.