Vertical Burn (36 page)

As gravity slowly inhaled G. A., Finney stood over him, his soot-streaked face dispassionate. Without meeting Finney’s eyes, G. A. slipped to the lip of the hole. Diana wanted to tell him to let go of the pistol—if he let go he might be able to hold on—but she still couldn’t get any words out.

“Why?” Finney asked. “Why did you guys do this?”

“You’d never understand,” G. A. gasped.

“Try me.”

“Why bother? You’re a loser.”

Locking eyes with Finney, G. A. slowly raised the gun for one last shot, a shot he was certain he could manage, just as he’d always been certain about everything else in his life. Finney didn’t bother to move out of the line of the pistol. He’d taken a bullet to his gut and didn’t feel like moving. Besides, he had it two to one against G. A. getting off the shot. He was right. Instead of pulling the trigger, G. A. slipped into the hole. On the way down they could hear him screaming, “Aw, shit!”

When he hit bottom, the ugly thump came back simultaneously with a hollow-sounding gunshot, as if his finger had reflexively jerked the trigger.

“Am I ever glad to see you,” whispered Diana, hoarsely.

“You okay?”

“I think so.”

“He was trying to throw you down the shaft.”

“It was the damndest thing.”

The door from stairwell B opened, and four men wearing MSAs and full bunkers entered in a whirl of smoke, their helmet shields identifying them as crew members from Ladder 7. They carried spare bottles and rope bags. The door opened again, and four more firefighters appeared.

“You the ones set up the rope system?” the officer asked.

“We are,” Diana whispered.

“Is it working?”

“So far.”

“Can you show us what you’ve done?” asked the officer.

“Maybe she can,” said Finney, backing against the wall where he slowly lowered himself to the floor. “I have to take myself out of service here.”

When they opened his coat, his T-shirt was soaked with blood from his navel down. The bullet had gone in at an angle, had zipped around the outside of his rib cage so that, using their fingertips, they located it just under the skin near his spine.

“What the hell happened?” asked the officer.

“It’s a long story.”

“Where did you guys come from?” Diana asked.

“Reese got this great idea of using ropes in the elevator shafts. The stairs cleared a little bit, so we came up to try it.”

77. A PAIR OF FEET UNDER A BLANKET

As they reclined in lounge chairs on the deck atop Finney’s houseboat, the late autumn sun glinted off Lake Union; boat traffic paraded across the surface of the lake like colored geegaws in a shooting gallery.

Diana doing the lion’s share of the work, they’d kayaked all morning in the double sea kayak, up the Montlake Cut to Lake Washington, past the razzle-dazzle homes and condos on Lake Washington Boulevard, and then along the lee side of the new floating bridge. They’d tied up at the sailing club at Leschi and lunched, then paddled back to Lake Union.

Their leisurely day was to have been capped off with a medal ceremony at the Seattle Center, a commemoration of heroes at the Columbia Tower that Finney had, at the last minute, decided to boycott for reasons he could not explain.

Diana and Finney were sitting in deck chairs so they could absorb the sunshine and watch the sailboats while they listened to the football game at nearby Husky Stadium on a portable radio, the announcers occasionally drowned out by the drone of a seaplane dropping down onto the water. In order to keep them warm, Diana had tucked her stocking feet into a provocative nook under the blanket in Finney’s lap.

They were both still on disability leave, and she had spent the last week at his place, returning home only to pick up fresh clothes, check messages, and water her mother’s houseplants. “What’s the score?” he asked.

“You just asked. Twenty-seven ten. Sure you don’t want to go to that ceremony?”

“When I think about medals, all I can see is that plaque over Reese’s desk.”

“If you’re not going, I’m not going.”

“That’s silly. Go ahead.”

“Not this time.”

After a minute or two, Diana said, “Rumor has it, when you get back from disability, Smith is going to make you a lieutenant.” Smith had been appointed interim chief of the department following Charles Reese’s abrupt resignation.

“That would be nice.”

“Is that all? Nice.”

“Yeah.”

Once Reese had staffed the upper floors of the Columbia Tower with truckmen, it had been a relatively simple, though time-consuming, process to evacuate the last of the wedding party out of the tower. Since Oscar Stillman was no longer available to manipulate the air pressurization system, the stairs had become passable first for firefighters and later for civilians.

The morning after the fire nineteen firefighters were sent to the hospital suffering burns or smoke inhalation. Finney was treated for burns, cuts, a gunshot wound, smoke inhalation, and a chipped tooth he’d incurred during his scuffle with Balitnikoff.

For twenty hours the fire raged, and after it was tapped, the Columbia Tower had a distinct tilt to it. One local newspaper columnist proposed that it be left that way and transformed into a tourist attraction.

During the fire Jerry Monahan gave a rambling confession to the medics who were treating his broken leg. He wanted to come clean in time for somebody to stop Balitnikoff, Tony, and the Lazenbys from killing Finney and his friends. Monahan didn’t seem to mind murdering two hundred strangers, but losing three people he knew bothered him no end, especially after having suffered guiltily through Gary Sadler’s emotional funeral a few days earlier. He’d admitted the Lazenby brothers had been inside the Bowman Pork fire giving bad directions to Sadler and Finney, that they’d taken an unconscious Sadler back into the building after Finney had carried him out.

Tony Finney turned state’s evidence, admitting he’d been desperate for money after a succession of gambling losses. Tony had always coveted the good life, and just to make sure he never got a piece of it, he’d gambled away most of his paychecks. As had the others, he’d done it for the money, tax-free and ankle-deep, as well as the promise, initially, that nobody would get hurt. After their first major fire resulted in Bill Cordifis’s death, they all realized they might well be prosecuted for murder—that was when denial, rationalization, and justification set in.

Gil Finney reluctantly told his son John that Sadler had visited him with theories about Monahan, and that he had breached Sadler’s confidence by telling Tony, who in turn must have told the others. Thus, the booby trap in Bowman Pork—intended to kill both Finney and Sadler.

For a few hours after they picked his body up off the street, Marion Balitnikoff was hailed by television news reporters outside the building as the second heroic firefighter who’d fallen to his death battling the Columbia Tower fire. It was the only glory he was to squeeze out of this.

Wrapped in a canvas tarp, Oscar Stillman’s body was found upstairs on fifty-eight. The most popular theory for why G. A. Montgomery had transported him up there was that he’d been planning to pitch him down the elevator shaft so it would look like an accident.

Paul Lazenby was found on sixty with a badly broken ankle. Michael Lazenby was picked up two days after the fire in L.A., waiting to board a Mexican Airlines flight to Mazatlán. Currently they were both in the King County jail, charged with the murder of Gary Sadler, the attempted murder of John Finney, and conspiracy to commit arson.

The day after the Columbia Tower fire was tapped, Charlie Reese gave a series of media interviews in which he attempted to fob off blame for the catastrophe on shady building contractors. Four days after the fire he resigned, saying he was going back to college to pursue a degree in social work, that he wanted to work with wayward teenage girls.

Later that week, Robert Kub came out with a public statement laying out what had really happened at Leary Way when he and Reese went inside to search. When reporters tried to contact Reese for his rebuttal, he’d already left town.

All in all, the Columbia Tower was the worst fire tragedy in Seattle history, the runner-up a 1943 plane crash in which a B-29 missed the runway at Boeing Field, crashed into the Frye Packing Plant, and killed thirty-two people.

In addition to Barney Spritzer, Stillman, Balitnikoff, and G. A. Montgomery, twenty-eight civilians, including building owner Patterson Cole, died, most in the elevator fiasco. Only one man survived the freight elevator, Norris Radford. His was a curious case, because a week later he managed to disappear from a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, near his mother’s home, and hadn’t been heard from since. Patterson Cole’s right-hand man was now being sought by the FBI.

Annie Sortland died in the burn ward a week after mistakenly naming Finney as her attacker.

Although dozens of people were treated for burns, heat exhaustion, smoke inhalation, and cuts from falling glass, the rest of the wedding group upstairs made it out safely. Two were already slated to publish books on their experience.

Though it was known that money had been funneled from Patterson Cole to finance the group of renegade firefighters, Cole was dead and his assistant missing, so nobody yet had the full story. Monahan and Tony Finney both maintained that the go-between for the money was G. A., and that he had, by his own account, dealt only with Norris Radford. Cole, desperate for cash to pay off his wife in their divorce settlement, knew he couldn’t sell off enough assets at fair market value in time, so he’d decided to get the cash in his own way.

When all was said and done, the fire department found an abandoned engine in the street in front of the Columbia Tower, an exact duplicate of Engine 10.

A day and a half after the fire, one of the building engineers, a man named Adolph Piacentini, drove his car across the Canadian border at Blaine, Washington, and, a few miles later, parked under some trees just off Highway 1 outside New Westminster, where he blew his brains out with a .357 revolver he’d smuggled illegally into the province. As was the case with some suicides, it had taken him two shots. He left no note, but his adult daughter said he had medical debts and had been especially troubled the past few weeks. Always safety conscious, he’d inserted ear plugs prior to the shooting.

“You expecting somebody?” Diana asked, turning her head casually toward the dock.

“What?”

“Those people coming down the gangway. Some woman. Your father. Looks like Smith, and I bet that other guy’s the senator who’s giving out the medals tonight.” Finney was already scrambling down the ladder to the lower deck. He’d called in with the excuse that he wasn’t well enough to attend the ceremony.

There were four of them: the personnel director for the city, a woman named Roetke; acting Seattle fire chief Smith; ex–battalion chief Gil Finney; and Senator Jon Stevenson, who was to present the awards at the Seattle Center in two hours. After they’d shaken hands all around—Finney remaining on the couch under a blanket—the senator said, “It’s a shame you’re not well enough to attend the ceremonies.”

“I pleaded with the doctors,” Finney lied.

“And you must be Diana Moore, the other firefighter I’ve heard so much about.”

“Yes, sir.”

A well-dressed, silver-tongued man in his sixties, the senator had spent most of his career in the state legislature before going to Washington, D.C. Neither Finney nor Diana bothered to correct his misimpressions of the Columbia Tower fire, of which there were many.

When they were ready to leave, Finney’s father approached the couch. “Both my sons are heroes. You went up and got those people. And Tony came forward and confessed. That probably took more guts than what you did.”

Once again, even though he was headed for prison, Tony had come out ahead in his father’s mind. It didn’t matter. People were screwed up. Finney smiled and said, “I love you, Dad.” His father nodded and stepped to the back of the room.

After everyone left, Finney and Diana went out onto the lower deck of the houseboat. The sun had sunk over the hill behind them, and a great shadow was quickly sweeping across the choppy waters. On the far shore, cars on the freeway sent the occasional sliver of reflected sunlight across the water.

After a while, Diana touched Finney on the cheek with the back of her hand. “Something bothering you?”

“A lot of things.”

“Me, too. But the farther we travel away from it, the smaller it gets.”

“Some philosopher say that?”

“Yeah. Me.” When he sat down, she straddled his lap, facing him. They kissed. After a few moments she said, “You coming back to the department?”

“I don’t know what else I’m good for.”

She looked into his eyes and kissed him again. “I can think of a couple of things you’d be good for right now.”

“Oh, yeah? You going to show me?”

Kissing the tip of his nose, she said, “I think I just might.”

"EMERSON WRITES WITH THE RICHNESS AND GRACE OF A POET.”
—Robert Crais

"Riveting . . . Far and away his best [novel] yet . . . Guaranteed to scare the socks off us normal citizens. The firefighting setting of
Vertical Burn
is one that Emerson knows intimately, and he has a gift for painting it. . . . Emerson’s always had a way with spectacular climaxes, and this one, a remarkable eighty-page scene inside a towering inferno, is a doozy.”

—The Seattle Times / Post-Intelligencer

"Earl Emerson’s plotting is original, suspenseful, so well done that the richness of his writing seems almost a bonus. . . . [He] has taken his place in the rarefied air of the best of the best.”

—
A
NN
R
ULE

"Filled with suspense, action, and derring-do, Earl Emerson keeps the reader thoroughly involved. . . . The characters resonate beyond the pages. . . . In addition to creating a smart, exciting read, Emerson has written a tribute to his profession.”

—Tulsa World

"Catches your attention fast and keeps you all the way to the end. . . . The author turns fire into a living, breathing character.”

—The News Tribune
(Tacoma)

"FASCINATING, FAST-PACED . . .

The detail in the lives of firefighters and how they actually fight fires is thoroughly engrossing. This is my first novel by Earl Emerson. . . . I’ve got some catching up to do.”

—Times Record News
(Wichita Falls, TX)

"Lightning-paced, exciting, and surefooted,
Vertical Burn
creates and maintains a level of suspense that will keep you on edge right to the end. . . . Emerson continues to turn out exciting and vivid mysteries and thrillers.”

—Statesman Journal
(Salem, OR)

"Earl Emerson is a writer’s writer. In every book he tries something new, and he always comes up a winner.”

—
A
ARON
E
LKINS

"Recommended . . . A complex tale of smoke, flame, and murder . . . Emerson vividly portrays the physical hardships of racing fire and heat while encased in cumbersome protective garments and carrying fifty pounds of gear. He develops both male and female characters well, writes with assurance, and skillfully juggles a complicated plot.”

—Library Journal

"A riveting story of conflict, deceit, murder, and redemption.”

—
J
OHN
S
AUL

"
VERTICAL BURN
SIZZLES WITH EXCITEMENT. . . .

Emerson gives us a ringside seat to firefighter protocol and procedures intermingled with relentless suspense. . . . It’s a convincing tale populated with the courageous individuals who fight fires and the scoundrels who set them.”

—BookPage

"Reads a lot like one of Cannell’s Shane Scully potboilers . . . What’s extra-special about this book is the accuracy and breathtaking elements of the fire scenes. . . . Emerson really bumps it up a couple of notches with his vivid portrayal of the physical hardships in actual firefighting.”

—The Toronto Sun

"Emerson combines an intimate knowledge of fires and firefighting with an intricate plot played out by characters you can love or hate. It’s a thriller that delivers on thrills.”

—Booklist

"Loyalty, greed, conspiracy, and jealousy are the themes that fuel Emerson’s fire here. The result is a hot new book with an engaging main character, an incendiary plot, a sizzling romance, and several explosive action sequences.”

—Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

"[Emerson’s] charismatic protagonist is both believable and admirable . . . you’ll root for him.”

—Kirkus Reviews