Vertical Burn (8 page)

G. A. fixed his hazel eyes on Finney, his bushy eyebrows lowering. “I don’t buy any of this.”

“I don’t know why not. You were already looking into it yourself.”

“Examined the possibility and dismissed it. These days all companies in the city are taking more alarms than when you and I signed on. It was only a matter of time before this started happening. That’s why we have mutual aid pacts with the outlying districts. Let me try to put this delicately, John. I know how hard you took Bill’s death. Sometimes transferring the blame to someone else tracks with reality. Sometimes it’s wishful thinking.”

Finney knew there was some truth to what G. A. was saying. He also knew that if he could prove the events of June 7 had been planned, G. A.’s official interpretation would look foolish, and the investigation would be reopened. It would mean G. A. had made a bad call. With a fire that big and a fire death involved, a department death, it would be embarrassing as hell. There was a good possibility it would ruin him.

“Here’s the deal, John. The department report, the Labor and Industries report, and the NFPA reports on Leary Way are all coming out any day now. Why don’t you sit tight and see what they have to say? This was a tragedy, but don’t try to link it up to the Kennedy assassination or Area Fifty-one.”

“Is that how I sound?”

“That’s exactly how you sound.” They were quiet for a moment. “Listen, I feel as bad about Bill as you. But we have to let it go.”

Oddly enough, G. A. Montgomery had been appointed chairman of the panel preparing the SFD report on Leary Way. Finney wasn’t convinced that putting the man who’d investigated the fire in charge of the panel investigating the department’s performance in extinguishing the fire was kosher, but apparently nobody else had any problem with it.

“You’re going to keep after this no matter what I say, aren’t you, John?”

“Absolutely.”

“I can tell you right now, when all is said and done, what you’re going to find is a series of coincidences.”

“Then you’ll be right and I’ll be wrong.”

As he turned to leave, G. A. said, “You still seeing that counselor the department set you up with?” Finney looked out the beanery windows at the corona the streetlights formed in the drizzle. “I’m just thinking you can use some help. Anybody in your position could.”

“I quit her. She was a little too neurotic for my taste.”

“One last thing,” G. A. said. “Give me the address of that vacant house. I’ll look at it. I can do that much.”

It was nearly midnight when Finney picked up his ringing phone. “Seven Avenue South and South Holden Street,” said a gruff voice. It sounded as though the call was coming from a phone booth alongside a busy highway, and Finney had to struggle to put the blurred syllables into words. He noticed his caller had given the streets in the standard fire department lexicon, the avenue before the street so that the designators were next to each other, the number clean and without a suffix. “You know where that is?”

“Of course I do. What about it?”

“Meet me there tomorrow morning at zero six-thirty. It’s about Leary Way.”

“Who is this?”

“I can’t say anything over the phone. Zero six-thirty. Don’t bring anybody else.”

17. BLOWING UP GRACELAND

It was early when Finney rolled over in bed and peered out his window at a single light reflected off the inky lake. A heavy fog had moved in overnight, obscuring everything except the boat next door. Power lines buzzed. The weather report said the fog would burn off by noon and that the rest of the day would be clear and sunny, but Finney, a Northwest native, knew this kind of October mist could roost on Seattle indefinitely like a large, wet hen.

At twenty minutes past six, when he drove past Station 26, the rigs were in place behind the roll-up doors, everything dark except for a glow from the beanery lights. On A-shift, Peterson generally woke up a couple of hours before everybody else, rustling around in the beanery and whistling and just generally annoying the others who were still trying to sleep.

Finney drove eleven blocks past the firehouse and parked next to the river where Seventh and Holden merged with Riverside. He saw no pedestrians and no parked vehicles. What little traffic there was came and went in the fog with startling suddenness. After fifteen minutes, he began pacing the short chunk of Riverside Drive that paralleled the water.

Oddly enough, the vacant house Monahan had put on the dangerous buildings list for Finney was two blocks away.

Engine 26’s first-in district was small but tricky, bordered on the south by the city limits, bisected at odd angles by Highways 509 and 99. The Duwamish Waterway sliced through it, too, running between 26’s and the rest of the city, its muddy water spanned by drawbridges. Half a dozen streets and avenues dead-ended at the river and continued on the other side in Engine 27’s district, so that the drivers of both stations had to memorize dozens of individual addresses—or risk watching helplessly as a fire burned across the river.

By seven he was back in the cab of his Pathfinder with the heater running. He’d seen only a handful of cars, none with red IAFF union stickers in the window. Finney was assuming from the way the caller used the street designators and military time that he was meeting with a firefighter.

At 7:25 a pedestrian glided forward through the fog and tapped on his window. “They’re coming for you,” she said, as he rolled the window down. “The first thing they’re going to do is make us sterile. It’s only a matter of time before they get around to blowing up the Supreme Court, the Empire State Building, Graceland.”

“You’re out early this morning, Annie.” The homeless woman’s knit cap and eyebrows were freighted with moisture. He wondered if she’d been roaming these streets all night.

“The defenders of freedom are few and far between, but we don’t sleep in.”

She gave him a blank look that made him think she hadn’t gotten much sleep, then she turned briskly and pulled her cart away into the murk.

Finney was due at the station at 7:30, in less than five minutes, and it was obvious by now that last night’s caller wasn’t coming. Everyone in the department knew how to push Finney’s buttons, and the phone call the previous night was probably a practical joke. They were probably yukking it up in the beanery at this very moment over the thought of Finney out here in the fog waiting for secret information.

When he got to the station, nobody paid any attention to him. He carried his personal protective equipment over to the engine in the apparatus bay, removed Peterson’s gear, and put his own equipment on the rig. He Velcroed his name tags onto the passport name card in the cab, inspected his mask to make sure it was in working order, and signed into the daybook in the watch office. He ran the daily checks on the PhysioControl Lifepak, changed batteries in the three portable radios, and looked inside every compartment door on the rig to ascertain each piece of equipment was in place and in working order.

At 8:36, while he was mopping floors, 26’s big metal bell began clanging. The tones on the station speaker signified that it was an aid call, the address only a few blocks north of the station. As the doors rolled up, Monahan fired up the Spartan, turning on the emergency lights, and they rolled out onto Cloverdale and into the mid-morning Boeing traffic. Around the corner the residential streets were empty.

After they stopped in front of the address, Finney procured the aid kit, O
₂
kit, and Lifepak and carried them into the house. Their ninety-two-year-old patient had flu symptoms. They called an ambulance, and ten minutes later, as Finney was wheeling the empty ambulance stretcher through the front entrance of the home, a fire call came in on his portable radio. Engine 26 received only two or three alarms a day, and it was rare to miss one because they were already out of service.

“Engines Twenty-seven, Eleven, and Thirty-six; Ladders Seven and Eleven; Aid Fourteen, Medic Twenty-eight; Battalion Seven: Eight Avenue South and South Elmgrove Street. Smoke from the building.” The location was only a few blocks away, but they wouldn’t be included until Lieutenant Sadler radioed the dispatchers that Engine 26 was back in service. In all probability, Engine 27 would get there first.

18. BLIND MEN TOSSING HORSESHOES

Even though Lieutenant Sadler cautioned Monahan to slow down and keep an eye out for the other rigs responding in the fog, Monahan drove too fast and ended up skidding the 34,000-pound apparatus to a halt just inches shy of Engine 27’s tailboard. They were lucky he hadn’t killed anyone.

Finney had been smelling smoke for blocks, and now it mingled with the odor of hot brakes and the back-of-the-throat tang of a week’s worth of big-city pollution suspended in the fog. Between the smoke and the fog, they would be like blind men tossing horseshoes.

For a split second Finney glimpsed the roofline and a wind-blown chimney, dense black smoke pumping from a dormer at one end. Then the smoke and fog damped out his view.

After conferring quickly with the driver of Engine 27, Lieutenant Sadler twisted around in his seat and spoke to Finney through the crew-cab window. “McKittrick says he thinks there’s a hydrant about a hundred yards down. I’m going to send Jerry. You and me are going to take a second line off Engine 27 and back them up.”

“Right.”

Finney couldn’t have been more pleased. They were taking a line inside. They were going to fight fire. He lived for times like this.

The smoke was thick and acrid, and they coughed as they moved through it. Even Sadler, the hardened nicotine junkie. Even McKittrick, who operated Engine 27’s pump panel, his nostrils yielding a steady stream of snot after only a few minutes’ exposure to the smoke in the street.

Air cylinder on his back, Finney climbed down off the rig and went around the back of Engine 27, where he pulled out the first hundred feet of inch-and-three-quarter hose load with the gated wye. By the time he got it on his shoulder, McKittrick had shouldered the second hundred feet. Ian McKittrick had almost twenty-five years in the department, fifteen of those behind the wheel of Engine 27. He was a fast talker and knew his job better than he knew his kids. Bald-headed and slack-jawed, McKittrick placed the gated wye and ten feet of line near a hose-port on the fire side of the rig—he would connect it later—then followed Finney through the fog, dropping dry hose flakes onto the ground behind them as they proceeded. Finney, unable to see the house, followed the first line on the ground.

It wasn’t until Finney was on the front doorstep that he realized this was the vacant house they’d put on the dangerous buildings list.

McKittrick hollered over his shoulder as he ran back to his rig. “Don’t waste any water. All I’ve got right now is that five hundred gallons in the tank.”

The front door was half off its hinges, mute testimony to the rough passage of the earlier crew. Inside, Engine 27’s hose stream was being directed into a sheet of orange without any seeming effect, and Finney could see the boots of two firefighters on their stomachs in front of him. He could hear the crackle of burning wood. Even in the doorway he was forced to tip his helmet so that the brim shielded his face from the heat.

Behind, over the roar of Engine 27’s pump, he could hear Lieutenant Sadler yelling, “You stupid shit!” He assumed the comment was addressed to Monahan; those sorts of expletives usually were. Later, he learned Sadler had anchored a piece of four-inch supply line in the street while Monahan drove away and recklessly overshot the hydrant, disappearing into the fog.

Finney pulled his facepiece on, tightened the straps on the sides, opened the valve at his waist, and inhaled clean air; then he pulled his hood over the top of the facepiece, put his helmet back on, and knelt in the doorway waiting for his partner. A torrent of hot smoke surged out of the building into his face, but with this much cover, he barely felt the dirty heat.

Sadler reached the porch at the same time as the hose at their feet stiffened, the water knocking the kinks out with the sound of a cardboard box being kicked. Finney worked the bale on the Task Force tip to bleed air off the line. A few seconds later Sadler finished masking up and tapped him on the shoulder.

Finney crawled twelve feet inside before his helmet rapped against the green bottle on another man’s back. Even with every bit of skin covered by thick protective clothing, the heat had pinned Engine 27’s crew to the floor. Finney and Sadler were still on their hands and knees, but they would get lower as their clothing and equipment began to heat up. He heard the mellow, ripping sound of fire scratching at the structure.

Not realizing Finney had run up against the other crew, Sadler bumped him from behind, hard. Like any other high-danger activity, firefighting could get addictive, and doing it better and quicker than others was addictive, too. Sadler said, “Come on! Let’s fight some fire! Let’s go, man!”

It was always cooler behind. Finney knew of a man on Engine 6’s crew who’d been shoved into a burning basement from behind by an overeager officer. Sadler bumped Finney’s back again, harder. When Finney turned to complain, he reached out but felt only empty space and scarred hardwood flooring. For a split second he thought Sadler might have fallen into a hole in the floor or rolled down a stairwell.

Retracing his path along the hose line, he groped his way to the doorway. Inexplicably, Sadler was standing on the porch, McKittrick alongside him. Sadler spoke through his facepiece without turning his gaze from McKittrick. “Ian says there’s a victim upstairs.”

“This is the house I was in last shift. It’s vacant.”

“He saw a victim.”

Sadler, McKittrick, and Finney trotted through the tall, wet weeds in the yard, McKittrick stumbling on a coiled hose line. When they were almost to the road, McKittrick turned and pointed to a second-story window barely visible in the murk. Sadler gave a report on his portable radio. “Dispatch from Engine Twenty-six. We have a victim on the second floor. Repeat. Confirmed victim on the second floor. We’re going to initiate a rescue.”

Finney glimpsed coils of black smoke belching out the broken windows, a tongue of flame. Then something upright darted past a window on the second story, something that resembled a human form.