Into the Inferno

by Earl Emerson

  He peered around the vehicle to see where I was headed, spotted Achara, and rolled his eyes. As a group, the guys in the department indulged in a lot of adolescent humor about my homing in on the best-looking woman at any accident scene—some of them even claimed I’d elbowed them aside to get to particularly pretty victims. I almost always let them run with their joke.

  Achara was on the passenger side of the Suburban, hands on her knees, staring at the ground. “You all right?” I asked.

  The ringing in my ears obscured her initial reply. When I asked her to repeat, she said, “Got a pencil? I’m going to give you some numbers. Don’t tell Scott.”

  “Why not?”

  “Write this down. I want you to have this before I tell you anything else.”

  “I don’t have anything to write with.”

  “There’s no time to get it. Just listen. Seventy-five, forty.”

  “Seventy-five, forty.”

  “That’s the first part. The rest goes, eighteen, twenty-four, eighteen, sixty-three, oh-eight, forty-six. Write it down first chance you get. Don’t let anyone see it until you need it.”

  “Need it for what?”

  “Give it back to me. Do you remember it?”

  “Seventy-five, forty. Eighteen, twenty-four, eighteen, sixty-three, oh-eight, forty-six.”

  “Not too many people could do that.”

  “Bible school.”

  She wasn’t bleeding, but she would probably end up with a black eye from the impact of her air bag. “You sure you can remember that?”

  “I can remember anything.”

  “Jesus Christ! You could have killed somebody,” Donovan whined, rounding the rear of the Suburban holding a four-by-four inch gauze pad to his nose, his tieless shirt dappled with red.

  “It was your fault.”

  “My fault? You grabbed the wheel. You don’t ever grab the wheel when somebody else is driving.”

  “You were in the wrong lane, Scott. You were going to kill somebody.”

  “The only person was going to kill anybody was you.”

  “Look who’s talking. Mr. Ethical.”

  “Now don’t get into that.”

  “I’ll get into it if I want to get into it.”

  “This is my last warning. Don’t go there.” His voice was surprisingly calm considering what they’d just been through.

  They glowered at each other, and before anybody could react, Achara stepped forward and kicked Donovan in the shin. He stepped back and held his leg. The contrast in size between Achara and Donovan made the skirmish almost funny. I doubted she weighed a hundred pounds. At the least, Donovan weighed two-forty.

  None of this kept her from kicking him a second time.

  I stopped her before she could do anything else. “No, you don’t. That’s the end of it. It’s over.”

  “Get out of my way. You don’t even know what this is about.”

  “Sure I do. It’s about somebody going to jail.”

  “Don’t even make me tell you how many martial arts I know,” Donovan warned, over my shoulder.

  Donovan’s jaw was clenched, his blue eyes glued to Achara. Yet, strangely, he seemed afraid of her. In a physical altercation he could take Achara, together with me and probably Stephanie and Stiles, all of us at once. Because of the calluses on Donovan’s knuckles, I had no doubt his martial arts skills were impressive. Yet he hadn’t made a move to defend himself.

  Stiles picked up his aid kit and marched across the street to his pickup truck. Stephanie took Achara by the arm and led her behind the Suburban. I gestured for Donovan to step over to the Lexus.

  “What’s going on between you two?”

  “You saw her. She caused that accident.”

  “What were you arguing about in the truck?”

  “It’s pretty simple. I’m in charge and she’s not. She was in school so long, she never learned to take orders.”

  “You two better straighten this out.”

  “She’d better straighten herself out.” Donovan looked off in the distance toward Snoqualmie Pass, where billows of black smoke from the state fire academy were rolling across the foothills. We’d all trained up there at Exit 38, everyone in the department, probably every firefighter in the state. “She just needs to stay on track. She gets out of the lab so infrequently, I don’t think she knows how to behave in public.”

  “I have a feeling there’s more to it.”

  “Hey, listen. She assaulted me.”

  “You drive back with Stephanie. I’ll go with Achara.”

  “Not necessary. We’ll be fine.”

  “You sure?”

  “It’s a lot of strain, you know?” Donovan’s eyes held mine. I figured him for a real Lothario, a heartthrob with the ladies, or maybe the guys, the ones who liked that type, big, thick, muscular, the boyish haircut, the baby-blues behind the wire-rimmed spectacles. “Trying to figure this out and get the work done before we lose you. And now we have that other firefighter, what’s her name?”

  “Karrie.”

  “I know this is a lot of pressure on Carpenter. I tried this once before in Tennessee and we weren’t successful, and you know what? It really bummed me out. I think the same thing’s happening to Achara. You know what I’m talking about. You do emergency work all the time. We don’t get out of the office. This is just a lot of strain.”

  “Yeah. Well.”

  Stephanie came around the vehicle and said, “I think she’ll be okay now. Why don’t we switch cars. You drive with Achara?”

  Donovan said, “Forget it. We’ve got work to do. I’ll go with Achara.”

  For a split second Achara looked at me, and I had the feeling she was afraid I might tell him about the numbers she’d given me. She stepped forward and put her talon of a hand out, and she and Donovan shook.

  Moments later Donovan managed to extricate the Suburban from the ditch without the assistance of a wrecker. There was no telling what was going on between them, perhaps a tinge of professional envy, Donovan finding himself upstaged by the whiz kid from MIT, Achara rankling under the yoke of a boss she knew had lesser skills than she. Or maybe it was seeing Joel. Visiting him had shaken me up, too.

  What bothered me even more than Achara’s sudden show of temper was the numbers she’d given me. I had no idea what they meant or why she’d offered them. Or why she didn’t want Donovan to know about them. I had the feeling they were part of a chemical formula, but what did I know? Sooner or later I’d get her alone and we would have an interesting conversation.

  45. DON’T ASK ME WHAT I WAS DOING

  IN A MOTEL ROOM WITH STEPHANIE RIGGS

  Wracked with guilt for not being with my daughters, I thought about fleeing before she came out of the bathroom. I was stretched out on the bed, hands clasped behind my head, doing deep-breathing exercises, while the smartest, most attractive woman I’d ever met was taking her clothes off behind the bathroom door in a sleazy North Bend motel room.

  Outside, it was nearly as dark as my heart.

  My girls and Morgan had left a note. Although I’d given her the keys and told Morgan she could use my truck for whatever came up, I was surprised when she took me up on it. They’d gone to a movie I’d seen with them already, one they knew I didn’t care to sit through again.

  After we decided to go to the store to pick up groceries for supper, Stephanie, instead of turning left off Ballarat and heading toward the QFC, had turned west on North Bend Way, swinging into the parking lot at the Sunset Motel. When the motor stopped, she gave me a long look.

  “What?” I said.

  Without a word, she went into the office, got a key, and proceeded to a room off the second-floor balcony. Suspecting I was soon to become the recipient of what my army buddies used to call a mercy fuck, I followed with the aimless hankering of a stray dog trailing a garbage truck. Not that Stephanie was anything like a garbage truck, even if I was exactly like the stray dog.

  It might have been my imaginatio
n, but I thought she’d been looking at me differently all day. It was even possible we’d had a few tender moments of the kind you get with someone you’re beginning to fall in love with.

  Despite my reputation as a womanizer, I was always confused when it came to women. I never knew what they were thinking, not unless they told me, and most of the time even then I didn’t really know.

  As I followed her up the open stairs and along the walkway, she turned back and ambushed me with a kiss. Right out there for the birds to see, and the three Hispanic kids kicking a soccer ball against the wall of a nearby garage door. Ridiculous and dewy-eyed as it sounds, it was the kind of kiss you always want to be your first with a woman, the kind you never get except once in a blue moon, when one of you is just a tad drunk or a lot exhausted and you know the relationship is not going to extend past the exchange of phone numbers.

  We weren’t drunk, but we both knew the relationship had two days, three at the most, and that must have added spice to it.

  Stephanie resumed her ardor as soon as we were in the room, her body small and slender and taut in my hands, her arms twined around my neck, her lithe stomach pressed against mine, as she stood on tiptoes clinging to me. Every part of her body felt hot against my cool skin. She kissed the tips of two fingers and pressed them to my nose, then turned and disappeared into the bathroom.

  I closed the door with my foot and reached out and flicked on a dim light. The drapes were already closed. The room had a queen-size bed, a vanity, one chair, and a cheesy painting of a moose in a swamp.

  I lay on the bed without a thought in my head except . . .

  Mercy fuck.

  I was about to get one.

  Joel McCain once told me my crimes against women were a control issue, that I needed to be in control of every little aspect of every relationship. I only half wondered how he knew that about me. He hadn’t endeared himself to me by calling my relationships with women crimes. I’d bridled at the thought. Hell, I was still friends with all of my ex-girlfriends.

  But he was right about control. As a child I’d had zero control over my life or even the hours in my day. At Six Points every waking minute was accounted for, booked in advance by the church, by my father, by William P. Markham, and by the Lord Jesus Christ. If you were a kid, there was no time for riding a bike or flying a kite or painting by numbers. Nobody played cards or read fiction. These activities were all blueprints offered up by the devil to take your mind off God’s work. Since birth I’d had the principles of austerity and compliance pounded into my brain. Okay. So I had control issues.

  I suppose I must have been a control freak with Lorie as well, though specific examples escape me. Lord. Maybe I had driven her away! Maybe her parents were right about me. Maybe I’d turned my ex-wife into a lesbian.

  Now I was in a motel with Stephanie Riggs.

  And she was in control.

  And you know what?

  I kind of liked it.

  My life had been taken out of my hands, my days orchestrated by our panicky quest to track down the origins of the syndrome. If she wanted to come out of the bathroom and make love, fine. If she wanted to come out and tell me to scram, that was fine, too. At this point I refused to let anything bother me.

  When I heard the shower running, I knew I was in for a wait.

  The funeral had been hell. Sitting between Karrie and Ben Arden’s wife, Cherie, I could only wonder why I hadn’t believed Stan Beebe’s story back when there’d been a chance to save him.

  The world had mobilized to save my butt, but without lifting a finger I’d let Stan drown in a sea of desperation.

  The visit to Joel McCain’s house and the bizarre interactions between the chemists from Canyon View had been puzzling at best. Achara’s quiet conference with me and desperate anger at Donovan had been even more puzzling. Thinking to catch her alone, I’d been on the lookout for her all day, but it hadn’t happened.

  Back to the station after the accident, I was standing outside in the sunshine dialing various media outlets on a cell phone when the black Suburban pulled into the gravel lot across the street from the firehouse, Donovan and Carpenter peering out the open driver’s window like an old married couple out for a Sunday afternoon drive, the issues between them seemingly resolved.

  Side by side, they walked across the street just as Stephanie came out of the station. After eavesdropping on my phone conversation for a moment, Donovan said, “You’re not calling a television station, are you?”

  Placing my palm over the phone, I said, “Yes. Why?”

  “That’s crazy. You should stop!”

  “I’m—”

  “Trust me on this. I was in Chattanooga, where the news guys came in like a herd of elephants and raised so much dust things never got right again. The investigation ground to a halt! I’m telling you. We’ve got a couple of days to move like lightning. Don’t gum up the works.”

  I told the folks at the TV station I would call back. Maybe Donovan had a point. He’d been through this before; I hadn’t. I had a strong inclination to hold a press conference, but maybe he was right.

  Donovan interrupted my thoughts. “I’m planning to run down some leads here in the valley. I want to look over the accident site from last winter. I also want to interview McCain’s friends. And Feldbaum’s. Maybe yours, too. Sometimes you can get something verbally that you can’t dig up with test tubes and science.”

  “I told you before. It’s got something to do with Jane’s California Propulsion, Inc. It has to.”

  “I know. I know. And we think there might be something to that. I’ve already done a quick read-through of my lists from three years ago, and I can’t find their name. I’m going to have Achara work on that this afternoon. She’ll check out the various components to rocket fuel and see what the health implications are. She’ll also make some calls about Jane’s. We have a few contacts in the industry, so we might be able to learn something.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. We want you well, pal.”

  “Thanks.”

  He winked. I glanced at Achara to see what her take on this was, but she didn’t seem to be paying attention.

  “If you’re still thinking about calling the media,” Donovan said, “don’t. I’m telling you. They show up, they’ll turn this into a circus. You want to give a hundred interviews a day? That’s what the chief in Chattanooga was doing. And they didn’t get one pertinent piece of information from the public. Not one.”

  Stephanie came out of the station in time to hear this. “You’re not going to call the media?” she asked.

  “I was. Donovan’s got another take on it.”

  “I think you should.”

  “What do you think, Achara?” I asked.

  She turned to me. “It’s your call. I’m not going to vote on a thing like that.” Everybody waited for my decision, Stephanie, Donovan, Carpenter, Ian Hjorth, who’d also come outside and joined our group.

  “I’m going to talk,” I said.

  Stephanie patted my shoulder. “Good. Somebody out there might know something.”

  Shaking his head with a conviction that almost changed my mind, Donovan said, “It’s your call. But first give us a twenty-four-hour period without interference.”

  “I don’t think so. Tomorrow’s day six.”

  “You don’t know that for certain.”

  “Tell you what, Scott. When you contract this, you take a chance on which day you’re on.”

  “You’re right. Sorry. Forget I even said that. Jesus. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  I set up a press conference for ten o’clock the next morning outside the fire station.

  Soon after my decision, Achara took her briefcase and notes and walked the two blocks to the North Bend branch of the King County Library; she said she was looking for a place to spread out her notes and work. Donovan climbed into his Suburban and drove off without telling us where he was headed.

 
Stephanie and I dropped the girls off with Morgan at my house, exchanging tearful kisses with both. Morgan, who’d been all but unreachable for almost two days, was suddenly eager to baby-sit.

  The most frustrating task that afternoon was locating firefighters from the Chattanooga Fire Department willing to speak candidly. Already one firefighter was being sued by one of the litigants for speaking out in public, and just about everyone and their mother had been subpoenaed to the trial.

  Once again, I found myself in a long, rambling conversation with Charlie Drago, who now filled me in on the LPG disaster that happened two weeks after Southeast Travelers, the explosion he’d forgotten to tell me about during our first conversations. The fact that he’d forgotten to mention it the first time around spoke volumes about his mental acuity.

  He also said there’d been a fire in his garage shortly after he began looking into the syndrome, blamed it on powerful unnamed forces, said he’d been followed by men in black for weeks, that his phone had been tapped, that they might be listening to us that very minute. The more we spoke, the more I realized Charlie was a full-blown paranoiac.

  “You gotta listen to me,” Drago said. “Whatever anybody tells you about that LPG incident, it was not an accident. It was a trap. You know who responded? The same group of guys went to Travelers. It was only luck it didn’t kill more than the six of them and the two civilians. You wipe out half a battalion and you suddenly no longer have anyone who cares about Southeast Travelers. Specifically, you wipe out the guys who responded to Southeast, and you got no one left to come down with this syndrome and start suing. That was the plan all along.”

  “Carl Steding told me the same thing. That it was a trap. Or at least that’s what he hinted.”

  “Trouble is, we’re practically the only two people in town who think that.”

  “Wasn’t the LPG incident ruled accidental?”

  “Sure it was. That’s what they wanted.”

  “That’s what who wanted?”

  “The people who lit up my garage.”

  “And who were they?”

  “Whoever stands to lose their pants over Southeast Travelers. It could be any one of thirty corporations. Or their investors. Thousands of investors. In fact, investors are usually the worst. I should know. I was an investor once.”