Flashover

by Suzanne Chazin

  “Dana,” Carter muttered, as if in a trance. Connie and Georgia gave him puzzled looks, so he elaborated. “Charles Dana—Louise Rosen’s former medical partner. The name just came to me.”

  “You knew Louise Rosen?” Connie asked Carter.

  He shook his head and fumbled about for an explanation. “Just something I saw in her apartment.” Carter wasn’t about to mention the fire department connection to Connie—not without more evidence, at least.

  “Excuse me, ladies,” he said, rising from the table. “I need to make a call.”

  Carter left the table, and Connie studied Georgia. “You all right, baby girl? You look exhausted.”

  “It was a tough night,” Georgia admitted. “And it’s not over, I guess. But I still want to help you study for your sergeant’s exam later.” She noticed a Band-Aid on the inner crook of Connie’s left arm. “You give blood today?” she asked.

  “Give it every day,” said Connie, shrugging off her concern. “Don’t worry about my exam. You need rest more. Or a little road therapy with Dr. Harley.”

  Georgia smiled at the thought of her Harley-Davidson Softail Custom, parked in the narrow lot next to Manhattan base. Then she shook her head.

  “Actually, Con,” said Georgia, playing with her fork. “I kind of need to talk to you more.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Connie, tucking a wad of frothy black hair behind one ear that sported three or four pierced earring holes. “Man trouble, job trouble, mother trouble or kid trouble?”

  “Is it always one of the above?”

  “No. Usually, it’s three out of four.”

  Georgia felt herself bristle slightly at the truth behind Connie’s words. It was Georgia who usually ran to Connie—not the other way around. Though Connie was a year younger than Georgia and childless, her toughness and self-assurance made her seem so much older and wiser. There was an effortlessness to Connie that Georgia envied—not least of all because Georgia found that kind of decisiveness and grit so hard to muster in herself.

  Connie pressed a glass of water to her full, cocoa-colored lips. “It’s Mac, isn’t it?” she asked, putting the glass down without drinking. “What’s he done, the pig?”

  “Maybe everything. Maybe nothing.” Georgia sighed. “I think I’m pregnant.”

  “You take a test?”

  “The kits say you have to wait ten days after a missed period. I’m only eight days late.”

  “Eight days doesn’t mean you’re…”

  “—I’m never late. And my breasts are sore. And I’ve got this funny tingling around my nipples that I haven’t experienced since I was pregnant with Richie—”

  “But you’re on the pill, right?”

  “No. It makes me gain weight. I’ve been using a diaphragm, but one night, I forgot and I didn’t want to tell Mac, so I just winged it and…”

  “—Shit,” Connie muttered. She played with the Band-Aid on her left arm.

  “Yeah. Shit.”

  “Have you told him?”

  Georgia shook her head. “We’ve only been together four months. Aw, man.” Georgia held back a catch in her throat and massaged her temples. “I can’t go through with another man what I went through with Rick. It was horrible. I can’t raise another child alone.”

  The two women sat in silence for a moment. Finally, Connie spoke.

  “It’s not the Dark Ages, girl,” she offered gently. “You’re not trapped—you know that, don’t you? I…” Connie fiddled with the leather wristband on her watch. “…I’ve been there. I’d help you through it.”

  “You’ve been there?” Georgia stared at Connie, unable to conceal her astonishment. They’d been friends for eight years. Hell, the word friends didn’t even begin to cover it. One weekend, when Richie was two and a half and Georgia’s mother was away, the child had a temper tantrum over a bowl of peas. Georgia, physically and emotionally exhausted from being a brand-new firefighter, lost it. She screamed and cried and seriously considered giving Richie up and just walking away from the idea that she could ever cope with being a single mother.

  It was Connie who saved her that night—Connie who came over, scraped up the peas and broken dishes, gave Richie a bath and put him to bed, made Georgia go for a run and then talked to her until three that morning. Since that time, there was nothing the two hadn’t shared with each other—or so Georgia had thought. Yet here was something Connie had chosen to hold back.

  Did she think I would judge her? Georgia wondered. She longed to ask her friend a million questions: When? How old were you? Was it with your ex-husband? Connie had had a brief, childless marriage at nineteen that she seldom spoke about. And there had been one other serious love in her life—a man she’d met through her job, about two years ago. But that, too, was short-lived and had hurt Connie so deeply, she never told Georgia his name.

  Georgia started to speak, but Connie cut her off. She seemed to know what was coming.

  “The details don’t matter, baby girl,” she said gently. “It was a long, long time ago. I’m just trying to tell you that I’ll be here, no matter what.” She patted Georgia’s arm and smiled. “That’s more than either of us can say about the men in our lives.”

  Carter walked toward them now, grinning and waving a piece of paper in their faces. Like most men, he had trouble picking up cues between women and simply assumed that his mood would be theirs.

  “Got it,” he said with satisfaction. “Rosen’s old medical partner, Charles Dana, lives in Riverdale, up in the Bronx.”

  Georgia pushed her plate aside and tried to do the same with her jumble of emotions. “Did you call him?”

  “Yes. There was no answer. But I understand he’s not in great health, so the odds are good he’s probably close to home.”

  “Let’s take a ride up,” said Georgia.

  Connie rose from her chair, looking alarmed. “Girlfriend, you go up there and start asking this Dana guy about a bomb on the Empire Pipeline, Arzuti and Willard will have my head. They’ll know where you got it from.”

  “We wouldn’t do that,” Georgia assured her. “Not that way. And besides, you didn’t tell us about Dana.”

  “But you don’t know what you’re walking into,” Connie argued. “You don’t know how or even if Rosen’s death is related. It’s dangerous—and it’s going to come back to me. I just know it is.”

  “You have our word,” Georgia promised. “We won’t mention this lunch to anyone.”

  Carter frowned at the dishes on the table. “This was lunch?”

  7

  Riverdale is a tiny enclave in the Bronx, hemmed in on the south by Manhattan and on the west by the sheer cliffs overlooking the Hudson River. Though it occupies acreage within the city limits, Riverdale shares little else with the rest of the borough. Its citizenry is largely white and affluent, and they live in a mix of stately homes and elegant high-rises.

  Georgia consulted her Hagstrom’s map of the borough now, and cursed the roads that seemed to meander and dead-end without warning. “I like Manhattan and Queens,” she muttered. “The street numbers make sense. You turn right three times, you’re back where you started. Here, we do that, we could be in Jersey.”

  “The scenery’s pretty, at least,” Carter noted as they drove along narrow streets filled with ancient oaks and a profusion of rose vines and lavender wisteria. Each house was different and more magnificent than the last: palatial Tudors with their dark timber beams and slate roofs. Spanish villas decked out in red tile. Brick Georgians with palladium windows and gated entranceways hemmed in English boxwoods.

  “Tell you one thing,” said Carter. “Dr. Dana had bread before he started doing One-B Board medicals for the FDNY. Which just burns me up when you think of all the guys on the job he shafted—guys who didn’t have enough disability pension to pay their mortgages.”

  Georgia nodded. Like most marshals, she was occasionally assigned to guard the One-B Board hearings—a precaution installed back in 1987 after a distraug
ht firefighter, turned down for three-quarters, fatally shot one of the pension board doctors. Some of the firefighters who came before the board were schemers and drunks—people who never deserved the job in the first place. But there were others who stuck out in Georgia’s mind long after their rejections: haggard men who shuffled and limped, who were swollen up on steroids or rail thin with cancer. She recalled the wives most of all. Many left crying.

  “Did you know any hard-luck cases personally?” asked Georgia.

  Carter was quiet for a long spell. Georgia assumed he wasn’t going to answer the question. Then all of a sudden, he murmured a name. “Danny Maguire.”

  “You worked with him?”

  “Uh-huh. When I was a firefighter up in Harlem in Twenty-eight Truck. Salt of the earth, Danny. First in the building at every fire. He couldn’t cook worth a lick—typical Irishman that way. But he treated me right—never cared that I was black—not like a lot of the others back then. Danny spent his whole career in Harlem and the South Bronx. And that was when the Bronx was burning, man. Twenty, thirty fires a night. No mask, nothing. One day, Danny started having trouble swallowing. Doctors diagnosed esophageal cancer.”

  “Isn’t that line of duty?” asked Georgia.

  “Not before the Cancer Bill back in ninety-four, it wasn’t,” said Carter. “Maguire wanted to stay on the job, but in the end, he couldn’t. He went before the One-B Board. Rosen and Dana found out he smoked. They told him that those twenty fires a night he inhaled for years had nothing to do with his cancer. It was that itty-bitty cigarette he puffed a few times a day.”

  “Did he appeal?”

  “What was he going to do, Skeehan? Civil service law is plain here. The city can pick any doctor it wants to do the medical evaluation and even then, it can veto the findings. The city picked Rosen and Dana, and hundreds of men ended up just like Danny Maguire. They gave their lives and their health to this job, and the job gave them nothing in return.”

  “C’mon, Randy. A lot of guys get out on three-quarters, and not all of them are legit. What about that marathon runner a few years back? He was a firefighter on three-quarters. And remember when the city cut back on desk jobs, and all the brass at headquarters suddenly came down with job-related injuries?”

  “You know the right people, you get the right pension.” Carter shrugged. “You’re a chief at headquarters shuffling papers, you got a whole lot better chance of getting three-quarters than a guy like Maguire, sucking up smoke every day, doing his twenty in Harlem and the South Bronx.”

  They found Charles Dana’s house at the next bend in the road, behind a dense hedge of forsythia and lilac. Three stories high, it exuded New England charm with its white clapboard siding, columned front porch, hunter green shutters and brick chimneys rising solidly at each end. On the right side of the house, a large oak tree graced the lawn. On the left, set back about twenty feet from the house, sat a two-car garage topped by a cupola with a rooster on a weathervane.

  Carter pulled into the driveway, and Georgia noticed now that there were three days’ worth of New York Times newspapers still in blue plastic wraps at the Belgian-block inlaid foot of the driveway.

  “Think he’s away?” asked Georgia, nodding at the papers.

  “He’s not supposed to be well enough to travel.”

  Georgia raised an eyebrow. “Exactly how do you know all this?”

  “From a buddy of mine in fire department personnel,” Carter explained. “I got Dana’s number from him. The less A and E knows about the fire department connection right now, the better.”

  They got out of the car, and Carter walked over to Dana’s mailbox. It was overflowing with bills and supermarket flyers.

  “Guess my friend was wrong about Dana being sick and all.” He sighed. “Still, we’re here. Might as well ring the doorbell.”

  They followed a brick path onto the front porch. Georgia pressed the doorbell button and peered through the side panes of glass. She saw a large foyer with a sweeping center staircase. The lower half of the walls was covered in white bead board; the upper half in bold red floral wallpaper. No one came to the door, yet she could hear a television blaring. Georgia and Carter traded puzzled looks. The mail suggested he wasn’t home; the television suggested he was. Carter tried the handle. It was locked.

  Georgia and Carter walked around to a flagstone patio in the rear. Except for the rumble of a lawn mower on the next street, the yard was as silent as a cemetery. No sirens. No car alarms. No teenagers’ boom boxes. Just the buzz of cicadas and the caw of black crows at a birdbath. Georgia never realized how much she took the white noise of the city for granted until there wasn’t any. The stillness that replaced it had an edgy quality to it, like an amusement arcade off-season.

  On the patio, Georgia cupped her hands over the panes of glass at the back door. On a kitchen counter, she spotted a ring of keys with a small black clicker beside it. The garage-door opener.

  “Who goes away and leaves their keys at home?” asked Georgia.

  “Maybe he has two cars and two sets of keys,” said Carter. He banged on the back door and tried the handle, but there was still no answer. “Let’s go check out the garage.”

  Dana’s two-car garage sat about thirty-five feet from the back of the house. It was sided in white clapboard, with eight windows the size of place mats across the door in front. The windows provided very little light, and it took Georgia a moment to focus. One bank of the garage was filled with old furniture and bicycles; the other, with a black Mercedes sedan. The driver’s-side door was open. There was a figure in a short-sleeve collared shirt slumped over the wheel.

  “Dana?” said Georgia. “Oh, my God.”

  Carter whipped out his radio. In a calm voice, he asked fire dispatchers to send an ambulance and a fire truck to Dana’s address. Georgia wasn’t waiting, however. She ran back to the kitchen door. The garage-door opener was right there—right on the counter. All she had to do was slip the lock on the door and press the clicker to open the garage. If Dana was still alive, maybe she and Carter could start CPR. Maybe they could save his life.

  It was a flimsy push-button door lock. It wouldn’t last two minutes in Queens, thought Georgia. From the corkscrew-sized case on her duty holster, Georgia extracted her Leatherman. She pulled the black handles open and searched through the array of gadgets for the flat blade of a file. Then she slipped the edge of the instrument in between the doorjamb and the wood frame and slowly pushed up. She felt the button give way. With her other hand, she turned the knob.

  She grabbed the opener, ran outside, pointed it at the garage door and pressed the big gray button in the center. There was a momentary rumble and clatter as the door started to rise. And then suddenly, after lifting about five inches off the ground, the motor cut out. The door froze in the semiclosed position. Georgia tried the button again. There was a jolt, but no movement. She pressed the button several more times. Nothing happened.

  “It’s jammed,” she told Carter, shoving the clicker in her pocket. She got down on her stomach, hoping that she’d be able to squeeze under the door. But five inches just wasn’t enough space.

  And then she saw it, in a corner of the garage: a finger’s worth of flame. It was dancing across a foam-rubber mattress that was leaning upright against an interior wall. Her heart quickened. She got to her feet. Carter turned and looked at her ashen face.

  “What?”

  “Fire,” she sputtered. Carter looked in the garage windows.

  “Lord almighty,” he said softly, drawing the words out. He pulled out his radio again. “Ten-seventy-five,” he said, giving the code for a working fire and updating dispatchers on the situation. Then he turned to Georgia.

  “Give me the clicker,” he demanded. Georgia handed it to him. He pressed the button frantically. Nothing happened. Through the garage-door windows, Georgia could see the flames tearing up the center of the foam-rubber mattress now, growing into a plume of bright orange that fanned out a
cross the ceiling of the garage like a palm tree. Gauzy gray smoke danced like fog, filling the upper reaches of the interior in a matter of seconds. Georgia could see Dana’s head resting on the steering wheel. He’s dead. He’s got to be. He hasn’t moved. The smoke thickened, blanketing the top layer of the ceiling, feeding off the air that was being sucked in under the five inches of door that Georgia had managed to open.

  Georgia scanned the patio. There was an outside spigot for water, but no hose. All the hoses were in the closed garage. Carter seemed to be realizing the same thing.

  “There’s a halligan in the trunk of the Caprice,” he grunted as he gave a futile tug on the handle of the garage door. “Bring it to me.”

  Georgia ran to the car and popped open the trunk. She grabbed the halligan—a crowbarlike prying tool used by firefighters—and brought it back to Carter, along with a shovel for herself. Carter first tried to jimmy the door back onto its gliders. When that failed, he swung the halligan and tried to splinter the door open while Georgia did the same with the shovel. Sweat poured off both their bodies, but the door didn’t move. Nothing, it seemed, could compensate for the jammed or burned-out electric motor. The eight windows across the garage door were too small to get into or out of, and breaking them would only feed oxygen to the fire and make it hotter.

  The entire mattress was now engulfed in flames, and smoke was banking down as if someone were pumping it with an enormous set of bellows. Soon it would be so thick, it would bury Dana and his car in darkness. Georgia squinted into the car now. Smoke was pouring in through the open driver’s side, encircling his body like an enormous python. And then she saw it—a twitch in Dana’s right shoulder. The barest tremor in his right arm. He seemed to jolt his head up suddenly, and Georgia thought she heard a raspy, throaty cry.

  “He’s alive,” Georgia choked out as her partner kicked at the door. “Dana’s alive. Dear God, what do we do?” Georgia picked up the shovel and bashed it against the door. The garage was surrounded by concrete. She couldn’t even tunnel under the five inches of doorway to get Dana out. The heat was building, radiating from beneath the door like an open oven. A curtain of smoke dropped down from the ceiling, blotting out light and air.