Flashover

by Suzanne Chazin

  Dana tumbled out of the car to the concrete floor of the garage. It looked like an effort for him to move and Georgia couldn’t tell if it was the smoke and heat, or some prior condition that was making his actions so limited and jerky. He was a heavyset man, perhaps about seventy years of age with thinning gray hair that was already starting to frizz in the elevated temperatures. His eyes were, wild and disoriented, as if he had no idea what he was doing in that garage, much less what was happening to him now. He gagged up black phlegm, then called out in a cry so high-pitched, it sounded like a child’s. The skin on his arms began to blister, and his shirt began to melt into his back. Georgia got down on her stomach and reached a hand under the garage.

  “We’re here, Dr. Dana. Here’s my hand. Crawl to my hand,” Georgia shouted. But within seconds of sticking her hand underneath the garage door, Georgia felt a sudden, geometric rise in the heat. The pain drove her back.

  “What do we do, Randy?” she asked, getting to her feet. “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Dana, disoriented, began crawling in circles. The smoke had turned black. Already, visibility in the room had dropped to knee level. Chest-high temperatures appeared to hover around five hundred degrees, judging by the mass of metal cans and glass jars on the shelves Georgia could hear popping inside. A broom ignited spontaneously in a corner. So did a lawn-chair cushion and a calendar tacked to the wall. Ghostly wisps of flames flew like lightning across the ceiling, multiplying in number with each passing second.

  “He’s burning up. He can’t find his way,” said Georgia. “We’ve gotta break the windows. He’ll die if we don’t.”

  “He’ll die if we do,” Carter shot back, then looked at her gravely. They both knew that breaking the windows was a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it would temporarily vent some of the smoke and heat trapped inside the garage, and improve Dana’s immediate chances of survival. But it was also true that firefighters vent—break windows, cut holes in roofs, open doors—only when they can follow up their actions with water to cool a fire’s gases and smother its flames. Here, without a hose line, it was a gamble that would only pay off if the engine company arrived within fifteen to thirty seconds of venting.

  “We don’t have a choice,” said Georgia. She heard a siren rounding the corner. Carter heard it, too. If they broke the windows now, the engine might make it in time to save Dana. “He’s dying, Randy. We’ve got to do something.”

  Carter swung the halligan and delivered one swift blow to each of the eight single panes of glass. The windows shattered easily. Black smoke streamed out of the interior. For the moment, at least, the heat would abate and visibility would return. Dana might have a chance. Georgia looked to the street, expecting to see a big, fat red fire engine pulling up to the hydrant by the curb. But the siren she’d heard wasn’t attached to a fire engine. It was attached to an FDNY ambulance. Of course, Georgia realized suddenly. Carter called for an ambulance first. Dear God. We blew it. I blew it.

  She turned back to the vented windows. Black smoke belched from the interior. And then, suddenly, something else began to stream from the garage: jagged orange flames. They crackled and spit as their fingers curled upward to the gutters along the roof. The temperature spiked suddenly, pushing out of the garage with physical force. Georgia heard a roar like a hurricane from inside. Carter hooked his arms underneath Georgia’s armpits and dragged her back, away from the doors just as an explosive plume of gas and flames tore through the garage roof, climbing ten feet into the air. In the distance, an air horn sounded a throaty bray. Fifty-two Engine and Fifty-two Truck were finally here.

  And it was all too late.

  8

  Robin Hood fingered the grave blanket on the passenger seat of the car. Red carnations, white hollyhocks and yellow freesia—no lilies. Bear hated lilies. Roses, too. They reminded him of funerals. He’d been to enough in his day.

  Hood set out on the worn and treeless footpath along an unbroken line of headstones that seemed to tumble right down to the East River, like rows of dominoes just waiting for a push. Calvary Cemetery was quiet on this late Monday afternoon. The grass was so brittle and dry, it crunched underfoot. The sun, so intense earlier, was locked in a prison of clouds, but the glare beneath was enough to make Hood slip on a pair of mirrored shades and a baseball cap.

  At the crest of the footpath, Hood cradled the grave blanket and stared out past the field of headstones. Across a thin strip of tin-colored water rose the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, undulating in a coating of ozone and radiant heat. Here was the picture-postcard view of the city—the slanted roof of the Citicorp Center, the filigreed Art Deco peak of the Chrysler Building. Here was the whole of Manhattan strutting its lithe and leggy curvature like a bunch of beauty queens at a pageant. For an audience of the dead. Bear would laugh at the irony. He’d spent his whole life in a Brooklyn row house with a view of a granite-block school and a neighbor’s jerry-built laundry line. And now that he was dead, he had a panorama any developer in New York would kill for.

  Hood squinted down the military-straight row of gray headstones for Bear’s grave and noticed a familiar face squatting before it. Alan Levine. He was barely forty, but he already possessed the round-shouldered slouch and lumpy body of a man much older.

  Levine rose slowly, grunting with the heat and the effort. He had large, pale gray eyes that seemed to bulge slightly from behind his thick glasses. When he smiled, as he did now, his full lips, normally compressed into the center of his face, spread like ink on wet paper and tended to sag. The effect was very much like staring at a chameleon.

  “Beautiful view, isn’t it?” asked Levine, inhaling a deep breath of air that was too still to be refreshing.

  “Yeah. Makes you want to croak just to enjoy the scenery.”

  Levine’s bulging eyes crinkled in appreciation. But he wasn’t here to shoot the breeze, and they both knew it. If he was trudging around a cemetery in Long Island City on a hot summer afternoon, it was to deliver bad news. Good news, he could’ve called in over the phone from his air-conditioned office in Brooklyn Heights.

  Levine kept his back to the water and stared at the gridlock of cars sitting end-to-end on the boxy gray trusses of the Kosciuszko Bridge. Their honking horns and rumbling engines were far off and dreamy from here, as if this land were already a transport to another world.

  “I knew you’d be here today,” he said softly, kicking at a small pebble beneath his polished black wing tips. Lawyers’ shoes. That was the problem with Alan Levine. Much as he cared, he was, in the end, an outsider. He could never really understand firefighters.

  “It’s Bear’s birthday,” Hood grunted.

  “I know.” Levine eyed the grave blanket. “I debated about waiting a day because of it.”

  “Bad news is just as bad a day later.”

  Levine studied the Maltese cross chiseled into the top of the shiny dark gray headstone. Four fluted inverted triangles projecting from a center disk. It was the symbol of firefighters everywhere. He was silent while Hood squatted down and put the flowers on Bear’s grave. When Hood rose, he spoke.

  “I really tried on this one,” Levine began. “It just can’t be done. It’s been too many years. The paper trail is lost.”

  “You mean they lost it.”

  Levine offered up a sad, chameleon smile. “Maybe. Then again, everything was filed by hand in those days—medical records, personnel files, work charts, fire reports. There were no computers. Things can and do disappear. I’ve seen it happen in other cases.”

  “No paper trail, no lawsuit—is that what you’re telling me?”

  “It’s more than that.” Levine sighed. “After it happened, two of the four companies were closed and the men were scattered. How do you prove that one fire did them all in?”

  “Nineteen men are dead, and the twentieth ain’t far off.”

  “Yes,” Levine acknowledged. “But dead from what? We’ve got six
different kinds of cancers. We’ve got Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis and Lou Gehrig’s disease, too. And five of those nineteen didn’t even die of illnesses you could trace to exposure. Lopasio died in a fire. Parrietto and Sikorsky had heart attacks brought on by clogged arteries. That proby, Mickey, shot himself. And you know about the hit-and-run.”

  “But all of them were already getting sick. Their autopsies and medical records show that.”

  “Doesn’t matter. They didn’t die of injuries that can be directly linked to their work as firefighters. That’s what a judge will say. And besides, sixty-five other men who fought that blaze are alive and kicking.”

  “They weren’t inside the warehouse. These men were. You sound like the fire department,” said Hood.

  “I sound like a judge,” said Levine. “Because I know what a judge will say. He’ll say, ‘show me the proof.’ And there is none.”

  Hood nodded at Bear’s grave. “You’re looking at it.”

  “I’m looking at the grave of a man who suffered and died. And I’m sorry. Truly, I am. But the man in that grave also drank and smoked and went to many, many fires—in the days before most firefighters wore masks. I need more than your grief to make this case stick.”

  Hood picked up a rock and threw it down the crest of the hill just to see how far it would go. It bounced off a headstone somewhere below. The plink echoed across the cemetery. The air was heavy with the odor of rotting vegetation.

  “Bear loved the summer—didn’t matter how hot it got. He’d take me to Mets games and at night, we’d lie on the roof and count stars.” Hood stared out at the East River now, at a passing garbage barge encircled by seagulls, cutting a wide strip through the still, concrete-colored waters.

  “They say you can’t see most stars in the city sky—they say the lights wash ’em all out. But I remember seeing hundreds.” Hood gave a small shake of the head. “Funny, now I look up at night, and all I see is darkness.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Levine. “I know you wanted justice. I wish I could give it to you. But you have to understand that there is no such thing as justice in the abstract. It is merely a compact between men.”

  “Says you.”

  “Said the Romans more than two thousand years ago,” Levine corrected. “Cities weren’t built on justice. They were built on compromise—and the bodies of just men.”

  A red carnation bud had tumbled on the path. Hood picked it up and used it to make the sign of the cross over Bear’s grave, then squeezed the bud so tightly, the red petals oozed through Hood’s fingers like blood, dropping at Levine’s feet.

  “There are other kinds of justice, you know.”

  9

  “All right, let’s go over this again before Brennan shows up,” said Mac Marenko. “I want to be real clear on what happened here.”

  Marenko paced Charles Dana’s kitchen. The house was the only part of the property not crawling with emergency personnel. Georgia was wrapped in a blanket—courtesy of the EMTs who thought she might go into shock. Her blouse was filthy, her pants had a hole in the knee from crawling on the driveway, and the back of her right hand was red with first-degree burns from sticking it under the garage door to try to rescue Dana. She didn’t really need the blanket anymore, but like a child, she was afraid to give it up—it was all the security she had.

  “You.” Marenko pointed at Carter, all business. “You saw Dana in the garage, slumped over the wheel of his car, so you called dispatch—correct?”

  “Affirmative,” said Carter stiffly. He could be all-business too. “I requested an ambulance.”

  “And you.” Marenko pointed at Georgia. “You were where?”

  Georgia gritted her teeth. The bastard hadn’t even asked about her burned hand.

  “I was with Carter,” she said coolly.

  “The whole time?”

  “You want to polygraph me?”

  “This isn’t personal,” he said, fixing his bright blue gaze on her.

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  “Aw, Jeez,” said Marenko, throwing up his hands. “You don’t get it, do you? You’re in a shitload of trouble for coming up here without authorization. Look, I don’t know why, but A and E’s crawling all over this one. As is the mayor. They’ve got special branches of the PD out on the front lawn I haven’t even heard of. Nobody’s telling me anything. And if you hadn’t tried to open that garage door, Dana would still be alive.”

  Georgia shot Carter a nervous glance. In it was an implicit question: Should I let Marenko know what Connie told us about Rosen and the bomb threat to the Empire Pipeline? Carter offered the faintest shrug of his shoulders. Georgia read the gesture: It’s your call. Connie’s your friend.

  One minute, Georgia felt certain she should tell Marenko. After all, two people were dead. The gravity of that certainly outweighed all else. And besides, Georgia reasoned, I don’t have to tell him the information came from Connie.

  But Georgia also reasoned that there may be no connection between these deaths and the bomb threat. And even if there was, A and E was already working it. Telling Marenko—and by extension, Chief Brennan—wouldn’t shed any new light on the case. No matter how much Georgia protested, everyone would know the information came from Connie. It would destroy her best friend’s career. Georgia couldn’t take that chance—not for such a vague and uncertain payoff.

  “We were following up on the Rosen case,” she told Marenko soberly now. “Rosen and Dana used to be partners.” She caught Carter’s eye, and he nodded that he understood. There would be no mention of their lunch with Connie Ruiz.

  “You couldn’t run it by me before you came up here?” Marenko asked.

  “You weren’t in.”

  “There’s a thing called a pager, Skeehan,” he said, tapping the device on his belt. “Use it next time.”

  “Look, Mac,” Carter interrupted, “whether Skeehan paged you or not, I think given the chain of events, our actions were reasonable.”

  “Reasonable, huh?” grunted Marenko. He peered out the kitchen window at the garage. The little white, clapboard-sided building was a charred, crumbling hulk of its former self. The roof had partially burned away, leaving only blackened rafters. The cupola had collapsed into the garage. The rooster weathervane had somehow disengaged and was lying on the driveway, bent and oxidized orange. Firefighters had finally managed to get the garage door off its hinges. Now, scorch marks wreathed the entrance.

  “Where’s the garage-door opener?” Marenko muttered without taking his eyes off the garage. Neither Georgia nor Carter answered. Marenko turned to face them.

  “What?” he asked. “You gonna tell me the door just decided to rise by itself? Where’s the opener?”

  Carter shrugged. Georgia knew he still had it. He was trying to protect her.

  “It’s okay, Randy,” she said softly. Then she looked at Marenko. “Carter had nothing to do with this. It was my idea.”

  Reluctantly, Carter pulled the opener from his front pants pocket and handed it to Marenko. Marenko examined it for only an instant, then tossed it on the counter and cursed.

  “Make the explanation good, Skeehan,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “’Cause Brennan is gonna nail our asses to the wall on this one, if A and E and the mayor don’t get there first.”

  “It was on the counter,” said Georgia, nodding to the gray granite surface Marenko was leaning against.

  “And the kitchen door just happened to be unlocked?” Marenko drummed his fingers along his biceps. “It was unlocked, right? Please don’t tell me you broke in on top of all this.”

  Silence.

  “Look, Mac,” Carter pleaded, “forget about the door for a minute. We had a man in a locked garage, slumped over the wheel of his car. It’s a clear-cut case of exigent circumstance…”

  “—In a court of law, maybe,” said Marenko. “In a court of law, you can throw around a term like ‘exigent circumstance’—tell a jury that life and safety
issues overrode any constitutional concerns. But this ain’t no court of law. A and E finds out we did anything questionable here, they’ll leak it to the media. The press will have a field day telling the public how a couple of firefighters went to interview a prominent doctor and ended up torching him instead.”

  Georgia looked at her partner. Carter had nothing to do with her choice of breaking in. But if she told the truth, Marenko would have to take it to Chief Brennan, and they would both hang. Carter was maybe a year away from retirement. She couldn’t do anything to jeopardize his career, any more than she could Connie’s.

  “The door was unlocked,” Georgia blurted out. Marenko looked at Carter.

  “That your story, too?”

  Carter froze. Seconds passed.

  “It must’ve been stuck when I tried it earlier,” he said finally.

  “So,” Marenko exhaled, “now all I have to do is make you two look like you can find the right end of a matchstick.”

  Carter stiffened. “I’ve been investigating fires for fifteen years, Mac,” he said tightly. “I was doing it when y’all were still figuring out which end of the ladder was up.”

  “Guys, c’mon,” said Georgia, stepping between them. “Both of you go get some air.” She practically pushed them out the door, then hung back in the kitchen, thankful for a few minutes of privacy to try to get her own emotions under control. Then she walked across the lawn to the garage. Melted cans and shattered glass littered the concrete floor. The surface of the Mercedes was now a dull blue-black, pitted and rusted from oxidation.

  There was a dirty white sheet over a figure about five feet from the garage entrance. Herb Moskowitz from the photo unit was behind it, snapping pictures. He was a heavy man, and as he trudged across the floor, it oozed with a slimy mixture of half-melted furniture cushions, paint cans and leaking fluids from the burned-out sedan. Moskowitz noticed her looking on just as he was about to remove the sheet covering Dana.