Flashover

by Suzanne Chazin

  Delaney thumbed through the photos. His face paled. Georgia noticed his fingers tremble and slip when he slid the stack of photos facedown across the desk to her. He shook his head.

  “Those men are dead, Marshal. Robin Hood can’t be among them.”

  “He could be a brother, a son, an uncle. I think he’s related. And I think I know why he wants Empire to pay. The pipeline runs right underneath the former warehouse site on Bridgewater Street. A leak—even a very small one—could have started that blaze. And now, as I understand it, that site has been slated for the new football stadium.”

  The room went silent. Rankoff’s eyes, dark as port, glinted almost as much as the fluorescent lights bouncing off his white hair.

  “Marshal Skeehan is a remarkably good investigator,” said Rankoff. “Yes, Marshal.” He turned to her. “The land along Bridgewater Street is being seriously considered for the new stadium. And I will most certainly bring all your concerns to the mayor’s attention—if I may hold onto these papers for now?” He nodded politely to her.

  “I promised I would return them to Tricia Flannagan.”

  “And so you shall—after I show them to the mayor.” Rankoff’s smooth voice brooked no argument. He took the materials from her.

  “One question troubles me,” said Rankoff. His dark eyes seemed to hold her in his grasp like two magnets. “In his taped message, did Robin Hood ever mention this Bridgewater fire?”

  “Well, no…”

  “Was there any reference to Greenpoint? To a warehouse?”

  “No, sir. But I think if Chief Delaney could find that report…”

  “—Acting Commissioner Delaney,” Rankoff corrected, “has just expressed to you that he has nothing to corroborate your concerns about that fire. The firehouses are gone. The men are dead. The city is doing everything it can to find Robin Hood and stop this bomb. You are stirring up issues that are unrelated to the task at hand, and I am sure I speak for the commissioner when I say that this is an inefficient use of your resources.”

  Georgia’s mouth dropped open. She bounced a look from Rankoff to Delaney to Brennan. No one seemed taken aback that Rankoff had just gone over Delaney’s head and in effect ordered Georgia to stop the investigation. Georgia couldn’t believe it. A civilian, going over the head of a thirty-year veteran of the FDNY, the chief of operations and now the acting commissioner of the entire department. Who was this guy?

  Georgia stared at Delaney—a challenge of sorts. Are you going to take this? Delaney shifted in his chair. Georgia saw something flicker in his warm brown eyes. A hint of gratitude, mingled with fear. He looked as torn as Georgia had after she’d left Connie’s apartment with Randy Carter. He rose partway from the chair.

  “I’m going to have to close the matter, Marshal,” said Delaney. “Unless, of course, you can find me something solid to link this fire to Robin Hood.”

  Georgia found Andy Kyle after the meeting. He was sitting by himself on the front steps outside the building, staring at the ribbons of clouds snaking razorlike across an opal-colored moon.

  “Did you get hold of Mac?” she asked.

  “I did.” He patted the concrete stoop next to him, urging her to sit. She obliged. “Mac said he’d look into Tristate…and he, um, said thanks.” Kyle kicked a stone at his feet. They both knew what he was talking about.

  “You did a nice thing, giving him Bernie Chandler’s number.”

  “Let’s hope he doesn’t need it,” said Kyle. “How did the firing squad go?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Georgia. On the plus side, no one had mentioned charges—perhaps because the department needed her too much right now. Then again, she’d been stripped of all her evidence regarding the Bridgewater fire and Delaney had told her to stop investigating it. Or had he? He’d said to stop investigating unless she could find a solid link. Georgia might have tossed off the inconsistency—except for the fact that every statement Delaney made in that room appeared to be under duress.

  But how do I investigate a fire if the men are dead and the firehouse they came from no longer exists?

  “You know, Georgia,” said Kyle now, “my dad knows a lot about real estate firms in the city. If you tell me what you’re looking for, maybe I can get some information on Tristate for you.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Andy. But you’re brand-new. I don’t want to get you involved in something that could be bad for your career.”

  He laughed. “Hey, if it’s a lost cause, I’m your man. In college, I was the guy who was dumb enough to launch a Mideast peace march.”

  “Always trying to save the world, huh?”

  He shrugged. “I’m more realistic now. I pick my battles a little better.”

  “What?” asked Georgia. “You eat dolphin-friendly tuna?”

  Kyle laughed. “Yeah, that kind of thing.”

  “Believe me, Andy, this is bigger and uglier than you want to get into.”

  Their conversation was broken by the rumble of a fire engine pulling up to the curb in front of a fire hydrant. Five men in dark blue firefighters’ uniforms got out. Kyle nodded to them.

  “Wanna bet they’ll knock back a few cold ones for old Ed?” He shook his head as the firefighters wandered past. “I’ll bet they didn’t log this little excursion into their firehouse journal.”

  The firehouse journal—of course. Georgia straightened up. Why hadn’t she thought of it? Everything about the Bridgewater fire would be in the daily company log. And those logs would probably still be in the old boarded-up firehouse. It wouldn’t be that hard to get inside. The Bureau of Fire Prevention still used the building for storage. Georgia herself had gone there about six months ago to retrieve some paperwork for a case she was working on. There was bound to be a way to get in there again. The logs might offer the definitive link Delaney seemed to need to override Rankoff on this case.

  “The Bureau of Fire Prevention still keeps records in the old Ladder One-twenty-one, don’t they?” asked Georgia.

  “Maybe,” said Kyle.

  31

  The Greenpoint, Brooklyn, firehouse once occupied by Ladder One-twenty-one and Engine Two-oh-three had been built of brick and timber a hundred years ago, back when, as the saying goes, the buildings were made of wood and the men were made of steel. It had a low-slung room in the rear—a former stable—and a three-story airshaft for drying hoses when they were still covered with canvas instead of polyester. It had a brass sliding pole, a coal-fired burner and a recessed area in the officers’ quarters for a spittoon. There was history in every piece of crumbling mortar, a history that resonated with the hooves of horses and the bark of Dalmatians along the cobble-stoned streets of this riverfront community.

  Now, it was a ghost of its former self. The garage was empty of rigs. The red paint on the apparatus door peeled like a bad sunburn. Some windowpanes were broken, some boarded over. And the flagpole in front hadn’t had an American flag hoisted on its riggings for more than a decade.

  Georgia scanned the deserted block. It was eight P.M. The heating contractors and auto-body shops that bordered the firehouse were all closed at this hour. The row houses—two blocks farther down—had their blinds drawn and their air conditioners on high. To the north, the dark, stagnant waters of the Newtown Creek slithered like a slow-moving python into the East River.

  The firehouse was locked—accessible only by keyless entry, a code Georgia had, thanks to a quick call to Lieutenant Prager at Ladder One-twenty-one’s new quarters. Georgia trotted out her tale about needing some records in Fire Prevention, and Prager looked up the coded entry for her. She knew he’d have the combination. It seemed inconceivable that the new Ladder One-twenty-one wouldn’t have access to its former quarters.

  She pushed the four digits into the panel by the side door now and flicked on a switch. A pale sheen of fluorescent light buzzed to life fourteen feet overhead. The brass sliding pole had tarnished from lack of use. The white tile walls were caked with layers of soot and
diesel exhaust. Georgia ran her hand over the greasy squares of glass inside the apparatus door and shivered. She wasn’t cold—just anxious. She wanted to browse through the journals and go home. The sooner, the better.

  Georgia’s footsteps echoed across the concrete floor with a starkness that reminded her of a subway tunnel in the dead of night. The only other sound was a steady thump-thump of water leaking from a corner of the first-floor ceiling into an old tin coal bucket. She longed for the sounds of a firehouse to fill up the space—the curses and guffaws of firefighters trading insults with one another, the disembodied drone of dispatchers over the department radio, the clacking keys of a teletype machine spewing out a status report of a fire in progress. She felt the ghosts of every firefighter who’d ever worked here.

  The building looked just as the firefighters had left it when the place closed down in the mid-1980s. On a bulletin board, there were yellowed notices about firehouse barbecues and newspaper clippings that were beginning to crumble. In the drawers of the house-watch desk Georgia found old memos and a faded Polaroid of a man Georgia recognized from one of Tricia’s photos. A big, burly man with sandy hair and a goofy grin. In the snapshot, he was munching on a foot-long sandwich. Beneath it, a firefighter had scrawled, O’Rourke gives mouth-to-mouth to a real hero. Beneath that, in different handwriting, someone had written, What hero? All I see is a fat guy eating like he’s going to the chair.

  Georgia started her search in the basement. There were no firehouse journals there—only some discarded furniture with cigarette burns on the armrests. The walls were slick with moisture, the pipes were covered with powdery white asbestos and the place smelled of mildew. Georgia headed back up the stairs and took a rusting metal staircase up another flight to the second floor.

  The hallway was dingy. Huge water stains radiated from the ceiling, and plaster hung like torn scabs. There were three tin coal buckets along the floor, but they were mostly empty—not like the one on the first floor with its steady thump-thump. Must be a leaky pipe down there, thought Georgia.

  She bypassed the locker room and walked into the firefighters’ bunk room. There were no cots anymore, but Georgia could still see the marks on the walls from where the metal head rails had been. There were boxes on the floor and a couple of filing cabinets in a corner, but these were all marked “Bureau of Fire Prevention.”

  She wandered back down the hall and opened the frosted-glass door to the officers’ bunk room. Here, too, the beds were gone, replaced with more filing drawers and cartons. The window, facing the front of the building, was covered over with plywood. She did a quick search among the boxes and filing cabinets, but there were no journals. Her heart sank. What if the new companies simply took the old records with them? She couldn’t look at those records without an explanation—and any explanation would need to be cleared through Chief Brennan.

  The officers’ bathroom was on her right. She flushed the toilet, and was pleased to see it still worked. She’d been in the FDNY too long not to take advantage of any working toilet with some privacy.

  As she unzipped her pants and relieved herself, she caught a reflection in a cracked mirror on the wall. It was another door, on the opposite side of the bathroom. She flushed the toilet, then opened the door to find a steep, rusted-metal ladder leading up a short flight of stairs. She climbed the ladder, nearly bumping her head on the sloped roof and running into a massive bank of cobwebs. The space at the top was only about four feet high with a small oval window overlooking the street. But it was big enough for its purpose. Staring back at Georgia were rows and rows of haphazardly stacked journals recording the daily history of Ladder Company One-twenty-one and Engine Company Two-oh-three. No one took them, Georgia suspected, because no one knew they were here.

  She pulled one down and fingered it. It was a very old one—from 1910—a big cloth-bound ledger, the size of a coffee-table travel book and just as heavy. The pages were brittle and mildewed with age. Inside, in beautiful script, were entries recorded in military time: 1400 hours: Fed and watered the horses…1800 hours: Attended to splinter in Nozzle’s paw. Nozzle was probably a Dalmatian. Dalmatians were used because they had a calming effect on the horses, plus they had the speed necessary to run ahead of them and clear the streets.

  Georgia searched through the books until she found the more contemporary journals. It was easily ninety degrees in the crawl space, so she grabbed all the journals she could find from 1978 through 1984, stuffed them into an old canvas tool bag she found lying around, and dropped them down the ladder. In the officer’s bunk room, she thumbed through the 1978 one first. It was filled with the mundane daily entries of firehouse life. 10:00: Captain Flannagan drills on forcible entry. Forcible entry was a nice word for breaking down doors and windows. 13:00: BI. BI was building inspection, checking buildings for code violations or fire risks.

  She flipped ahead until she reached the right day, August 21, 1978. But the entries told her nothing. There was a mark in the journal for a 10-33 at 23:00—a smoke condition at eleven P.M. But there was no mention of injuries. The men may have been sick when they left that fire. But in the macho code of the day, no one “tapped out”—went on medical leave.

  Georgia idly scanned the pages for the months after the fire. November 12, 1900 hours: Firefighter Gerry Mulrooney collapses in kitchen…January 9, 1979, 1300 hours: Firefighter Mickey Hanlon complains of trouble breathing after a training exercise. In the months and year that followed Bridgewater, Georgia saw dozens of odd illnesses and physical complaints she’d never seen in the time preceding the fire. Suddenly, men who had never gone on sick leave—not even when they suffered second-degree burns or bone fractures at a job—were falling apart.

  She read the firehouse journals from the early 1980s. The complaints of strange illnesses continued. In 1983, she counted twenty-two separate reports of serious health complaints. In the 1984 journal, there were frequent mentions of Lieutenant Edward Delaney of the Division of Safety interviewing members of the two fire companies. Still, there was nothing in these pages that really told her anything.

  And then, as she turned one of the pages, something tumbled out of the journal—a canary-yellow index card, eight inches by five inches in size. Georgia recognized the card right away. It was a CIDS card—CIDS being short for Critical Information Dispatch System. Firefighters filled these out when they encountered a hazardous or unusual condition during a routine building inspection. CIDS cards were sent to the borough’s fire dispatchers and entered into their files. In the event of a fire, the information was relayed to the chief on the scene to alert firefighters before they entered a building.

  Georgia scanned the CIDS card now. Its corners had become dog-eared, the yellow had mottled and there were coffee stains on the back. But the business name and address were clear: Kowalski’s Carting and Hauling, 327 Bridgewater Street, Brooklyn. She could hear her heart beating in her ears as she searched out a date. November 1977.

  But what was a CIDS card doing in an old firehouse journal? Even if the building no longer existed, the card still belonged with Brooklyn Dispatch.

  Georgia noticed that under the section labeled “Transmitted Data,” some long-ago firefighter had neatly hand-lettered in the squares: Approximately fifteen thousand 55-gallon drums of unspecified chemicals stacked in Z-shaped configuration inside warehouse. Strong solvent odors. Hazardous and incendiary conditions. Recommend immediate removal. Firefighters should not attempt interior firefighting operations.

  November 1977? Georgia frowned at the card now. That was nine months before the fire took place—three months before the Department of Environmental Protection authorized the barrels to be trucked out of there. Why didn’t the fire department close the warehouse down? Why were four fire companies allowed to go inside when this CIDS card—filled out nine months prior to the fire—specifically said not to? Was it a simple oversight?

  She looked down at the box labeled Ownership of Property. A cold, clammy sensati
on settled along Georgia’s spine. She expected to see the name Kowalski. But she saw a name that made her heart feel the cool certainty that this was no simple filing mistake: Tristate Trucking. The very company charged with trucking the fifty-five-gallon drums out of the warehouse six months before the fire was also the warehouse’s owner for at least three months before that. Tristate knew the hazards—and did nothing.

  Georgia opened up her black leather hip bag and shoved the CIDS card inside. The zipper on her bag pierced the silence. There was something wrong with that silence, she realized now. The steady thump-thump of water in the tin bucket at the foot of the stairs had stopped. Georgia sat still and listened, expecting to hear the drip start up again. But instead of a thump, she heard the sound of metal scraping across concrete. Someone was moving the bucket. Her breath stilled. Her heart curdled in her chest.

  “Who’s down there?” she called out. She reached for her gun, then flattened herself behind the open door and listened. It could be a firefighter sent over to retrieve some old files. But even as she called out the words, she knew: firefighters are loud walkers and loud talkers. She’d have heard a brother coming before he ever made it this far into the building. That meant that whoever was here probably wasn’t supposed to be.

  Christ, thought Georgia. Of all the times for the building to be vandalized. She took the safety latch off her nine-millimeter Glock semiautomatic. Her stomach twisted like a washcloth being wrung of moisture. She didn’t want to be forced into making an arrest, not here, in this boarded-up firehouse. Not with all the explanations she’d have to come up with. Plus, she didn’t want any intruder to think she was alone. That could be the most dangerous miscalculation of all.

  She heard a set of footsteps on the concrete and the rattle of what sounded like a tin can.