by Earl Emerson
The dispatcher said, “Okay, Attack Six. Nothing visible. Investigating. All units responding to Twenty-three Avenue and East Cherry—code yellow.”
My father had worked these same streets. He must have felt, as I did, that there was nothing stranger than waking out of a deep sleep and racing down the street on a thirty-ton rig, red lights and sirens blaring. It was one of the reasons I loved the job.
The first call was a false alarm, but before we got back to the station we responded to three more fire calls, all arsons. One was a tree fire. Attack 6 caught a fence fire. We caught a garbage can on fire behind a residence. When Pickett and Rideout came around the truck with pump cans, I watched Rideout make a point of getting water on the fire first. I liked that.
We ended up missing two more fires while we waited for an investigator. There’d been multiple arsons in this part of town over the last two weeks, and the department’s investigative arm, Marshal 5, wanted to see every one of them.
“Who do you think’s setting all these fires?” Rideout asked.
“Probably some probationary firefighter who wasn’t getting enough action,” Dolan teased.
At two A.M. Marshal 5’s investigator arrived, a woman named Connor. After she snapped her photos and poked around, we headed back to the station, where Rideout and Dolan refilled the pump cans and pressurized them, Pickett went to bed, and I wrote the fire report on the computer in the cramped inspection room just outside my office.
Thirty seconds after my head touched the pillow the house lights came on again, the big bell on the apparatus floor clanged, and we heard the dispatcher over the station amplifier. “Porch fire. Flames showing.”
“I get my hands on this arsonist, I’ll fuck ’im up,” said Dolan, using the steering wheel to pull himself up onto the rig. “I’ll fuck him up good. We’re supposed to be in bed.”
6. YOU BE BURNIN’ ME OUTTA MY HOME
Both rigs were fired up and everybody was on board except Zeke Boles. For whatever reason, Boles hadn’t reported to the apparatus floor, and now Slaughter and Gliniewicz were shouting his name in an attempt to wake him up.
Their efforts might have been more effective if one of them had gone to the bunk room to get Boles, but they preferred to sit on the rig screaming until their neck veins bulged and their mustaches twitched. Being effective was not their goal. This was about enjoying their rage, and I had the impression they both relished the sight of a black man screwing up.
“Let’s go,” I said to Dolan, even though by the book we were supposed to follow behind the quicker engine.
It was a porch fire on Thirty-first Avenue South. We were the first firefighters on the scene, but there wasn’t much we could do except mark the location and give a radio report. Ladder 3 carried almost no water. We had the hundred-foot aerial built into our truck, half a dozen ground ladders, hundreds of tools, pry bars, machinery of all sorts, ropes for high angle rescue, so much equipment the apparatus compartments could barely contain it, but only five gallons of water in two pump cans.
“Ladder Three at eighteen twelve Thirty-one Avenue South,” I said into the black telephone-style handset. “We have a preconnect porch fire attached to a two-story wood-frame residence approximately thirty by forty. Engine Thirty, on your arrival lay a preconnect. Ladder Three is doing search and rescue.”
I turned around and looked at Pickett and Rideout. “Make sure everybody’s out. Take the thermal imager to see if the fire has spread. Rideout, take the irons.”
As I spoke, Engine 30 rolled up from the other direction.
Two men climbed down out of Engine 30’s crew cab, ran around to the back of the apparatus to pull out the two-hundred-foot 13⁄4-inch preconnected line, and tapped the fire, all in less than ninety seconds.
When an elderly Filipino man and woman emerged from the house in their pajamas, Rideout escorted them down the concrete stairs so they would be safe from the hose stream.
My guess was the perp was still somewhere in the neighborhood. Two vehicles had driven past: a station wagon with a family in it, and a young man and woman in a Jeep, who looked as if they were coming home from a date—if people still dated these days. I didn’t. Not like that.
The fire was out and we were regrouping when the dispatcher sent Attack 6 and Ladder 3 to Thirtieth Avenue South and South Judkins, mere blocks away.
Attack 6 took off and a minute later we found them on Thirtieth South parked in front of a fence fire. Zeke Boles was using a pump can to put water on the flames. Had this been your first glimpse of him, you might have thought he was firefighter of the year.
“Damn! Look at that,” Pickett said.
“That’s Zeke,” Dolan said. “Fall asleep in his spaghetti one minute, save your life the next.”
While we were mopping up and talking to neighbors, Engine 30 was dispatched to a residence a block or two west of the original call on Thirty-first. It was clear our fire-setter was still working the area.
“Don’t this bastard ever sleep?” Dolan asked.
“I don’t get it,” Rideout said. “Why would somebody go around lighting fences and porches?”
“So this is how many tonight?” Dolan asked. “Six? Six.” He turned to Rideout with a glint in his eye. “Hey, little girl. This the first time you ever had six arson fires in one night? The probie buys ice cream for every first.”
“My name is Rideout.”
Dolan grinned. “Okay. But you owe us ice cream.”
“If you say so.”
Engine 30 came on the radio. “Engine Thirty. We have a fully involved car fire. No exposures. Laying a preconnect.”
“Okay, Engine Thirty,” said the dispatcher. “Fully involved car fire. Preconnect.”
“We’re going to be up all night,” said Pickett. “I got a golf game tomorrow morning.”
Minutes later Battalion 5’s Suburban pulled up and Chief Johnson asked us to return to the first alarm on Thirty-first to pick up Engine 30’s hose line, which they’d abandoned when they got the car fire. We were shoulder loading and draining it when Attack 6 was dispatched to a garage fire down the hill on Lake Washington Boulevard South. Moments later the dispatcher added us to the alarm.
Until now we’d been saved by luck, insomnia, and drivers with cell phones. But there was no guarantee the next fire would be spotted in time. Most of the city was asleep. Any wall fire could spread to the eaves, flash through the attic, destroy a house before the family inside could roll out of bed. What we had here was a murderer looking for victims. The thought made my blood boil. I’d always hated arsonists, but this was the first time I’d run up against one this bold.
Our garage fire was “out by occupant“ when we got there.
We were on our way back to the station when we ran into the biggest fire of the night quite by accident. As we were driving past, we spotted some orange light flickering off the walls of a nearby house.
“Sonofabitch!” said Dolan.
As we pulled around the corner and headed down the residential block under the trees, a thick pall of smoke hung in the street. “How the hell did they miss this?” Dolan asked. “Attack Six must have driven right past it.”
“They were probably busy yelling at Zeke,” said Pickett.
The fire was in a garage directly across from a nursing home on a little-traveled street.
I called it in on the radio, asked for a full response, and told Dolan to park in front of the nursing home, where we wouldn’t be blocking the hydrant or any other incoming units.
There were two large houses on the south face of the block, with a garage between them at the top of a long driveway. Black smoke was boiling from under the eaves of the garage.
“I’m going to the roof,” Dolan said, as I came around the front of Ladder 3.
“Take Rideout with you. Let her cut the hole.” Pickett had rendered himself useless by running up to the fire building for a gander, “scouting,” he would explain later when I chewed him out. “You and I
’ll carry a ladder,” I said to Rideout.
Across the street Attack 6 pulled around the corner and Gliniewicz jumped out so quickly he fell onto his hands and knees. I’d noticed earlier he was excitable on alarms. Slaughter was already screaming at Zeke Boles. “God damn it, Zeke! Where the fuck are you? I said preconnect. When I say preconnect that means you get the preconnect. Are you deaf, man? Jesus Christ. Do I have to do everything for you? You want me to wipe your behind too? You like four squares or do you want me to shove the whole goddamn roll up your ass?”
Even though he was already one jump ahead of his officer, you could see Zeke beginning to buckle under the abuse. I had never had that reaction when I was a rookie working under Slaughter. I’d been as close to clobbering him those first few times he screamed at me as I’d been to clobbering anyone. Fortunately I hadn’t, or I would have lost my job. His yelling on the fire ground was odd behavior for somebody who prided himself on being so reasonable and measured around the station.
Rideout and I slid the heavy three-section, thirty-five-foot ladder from the rear ladder compartment on Ladder 3 and walked across the street with it. Avoiding both windows on the side of the oversized garage, we dropped the spurs into the flower bed and I steadied the ladder from one side while Rideout stood on the other and tugged on the halyard to raise the sections. I’d given her the fly side to test her strength. A lot of people weren’t strong enough to raise the flies on a thirty-five-foot ladder. Others were strong enough during daylight hours but couldn’t do it in the middle of the night. Rideout raised it without a hitch.
In front of the garage Slaughter and Zeke were straightening the kinks in a two-hundred-foot section of hose Zeke had laid from the engine. Through the smoky opening I saw two automobiles. You could hear glass breaking, the crackle of fire, a popping sound as a can of paint exploded. Inside sat a Fifties-era Buick, pristine and shiny. Another automobile looked to be a decade older: whitewall tires, running boards, and a suicide door—collector’s items.
Taking a lungful of black smoke, I shouldered the heavy door open. Zeke opened the task force tip on his 13⁄4-inch line and threw a spray of water into the interior.
“What the hell are you doing?” Slaughter barked. “You see any fire? You see anything? You don’t just go squirting at smoke. Look for the seat of the fire.”
Chief Johnson showed up a moment later, his words muffled by the yowling of the chain saw on the roof. “Who called this in?”
“We did,” I said. “We spotted it from the road.”
Even if we lost control of the garage fire, which was not going to happen, the only other building in immediate danger was the residence to the west. The larger residence to the east was separated by the driveway and a small garden embroidered with ivy.
“What the hell’s going on? I been hearing sirens all night, and now you people be burnin’ me outta my home.” A large, angry-looking man climbed the slope of the driveway.
“You’ll have to go back, sir,” said Chief Johnson. “This area is under fire department jurisdiction.”
“That’s my home next door there. My wife’s over there right now coughin’ her fool head off ’cause of the smoke. Whatsa matter wi’ you people?” He’d been drinking.
“Sir,” Johnson said. “We didn’t start this.”
“You tryin’ to say I did?”
“Sir, you’re going to have to leave this area until we get things under control.”
I found Rideout at the base of the ladder we’d put up. “Why aren’t you opening the roof?”
“Pickett said we were switching partners.”
“He said what?”
“He said we were switching partners, that he and Dolan were opening the roof.”
7. I KNEW HE KNEW I KNEW IT
Dolan and Pickett cut a hole in the roof, heavy black smoke pouring out as soon as it was open. They climbed down just as the officer from Engine 10 rushed up to Chief Johnson and said, “Chief, we got a report of a fire on the other side of the block.”
“Go check it out,” said Johnson, a battalion chief who had a reputation as a nervous Nellie, a man who followed the book so closely that when something came up that wasn’t in it he was struck dumb.
While Johnson was mulling things over, a large maroon Chevrolet with three radio antennae pulled up. Chief William Hertlein was driving.
The last time I’d seen Hertlein, he was flat on his back on the beanery floor at Station 32.
For almost half a minute Hertlein didn’t look at anything on the fire ground except me. No matter what he said, no matter how much power he thought he had, he was afraid of me. He knew it. I knew it. And he knew I knew it. A muscle under his right eye twitched. I almost expected the scene to start moving in slow motion, a haunting musical score building to a crescendo in the background: department bad boy faces down the chief who wants to oust him.
Hertlein abruptly turned to Chief Johnson. “What’s going on, Joe?”
Engine 10 came on the radio and said they had a tapped exterior wall fire on the other side of the block, then asked for a thermal imager. After exchanging looks with Johnson, I sent Dolan and Pickett around the block with our thermal imager. “Radio if you need something,” I said.
The thermal imager was a handheld camera that registered heat in the viewfinder. You could direct it at a row of parked cars and tell which had been driven recently by the warmth of the hoods. In fact, the imager was sensitive enough to trace someone walking barefoot across a tile floor by footprints invisible to the naked eye. In a smoke-filled atmosphere you could spot victims or fallen firefighters. These days it was the standard tool for search-and-rescue teams.
An immense, three-story house loomed to the east. A smaller, raised cottage I hadn’t noticed earlier stood at the rear of the property behind a courtyard and beyond the smoldering garage. Because of the slope and angle of the driveway, the cottage was invisible from the street.
A blond woman in tight pants and a sleeveless blouse was watching us from the cottage porch. I took a couple of steps in her direction, gestured at the main house and said, “Anybody inside?”
“My boss.”
“Just one person?”
“Yeah.”
“Is he home tonight?”
“She. I guess so.”
The house was dark. “She a sound sleeper?”
“Usually.”
I strode through a patch of wet ivy and knocked on a back door. I knocked again. “Let’s go around,” I said to Rideout.
Lieutenant Slaughter shouted at me as we rounded the corner of the house, “Hey! Aren’t you going to help with these cars? We got a salvage job going on here, buddy.”
Ignoring him, we walked around to the front of the house and found a covered wooden porch overlooking Frink Park and Lake Washington. I knocked on the front door. The windows were dark.
Chief Hertlein pulled up in the street, waiting for me to do something wrong while drizzle speckled his windshield. Once again I knocked on the front door. Rideout rapped on a window. “Hello. Hello in there,” she called.
I looked at Rideout. “You smell smoke?”
“The whole neighborhood smells like smoke.”
I put a flashlight up against the window, then stepped back and kicked the front door three times before the frame split and the door shuddered open. Somewhere behind me I heard Chief Hertlein yelling to stop. The foyer was filled with smoke, so we couldn’t see more than eight feet. When he saw the smoke, Chief Hertlein announced over his radio that he had located a fully involved house fire just west of the garage fire, that he wanted a second full response.
“Cover,” I said to Rideout.
“My mask?”
“Yeah. Cover. The neighbor said there’s somebody in there. We have to move.”
We were entering the residence when Chief Hertlein approached the front porch. “Stop! You can’t go in there. You have to wait for a hose line.”
“There’s a victim inside. She�
�ll be dead if we wait,” I said.
“I’m telling you to wait.”
I looked at Rideout and spoke softer so the chief couldn’t hear. “It’s your choice. Come in with me or stand out here while the lady dies.”
“He said to stay out,” she replied through her mask.
“I can’t hear him.”
I’d placed her in an interesting moral dilemma. Obey the orders of her immediate supervisor who was looking for a fire victim, or obey the chief of fire department operations. She followed me.
I had a battle lantern in one hand, was feeling along the wall with the other, doing what we called a right-hand search, going in right, following the wall. In short order I knocked over a table of some sort, heard a vase shattering, then bumbled into what must have been a hat stand. I touched Rideout’s shoulder and told her to go left, which she did. I heard more glass breaking on her side of the hallway. The thermal imager would have been invaluable, but Dolan and Pickett had it.
I couldn’t see her flashlight and she probably couldn’t see mine. The smoke wasn’t hot and didn’t appear to be moving, and we were breathing compressed air off our regulators, so we weren’t in any immediate danger. It was the homeowner who was in trouble.
It was only when I realized how large the house was that I told Rideout we were backing out.
Hertlein was gone when we got outside. “Go get a fan,” I said.
Unclipping her high-pressure air supply hose from her face piece, Rideout left the yard at a jog trot while I radioed King Command, as Chief Johnson had designated himself, that Ladder 3 was at the house due east of the fire building, that it was full of smoke, and we were initiating a search.
Waiting for Rideout, I made a couple of quick reconnoiters left and right of the front door, managed to find a staircase and get back to the door before Rideout showed up dragging the wheeled gasoline-powered fan up the stairs. I helped her get it onto the porch and told her to fire it up. Chief Hertlein must have followed her because he was on the sidewalk looking up at me.
“What are you doing?” Hertlein yelled.
