Pyro

by Earl Emerson

  As we spoke we heard the sounds of the engine firing up, the men yelling to each other, the bay doors cranking open. The engine roared out of the station, and a moment later we heard them slowing across the street at the library.

  “So how many of my grandmother’s movies do you have?” I asked.

  “All of them.”

  “Even the film libraries don’t have Rio Cantina.”

  “I bought it from the estate of a collector two years ago.”

  “You know, that’s the one movie of my grandmother’s I’ve never seen.”

  Silence. I’d given him an opening, but he either wasn’t interested or couldn’t summon the gumption to say anything. My money was on the latter. It was intriguing that this man, who in the night in his firefighting armor seemed to be afraid of absolutely nothing, was so afraid of me now.

  I decided to give it one more shot. “I have an idea. There’s a retrospective at the Harvard Exit. They’re playing a couple of Nanna’s movies. I’ve been trying to find somebody to go with. Would you like to come with me?”

  Before he could reply, another alarm went off, the overhead lights came on all over the station, a bell clanged, and within seconds he was gone. As were the others. It was just me, the caterers, and a garage full of diesel smoke.

  20. GEE, LET’S ROB FORT KNOX

  Even though I knew she would be gone when we got back it was disappointing to arrive at the station two hours later and confront Pennington’s absence. Like a boob, I ran into my office and scanned my desk for a note.

  There wasn’t one.

  While the four of us sat in the beanery in various states of deshabille, bored by the lackluster play between the Raiders and Chargers, I stewed over the variety of slow-witted things I’d said to Vanessa Pennington.

  All my life I’ve had trouble talking to a certain sort of woman, the sort I might conceivably fall in love with. The women I spent time with, when I did spend time with the opposite sex, were misfits, neurotics, dysfunctional. Like me.

  Real women made my teeth go dry and my eyes tear up.

  If I’d had my wits about me, I might have invited her to watch Rio Cantina with me. I might at least have suggested loaning it to her, which would have necessitated seeing her twice more, once to give her the tape and once for her to return it, but I didn’t think of any of these possibilities until afterward.

  As we sat watching TV, Joe Williams came in at a little after ten. Joe wasn’t due to relieve me until 0730 hours tomorrow. Gliniewicz, Slaughter, Towbridge, and I were watching the ball game. Zeke was in the phone booth.

  “What’s up?” Slaughter asked, turning from the TV. Slaughter had a manner of engaging people when he spoke to them that I would have given anything to appropriate.

  “The old lady threw me out again,” Williams said. “She thinks I’m hot for our next-door neighbor.”

  “Are you?” Slaughter asked.

  “Well, yeah. A little. But hell, I’m a guy. Ain’t I supposed to look?”

  “Get yourself a pair of those mirror sunglasses so she can’t see your eyeballs,” Gliniewicz said. “It sure saved my marriage.”

  “What saved your marriage,” said Towbridge, “was you bought your wife that Lexus.” Gliniewicz ignored him.

  “Are you gonna sleep here tonight?” Slaughter asked.

  “I don’t have nowhere else,” Williams replied.

  “You gonna double up with Wollf?” Gliniewicz joked.

  Williams gave me a look. “I get the outside.”

  “I get the outside,” I said.

  “Well, hey. If you’re going to be like that, I’ll sleep downstairs.”

  “No wonder your wife doesn’t want you around,” Towbridge said. “You can’t compromise.”

  As Williams left to get his bedding and personal gear, the phone on the beanery table rang. Towbridge picked it up, glanced at me, and said, “You know somebody named Mitzi?”

  “I’ll take it in my office.”

  Williams was still in the Ladder 3 office when I picked up the phone. “Lieutenant Wollf.”

  “Lieutenant? This is Parkinson on Aid Twenty-five. Hey, we got a call down here at the Arroyo Tavern just off Broadway. It’s sort of a mess. This woman named Mitzi says she knows you. SPD wants to take her to the precinct and book her, but she says if she gets arrested she’ll have to go back to prison. The cops say if you vouch for her they’ll let her go.”

  “What’s she being arrested for?”

  Across the room, Williams grew quiet.

  “Disturbing the peace.”

  “She okay?”

  “I can’t prove it, but my guess is she’s on smack. We’ve had a bunch of ODs in this neighborhood today. There’s some black tar in town. You know her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you want to come and get her?”

  “Hold on a minute.” Williams was halfway out the door with an armful of bedding and his shaving kit. “Joe? Think you could work a couple hours tonight? I’ll give you merits.”

  “You got woman trouble too?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “If you clear it with the chief. But I can’t work all night. The wife and I been goin’ round and round for two days. I ain’t had any rack time.”

  I borrowed Towbridge’s Saab and drove two miles to the Arroyo on Capitol Hill, double parking on East John next to the idling aid car.

  There were two police cruisers behind the aid car, two more in front. Inside the Arroyo they were watching the same football game we’d been watching at the station. A few neighborhood blue collar types nursed beers. The rest were police, fire, or prisoners.

  Mitzi was on the floor in the center of it all with half the buttons missing from her sleeveless blouse. She was in her early thirties, a buxom bottle-blonde in a tight black skirt. Even at her worst, and this was close, Mitzi could seduce a church softball team into robbing Fort Knox.

  Parkinson looked up from the clipboard he was writing on and said, “Her vitals are normal and she’s oriented times three.”

  “She’s AOB,” added his partner, a woman. Alcohol on breath.

  When Mitzi heard my voice, it took her a while to find my eyes in the crowd. From what I could see—broken beer mugs and upset tables—there’d been a brawl. I wasn’t surprised. Inciting brawls was her speciality. She had a fat lip and a mouse under one eye.

  “You know this woman?” one of the cops asked. I’d thrown a windbreaker on, but he could see my uniform shirt and collar bars when I took the jacket off to cover her.

  “I’ll vouch for her.”

  “Oh, baby.” She looked up at me. “Come down and give Mitzi a little kiss. Come here, baby.”

  “You’re drunk, Susan.”

  “Am I?”

  “Come on. Get up. I’ll take you home.” I took one of her hands, pulled her to her feet, and put an arm around her solid torso. “Where’s your coat?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I got robbed, sweetie.”

  “You want help?” Parkinson asked.

  “I can manage.”

  I walked her outside and put her into Towbridge’s Saab. By the time I started the motor, she’d nodded off. “Susan. Wake up. Where are you staying?”

  “I’m with a man named Igor.”

  “Where?”

  “I think it was a Motel Six.”

  “You gotta give me a little more help than that.”

  “I do?” Then she was asleep again.

  I shook her. “Look, Susan. Tell me where you’re staying.”

  “Call me Mitzi.”

  “Okay, Mitzi. I don’t want to hand you back over to the cops.”

  “Take me to your place.”

  “We tried that before.”

  “Okay, then. Take me to your firehouse. I wanna meet your friends.”

  I secured her seat belt, let the clutch out, and drove down Madison until I hit Twenty-third, then followed it south to Yesler, where we stopped at a red light across th
e street from Six’s. Behind the closed blinds I could see the flickering light from the TV. Gliniewicz had the night watch and would be up until two or three watching old war footage on the History Channel—he frequently lamented the fact that he’d been born too late to participate in WWII.

  There was a damp chill in the night air that penetrated through to my socks.

  I drove east on Yesler until the dead end, then headed down through Frink Park and the woods. Ten years ago Attack 6 had been returning from a midnight alarm when they saw a man down here. Suspicious, they wrote down his license number and gave it to the police. Later, SPD found the body of a woman in the park and charged the car’s owner with murder.

  Susan was just the sort of lost soul who might end up in Frink Park.

  When I parked the Saab next to my Ford in the parking lot of the Water’s Edge, Susan was asleep, head lolled to the side, mouth open. Gathering the folds of my windbreaker around her, I hauled her out and tried to stand her up.

  Mine was the end condo unit on the first floor, with a deck over the water just off the living room. Somewhere high on the hillside I heard a siren and knew my guys were up there working.

  “Where we goin’?” Mitzi muttered.

  “Someplace safe.”

  “You gonna stay with me, Paul?”

  “I’m going back to work. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I turned down the bed in the spare bedroom, removed her shoes, my windbreaker, and tucked her in. She curled up on the pillow like a little girl, her hands pressed together under her cheek.

  “Good night, Susan.”

  “Numm, numm,” she said.

  21. WOLLF BECOMES LEGEND

  Cynthia Rideout

  DECEMBER 8, SUNDAY, 2358 HOURS

  Tonight I was cleaning up the beanery when Towbridge and Gliniewicz started talking about Lieutenant Wollf. It turns out Wollf came into the department as a probationary firefighter under Lieutenant Slaughter, that Slaughter actually tried to fire him. He said he was dangerous at fires because he was too aggressive. That’s coming from Slaughter, who has a reputation for being one of the biggest risk-takers around.

  Then one night about halfway through Wollf’s probationary term, Wollf, along with three others on Engine 13, took a line into a furniture warehouse and proceeded to look for the fire, which, unbeknownst to them, was below them in the basement. While they were inside, the warehouse filled up with smoke, and by the time the four of them began running out of air, they were lost. Wollf had been keeping track of which wall they were on while the others laid their line over the tops of furniture, thinking they would tap the fire and follow the hose out the door. The fire grew and they never did find it. After the heat built up inside the building, they were forced to their knees and could no longer trace the line over the furniture. They split up and began looking frantically for an exit.

  Three of them got lost and ran out of air while Wollf found a wall and traced it to an exterior doorway. He turned around and found each of the men in turn, walking them one by one out of the building each had believed they were going to die in.

  It turned Wollf into a legend.

  For various reasons, he’s been a legend ever since.

  22. BLACK CHERRY DIET SODA

  By the time I got back to the station they’d had two alarms. An aid call and a fence fire, both arsons. So much for the theory that the arsonists had been arrested over the weekend.

  When the bell hit again, I was putting my gear on board. Williams shouted from somewhere in the station, “You got me?”

  “I got you, man. Thanks for covering.”

  It was another aid call. An elderly woman in a cramped apartment full of ancient furniture, stacks of newspapers, and broken-down walkers. She was having trouble catching her breath, more worried that she wasn’t going to get her purse and keys to the hospital than of dying.

  It wasn’t until we were back in front of the station that we got the full response to Twenty-ninth and East Cherry. This would be Ladder 3’s fourth alarm in an hour.

  Cherry Street was a haven for hookers and drug dealers, but as we crossed Martin Luther King Jr. Way heading east we found ourselves in a quieter neighborhood of single-family homes. The area had been mostly Jewish until World War II, was mostly African American now, though more whites were moving in all the time, buying cheap and remodeling. Gentrification, it was called.

  We found a small fire in a pile of debris between two houses. Gliniewicz ran the centrifugal pump on Attack 6 while Zeke and Slaughter laid a 13⁄4-inch line and blew all the evidence thirty feet into the backyard with the hose stream.

  A small crowd gathered, rather quickly, I thought, given the windchill factor and the looming rain or snow. By the time the chief left, we had maybe thirty people standing around.

  I scanned the crowd, looking for faces I’d seen at other fires. If there was a firebug here, I couldn’t spot him.

  There was one thing.

  On the far side of the involved house against the opposite wall, I found a black cherry diet soda can under a bathroom window. Upright and opened, it appeared to have been partially drained. Or filled with piss. The can looked new, but it could have been there for weeks since that side of the house was littered with garbage and detritus.

  “People need to clean up,” said Towbridge, who’d followed me around the house.

  “Black cherry diet soda,” I said, shining my flashlight on the can.

  When we got our fifth alarm of the night, I hurriedly told Slaughter about the can and left him in charge of the scene. “Engine Twenty-five, Engine Ten, Engine Thirty-four, Engine Five. Ladders Three and One. Battalions Five and Six. Medic Ten. Safety Two. Twelfth Avenue and East Fir Street. Engines Twenty-five, Ten, Thirty-four—” They didn’t routinely send this many units unless they had a confirmed fire or an intersection with a huge potential for disaster.

  “We’re going to be first in,” Dolan said.

  He couldn’t have been more delighted.

  23. PICKETT GETS BURNED AND I DIDN’T DO IT—HONEST

  Cynthia Rideout

  DECEMBER 9, MONDAY, 0935 HOURS

  I just got home from visiting Pickett at Harborview Hospital, and I feel so bad about the whole thing. Roper is on my lap purring away. He’s about the only consolation I have right now.

  I barely had my bottle on when Dolan drove to Twelfth and East Fir and realized the dispatcher had given us the wrong intersection. Dolan didn’t even slow down on Twelfth, just kept rolling up the hill as Wollf said something on the rig radio about a corrected location.

  It happened that fast.

  When a ladder truck is first in, there’s not a whole lot they can do. After all, we don’t carry any hoses or water, just the ladders and all that equipment.

  The fire was in a three-story apartment building on the northeast corner of a quiet intersection. Lots of potential for fatalities. All kinds of people yelling and screaming for us to do something.

  A ton of smoke. No flame that we could see.

  It was our second fire in ten minutes, and I don’t mind telling you it shook me up.

  There were a million things to do and only four of us. Three, really. Because Lieutenant Wollf was the incident commander for the first few minutes.

  We could hear sirens in the distance, but nobody else was there yet.

  So picture this.

  We get to the intersection and we see a three-story apartment building with a brick facade, built in a simple rectangle running lengthwise to the east with a flat roof and no protrusions. All the windows are flat against the walls. In the center of the wall facing us is an open stairway with balconies. On either side of the stairway are apartments, nobody in any of the windows.

  There’s smoke coming from under the eaves. The central open stairwell and landings are obscured by smoke.

  Which apartments are burning—no one can say.

  To make matters worse, there are two men in their underwear on the third-floo
r landing. One man is putting his bare foot up on the railing as if he’s going to do a header onto the sidewalk.

  “Get a ladder,” Wollf said. “Be careful they don’t jump onto it before you get the dogs locked. Talk to them. Communicate.”

  I say, “Yes, sir.” Maybe I don’t really say it. Anyway, I am thinking the words. Here’s the bad part. When I turn around, Towbridge is gone.

  Dolan is putting the aerial to the roof, so he’s not going to help.

  A civilian standing nearby says, “Can I assist?”

  “Yeah. Follow me.”

  We go to the ladder compartment at the back of the rig and he helps me pull the twenty-five-foot ladder out and we start toward the stairwell with it, and when we get maybe twenty or thirty feet from the rig I hear Dolan yelling at me. “Not that one. Get the thirty-five.”

  So we lay the twenty-five across the sidewalk and go back to the apparatus for a thirty-five. By now at least one other rig has shown up, Engine 25. When I look inside the ladder compartment, the thirty-five is not there.

  When the civilian and I put up the ladder we dropped, I know two things:

  (1) This ladder isn’t going to reach the third-floor balcony.

  (2) The people on the balcony are gone. They’ve come down the stairs on their own and are standing next to us looking up as if there are other people up there, which there aren’t.

  We still can’t tell which apartment unit is involved.

  Then somebody with an Engine 25 badge on his helmet shows up in front of me and says, “Which floor?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I answer. He gives me a disgusted look. Like he knows.

  Behind us I hear the roar of the motor on Ladder 3 as Dolan puts down the outriggers and prepares to raise the aerial. A hose line begins to fill at my feet with the usual sound of empty cardboard boxes getting kicked, and more people from Engine 25 show up. Somebody is beating in a door on the first floor. Boom. Boom. Two half-dressed male civilians are screaming at the firefighters that the fire is in their unit on the top floor.

  I turn around to get directions from Wollf, but he’s busy talking to the officer from Engine 25. Pickett appears in front of me.