Pyro

by Earl Emerson

  “So who’s been setting fires up north?” Dolan asked. “We been hearing units on fire calls all night.”

  “There’s at least two of them now,” said Connor. “Maybe three.”

  “Two pyromaniacs?” My voice must have betrayed something, because everybody looked at me. I could feel the poison coursing through my bloodstream like acid.

  “Or three,” said Connor.

  “Three? There’s probably five of the snot-nosed bastards,” corrected LaSalle.

  They both wore jeans and windbreakers, fire department sweatshirts under the windbreakers. Connor wore heavy, steel-toed work boots, while LaSalle wore sneakers. Stepping into the fire unit, LaSalle turned back to the doorway and grinned at me, displaying the gap between his front teeth. “Nice work. You got this place lit up like a condom shop at Mardi Gras.”

  Connor turned around and twitched an eyebrow at Rideout, as if to say, “Boys.”

  LaSalle said, “I heard Pickett got hisself burned.”

  “How bad was it?” asked Connor.

  “Just a little on his face,” said Towbridge.

  “A lot on his face,” said Rideout.

  “Hertlein’s going to hang somebody out to dry. You his partner?” LaSalle asked, turning to Rideout.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sir?” LaSalle looked at the numbers on Rideout’s helmet and said, “Sir. I like that. Can the rest of you guys call me sir too?”

  Dolan said, “Sir Asshole or Sir Ignoramus?”

  LaSalle laughed.

  It was a two-bedroom unit. The fire had emerged from a narrow corridor leading to the bedrooms to the left of the living room. You could see where it had spread downward from the ceiling, the walls charcoal at head height, gray down low, until, a few inches from the floor, they retained their original color. Even in the corridor, where the fire had burned hottest, the bottom few inches on the wall were clean.

  Until LaSalle and Connor began pulling burned material out of the bathroom and examining it piece by piece, we assumed the fire had been started by the carelessness of one of the young women who lived here. She had already told us she had lit a candle in the bathroom and left it burning when she went out. LaSalle and Connor decided the fire started in the ceiling fan over the commode. Faulty wiring had ignited the fan motor and set the ceiling on fire. After it burned awhile it weakened the ceiling plaster enough that the fan unit fell onto the countertop, where the fire quickly melted the candle and the false marble countertop.

  I turned to Rideout. “Did they teach you how to read a fire in drill school?”

  “A little.”

  “When there was enough smoke and gas built up from the fire in the bathroom, the smoke began following a natural path to the window in this bedroom. When you guys turned the fan on at the front door, the pressurization helped push the gases out the bedroom window. From the bathroom through this bedroom. It was perfect.”

  “So when I broke out the kitchen window, I changed the air flow and got Pickett burned?”

  “That puny little window wasn’t enough to do that,” said Dolan.

  I said, “What brought the fire out toward the living room was the fan getting shut off. All of a sudden the apartment was no longer pressurized, so the heat began heading toward the largest opening. The front door.”

  “If the fan had been on, Pickett wouldn’t have been burned,” Towbridge said.

  “It don’t help,” said Dolan, “that we’re forced to wear all this damn equipment. This hood. And now they even say they’ll write charges on us if we go into a fire without our collars up. What a crock of shit. In the old days, you went in with your ears exposed. When a room got too hot, you could feel it. You backed out. Now your gear gets hot and you don’t even know it. You get burned before you can take it off. Did you see those lines on his face? Those were contact burns. His face piece and hood burned him. He got burned by his own equipment.”

  “You close to nabbing your arsonist?” I asked LaSalle.

  “It’s just a matter of time. They all get caught.”

  But they didn’t all get caught. My father’s killer was still out there. “At two of the arsons we found Shasta diet black cherry cans,” I said.

  “You save them?”

  “At the last one I had Slaughter mark it for you guys.”

  “He never said shit to us.”

  LaSalle gave me a look. Connor said, “Next time try to preserve anything you find in place.”

  “It’s probably nothing,” said LaSalle. “There’s been a lot of trash around these sites.”

  The casualness with which LaSalle treated my tip put things into perspective. He was right. There had been a lot of debris at our fire sites. Discarded furniture. Fast-food wrappers. Bottles. Cans.

  26. IF YOU AREN’T, YOU WILL BE

  When we got back to Six’s I could smell floor wax along with the acrid tang of smoke we’d brought back to the station on our clothes and hair.

  As I typed up the fire report, I became aware of Steve Slaughter in the doorway. “You guys have a bad night?” he asked.

  “I’ve had worse. Are you still on good terms with those guys in investigation?”

  “Sure.”

  “I was wondering why you didn’t pass along my information on the can we found at that fire off Cherry?”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t seem important. It was pretty hectic.”

  “Have you heard anything about diet Shasta cans?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you could put out some feelers and see what they know that they’re not telling.”

  “I’ll swing by on my way home.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Paul, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. You know as well as I do every time we go out there’s a chance Zeke is going to get me killed. Then there’s Gliniewicz. I like the guy, but he’s bullheaded, drives like a maniac, and any time he has to carry any hose, he starts wheezing like an old radiator. Neither of them’s going to run in and drag my sorry ass out of a fire.” I tried to keep my eyes off Slaughter’s beer belly. Like a lot of overweight firemen, he thought he was in shape because he had been once—years ago. “I don’t want another weak sister on my crew.”

  “And?”

  “I’m talking about that chick you’ve been babysitting.”

  “There’s no babysitting going on.”

  “Oh, come on. You’ve been nursing her like a sick kitten. You realize if she makes it through probation, she’s going to end up on my crew.”

  “You’re not telling me to write a bad report on her, are you?”

  “I shouldn’t have to tell you. She’s fucked up two fires in a row. Thursday night and last night. Take last night. She goes in with Pickett—Pickett gets burned. Or Thursday. You go in with her. You bring the victim out by yourself.”

  “That was my decision. And she didn’t get Pickett burned. Listen, Steve. I’ve evaluated recruits before and—”

  “That’s why I don’t understand this. Everybody sees her screwing up but you. You know how women are. Hell, they don’t even have the same gene structure we do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Think about it. A woman . . . she’s got all these genes telling her to build a nest and start having babies. Something bad happens, her instinct is to duck and cover. Hide the babies. The whole Bambi bit. Our instinct, something happens, is to grab our spears and kick ass. We see a fire, we get the hose and charge in. A woman, she sees a fire, her instinct is to run. There’s no getting around the fact that every time a woman goes into a fire she’s fighting her basic nature.”

  “I haven’t seen any evidence that Rideout’s afraid.”

  “Then you’re blind. You know what else? And don’t tell me this isn’t true, because you and I have both been there. Women come in, they’re at their physical peak. They’re as strong as they’ll ever be. Even then they barely pass the minimum requirements. A year later they’re weaker. F
ive years later they can’t carry a suitcase through the airport. A guy comes in . . . hell, take Gliniewicz. He hasn’t done a thing to take care of himself in eighteen years. What d’ya wanna bet, one on one, he could take Rideout?”

  “Look, Paul, I’ve got a report to finish.”

  “Would you want her on your crew?”

  “She is on my crew, and she’s doing just fine.”

  “Bullshit.” Slaughter chewed on the corner of his mustache. “We could have a good station here. You know that, Paul. We could have one of the best firefighting units in the city. Zeke’s going to transfer out, and I would appreciate it if I didn’t have to replace him with a woman.”

  “I’m not going to make up stories about her or listen to anyone else’s. So far she’s done fine, and that’s what I’m writing.”

  Slaughter stared at me for ten long beats. “You’re bangin’ her, ain’t ya?”

  “Get out of here.”

  Slaughter walked to the engine office door, pushed it open, then looked back at me. “You’re bangin’ her. If you aren’t, you will be.”

  27. WHEN I WAS FOUR

  The walk home that morning gave me time to clear my head. I was pissed. About a lot of things. People coming at me from right and left trying to get me to fire the rookie. The pyro. The senseless fire watch at Eleventh and Fir.

  I was pissed at the thought that the firebug might be driving past me as I walked home. That we didn’t know who he was. That his fires kept help from arriving at Eleventh and Fir when we needed it. That Hertlein might be turning off fans while my guys were inside. That there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about any of it.

  The sporadic fires they’d had in the area in the weeks before I arrived at Six’s had affected all shifts, but in the past four days most of them had been on C-shift. It would be interesting to see whether the arsonist would wait to strike again until Friday, when we would be working next. It would be even more interesting to see whether more Shasta diet black cherry cans showed up.

  I wanted to kill the pyro.

  I didn’t like the feeling. But there wasn’t much I could do to get rid of it either. Most people could have shaken it. I couldn’t.

  There was a lot to think about as I walked home in the chill morning air. Slaughter was widely recognized as a smoke-eating firefighter, a good officer, somebody who knew his business. Yet having worked with him eight years earlier, it was my belief that most of his reputation came from stories propagated by himself. When I was a boot at Thirteen’s, he’d been a yeller and a screamer on the fire ground. I’d transferred out as soon as I could, using the excuse that I wanted to work on a ladder company. At Thirteen’s he’d been tough on me until the night of the Armitage Furniture Warehouse fire, when I hauled his ass out of the building. After that there wasn’t much he could say. It was a night he never talked about, probably because he knew he’d panicked in the smoke. I got an award, and he stopped writing negative reports on me.

  Filling the moist morning air with exhaust, two idling cars sat driverless in the parking lot at The Water’s Edge. It was eight-thirty in the morning, and I had to remind myself most people were leaving for work, not getting home as I was.

  Two miles away across the flat waters of Lake Washington, skyscrapers in Bellevue appeared to sit right on the water. To the south, the floating bridge supported a string of headlights.

  “Hello,” I said, unlocking the front door. “Susan? You awake?”

  I took off my shoes, set my rucksack by the front door, and walked down the corridor past floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with videos. I rapped on the guest room door. “Susan?”

  No answer. The room was empty.

  I scanned the guest bedroom for a note but found only a rumpled bed and a drinking glass on the nightstand, a half-moon of rose-colored lipstick on the rim.

  Last time she disappeared on me she trashed my place. That was a year ago. Since then she’d gotten a job but, judging by last night, had fallen in with bad company again.

  Her name was Susan, but she’d recently announced she wanted to be called Mitzi. She’d been raised by a stepfather she hated, and being called Susan brought those years back. I hadn’t yet adjusted to the name change.

  In my bedroom one of the dresser drawers had been left ajar just enough to tell me someone had been in it. I kept my belongings meticulously arranged and folded, every pair of socks lined up facing north and south, the shirts in my closet arranged by color and sleeve length. I liked order.

  A careful reconnoitering of the rooms revealed a small metal box in my office that had been jimmied. Of the assorted coins in the box, three Krugerrands were missing. It showed her state of mind that she’d broken the lock on a box that hadn’t been locked and then taken only three out of the fourteen gold pieces, as if I might not notice only three missing coins.

  In the sink were two empty Red Hook bottles. I hadn’t had a drink since I was seventeen and almost killed Rickie Morrison under the influence, but I kept a six-pack in the fridge for guests. Susan and one or two other women were the only visitors who’d been here over the past two years—unless you counted the cable guy or the butt-crack bozos who laid the new carpet in my spare room.

  On the walk home it occurred to me how much I depended upon the fire department for social intercourse, how little social interaction I had in the rest of my life, and how much I’d been looking forward to spending the day with Susan.

  Actually, I didn’t have any social life apart from the firehouse. On a four-off I was lucky to talk to a single person who wasn’t a cash register jockey or a telephone solicitor. There was a redhead I saw at the gym, but in three years I hadn’t worked up the courage to say more than “Hi.” I could tell she thought I was an idiot.

  It would be a dream assignment if I could remain at Six’s. I liked Dolan’s sly sense of fun and Towbridge’s ability to see through bullshit and find the humor in any situation. And while Pickett had problems, he certainly wasn’t afraid of heat.

  I missed the day Susan and I would have had together more than I missed the Krugerrands. We could have lunched down the street at the Leschi Café. We might have taken in the Patricia Pennington flick at the Harvard Exit. It would be like old times. But this was like old times too, getting robbed by her.

  I fixed a light breakfast and ate in front of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Internet site, perusing the stories about last night’s twelve fires, which had been attributed to three or more firebugs. The chief of the department said we were closing in on the perpetrators and would have them in custody within days. I very much doubted that.

  After cleaning up my breakfast dishes and laundering the bedding in the guest bedroom, I dragged out the trunk under the bed in my computer room. An accomplished thief, Susan was unlikely to have missed the large black steamer trunk.

  When I opened it, the mass of materials and papers I’d configured so carefully and stored so dutifully was topsy-turvy.

  The melted firefighter’s helmet was crammed full of newspaper clippings, as if she’d balled them up to get them out of the way. The photographs our mother had saved had been rifled.

  Here was my history. My mother’s history. My father’s. Neil’s.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor in my stocking feet, I began sorting. Fire department paraphernalia laid out neatly in one pile. Clippings about the search for the Central Area firebug in another. Stories about my father’s fiery death in another.

  One small news clipping caught my eye. It was dated two weeks after my father’s death. I had been four.

  ARSONIST LEAVES SIGNATURE

  SEATTLE—Although most of the arson activity plaguing Seattle neighborhoods over the last three months has abated, investigators are still on the lookout for the individual responsible for the death of Seattle Fire Lieutenant Neil Wollf, 29, last month.

  Fire investigator William Kerrigan said, “We’ve got a dedicated staff and we’re putting everything else on hold until we nail him.” />
  Last month during a series of nighttime arsons on Capitol Hill and in the Yesler district, Wollf’s body was found in a basement fire near Empire Way and Union Street. Several fire companies had been battling blazes in the neighborhood when Wollf became separated from his crew. Approximately thirty minutes later his body was found in the corner of a basement fire in a house belonging to Esther Woods, 67.

  Says Woods, “We didn’t even know the house was on fire until we heard the firefighters.”

  Kerrigan acknowledged that fire department investigators remain on the lookout for fires displaying a specific signature left by the arsonist. However, he refused to confirm what some fire personnel have indicated to us: that the arsonist leaves a can of a particular type of soda pop at each crime scene.

  Since November of last year the firebug has been lighting fences, garages, and exterior house walls and has been blamed for over $500,000 worth of damage as well as untold dollars in police and fire department overtime.

  The most damaging fires occurred in the two weeks prior to Wollf’s death. A fire in January caused the death of an elderly resident in the Madrona neighborhood. Officials strongly hinted all these fires were set by the same individual.

  Arson fires in the Central Area have come to a virtual standstill since Wollf’s death.

  “Right now we don’t know if he’s still out there biding his time or if he’s moved on to another jurisdiction,” says fire chief Frank Hanson.

  I’d heard about the soda pop cans from Neil, who’d been a child when he told me about it, so until this past week I had no idea whether it was true. Now Shasta diet black cherry cans were showing up at our arson sites.

  Was it possible that after twenty-five years of silence my father’s killer had returned?

  I’d been thinking about offing the bastard since I was four. I would too, if I caught him. It felt funny to voice it. Ethicists speculate about going back in time and meeting Adolf Hitler in 1929 and whether it would be honorable to murder him if you knew it would save thirty or forty million lives. I found those moral conundrums boring. I had no qualms whatever about slaying the pyro who killed my father. No second thoughts. It would ruin my life; it might send me to prison. But he would be dead.