by Earl Emerson
Grabbing him by the collar, Slaughter drags him until they are beside the nearest burned-out skylight, torrents of hot smoke rushing skyward from the four-by-four-foot opening where the skylight had been.
“No. Noooooooo.” Fitting the nape of his neck into his gloved hand, Slaughter squeezes him like a struggling fish, then pulls him over to the opening and pushes his face into the smoke. “Don’t do this,” Ward begs. “Please don’t—”
Ward’s sentence is cut off by a coughing fit. He chokes. It is as if Slaughter is holding his head underwater. He gags and finally vomits.
Slaughter brings him back into relatively fresh air on the south side of the hole, allows him to regain his equilibrium, then pushes him back into the smoke. Ward tries to hold his breath again, but it doesn’t last. He is coughing violently when I say, “Stop it.”
Pulling Earl Ward out of the smoke, Slaughter tosses him to one side, where he flops like a sparrow that’s hit a window.
“I’m taking him down.”
Slaughter grins. Nearby another skylight melts through and we hear the fire on three. I am surprised the roof hasn’t collapsed. Smoke rushes out of the skylights with a woofing sound that could only be described as dogs walking on marshmallows. Lots of dogs. Lots of marshmallows. Lots of smoke.
“Fuckin’ bastard.” Slaughter looks down at Earl Ward and kicks him hard in the kidneys. Ward rolls over and curls into a fetal position. “This is Attack Six on the roof. I’m bringing down the Ladder Three officer and one civilian.”
Slaughter’s made it sound as if he were rescuing me, putting it out over the air that way so the whole city will get a false picture of what is happening up here. “You go ahead,” he says. “I’ll follow with him.”
“Not on your life. I’m taking him.”
“Listen here, asshole. I’m the senior officer. You just trot on along.”
“Jesus, man. We can’t argue about this. The roof is going to cave.”
“That’s why you need to move along.”
Slaughter and I watch each other warily. I know he will come down alone. It is the perfect out for me. Let somebody else get rid of Ward. Take it off my conscience and push it onto Slaughter’s. This is why fictional heroes keep psycho tough-guy friends. So the psychos can dispatch enemies while the hero’s conscience remains clear. But if you think about it for two seconds, that is all smoke and mirrors. It’s for suckers. If I allow Slaughter to bring Ward down, he will kill him and we all know it, all three of us. He’ll say Ward fell off the roof or Ward ran away in the smoke, but Ward will die. Slaughter will be responsible. But so, too, will I.
“I’m not going to let you do this,” I say.
“Like you have a choice. Move, dickhead.”
“Fuck you. Hand him over.”
“It’s him!” Ward is pointing at Slaughter. “I know that voice. He’s the firefighter I told you about. He’s older and fatter, but that’s him.”
“This ain’t fat,” Slaughter says. “I been liftin’ weights.”
“You killed this man’s father.”
“What are you talking about?” Slaughter boots him again. Hard. Ward rolls over and groans.
I step between them.
“You’re the one who knocked his father into the fire.”
“Bullshit!” Slaughter tries to chase Ward, but I block while Ward scoots across the tar roof on his side, moving closer to the skylight and the smoke rushing out.
“Wait a minute.” I hold Slaughter in front of me.
“Keep your goddamn hands off me.”
“You were there, weren’t you? The night my father went into the basement. He’s telling the truth.” Perhaps because he is too weary to hide it any longer, he wears guilt like a beard.
“I recognize the voice,” Ward says.
It is true Slaughter has an idiosyncratic voice.
“What happened that night?” I ask Slaughter.
“I wasn’t there, so I don’t know. What I do know is this bastard set the fire, so he’s responsible. He pushed your father into that basement and then stood outside and watched him burn. Didn’t even help. Just stood there.”
I step toward Slaughter. Slaughter is big, but I am bigger and younger, and we both know I am crazy. “What happened that night?”
Slaughter is barehanded, so when he reaches into the thigh pocket on his bunking pants, I think he is reaching for his gloves. Instead, he tears the Velcro flap open and brings out a silver knife so large it looks like a joke prop. It is a knife he carries as a tool. He flips the blade out and points it at my navel.
“I told you he was the one,” Ward says, without getting up.
“Shut up,” says Slaughter. “You’re just trying to save your own butt.”
“I wish he was,” I say. “This is the same story he told me two weeks ago. That’s how he got your dosimeter. Twenty-five years ago you dropped it when you were fighting my father.”
“So I was there. So what? It was an accident. I didn’t cause it. Listen, stand back. You’ve already struck one superior officer. All I have to do is tell them you were coming at me.”
Water from a hose stream drums loudly on the parapet thirty feet away. Dollops of cold water shoot up past the roof and arch down, where they hit us like dirt clods.
“You killed my father.”
“Don’t be an ass. This jerkoff set the fire. He killed him. You know the law.”
“You were wrestling with him. You were responsible.”
“He wanted to save this asshole. Check it out. I was right and he was wrong. It’s as simple as that. Look at all the grief this asshole’s caused since your father let him go. I was going to throw this guy in the basement is what I was going to do. Your father thought it was un-fucking-ethical. So tonight I’m going to do what I should have done twenty-five years ago.”
“No, you’re not.”
“God. You’re just like your old man.”
“I hope so.”
Before he can reply, we hear screams, the same screams I heard as I was crossing the roof a few minutes ago. “Help me! Somebody help me!”
Flames begin shooting skyward at the west end of the parapet, reaching up over the wall. A hose stream shoots up over the parapet. More flames. More hose streams. The various fires below are melding into a single conflagration. Inside the building the fire is burning in rooms and hallways where exterior fire streams will never reach.
The voice is coming from the burned-out skylight Slaughter had been pushing Ward’s face into.
I grab Ward’s arm and look at Slaughter. “You going to do something about that screaming?”
“You’re the truckie. You make the rescue.”
I head for the aerial ladder at the east side of the building, taking Ward with me. “Steve. At least yell down at that guy and tell him help is on the way. Tell him not to move.”
“Fuck you.”
On my way past, I grab the knife out of Slaughter’s unsuspecting hands and sling the weapon over the side of the roof into The Harvey’s backyard all in one smooth movement. While I’m doing this, Ward slips away from me and vanishes into the smoke.
Then, before I reach the aerial, a small piece of the roof caves in.
74. HOW TO GAG AN ARSONIST
I stride through the smoke feeling the sticky tar under my boots. In places the roof sways with my weight. With bottle, mask, bunking suit, and tools, I come in at two eighty. Fortunately this isn’t new construction or it would have collapsed long ago.
Every aerial in the city has tools mounted on the top section so they can be accessed by firefighters—a pick-head axe, a pike pole, and a roof ladder.
Balancing the roof ladder on my right shoulder, I move through the smoke, taking care lest I bump into Slaughter or Ward and sweep either or both into a skylight. I haven’t backed off from murdering Ward just to kill him by accident.
Showers of cold water shoot over the parapet at the front of the building, smack my helmet, and make my ears ring. Ward and Slaught
er are nowhere in sight.
When I get to the skylight where I heard the screaming, salt and soot trickle into my mouth along with water. I peer into the murky depths using the flashlight on my coat. Volumes of hot, black smoke rush into my face, singeing my eyebrows and nostrils.
“You still down there?”
He doesn’t reply, but I can hear someone coughing.
“I’m letting down a ladder.”
“Hey, man . . . Where are you?”
“On the roof. I’m going to let down a ladder. Don’t climb until it’s solid.”
This skylight accessed the east end of the corridor on three, the same end I’d searched, which meant I either walked past this person or he’s made his way through a wall of smoke and fire I’ve deemed impassible. In either event, he’s down there because I screwed up. I feel bad about this.
Opening the ladder hooks, I begin to angle the butt end of the roof ladder into the square opening. After some maneuvering, I feel somebody grabbing the base of the ladder. “Don’t pull,” I say. But he can’t help it. He is in a panic.
I wrestle the ladder against his efforts until I feel the butt on solid footing, take out my utility loop, a three-foot-long piece of webbing every Seattle firefighter carries, fasten it quickly around the top rung, the other end over a nearby vent pipe to stabilize the ladder.
By the time I finish the knot, he is climbing. I can hear him coughing and spitting the way people do in smoke.
When his head appears, I grab him under the shoulders and help him up. He is a heavyset man who is probably suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning. This is confirmed when he reaches out for me and misses twice in succession; his coordination is kaput. It is a wonder he made it up the ladder.
“Anybody else down there?”
He shakes his head. His teeth are peppered with particles of soot, his eyes bloodshot and rimmed with tears, a telltale ring of soot marking his mouth and nostrils. I’ve spoken to CO patients who told me they were fine and then died eight hours later. This man is headed for the hyperbaric chamber at Virginia Mason Hospital for treatment, and if he’s very unlucky, from there to the morgue.
He is in shorts and a sweatshirt, barefoot, and before I can warn him, he crawls away from the smoky orifice into the bubbling tar. He picks up one hand and one knee and howls in pain.
I grasp him around the waist, carrying him like you would a large dog until I think we are at a spot where the roof isn’t hot. The roof wobbles under our combined weight. I escort him to the tip of the aerial and call Towbridge over the intercom. “One victim, Tow. He’s going to need help.”
“How many more are up there?”
“Including me, three.” I’m still breathing hard from carrying the victim.
“They got hose lines on me, but we already blew a tire. You want me to get your T-shirt out of the cab?” I knew that last was a joke, the thought that he might try to save my T-shirt while a half-million-dollar fire truck burned up.
“He’s got tar burns on him, Tow.”
“Right.”
Towbridge scrambles up the three-story ladder quicker than I’ve seen anybody do it all night. When he looks at me, I see something in his eyes I’ve never seen before. It takes a moment to realize he thinks he’s looking at me for the last time.
“Ain’t you comin’ down?”
“I have to get somebody else.”
Towbridge glances down. It is easy to forget how high we are. Forty feet. High enough to die if you fall. And if you don’t die, high enough to make you wish you had.
A breath of hot air rises into my face. I wonder how much carbon monoxide I’ve taken tonight, how much toxin is contaminating my bloodstream.
I don’t want to cross the shuddering roof again, but I need to locate Ward and get him down. I know from experience the roof is about to give way. My legs feel weak. I haven’t been this beat up since the Armitage Furniture Warehouse fire eight years ago.
I circle the penthouse. “Steve. Hey, Steve. Where are you guys?”
It occurs to me that the skylights are almost flush with the roof, so that in the smoke they will be easy to step into. I head along the south side of the roof, sweeping my flashlight in a large swath, stopping when I find myself blinded by smoke. At one point I look up and glimpse a black column rising into the sky. Smoke boils off the roof from all sides now, as well as from the skylights and vent pipes.
Carbon monoxide poisoning comes on quickly. It limits your ability to think and deceives you into believing you’re all right. I now have enough CO in me to blunt my reactions and my agility. I am holding on to my sanity like it’s my last nickel. For a moment as the smoke thickens, I wonder why I don’t turn around and go down the aerial myself. But I don’t.
Halfway along the south rim of the roof, I come upon a stack of roofing materials. The smoke shifts for a split second and I see movement on the other side of the stack, a man hunched over, working. Below us I hear food cans exploding in somebody’s kitchen. In another room, stored ammunition pops off like firecrackers.
One of the skylights at the other end of the roof begins spitting flame, illuminating the area around me. The extra heat starts to draw smoke away from the surface and pull it into the sky.
The increased visibility reveals Steve Slaughter thirty feet away, one boot on Earl Ward’s back, pinning him down. In his free hand he holds the blowtorch. Before I can reach them, Slaughter applies flame from the torch to the back of Ward’s ear.
Ward struggles and kicks frantically but cannot escape. Strangely, he does not yell. I wonder why he isn’t screaming, until I see Slaughter has torn off a piece of Ward’s dress, jammed it into his mouth, and secured the gag with a fire department body loop wrapped around Ward’s head. If the world got any crazier, I’d put a photo of this in our training guide and caption it, “How to gag an arsonist.”
Before he realizes I am there, I bat the bottle out of Slaughter’s hands. My hand speed is proving too much for him tonight. The torch flies over the parapet and into the darkness of the backyard. Slaughter glowers at me. “Are you fuckin’ insane?”
Slaughter presses on Ward’s back with his boot until Ward screams through his gag.
Slaughter reaches down and slugs Earl Ward in the back of the head with his fist.
He is preparing to do it again when I step over Ward’s body and push up against Slaughter’s chest. We are face-to-face now, toe-to-toe. He cannot hit Ward, but he can hit me. “Let’s get off this roof,” I say.
“This is the SOB burned me when I was handcuffed to the bed.”
It isn’t often you can point to one moment during which your fractured persona congeals into a single entity, but later on I will point to this moment, right here, face-to-face with Steve Slaughter. It is even more central than not killing Ward. I’ve been conflicted my whole life about who I am and what I need to do in life, yet at this moment I know exactly who I am.
I am my father’s son.
My father defended Ward against vigilante rage, and I will too.
“I’m not done with him,” Slaughter says. I can feel the spit from his words hitting my eyes as a wave of hot smoke engulfs us. “He burned me. I’m burning him. It’s simple justice.”
We hear the cracking and buckling of timbers as the center of the roof begins sinking. For a split second I think about leaving these two to their destiny. On my own I could make it around the perimeter to the aerial before the roof caves in. But I don’t move.
The pallet of roofing materials begins to slide away from us as the roof slowly begins sloping toward the center. A small hole opens twenty feet away while the area around the hole dips down like the walls of a funnel.
We slide, all three of us, toward the hole as a sheet of flame roars out. I can feel the heat on my back. The sudden light illuminates Slaughter’s face like a flashbulb.
Slaughter doesn’t seem to realize what is happening.
“I could have finished this fuck twenty-five years ago, b
ut somebody got in my way. That’s not going to happen here.”
“So you admit you killed my father!”
“It was an accident. He tried to protect this fuck.”
Suddenly the old rage rushes back. This man staring me in the eye, this man who is so cocksure of everything in life, this bastard destroyed my family. My mother. My brother. Alfred. It all started here. For a few seconds I am confused. I can live my father’s dream. Or I can avenge his death.
I lean toward Slaughter to counter the sinking roof behind us. Ward is beneath us. We continue to straddle him, Slaughter facing the flames, my back to them.
Without another word, I shove Slaughter; he backs up, stumbles, and lands on his rump.
The fire flares up and a fusillade of sparks shoots into the sky behind me, along with twenty or thirty feet of flame. I duck down on top of Ward to escape some of the heat and to cover him. The radiant heat has already penetrated through the layers of my bunking coat and trousers to my wet T-shirt and jockey shorts, where I am being scalded.
The roof creaks like a huge rusty hinge and grows steeper. Slaughter is holding on to the parapet, but Ward and I are being held in place only by inertia and the sticky tar surface of the roof.
Eddings has been screeching at us on the radio for the past minute, but now the dispatcher takes over in a calm voice. “Ladder Three. Attack Six. Do you read? Ladder Three? Attack Six?”
From below it must look like we are all dead.
Another large section in the center of the roof caves in and more flames shoot skyward. At this point about a third of the roof collapses with a staggered series of crashes.
Slaughter gets up from his crouch, catches his balance, and rushes me football style, as if to grasp me around the waist or push me into the hole behind us. He doesn’t seem to realize we are all on the verge of sliding in.
I knot up my left fist and crack him across the jaw.
The blow sends him reeling onto the pile of roofing material that is teetering on the lip of the maw. As soon as his weight settles onto it, the pile flips into the hole, the hole that is becoming a giant oblong funnel, sucking in everything in its path.
