Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  Tony picked a piece of lint off his younger brother’s collar. “God, I was worried for you that night. We pulled in just as the roof on the west side caved in and fired up the sky. I thought you were going to die. They must have been working on you, oh, fifteen minutes, had all your clothes except your jockeys stripped off and were putting ringers into you, when one of the medics decided to get a core temperature. A hundred and six. The doctors told me hallucinations start at a hundred and five. Can you imagine how hot you must have been twenty minutes earlier when you were inside?”

  To Finney’s way of thinking, the modern fire service had gone overboard in mandating protective equipment. During his first years on the job full bunkers had been optional. He’d worn a heavy bunking coat, a helmet, gloves, cotton—and later Nomex—pants, along with steel-toed work boots. Only at night or at the more hazardous fires would he climb into knee-high rubber bunking boots and the heavy bunking pants that came with them. In the old days their ears, necks, and skin around their facepieces were exposed. People who’d worked with that system liked it because, despite occasional steam burns, it gave them a valuable temperature gauge.

  Now, mummified in a variety of heavy, fire-resistant garments, they often went so far into fire buildings they couldn’t get out safely. There was no way to tell how hot it was until it was too late.

  And though the manufacturers touted the latest materials in heat transference properties, the fact was that even the best-conditioned firefighters sweated heavily while working in the multilayered bunking coats and trousers. The body produced sweat in order to cool, yet in bunkers there was no cooling effect. To Finney, compared to the old days, it seemed as if fires were being fought in slow motion. Teams were sent to rehab to drink and rest after depleting a single half-hour air bottle.

  Fire departments across the country were fighting forty percent fewer fires but losing more people than ever. Firefighters were dropping from heart attacks and heatstroke and from getting trapped deep inside burning buildings, while the industry adjusted its blinders and tried to figure out why. Finney and plenty of others knew why. They were going into these buildings carrying the earth and sky on their backs like Atlas.

  “John. I’m really sorry about what happened today.”

  “Thanks, Tony.”

  “Jesus! How are you going to tell Dad? This’ll kill him.”

  “I’ll figure out something.”

  Finney let Tony out the rear door of the apparatus bay, his brother’s final comment ringing in his ears. Despite their recent closeness, it was just like Tony to point out that this was going to hurt their father—kill him, in fact. It was also like him to make sure it was the last thing he said, a dig that appeared accidental yet probably wasn’t, the sort of double-edged comment Tony had honed to perfection over the years.

  15. NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE

  Suffocating, blinded, choking on smoke, Finney crawled down the dark corridor, his right glove skimming the wall. He’d been without bottled air for some time, and his mouth tasted of blood and burnt rubber and something that might easily have been roadkill. Nothing was nastier than smoke from a building fire.

  Piloting by the dim sounds of a fire engine pump somewhere outside, he made his way forward, but each time he inched ahead, it seemed as if the floor pulled him back, as if the floor were moving. When he finally looked down, he realized he was staggering through dead men tiered up like logs, each burned beyond recognition.

  Then his eyes were open and it took a few seconds to decide whether he was awake or only dreaming he was awake. When he rolled his head on his pillow to check the bedside clock, a mixture of sweat and tears crackled in his ear. It was 0305 hours, almost to the minute they’d been dispatched to Leary Way five months earlier. It was uncanny how some circadian clock in his brain knew what time to bring on the dream.

  Always Leary Way. Always a few minutes after three in the morning.

  Finney sat up and let the air in the houseboat cool him. He knew from experience he wouldn’t sleep again tonight. Sleep would be too great a gift. In an attempt to clear the cobwebs, he climbed out of bed and walked around the boat. He undressed and stepped into the shower, languishing like a drunk trying to sober up. He felt better after he’d toweled off and climbed into sweats and a thick pair of hiking socks. He went outside to the small deck, where he gazed across the black-glass surface of the lake.

  Along with seven other floating homes and a mixture of pleasure craft, his houseboat was moored to a dock just north of Crockett Street on Westlake Avenue North, the second slip from the end. To his east he could gaze out over Lake Union to the freeway and the lights of apartment buildings, condos, and vintage homes residing shoulder-to-shoulder on the western slope of Capitol Hill. To his north were the shadowy, surreal comic book shapes of the old burners and smokestacks in Gas Works Park. To the southwest the Space Needle appeared from his vantage point to be keeping watch over an ever-expanding clutch of downtown skyscrapers, their reflected lights twinkling on the surface of the lake.

  The houseboat had originally belonged to his aunt Julie, who twenty-two years earlier had lost her husband, a mechanic at Boeing Field, to a freak accident, when he was sucked into a jet intake. The event had been captured by some clown with an eight-millimeter camera. The footage ended up on the national news, and it did more to destroy his aunt than the death itself. In fact, she never stopped ranting about the news footage and how cruel it had been to both her husband’s memory and her sanity. The proceeds from the insurance settlement along with a small pension allowed her to hibernate in her bedroom, drugged by soap operas, smoking three or four packs of unfiltered Camels a day, seeking final solace in the bottom of a wineglass. After twelve years of this, her body betrayed her in the same way the world had, and one morning she found she could no longer walk.

  She’d been Finney’s favorite aunt, and when she started her long downhill slide, he was the only family member to stand by her. Where others saw a cynical old woman who crabbed about every little thing, Finney saw the Aunt Julie who’d taken him on pony rides when he was four, to Disneyland when he was ten, on college visits when he was seventeen. Twice a week Finney would buy her groceries, put them away in the kitchen, then sit and chat while she sipped wine. After she nodded off, he’d clean the place up and do whatever odd jobs needed doing.

  She’d had no children, just a battered houseboat on Lake Union and a tailless cat named Dimitri, both bequeathed to Finney when her heart finally gave out earlier that year.

  His initial plan was to neuter the cat and sell the boat, but he soon found himself living on the boat and treasuring the cat, testicles and all. The battle-scarred Manx followed him everywhere just like a dog. He was fearless, and Finney loved him for it.

  Since Leary Way, Finney had been stalled out in the middle of remodeling the houseboat. It would have been embarrassing if he’d ever had any visitors. As things stood, it was possible to launch one of his kayaks from the spare bedroom by stepping out past the blue plastic tarp hanging over the unfinished outer wall. Currently, he owned three kayaks and was building another from a kit. Kayaking was his one interest that continued unabated since Leary Way.

  He went back inside and pulled a small tape recorder off the nightstand. His hands were shaking. This was one of the hardest things he could do, but he was helpless to stop himself. In the beginning he’d listened to the tape at all hours of the day, but now it seemed to beckon only when he couldn’t sleep. The recording had been copied from the master tape the dispatch center kept of all radio transmissions made during the fire.

  On tape Cordifis’s tone was surprisingly calm, almost nonchalant: “I want to say a few things while I still have a clear head. Emily, I love you. You are my life. I don’t know how I ever got so lucky thirty-four years ago. There has not been a day that I regretted meeting you. Heather, you’re the youngest, and I’m afraid we spoiled you. I’d do it again. I hope you have that child you want. Marge, you just go ahead and d
o whatever you think is right. I’ve always trusted your judgment. Ever since you were little, you knew what you were about. Linda, I hope you and the kids get through this divorce and come out happier on the other side. You girls and your mother are what make my life worth living. And the crew of Ladder One. You’re all great. I love you guys. I don’t think I’ve ever had a crew member I didn’t think of as family.”

  (There was a sound that might have been gasping.)

  “I know I’m not getting out of here tonight, so I’m telling you right now, I don’t want anyone feeling bad over this. None of us get out alive. It’s just a question of when and where and how we do it. I’m at peace with this. I knew when he left, the odds of John getting back with help were zero. God bless him, though. He really thought he was going to make it. I’m sure he’s out there busting his gut. I only hope you’re not in trouble your own self, and I pray that you make it, John. You and I both know you only strike out once in this game.”

  (At this point there was a pause and then the tape grew scratchy. The next sound was Cordifis coughing. He hadn’t been wearing his mask.)

  “The smoke’s been down on the floor for a while, but this is hot. . . . John, I want you to know something about tonight . . .”

  (More coughing.)

  The tape ran on for a few moments before it ended with a clicking sound. Most people figured it had simply stopped, but Finney knew from the noises in the background that the fire had been pushing in on him, that Bill had deliberately shut off his transmission to spare the feelings of his friends and loved ones—that he didn’t want anybody to hear him die.

  Finney had endlessly speculated as to what Cordifis’s last words to him would have been had he been able to get them out. Probably not to feel guilty, that he knew it wasn’t Finney’s fault. Probably not to let this night ruin the rest of his life. Finney often wondered if it would have made a difference to have heard the words. Every time Finney heard that last click he felt as if his heart were trying to beat without any blood in it.

  For a month after they extracted Cordifis’s body from the rubble, Finney holed up on the houseboat and pickled himself in alcohol, sobering up only long enough for infrequent visits to his doctor and sometimes not even then. It was his brother who, one afternoon, found him in a pile of dirty laundry on the floor and told him he was turning into Aunt Julie. That was what saved him—Tony’s admonition and the vision he’d carried of a drunk Aunt Julie over all those years. That was all he needed to hear. He hadn’t had a drop of alcohol since.

  For months now he’d been obsessed with his own role at Leary Way, grappling with the generally accepted theory that his disorientation and failure to find an exit quickly was the cause of Cordifis’s death. He’d talked to everyone who had been at the fire, trying without success to fill in the incomplete pieces from his memory. There was nothing concerning Leary Way that was either too small or too large for him to dissect.

  He had an indistinct recollection of telling Reese and Kub that Bill was twenty-eight paces back, directly along the passageway he’d come down. But was that a memory or only a dream? Reese, the self-appointed spokesperson for both himself and Kub, said the two of them had heard nothing out of his mouth but babbling. It was a fact that he’d babbled a few minutes later when Soudenbury found him standing inside a doorway in the smoke. It was a fact that he’d babbled in the medic unit, and he knew he hadn’t made much sense in the hospital.

  The doctors said his confusion had been caused by a combination of smoke inhalation and heat stress, that he’d been lucky to survive. They assured him nobody would have been coherent in that condition. What they couldn’t tell him was when it was likely to have begun.

  It was small comfort to Finney. Bill Cordifis remained dead, and he was taking the rap for it.

  He had been obsessed for the past four months with his own actions at Leary Way and it was getting him nowhere. Maybe he needed to look in a different direction. Since the last shift he’d worked, when they’d been called to the food-on-the-stove at the Downtowner, he’d been thinking about the larger picture. On the surface the call to the Downtowner couldn’t have been more dissimilar to Leary Way—a routine alarm, no loss of life or property, nothing to think twice about. But Finney noticed a disturbing similarity to the night of June 7. Because there were so many other alarms going on in the city, and because there were no other units available, Engine 26 had been first in—far outside its normal response area. Just like the night of Leary Way. Because of citywide tie-ups, Ladder 1 had been called outside its normal district. None of the first arriving units normally responded to Leary Way. None knew the layout of the buildings or what was inside. Finney couldn’t remember such involved tie-ups at any other time during his career. He had to wonder how it could have happened twice in five months.

  He walked across the bedroom, fired up his computer, and logged onto the website for the Seattle Fire Department. Among other things, the site gave details of every alarm the department had fielded in the past five years, these divided into fire and medical calls for each twenty-four-hour period, all listed in chronological order.

  Finney checked the run lists for the last shift he worked and found a striking increase in alarms throughout the city around the time of the Downtowner incident. A lot of them were false alarms, although there had been two fires going on and the Downtowner was genuine enough.

  He went back to the night of Leary Way. In Seattle, taverns closed at two A.M., and between two and three on a Friday or Saturday night there would often be a marked increase in car accidents, stabbings, beatings, man-down calls, many of which required EMS responses from the fire department. But June 7 was a Tuesday, and the taverns didn’t have anything to do with the report of a natural gas leak at Sand Point at 0225 hours that tied up one chief, two engines, two truck companies, an aid car, and a medic unit for two and a half hours. Firefighters who’d been on that call told Finney they never found a gas leak. Nor did the taverns have anything to do with the report of smoke from a vacant house on Lake City Way that came in at 0237 hours. Nor the second house fire miles away in the 3900 block of South Othello Street, this also a vacant dwelling. The latter put virtually all of the Fifth Battalion out of service. A smoldering pier fire in West Seattle took the Seventh Battalion out of the picture. A brush fire at Fort Lawton tied up three more engine companies.

  The calls were all either unsolved arsons or false alarms, yet there was no known arsonist working in Seattle during that period and the department’s activity sheets for the weeks before and after June 7 showed no abnormal flurries of activity and few arsons.

  It was tempting to conclude that the alarms during both shifts were orchestrated rather than happenstance, that some unknown party or parties had engineered those fire calls so they would occur more or less at once. If so, the supposed object of that orchestration on June 7 would have presumably been to burn down Leary Way.

  What discredited the theory was that, according to the department fire investigation team, Leary Way was caused accidentally by an electrical outlet in a storeroom in an area not far from where Finney and Bill Cordifis found themselves trapped. The head of Marshal 5, the department’s fire investigation unit, Captain G. A. Montgomery, even put a photo of the offending wall outlet in the department’s union newspaper, The Third Rail. For months the melted outlet sat atop his desk, a mute testament to his skills as a fire investigator.

  Was the series of alarms that had occurred on June 7 and two days ago beyond the pale for their department, or did it happen once every few years? Finney began with January of that year, scanning the response records for other periods of abnormal activity. After several hours he became aware that the sun had come up, and he knew if he had any appointments that morning, he was going to miss them. By the time he’d finished, it was almost two in the afternoon; he’d pored over five years of records.

  He found only one additional shift that fit the rough pattern—an extraordinary number of calls in a
very short period of time, so many units out of service when new calls came in that units were responding to fires at the other end of the city. All three shifts had occurred in the past six months, the first just three weeks before Leary Way.

  But it was the vacant house he’d found by the Duwamish River that troubled Finney more than anything. It fit in perfectly.

  16. A CONSPIRACY OF VAST PROPORTIONS

  It was after five o’clock and dark outside when Finney parked at a meter on Main Street and pushed his way through a light mist to Station 10. Inside, he skirted the watch office, where Bud Masterson was reading a newspaper, and went up the stairs to the mezzanine, where he found Robert Kub alone in the shadowy fire investigation office watching a Sonics game on a six-inch TV. The office was long and irregular, and the interior windows overlooked Station 10’s apparatus bay, like a news booth in a stadium.

  Marshal 5, the fire department’s fire investigation unit, was comprised of eight firefighters cross-trained as law enforcement officers, along with two cops from SPD, the unit overseen by Captain G. A. Montgomery.

  “So, what’s up?” Kub said. “You look like something’s bothering you.”