Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  Finney had tossed and turned all night after the accident. But then, it was no accident. Even if the first pass had been accidental, the second and third charges had been deliberate. In order to avoid hours of scrawling out accident reports, a cagey driver might touch up a scratch on the rig with cardinal red or buff it out with automobile polish, but that only worked with minor scrapes. Last night’s rig had to have some serious damage. If it was a fire department rig, somebody would know about it, and Finney aimed to find out who.

  One possibility he was considering was that maybe one of the mechanics from the Charles Street shop, which was only blocks from the accident site, drank a few beers while working late and decided to go for a test drive. He wondered if it was possible one of the outlying fire departments had a unit that looked like Seattle’s, although, unlike Seattle’s traditional red, most of the outlying districts used lime-yellow paint schemes so they would be more conspicuous.

  Finney couldn’t decide if the hours he’d spent on Airport Way had anything to do with the attack or if the timing and location had been coincidental.

  He’d telephoned the police that morning, but they didn’t have any news. He called the Safety Chief, Stephanie Alexis, a cheerful, good-natured woman with forceful, often controversial opinions on how the fire department should be run, but Chief Alexis reported no vehicular accidents for yesterday’s shift.

  As much as he was plagued by Leary Way and puzzled by Riverside Drive, last night’s attack bewildered him even further. More than bewildered—he was pissed. Some damned fool had tried to kill him. He couldn’t believe how angry he was. Maybe he should have been this angry last night. Ever since Leary Way, things had taken longer to sink in, all things, as if his emotions had a blanket around them.

  As soon as the housework was finished, Finney drove the air rig to Station 14. In back of the station he could hear the recruits in the current drill school hard at work, the shouting of orders, heavy-duty aluminum ladders rattling, the calflike bellowing of the prime pump on an engine. A bellowing again as some luckless recruit fought to get it right on his second attempt.

  Fourteen’s was a Spanish-style building with towers, a tile roof, and stucco walls. Its look hadn’t changed much from the mid-thirties or from 1962 when Finney’s father had been stationed there as a firefighter. The department’s training division shared cramped space both upstairs and down with the living quarters for the crew of Ladder 7 and Aid 14. Years ago Engine 14 had been housed there, too, but it had been decommissioned long before Finney signed on. His father used to talk about how the drivers on Engine 14, nicotine and caffeine addicts to a man, would race to alarms full tilt over the railroad tracks a few blocks from the station and how, if they weren’t braced for it, the men on the tailboard would be launched into the air, along with all the hose in the hose bed. More than one tailboard man had lashed his wrist to the rail.

  During the twelve-week drill schools, training division commandeered the classroom at the northeast corner of the building as well as the mostly empty parking lot and seven-story training tower behind the station. About once a year recruits dropped a ladder on one of the parked cars belonging to a Station 14 crew member.

  In Ladder 7’s beanery they proudly displayed a photograph of one of the station’s high-angle rescue team members sliding down a line tethered to the Space Needle, a photo that never failed to impress visitors.

  Parking the air rig in front, Finney went inside and approached the building inspection file cabinets near the front doors. While two firefighters on a tall stepladder applied metal polish to the brass pole at the other end of the hallway, a female firefighter named Hedges began swabbing the floor around his feet.

  “Whatcha doin’?” she asked, slowly painting him into a corner with her mop.

  “Just looking up a phone number,” Finney replied, ignoring her prank.

  Every fire station in the city performed building inspections in its specified district. Meticulous records of each occupancy were kept, along with the disposition of each year’s inspections and fire code violations, if any. Some of the records went back thirty or forty years. Included in the folders were the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the occupancies, as well as information about the owners. Using the map on the wall above the cabinets, Finney located the block number for the occupancy on Airport Way where Monahan and Stillman had met yesterday afternoon.

  He pulled a thick folder out of the drawer and opened it on top of the cabinet. The occupancy name was MAKADO BROTHERS. Curiously, the last fire department inspection of the building had been done by Lieutenant Balitnikoff. Balitnikoff had not written up any violations, although the previous five inspectors had all penned Notices of Violation for various transgressions: extinguishers not tagged, fire doors propped open, cluttered aisles, illegal and improper use of extension cords.

  Finney found it odd that Balitnikoff had inspected the building, but when he unfolded the small work schedule card from his wallet he found the day in question was listed as C-7, Balitnikoff’s debit shift number. Firefighters worked seven debit shifts in addition to their regular schedules each year, approximately one every seven weeks, and most were worked outside the firefighter’s normal station.

  He flipped the file card and found the building was owned by Patterson Cole—not all that strange, since the octogenarian probably held the deeds to more property in Seattle than any other individual. It was with that thought that Finney riffled through the files and found two more occupancies on Airport Way owned by Cole, one of which, directly behind the Makado Brothers but addressed off Eighth Avenue South, had been listed as vacant three months ago.

  After jotting down the pertinent information, Finney put the files away and was on his way out of the watch office when Lieutenant Balitnikoff and Michael Lazenby sauntered in. Outside, the tailboard of Engine 10 was butted up against the north stall door, facing the street for a quick getaway in case they received an alarm.

  “Speak of the devil,” shouted Balitnikoff, exuberantly. “We were just talking about you.”

  “Sure as hell were,” said Paul Lazenby, pushing through the doorway behind his brother, Michael, who’d halted in his tracks. A fourth firefighter who didn’t normally work on Engine 10 shouldered his way through the group and headed for the back of the station.

  “Heard you had some magic mushrooms for dinner,” Lieutenant Balitnikoff said.

  “Extra special magic mushrooms,” said Paul, smirking.

  When Finney said nothing, Michael offered an explanation. “Thompson on D-shift is dating that cop. The little spinner? She told Thompson you claim you got run off the road.”

  Paul Lazenby and Balitnikoff burst into laughter. Michael, the only one of the three wearing his foul-weather coat, put his hands in his pockets and bit the inside of his cheek.

  “What happened?” asked Paul. “You crash into a garbage truck and think it was your old rig?” All three of them laughed again.

  Balitnikoff said, “You sure a deer didn’t jump out in front of you on the way home from the bar?”

  “Maybe you got hit by a beer truck,” Paul said.

  “Screw you,” Finney said.

  “Hey, you were off duty, man,” Paul said, his voice growing more sympathetic. “Oh, wait a minute. You quit drinkin’, didn’t ya?”

  Finney opened the door.

  “No, wait, you guys,” said Michael. “I want to hear this.”

  “Fuck all of you,” Finney said, walking outside.

  Michael followed him, zipping up his coat. “I don’t know why they ride you like that.”

  “Because they’re assholes?”

  Michael chuckled. “Their main problem is they don’t know when to quit.”

  Finney appraised Michael Lazenby for a moment. Though he didn’t give a rat’s ass for his older brother, Paul, he rather liked Michael, who had a boyish smile and a shock of blond hair that always looked as if it had just been rumpled. He seemed to take life as it came, whi
le Paul tried to twist and force every circumstance to suit him. Both brothers were narcissists to the core, obsessed with building muscles and chasing women, but somehow Michael managed to make it seem like an amusing quirk, where it was just obnoxious in Paul.

  “That wasn’t a bogus rumor we heard?”

  “Somebody tried to run me down.”

  “In a fire engine? For real?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hey, if you find him and want somebody to help beat the crap out of him, I’m your man. People start using fire rigs for that sort of bullshit and we’ll all get a bad name.”

  “Thanks, but that’s not going to happen.”

  “Keep me on the shortlist if you change your mind. I always like to get in on a good beating.”

  “Will do.”

  34. HAZARDS OF THE PROFESSION

  Diana and Blanchett had been working the chain saws for almost two hours, cutting through the heavy car-deck planking of the vacant pier until they’d uncovered the smoldering creosote-covered pilings where somebody, probably a lost tourist, had tossed a cigarette stub. They sawed and dug, stacking the heavy planks to one side after soaking the burned areas with a pressurized pump can. Ladder 1 and Aid 5 were the only units still on scene.

  It was a three-story warehouse, longer than a football field and empty, just tin walls, a roof, and the pier below, some of which was paved and some not. Several weary firefighters sat on piles of car decking they’d torn out.

  Before they were finished, Robert Kub arrived and, after inspecting the hole, removed himself from the immediate vicinity of the chain saws and lit a cigarette. A few minutes after Captain Moseby rotated personnel in the hole, Diana found Kub standing outside on the pier squinting listlessly into a southerly breeze.

  “How you doin’?” Kub asked.

  “I’m hot and I’m tired.” Diana laughed.

  “Now watch me throw this stub down here and start another fire.” He snickered at the thought. “That’d be just like me.”

  “Robert, have you been in touch with Finney?”

  “John? I’ve seen him.”

  “Is he all right?”

  Kub exhaled loudly. “If you mean is he all right health-wise, he looks like shit. But if you mean is his life going okay, that’s pretty much shit, too.” Kub snickered again.

  “The way Reese turned him down was crappy.”

  “Reese needs a new head.”

  “There’s a rumor going around that G. A.’s after him for starting that fire where he brought out the homeless woman. Is that true?”

  “It’s true all right.”

  “That’s so ridiculous.”

  “Until you start examining the evidence.” Kub inhaled on his cigarette and peered up at the overcast sky.

  Diana took off her heavy bunking coat and let the breeze cool her sweat-soaked SFD T-shirt. “What evidence?”

  “I wish I could talk about it, but I can’t.”

  “Any chance he actually had anything to do with it?”

  Kub watched a quintet of gulls riding an air current thirty feet away. “I’ll tell you this. When it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck . . . We came in together, me and John.”

  Kub withdrew a crumpled packet of Camels from his windbreaker pocket and, cupping his hands, set about the ritual of igniting another cigarette. In Elliott Bay a ferry steamed toward the dock from Bremerton. They watched in silence, while behind them the racket from a chain saw reverberated inside the tin-walled warehouse. The air smelled of cigarette smoke, salt water, sawdust, and from somewhere among the tourist shops on Alaskan Way, cotton candy.

  “Does he seem different to you?” Diana asked.

  “You mean after Leary Way?”

  “He used to be so . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Confident?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Yeah, well, one way or another, it’ll work itself out.”

  “I wish I were that optimistic.”

  “You ever notice when a guy goes nuts—I’m not saying he’s nuts—I was just thinking about this . . . you ever notice when a guy goes nuts, he’s always the center of the universe? He’s always the only one who can get the secret formula to the president on time. Ever notice?”

  Whatever Kub was trying to say, it didn’t make sense. “John’s not nuts,” Diana said.

  35. THE KNOX BOX KEY

  Although nobody had made any requests, at 2100 hours Finney told Lieutenant Sadler he was taking Air 26 out to deliver bottles.

  Sadler and Brinkley were draped in recliners watching a prizefight on cable television, Sadler making sniggering comments about the blond in the bathing suit who circled the ring between rounds holding up a sign. Jerry Monahan was half-asleep in the empty office near the front door, a book in his lap titled Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance. Finney still found it hard to believe he was involved in anything as sinister as arson. But then it was also hard to believe Monahan was a firefighter. Or that he’d made and lost several millions of dollars. Or that he’d been a semipro football player.

  Finney picked up his hooded foul-weather jacket and went out onto the dark apparatus floor, where he stepped up onto the officer’s side of Engine 26, opened the door, and reached across to an orange light on the dash. He unscrewed the plastic lens cap and disengaged the bulb so that when the current was tripped it wouldn’t light up, then replaced the cap. He lifted the spring-loaded lid on the small metal box that he’d always thought would make a good rodent casket, removed the most valuable key any department rig carried, and closed the lid. With the dashlight disengaged, no one would be the wiser.

  He was taking a calculated risk that Engine 26 wouldn’t receive an alarm while he was gone, and if they did, that neither Monahan nor Sadler would notice the disabled light or the missing key. Probably because it had never happened, the department had not concerned itself with people stealing Knox box keys. The administration assumed that most people didn’t know what a Knox box key was and wouldn’t know where to find one if they did.

  A Knox box was a small metal security box holding a building key, which could be installed by a property owner usually on a wall near the front door. Once sealed, a Knox box couldn’t be accessed by the property owners or even the police—only the fire department. The department’s assurance to property owners was to use Knox boxes only when lives or property was threatened, allowing emergency access without costly damage to expensive doors and windows.

  Finney drove Air 26 to Airport Way past the Makado Brothers buildings and around the block to Eighth Avenue South. The buildings were dark. Below the freeway on Airport Way there was almost no traffic.

  It was doubtful there was any kind of night watchman, but he pressed the doorbell twice anyway. When he’d waited long enough, he opened the Knox box with the stolen master key, removed the property owner’s key, and unlocked the front door. Then he replaced the building key in the Knox box.

  Uncertain what he was looking for, he followed the small cone of light from his flashlight through the offices and down the causeway into a warehouse. Fifteen minutes later he was back in the truck, no wiser than when he’d gone in.

  The first warehouse area had contained rows of shelves, thousands of small boxes stacked on them. A smaller building was filled with various machining tools. He’d found three Rolodexes in the office area, but none of the names meant anything to him. Could it be that Stillman and Reese were investors, and this company was being solicited to put Monahan’s high-rise rescue contraption into production?

  The wreck last night, the frame-up, Leary Way, Monahan’s peculiar actions the past few days—all of it had the feel of a jigsaw puzzle he’d been asked to assemble blindfolded.

  As he considered the possibilities, his gaze wandered across Eighth Avenue toward an enormous lot with two large, interconnected buildings, the only other piece of property Patterson Cole owned in the surrounding area. There were no lights, just an empty pa
rking lot and a lone Dumpster. Finney knew from the inspection cards these buildings were vacant.

  In the distance a disposal truck worked its way up Eighth Avenue. Finney watched as it stopped at various occupancies, the clatter of falling glass, metal, and rubbish clashing in the night. The driver emptied the Dumpster across the street, rounded the corner, and disappeared without seeming to notice Finney. It occurred to Finney that if the buildings across the street were vacant, the Dumpster should have been empty.

  Finney found the building key inside the Knox box bolted to the concrete wall near the front door. Moments later he was exploring the office areas, all empty except for a broken desk and a chair shoved into a corner.

  The bathroom smelled as if it hadn’t been aired out in months. When he opened a third door, the light from his flashlight was dwarfed by an immense warehouse, vacant except for a workbench and a tall, portable screen in the far corner.

  As he approached the workbench, he sniffed the odor of fresh paint and lacquer thinner. The screen was twelve feet high, thirty-five feet long. On the near side stood a red, cabinet-style tool box, open and promiscuous with tools.

  On the other side of the screen he was both shocked and relieved to find a fire engine—large, red, damaged, and presumably the one that had run him down the previous night. “Damn,” he said.

  He circled the vehicle slowly and saw where they’d already patched the fender, sanded and buffed it in preparation for the red spray cans of enamel lined up on the floor on newspapers.

  Across the grille were large red numerals: E-10.

  Twice he circled the vehicle looking for any subtle detail that would convince him this wasn’t an official Seattle Fire Department apparatus. It had decals on the doors, a map book in the cab, and every other piece of equipment one would expect to find on a Seattle rig. Yet he’d seen Engine 10 only hours earlier while making his air deliveries; it hadn’t had any front-end damage.