by Earl Emerson
It took Sadler sixty seconds to pry open the door.
Finney assumed from the amount of smoke on the other side that they were returning to the main warehouse. It was hotter after the relative calm of the closed room, and once again they could hear water streams beating against the outer walls.
For a split second Finney glimpsed a door on the wall directly behind Sadler in the smoke.
“Over there,” Finney said, walking forward. As he proceeded, Sadler ran not for the door, but directly at him, reaching him in two large strides, knocking him backward.
Finney tumbled back through the doorway, his bottle clanking on the concrete floor, the wind knocked out of his lungs, his hip and one elbow numb with pain. For a moment he felt as if he’d been struck by a bus.
“Goddamn it, Gary!”
Rolling onto his hands and knees, he took a moment or two to regain his senses before he realized Sadler was under a pile of burning debris. He felt the heat on his wrists as he frantically pulled the burning materials off his partner.
Several boards and one timber had fallen from somewhere above. They might have killed an unsuspecting Finney if Sadler hadn’t knocked him out of the way. When he turned and saw a pile of burning lumber teetering on a mezzanine over their heads, he half-carried, half-dragged Sadler out of the way. A hose stream from outside burst through a high window, forcing steam down on them. As the heat came down, Finney slipped and fell beside Sadler.
He became aware that he was lying on something, a lot of little somethings. Like ball bearings. He felt around with his gloved hand and then turned on the small flashlight on his chest strap—pigs’ feet, hundreds, thousands of pigs’ feet.
“Come on,” Finney said, receiving no answer. “Lieutenant?”
There was nothing more cumbersome than a man in full bunkers carrying another man in full bunkers. Sadler weighed 230 plus his 50 pounds of equipment. Finney knew it would be hard to drag him, next to impossible to carry him, but still he knelt and pulled him to a sitting position. When he had him almost standing, he threw his shoulder under his hips and folded his limp body across one shoulder. For a moment he thought rising from this half-crouch wasn’t possible, but with a great effort, he finally succeeded.
Breathing like a racehorse, he walked slowly, shakily, toward the wall where he’d seen the exit. At each step his legs threatened to buckle. How the hell did I get in this fix, Finney thought, as he tried to calm his breathing. I go to a big fire, the world caves in on me. Is it just me? Even as he had these thoughts, things began to get better. As it happened, he walked almost in a direct line to the outside door.
After he’d put Sadler down, he looked up and saw two firefighters nearby, both wearing backpacks and masks. He made sure they saw Sadler against the doorjamb and waited until they were approaching. Just before they reached him, Finney stepped back inside and lost himself in the smoke.
50. AN INCH OF COOL AIR
Alarm bell ringing, he made his way on rubbery legs across the warehouse space. His bottle would soon be drained of air, but unlike a lot of younger firefighters, Finney had entered the department under a regime when firefighters rarely masked up for anything, so he knew from brutal experience he could force himself through almost any amount of smoke.
Together with the conviction that they’d been within a few feet of the victims, frustration and anger nudged Finney back into the depths of the warehouse and beyond the immediate sounds of hoses and running pumps and shouting men.
He was dizzy and hot and still shaky from carrying Sadler, and even though he didn’t want to admit it, he was scared.
What he couldn’t have foreseen was the astonishingly quick buildup of heat in the building. “Christ,” he said to himself.
He reached a wall and followed it to the left. He’d lost the battle lantern and now had only the small, department-issue flashlight, which he could use to see at arm’s length in some places, not at all in others.
Locating a set of wooden stairs, he decided they were the same stairs he and Sadler had used earlier. As he crawled up into the heat, the sweat inside his bunking clothes began turning to steam and scalding him. He thought he saw orange licking across the space directly above, but when he tipped his head back to get a better look, there was only blackness and a burning sensation at the back of his neck where his collar touched him. The void in front of his eyes might have been thirty millimeters distant. Or thirty miles.
He reached the top step, dropped to his knees, and crawled alongside the wall, the ringing bell a constant reminder that his air was nearly depleted.
The space turned out to be empty. He was disappointed and somewhat surprised.
As he was mulling over his options, the bell on the back of his belt stopped clanking and he felt a sensation similar to sucking on a snorkel with a hand over the end. He ripped his mask off and scuttled down the wooden stairs on his stomach, trying not to breathe until he reached the shallow layer of relatively good air an inch above the concrete on the main floor.
Perhaps there was another set of stairs. Perhaps the firefighters who’d given him directions had been confused. Or maybe he was confused. Inhaling shallowly, he continued on his hands and knees along the wall, heading toward what he guessed was the east end of the building. He had no idea where the exit was.
It was always this simple. Leary Way had been this simple.
One small misstep. Nothing portentous. This was how it started. The margin for error was always minuscule. You screwed up one step at a time; pretty soon you were in trouble, and a while after that, not too long after that really, you were dead.
He was still crawling when he heard the sounds an MSA mask makes as somebody at rest inhales and exhales. On his MSA backpack belt he carried, as did all Seattle firefighters, a PASS device, which he now held in his hand.
The PASS was the size of a double-thick cigarette pack and had two settings—one designed to emit a piercing whistle after twenty-five seconds of motionlessness, so that others could home in on a downed firefighter, the other a manual mode to whistle regardless of movement. He switched his to manual.
He saw a fuzzy light and realized they were within twenty feet of him, moving closer. He tried to stand and holler, but the heat knocked him to the floor.
It didn’t take a whole lot of carbon monoxide to get your brain swimming. He was dizzy. Nauseated. Sleepy beyond all expectation. His temples throbbed. His face was flushed and hot. His eyes dry. He was beginning to lose track of time. The sense of déjà vu became almost overpowering. This was so similar to Leary Way. But then, smoke was smoke. He could have been anywhere.
They were closer now, his rescuers. Wanting to be able to listen, he fumbled with the noisy PASS device until it was off. Now there was only the low, crackling symphony of whispers from the flame overhead.
“Hey,” he shouted. “Over here. Seattle Fire Department.” But they were gone.
Then he saw an opening, a doorway with lights and noise and people and activity; it was all so close he couldn’t believe his luck. As he crawled toward the light, a woman stepped into the doorway, her hands in the pockets of a long, gray raincoat that reached her ankles. For a moment he thought it was . . . it was—Diana. He couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t in full bunkers. When she took her hands out of her pockets she wore no gloves; her hands were as bare and smooth as milk.
She was blocking the doorway, and for some reason, as he looked up into her gray eyes, he no longer felt any urgency to get outside. “You been in there killing old ladies, John?”
“What?”
“You realize sooner or later you’re going to have to explain yourself.”
“Why aren’t you suited up?”
“We’re talking about you, sweetie. Not me. We’re talking about your criminal career.”
He tried to move closer, but moving made him dizzy. He staggered. Hands on his knees, he put his head down and let the blood run back into his brain. It felt as if someone were beating
on his skull with a mallet.
When he looked up, he was alone. No Diana. No doorway.
He spun around in a circle trying to figure out where she’d gone, or if she’d ever been there.
He’d been within ten feet of an exit, and sure, maybe the smoke got heavier and obscured it, but if he stood still long enough, surely the smoke would lift and the door and the woman would reappear.
He saw something. He wasn’t sure what. A movement. A sliver of light. He moved toward it.
He felt a hard shove from behind and dropped to keep from stumbling, striking the concrete hard with his knees. When he put his hands out to push himself back up, he realized he was on the lip of a deep shaft, a shaft somebody had tried to catapult him into. He rolled to the side and crawled along the edge of the shaft in the blackness.
Switching the PASS device on, he flung it across the floor. Twenty-five seconds later the device began emitting a high-pitched wail. He heard movement, scuffling boots heading in the direction of the PASS. A burning timber crashed nearby, and when sparks flew off, he saw two helmeted figures in full bunkers. He couldn’t tell if they saw him or not.
After some time he realized he was staring at the ceiling light in a medic unit. The firefighter paramedic, an intense woman in a white shirt, was bending over him asking questions.
Naked except for a pair of wet boxer shorts and socks, Finney lay on his back under what felt like a giant sticky spiderweb. An electric fan somewhere blew air across his torso. He was thirsty, his teeth as dry as pebbles in the desert.
For some reason he knew he was still on scene. Put an address on it, he thought, straining to make his mind function, but he couldn’t come up with the day of the week or even the name of the president when they asked him. He couldn’t identify the unit he’d been riding or his partner. “Bill Cordifis,” he finally muttered, when they asked, but even as he said the words he knew he’d flunked the quiz.
He was drifting in and out of his own life.
Although he realized even as he was speaking that he wasn’t making sense, he felt he had a story to tell, one they needed to hear. He found himself jabbering about victims, female firefighters in raincoats, unknown assailants; even as he tried to get the tale out, he knew the odd-shaped lumber in his sentences was not building a structure that would stand. He knew his words conveyed nothing but his own befuddlement, and the worst part of it, now that he’d begun talking, was that he couldn’t stop. And when he did stop, he couldn’t start again.
Determined to compose a single sentence that would convey all of his desperation, he fell silent, straining to muster the right sequence of words. The faces over him were as somber as if they were peering into a casket.
When he moved his head from side to side ever so slightly, it seemed as if the entire medic unit tipped. The effect was so bewildering and wondrous he continued rolling his head back and forth for some minutes.
The medic who’d been working on him, a short-haired, broad-shouldered woman with a chest that, from Finney’s angle, all but obscured her face, stood up straight and, with a certain amount of deference, addressed someone at the rear of the van.
“We’re putting ringers into him, Chief. This is our second bag. When we got him, he had a rate of one fifty-eight and his blood pressure was eighty palp and falling. We cut everything off and put this damp sheet over him, but he’s not cooling down. We didn’t think to take his core temperature until maybe ten minutes into it. It was a hundred six. Hallucinations start at around a hundred five. You want to talk to him, fine, but he’s not making any sense. Right now we need to get more fluids on board and stick him in a hyperbaric chamber.”
“John? How are you, old pal?” The voice was directly over him, deliberate, cool-headed, and noticeably more affable than it had been with the medic. This was a man who knew what he wanted. “John?”
Finney stopped rocking his head and peered down between his feet through the open back doors of the medic van. Beyond his feet he saw a wall of rippling orange.
“John, we need to know what happened. We need to know. Where’s your partner? We’ve got a man missing, and you’re the only one who knows where he is. John, this is Chief Reese. Your old friend, Charlie. Stop and think and try to make sense. John, where is Gary?”
“I carried him out.”
“You couldn’t have. You could barely walk when they found you.”
“Before they found me. Left him with a couple of firefighters in the doorway.”
“John? Don’t go to sleep. Where’d you leave Gary?”
Finney could hear voices, but he couldn’t get his eyes open.
Reese barked out orders. “Get somebody to check all the doorways. Get moving. And don’t let those newspaper people know what you’re doing.”
It was then that a bulky figure in a dirty yellow bunking suit parted the white-shirted workers, an older man with a fleshy face and ruddy cheeks. It wasn’t unusual for Finney to see Bill Cordifis. He was dead, obviously, but Finney saw him once or twice a week. Sometimes in the visage of an old man collecting aluminum cans behind a supermarket. Sometimes he was a utility truck driver, or a face on a passing bus, a man in the passenger seat of a motor home on the freeway.
Leaning close, Cordifis said, “Bet you thought you were rid of me, huh, Sport?”
“I tried to get you out,” Finney whispered. “I tried my best.”
Unbuttoning his bunking coat, Cordifis said, “See what you did?”
From deep down in his stomach, from somewhere near the base of his spine, Finney could feel the scream coming even as he tried to staunch it. Although he’d lost most of his voice from the smoke, the sound he made was hideous. Hands struggled to hold him down, and as he screamed he knew he sounded like a gut-shot dog. The knowledge did not arrest the howl coming out of him. He screamed and screamed again.
51. JERKED OFF BY A MORON
Tuesday morning Oscar was forced to park nearly a half mile away from the site. Besides the gawkers who mobbed the intersection near the smoldering ruins, there were hundreds of firefighters who’d come to mingle in the smoke and early-morning fog. With one man missing and another possibly dying in the hospital, the mood was distinctly gloomy. Intermixed in the crowd were a few female fire groupies, but mostly male wanna-bes with bulging muscles and military haircuts, or fire-buff types, pocket protectors swollen with pens, medical flashlights, EMT cheat cards, and chief’s badges they’d bought mail-order from the back of Firehouse magazine. What a circus, Oscar thought.
Nearly every civilian vehicle passing through the intersection slowed as the occupants stared at the ruins. Some of the passersby rolled down their windows and shouted questions at the traffic babe under the light. Others turned on their headlights or pushed flowers out their windows onto the roadway—which by noon was carpeted with crushed roses and carnations, the sweetness blending with the bottom-of-the-shoe odor of last night’s fire.
Oscar wished he had a nickel for every time Finney’s name was invoked.
It was a bad time for the fire department. The medics said they’d be surprised if Finney survived, and even though he was officially listed as missing, everybody knew Gary Sadler was dead.
It was all so needless, Oscar thought. For Christ’s sake, a fellow who five months ago had been as badly injured as Finney, you’d think he would do anything to avoid Operations Division. Yet the dumb bastard couldn’t get back into combat fast enough, clearly a man who couldn’t stay out of trouble. Look at that mess on Riverside Drive.
Everybody knew barking dogs got shot, and it surprised Oscar that a man as intelligent as Finney could get himself into this kind of bind.
The newspapers were bound to regurgitate the Leary Way story. Last summer both Seattle papers had run multiple features on Leary Way, the Seattle Fire Department, and firefighting in general. Oscar remembered some of the press clippings: FIRE CHIEF’S SON NARROWLY ESCAPES BLAZE. CAPTAIN DIES, CHIEF’S SON LIVES. FIREFIGHTER’S BEST EFFORTS UNREWARDED. N
or would the media pass up a chance to rerun last summer’s photos of Reese and Kub emerging from that flame-shrouded doorway. Nobody was going to overlook the fact that John Finney had been a key player in both debacles. Oscar hated to see a firefighter go to the grave with that sort of stain on his reputation, especially a firefighter as likable as Finney.
It would be better if he died. They would give him a hero’s funeral, shed a few tears when the bagpipes played, start a college fund in his name.
Media mavens had flown in from as far away as L.A. and San Francisco, and Oscar knew that as long as the story remained ongoing, as long as Gary Sadler was missing and the outcome of Finney’s hospital stay remained in question, there would be hourly updates. Breaking news, they called it. Chief Reese milked his minutes in the limelight, joking with the large-jawed news lady from KSTW-TV in Tacoma as if she were an old girlfriend, or as if he wished she were. Reese knew that once Sadler’s body was recovered, the media would stop focusing on the minute-by-minute events and begin digging into why it happened. When it came to that business about not promoting Finney, Reese was going to look damned near prescient.
At noon Oscar tucked his shirt in and wandered over to the traffic enforcement babe under the light at West Marginal and Michigan, a dishwater blond with a thick waist and an officious air about her that amused Oscar. They chatted for five minutes, and when he asked for her phone number, she pulled her lips into a thin smile and informed him that she had a boyfriend. Oscar said her having a boyfriend didn’t bother him in the least. Unlike a lot of Seattle males, Oscar Stillman wasn’t afraid of women. He told her so, said he’d grown up with six sisters and four aunts, had three daughters, and had been married and divorced three times. He liked women and they liked him, too.
