Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  The man in the suit heaved a sigh and squatted on his haunches. “The house? Not very much. The contents? Another hundred. I have lost some gold and jewelry. I have lost—”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s say three-fifty. Sixty percent of that would be two-ten. I’ll give you a discount here. Two hundred. You fucked up. Now you pay the piper.”

  “I don’t understand. Who is the piper?”

  “Me, Abdul. I’m the piper.”

  “My name is Yassar. Yassar Himmeld. I am a good man.”

  “There are plenty of good men in prison.”

  “But how to repair the premises? You leave me with less than half of my losses. You leave me with—”

  “Sixty percent is about what it takes to keep you away from those tattooed biker boys up in Monroe. It’s that or you shave your legs and dab on eyeliner. Your choice.”

  “How do I know this isn’t a trap?”

  G. A. popped a Motrin and chewed it, then held up the tape recorder, which was still running. “I don’t need to trap you, Abdul. I’ve already done that. What I need is some of that extra green you got coming in from Aetna.”

  “Allah, help me,” Yassar said, sagging against the porch support.

  54. PARANOIA IN CHURCH

  Finney was escorted to the third pew in St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral on Capitol Hill, to the section reserved for speakers, family members, and dignitaries. Finney didn’t feel as if he belonged in the pew, but by the time he realized where they were putting him, it was too late. He knew people were staring at him. He wanted to think it was only because the burns on his ears and the back of his neck were highlighted with white silvadine cream which stood out in a sea of black uniforms like some sort of misapplied clown makeup, but he knew it was more than that. He knew it and he hated it.

  During the past two days he’d been out of the house only to visit his doctor. He continued to feel disoriented and at times dizzy, some of it from the medication, some from the delayed effects of heat stress and smoke inhalation, and from the chronic lack of sleep. He still hadn’t sorted out the events of the fire in his own mind. Although he believed he and Gary had been set up, he wasn’t certain. Even Diana hadn’t believed him.

  As did every other attending member of the Seattle Fire Department, Finney wore his black wool uniform, a ribbon of black tape across the coat badge. The church was filled with uniforms from departments all over the Northwest. Festooned in wreaths and black ribbon, Engine 26 stood outside waiting to carry Sadler’s casket to the family plot in Bellingham.

  Surrounding him in the first three pews were Sadler’s mother, his two married sisters, their husbands, assorted nieces and nephews, some of Gary’s old drinking companions, and a crop of current friends, mostly AA members and former girlfriends. Also in attendance were members from all the shifts at Station 26, as well as Charlie Reese and, at the opposite end of the pew, Captain G. A. Montgomery, who had been quoted extensively by the media over the past two days as saying their star witness had yet to give a statement. Finney was, of course, their star witness.

  Finney found himself barely able to sit, unable to concentrate, and reluctant to listen to the eulogies. He caught a few words from the podium. Sadler had been an Eagle Scout. He was part of the Big Brothers program and had nurtured two young men to adulthood. He was an attentive uncle who took his nieces and nephews camping and fishing every summer, skiing every winter. He was an avid hunter as well as an amateur taxidermist. As the eulogies continued, sweat ran down Finney’s neck and stung his burns like lemon juice on a fresh cut. He still couldn’t figure out why Sadler was babying him during the fire, and that pained him almost as badly as the sweat on his burns. Sadler had saved his life, and Finney let him down.

  With almost no conscious recollection of how he’d gotten there, he found himself outside the church among a forest of firefighters in dress uniforms. Engine 26 had left and so had the rest of the cortege.

  “You okay, buddy?” his brother, Tony, asked.

  “I guess.”

  “What you need to do, John, is you need to lay low for a while and let some of this blow over.”

  Diana Moore approached them. “Hello, Captain Finney.”

  Tony nodded and swung his dark eyes back onto his brother, as did Diana.

  “I’ve been meaning to come over to see how you were doing,” Diana said, to Finney.

  “Don’t bother. I’m fine.”

  “You been listening to the news reports about the fire?” Tony asked.

  “No.”

  “G. A. Montgomery was on KOMO saying Bowman Pork was set with a time-delay device. The way G. A.’s hinting around about what they found in the building, it was done by somebody who knew how to light a fire. Maybe a pro.”

  “Or a firefighter?” Diana asked.

  “That could be, too.”

  Finney listened to his brother rehash the details. The initial fire had been set in a small room off the loading dock, additional devices set to kick in later at various other points in the building. At least one of those devices must have gone off between the time Finney put Sadler in the doorway and when he went back inside. That was assuming he’d actually placed Sadler in the doorway and hadn’t been hallucinating. He and Tony talked it flat, and then Tony said, “God, I feel bad about all this stuff.”

  “Yeah, well . . . it wasn’t your fault.”

  After Tony left, Finney turned to Diana, whose hair was pulled into a knot at the back of her neck to facilitate the wearing of her dress uniform hat. The dull light from the sky made her face look radiant. He wished he wasn’t so angry with her, but he was. “I know you don’t believe me, but the fire was a trap,” he said, dully.

  “I’m sorry about what I said to your parents.”

  “Don’t ever regret telling the truth.”

  “Just because the fire was set doesn’t mean it was a trap.”

  “That civilian the night of the fire said there were victims inside when he knew there weren’t. Then somebody locked a door behind us. They killed Gary. You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Gary died. It happens to a firefighter every week somewhere in this country. Maybe every day.”

  “What about our victims?”

  “I heard Parkhurst talking before the service, and he said the man who told him about the victims hung around for about five minutes and then disappeared. Said he was probably one of those freaks who get off on lying to the fire department.”

  “They torch a building in our district when I’m on shift. Get somebody to report trapped victims, so we’re taking chances and going deeper than necessary. I practically handed Gary to those firefighters, and still he died inside the building. You’ve never believed any of this, have you?”

  “I can’t believe two firefighters would take Gary back inside.”

  “It was dark. Maybe they thought they had me.”

  “That’s just a little paranoid, isn’t it?”

  Finney took a deep breath. A raindrop the size of a marble fell out of the sky and struck him in the forehead. Another fell on Diana’s shoulder. Clumps of mourners on the street began to disperse. Moments later the air was electric with the smell of rain. Finney said, “You don’t believe anything I’ve said, do you?”

  Diana swung her wide-spaced gray eyes on him and brushed back a wisp of hair over her ear. A raindrop trickled down her cheek, or was it a tear? “It’s not that black and white, John. Besides, it seems to me you’re standing here imagining this is all about you, when Gary’s the one who’s dead.”

  55. THE OZARK

  Five hours after Gary Sadler’s funeral, Finney’s father answered his doorbell in West Seattle and found his son on the porch with a hot pizza and a six-pack of beer. Stepping inside, Finney deposited the cardboard pizza box on the kitchen table, while his father popped the top on one of the beer bottles; Finney put the rest in the refrigerator. “Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s got her ceramics class on Fridays. Take a seat. They go
t some great chopper shots of the fire. Interested?”

  “Yeah.”

  A devoted film buff, his father had thousands of still pictures chronicling his family and career. At last count, he’d cataloged over six thousand videotapes, many of which lined the shelves of four large bookcases he’d built in the family room. He’d collected hundreds of feature films, plus any television documentary involving World War II or firefighting or any other topic that caught his eye. He had one row devoted to real-life car chases and accident footage. When he played them, it became obvious he had all the crashes memorized.

  As he led Finney into the family room, his father said, “Missed you at the funeral.”

  “I didn’t see you either.”

  “We were in back, old Ralph Marston and me. Marston was one of Gary’s instructors in drill school. He actually tried to get him fired. Said he was cocky. Can you imagine?” This last said sarcastically. “It was funny. I saw Gary just the other day. Sure you don’t want a slice of that pizza? It smells good.”

  Finney noticed his father had barely sipped the Heineken. “No, thanks.”

  “How’d you see Gary?”

  “Oh, he dropped by. A lot of people are paying their last respects to the old bastard. It’s kind of nice, really.”

  “Can we take a look at the tapes?”

  “Sure.”

  Finney senior turned on the television and put the cartridge into the VCR, while Finney sat on the sofa, trying not to exacerbate the burns on his neck. His father dropped the remote in Finney’s lap and sat heavily. They were both wounded warriors, though Finney’s wounds would heal, most of them. “I thought this might give you a little perspective.”

  By the time news cameras reached the scene, firefighters were directing two-and-a-half-inch hose lines into the building from the parking lot. The interior was raging, but because they’d committed to an exterior attack, all they could do was wait for the flames to breach the walls; one of their primary missions would be to knock down floating embers before they ignited secondary fires up the hillside in the woods.

  When Finney saw an injured firefighter being half dragged to the rear of a medic unit, it took a minute to realize that injured firefighter was him. He looked bigger than he thought he would. He also looked half-dead. It was a frightening piece of film.

  What frightened him more than anything was his father’s running monologue, which was basically a roll call of the faces they were seeing on the footage, his father calling out names with calm regularity as they appeared on the screen. Finney was unable to conjure up any names at all. He hoped this memory impairment was temporary but had been told there was a good chance, given the extent of his carbon monoxide absorption, that it wasn’t. He didn’t even remember much of what the doctors had told him, only that forty percent of severe cases such as his ended up with long-term memory problems.

  They’d been watching the compiled news reports for almost thirty minutes when his father said, “I don’t know where he gets off standing at the command post like that.”

  “Who?”

  “Back it up. There he is. If I was B-One, I would have kicked him ass over teakettle.”

  Finney backed the tape up and saw a man standing five feet from Chief Smith, the picture blurred and fuzzy. It was Oscar Stillman. It took another long moment to bring up the name and remember where he knew him from.

  “I didn’t realize they were friends,” Finney said.

  “They aren’t. Not that I ever heard.”

  “Oscar Stillman.” Finney remembered Stillman’s kindness on the fire ground Tuesday morning, how Stillman had been one of the few people who’d spoken to him. He remembered being rude to Oscar, too. That was his inclination, he’d learned, to be rude to people who were kind when he was down. “What was Stillman doing at the fire? He’s not on the call list for a multiple alarm. Now that I think about it, he was at Leary Way, too. I remember seeing him when we were changing bottles.”

  “I talked to Smith at the funeral. Oscar was the reason they switched from offensive to defensive. Oscar was the one who warned him about the LPG inside the Bowman Pork building. Of course, later on they found out he’d been mistaken. But what the hell. Better safe than sorry.”

  “There was no LPG inside?”

  “There was one tank outside. The fire never got close.”

  “You still have those tapes from Leary Way?”

  “I put ’em all together on one master.”

  Finney stood up. “Where is it?”

  “You want it now?”

  “If that’s all right.”

  The Leary Way footage seemed endless, and was just as painful to watch as it had been last summer. His father, who always came to life when playing a videotape of a fire, gave a running commentary, noting hose lays that had gone awry, rigs parked too close to the building, and naming just about everyone who came across the screen. In some ways his father was like a Little League coach, the entire fire department his team. They watched for forty minutes before Finney backed up the tape and manipulated the remote to freeze a frame on the screen. It was another shot of Oscar Stillman standing at the command post next to the incident commander. “Look,” Finney said. “He’s talking to Chief Smith again.”

  “You said you saw him.”

  “I didn’t know he was at the command post.”

  “If he hadn’t been there, we probably would have lost you. He knew that building from his inspection program. He’s the one told Smith which side of that fire wall you guys were on. Otherwise they would have sent everybody to the wrong side. They wouldn’t have found you. I heard about it when you were still in the hospital last summer.”

  “Everybody searched the west side of the fire wall at Leary Way.”

  “That’s what I mean. Who do you think told Smith you guys were on the west side?”

  “Dad, we were on the east side.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’ve been back. I’ve traced the whole thing. They were all searching on the wrong side. And nobody found me. I was on my way to the exit when I bumped into Reese and Kub. I’ve talked to everyone. They were the only team on that side.”

  “Don’t that beat all? It goes to show sometimes a little information is worse than none at all.”

  “What it goes to show is that I’ve been in trouble at two fires, and for no discernible reason. Oscar Stillman was at the IC post dispensing information that could, if acted on, make things worse for me at both of them.”

  “I don’t think he meant any harm.”

  “You don’t think it’s odd he was at both fires?”

  “Does seem strange.”

  They sat back and watched the rest of the footage on Leary Way. When G. A. Montgomery showed up on the tape, Finney said, “You worked with G. A. What was he like?”

  “Biggest pussy I ever worked with. George Armstrong? God, he hated combat. He worked at Thirty-four’s when I was Battalion Two, and every time I said I was coming down to give them a drill, he’d have a bloody nose when I got there. People used to call him Captain Kotex. Said he should keep one up his nostril in case his period started again. I haven’t thought about that in years.”

  “You think he might be crooked?”

  “No way. I knew his uncle. Good people.”

  “What about Oscar Stillman?”

  “Oscar used to ride Attack Ten in the days when they were getting a lot of fires. That boy could eat smoke. I swear he’d still be in operations if he hadn’t hurt his back. He tried to get out on a disability, but they called it phantom back pain. Instead of handing him a pension, they ended up sticking him down at the Fire Marshal’s office. For a while there, he was real bitter.”

  Finney got up and stood at the window of the family room looking down over the backyard. As children, they were never allowed to leave so much as a toy in the yard, but when he was ten he’d asked his father for permission to build a tree house in the apple tree behind the garage, and his father, for s
ome reason, said yes. Finney worked on it alone for weeks, and then one overcast Saturday afternoon while he hammered away, his father showed up and began helping. It had been uncharacteristic of him. His father worked with him all afternoon, and the memory of that day remained one of the brightest of Finney’s childhood; he rarely visited home without checking to see if the faded boards of the tree house were still in place, always felt an inner warmth when he saw they were.

  His father stood beside him at the window. “I ever tell you about the Ozark Hotel, John? The college basketball championships were on TV. I was on Ladder Four. We could see the column of black smoke from the station, and then we rolled up on it just as two jumpers hit the sidewalk right smack in front of us. Smoke and flame coming out of everywhere. Every window had a head in it. Me and Samuelson, we got the thirty-five, and we put it up to the first person we came to. The guy jumped for the ladder before we even got it upright, almost knocked it out of our hands. He missed the ladder, of course, fell at our feet. Brains exploding all over our boots.”

  Finney knew the details by heart, but he let his father ramble, knowing the telling of it was somehow soothing to his father, perhaps in the same way that telling the tale of Leary Way would be therapeutic to him some day.

  “They had transom windows above all the doors to the rooms, so the fire went down the hallways and burned through these simple-ass windows and got into each of the rooms before the poor bastards knew what hit them. We put up every goddamn ladder we had and then moved them as fast as we could. I never worked so hard in my life.”

  “The Ozark drill,” Finney said. It had been a staple of ladder company evolutions in Seattle for years, a race to put up every ladder from the truck as quickly as humanly possible and then to move them from window to window even faster.

  “When we put up the fifty-five, some old man started down before we could get the tormentor poles out. His weight made the ladder start to creep along the side of the building. Then a woman came out and climbed right over him. We thought they were both goners, but that ladder slid down the side of the building, and by God, the two of them rode it down without a scratch. When it was all over, we lined up twenty-one bodies under tarps in the alley.”