by Earl Emerson
Balancing all the shit in my arms, I light the first bandanna and it goes poof. I’m not sure how long I can hold the business before it explodes in my hand, so I look down at the kid, who’s staring at me, and I say, “Hey, kid. You better get back inside. I don’t want you to get hurt.” He turns and runs back inside real cute like. Can’t be leaving no witnesses.
Just as I cock my arm back to pitch my shit into the stairwell, dumbster comes around the corner at the top and sees what I’m doing, yells something I don’t hear, and races down the stairs toward me, but I pitch the bottle, and to my surprise the bottle doesn’t break against the wall, it just bounces, but then it hits the stairs and cracks and spills gas out, and before you know it we got fire all over the stairs, not going too hot at first. Then the flames jump up.
Dumbster comes to a halt and stares at me, his face all glowing in the light. “You gonna pay for this, motherfucker.”
“I didn’t pay for no ticket, and I ain’t payin’ for this,” I says.
“I’m gonna go get my piece.”
“Go get your piece. Then we’ll both have one,” I say, pulling out my John Henry and pointing it at him.
“You better not shoot. You already in a heapa trouble.”
“I’m in a heapa trouble, it don’t make no difference, does it?”
“Just don’t you shoot me, motherfucker.”
By now the fire’s starting to climb, and he’s got his mitts in front of his face ’cause of the heat, and he turns around and runs up around the corner out of sight. One of them Mexicans comes out of the first floor, an adult this time, looks at me and turns his head until he can see inside the stairway, at which point he goes flyin’ back inside with all that mariachi music.
I strike a match, light my second bottle, and throw it inside the front door behind him.
Just as I’m starting to leave, the wind picks up and rips up them stairs and blows on the fire, and I can hear it making this purring sound. Dumb bastards. Fix that old Gerard for messing with my woman. And LaToya, too. You can’t trust a woman, there’s no point in keeping her around.
Now I’m heading down the street, and I’m thinking, Mission accomplished, you know. That’s when I notice this Caucasian cat angling across the street from the other side, headed straight at me, white hair and everything, got a little wiener dog on a leash. I keep a grip on my piece in my pants, but for a number of reasons I don’t want to use it, the foremost being it makes a shitload of noise, and noise ain’t something I want to be putting out just now. This white cat comes all up in my face and says something like “I’ll testify against you.”
“Fuck you!”
“No, you have to do something. You can’t just walk away from that.”
“Watch me, motherfucker.”
We’re on Rainier now, this long-legged freak walkin’ side by side with me. I keep my cool until he goes too far and yanks on my Raiders jacket. I can’t have no white motherfucker pulling on my coat, so I slip out the piece and point it. “What are you going to say about this?”
“There’s no call for that,” he says.
I can’t believe this honky. When he reaches out to touch my coat again, I give him a coupla taps and down he goes, his glasses all broke. He’s not dead, just kind of twitching, and his legs are trying to move, and I’m thinking to myself, why did he have to touch the jacket? He might as well have pulled the trigger his own-self.
I’m walking away now, and the deal back there at the club and capping this piece of shit: overall it makes me feel bad. Real bad. Fact is, I haven’t felt this bad since the time I got arrested for scrapping with Chumley over on Orchard Street. First Chumley kicks my butt, and then the cops arrest me and kick my butt, and then I get in the tank and run into Shivers, and he thinks he owes me behind somethin’ happened back in tenth grade, so he kicks my butt. This is almost as bad.
12. ESTEVEZ IS HOT
TREY>
We were sitting in an office on the fourth floor at Station 10, the heat turned too high: me, Jamie Estevez, and Chief Frederick Fish, who was fidgeting at his desk as if making time for us had seriously imperiled his workday. For two years, prior to the Z Club fire, he’d been our chief in Battalion 5, but he’d been promoted after the fire, which was unfortunate, since the promotion had drawn unflagging criticism from the minority communities of Seattle.
Jamie Estevez sat opposite Fish in the only other chair in the room while I leaned against the wall. I took off my foul-weather coat and hung it on a hook, and Estevez stripped off her navy blazer and draped it over the back of her chair. The pink blouse didn’t have to work too hard to make her look good. I turned away, thinking that if you’re going to be working with somebody for a couple of weeks, it’s best not to lust after them on the first day.
I’d been in a funk ever since running into Stone Carmichael and had been trying to shake it without success. We had a long history, and not much of it was pleasant, nor was any of it worth thinking about. It didn’t help when Estevez turned to me, as she’d done twice already, and said in that chirpy voice that was part of what made her such a charmer on the tube, “Is something wrong?” Something was wrong. I didn’t want to see my brother again and I didn’t want to be digging up dirt on the Z Club, but I didn’t want Chief Lennox or Chief Douglas handling it, either. Partially because I didn’t trust them to come up with an objective report, but also, I had to reluctantly admit, because I didn’t want Douglas drooling over Jamie Estevez for the next few weeks. Not that she was my type. She was hot, all right, but too aggressive and too much of a go-getter for a guy like me, who’s always been drawn to the homemaker types.
All morning she’d been taking potshots at me whenever she had the chance: I was “throwing” fire victims out the window; I was ungrateful for the damned award. On the good side, she was empathetic with each individual we spoke to and put them at ease, so each of the interviews had gone without a hitch.
Chief Fish, in his fifties, a slight, timid-looking man with heavy black-framed glasses, was the last chief I would have nominated to lose fourteen people at a fire.
13. A FISH STORY
DEPUTY CHIEF FREDERICK FISH;
FORMERLY BATTALION 5 CHIEF, C SHIFT>
Look, I have to leave in about twenty minutes to meet my daughter, so I’ll cover as much territory as I have time for now, and if we don’t finish, you’ll have to come back at some later date. I find it best to go through that night with the run sheet and computer printout in front of me. The printout contains the time of the first unit’s arrival, their radio report, the time we got water on the fire, the results of the initial search, all that.
I arrive just in front of Engine 13, park across the street from the south side of the building, and establish the command post there because I initially think this is the front of the building—but later I discover the main entrance is on the east side where Engine 33 has set up. When I first arrive, the smoke seems to be blowing away from us, but as the night progresses, the wind switches directions and there are times when it virtually engulfs us. At one point we’re using flashlights to see the status board.
Lieutenant Smith from Engine 33 comes over shortly after I arrive, and we do a face-to-face. While Engine 13 begins setting up lines, two of the Latinos who’ve been milling around outside run over to the building. There is a fair amount of smoke pouring out the doorway on my side of the building, and I can tell from the color of the smoke and the force with which it’s coming out that we have a good fire. Both these Latino guys are overcome almost immediately. I mean, they just go down. That’s when this guy from Thirteen—I think it was Voepel—walks over and gets them out.
I find out later they were having a wedding reception. Not my idea of a primo spot for a reception, but to each his own. What do I know? They’d done a head count in the street and realized one of their little girls was missing. I’ll give them two points for guts, and I think we should take away one point for stupidity.
I have
Ohman and his crew take a line through that same door, and then I send Ladder 12 in behind them to do search and rescue with a thermal imager. I ask Ladder 12 to ventilate the building, which they accomplish by putting up a gas-powered fan in the doorway. The fan turns out to be a disaster, because it isn’t up a full minute when I get a call on the radio from Engine 33 saying the fire is coming out the front door onto them and is pushing them into the street, so I have somebody shut it down. Of course that doesn’t help Engine 13 or Ladder 12 doing their search, because as soon as we shut the fan down, the smoke and heat just slam down on them.
About that time Ladder 7 shows up, and I have a face-to-face with the lieutenant and tell him we need some ventilation, but tell him what happened with the fan. Now we’re in a bind. We put the fan up where it was, we’ll burn Engine 33’s crew. We go around and put it up where Engine 33 is posted, we’ll blow the fire onto Engine 13 and Ladder 12 and maybe that little muchacha who’s missing. It’s a pretty big building with a lot of smoke in it, coming out around the windows and in the pipe chases in the bricks on side A. What we probably should have done, in retrospect, was put the fan back up and have Engine 33 go defensive, pull them out of the building. But then they give an additional report. Yeah. Here it is right here. “Command from Engine 33. We’ve found fire in a stairway leading to the second floor. We’re going to need another crew and more lines.”
I ask if they are separate fires, and he says they appear to be. I know then we have an arson, and with so much fire on their side, I’m reluctant to use a fan on my side.
I have Ladder 7 ventilate the roof. Fire in the stairs, I figure rooftop ventilation is the way to go. Of course, it wasn’t going to do much for the conditions on the first floor, where Ladder 12 and Engine 13 were searching. Then one of the members from Ladder 3 comes over with a couple more Latinos, and they tell me there’s two additional kids missing. A couple of little boys. I give that information to Captain Ohman on Engine 13, and he radios back that they’re not making any headway inside, that it’s really hot and smoky, that there are a lot of spaces to search.
About this time the entire Latino contingent more or less swamps the command post. I mean, there’s thirty of them—kids, too. They’re chattering a mile a minute and crying and getting in my way, and I can hardly understand a word any of them are saying. The cops see what’s going on and start clearing them away, but by then I’ve missed a couple of radio messages, so I have to backtrack with the dispatcher. It turns into a real mess.
About this time Engine 33 is reporting that they’ve tried to go up the stairs on side D and the stairs are untenable. Engine 13 is reporting high heat and zero visibility on side A, unable to find the fire and unable to locate any victims. Unable to complete the primary search because of the heat. I try to call Ladder 12 inside but get no answer. Right about that time some of the bricks on side A start falling onto the sidewalk from about thirty feet up, and I’m thinking if we’re not careful we’re going to lose firefighters here.
Then this woman cop comes over, and she’s got three kids with her, and they turn out to be the missing kids. They’ve been outside the whole time. This takes a while to figure out, because, I mean, none of these people are speaking good English, but finally I get them to agree that everybody is out.
At that point Engine 33 reports a loud explosion somewhere inside the building. And I’m thinking this is the Mary Pang fire all over again. So I ask Captain Ohman on Engine 13 if he doesn’t think we should declare this a defensive fire, and he radios back that they’re not doing any good inside. I ask Ladder 7 on side B how they’re doing getting to the roof and they report that they’ve had to reposition their rig because of power lines, but they’re working on it.
God, I hate to turn anything into a defensive fire. So I walk around the building to side D, thinking I’ll take a look, maybe view the second and third side of the building, and when I get around the corner, there’s this hellacious fire burning in the stairwell. And another one inside the doorway to the first floor. And they’ve got two two-and-a-half-inch lines going, but the water’s not making a dent in the stairs. There’s a crowd of Latinos on the corner watching, so I have some firefighter ask if there’s anybody upstairs, but they say there’s nobody up there, that the wedding reception was all on the first floor.
I call Engine 13 and Ladder 12 out of the building and declare a defensive fire. I go back to the command post, and it is about this time Engine 28 shows up. I make Captain Brown Division C. While I’m doing this, another group of civilians comes up to one of our officers and says they think there are people inside. They don’t know, but they think so. Our officer tells them that we’ve already accounted for everybody inside.
A minute or two later, a group of African Americans comes to the command post and begins screaming that there are people inside. The police come over and there’s some scuffling. I tell them we already had somebody inside searching. That placates a couple of them, but more keep coming. I believe this was the time…yes, this was when Captain Brown said he wanted to ladder the building. I told him no. My thinking at the time was you don’t declare a defensive fire and then put up ladders.
By this time Engine 13 and Ladder 12 had come out.
Now, I know later on, a week after the fire, the papers found a bunch of people who claim they told us there were people inside and we blew them off, but this is how it happened. We were told by the Latinos in the wedding party that the building was empty.
So the cops disperse the blacks who are mobbing the command post, but they start to gather at the corner, and they’re getting louder. Finally they’re throwing bottles at my firefighters, and what we have basically is the beginning of a riot. More and more young black men and women showing up every minute, chanting, “Get ’em out! Get ’em out!”
I can tell the police are not ready for this—maybe for traffic control, but not a riot.
Then two things happen at about the same time. Captain Brown here gets on the horn and says they have a ladder up to a window and there are victims on floor two. At the same time, two young men come out the A side onto a small fire escape on floor two and start yelling for help through the smoke.
I tell Ladder 12 to put up ladders to the fire escape. They get those two down, and then two more and then two or three more, and I’m thinking, Holy Christ! How many people are up there? It becomes clear there is some sort of party on floor two, because all these people are dressed for a night out. We rescue eight or ten, and that’s when I learn we have a missing firefighter somewhere inside on the first floor.
Listen, I hate to do this, but I’ve gotta go now. My daughter has this appointment I can’t miss. There’s more—obviously—but you’ve got the beginning.
14. ARE WE GOING TO DANCE OR NOT?
JAMIE ESTEVEZ>
“Just a quick question before you leave,” Trey said.
Chief Fish, who had already snatched a coat off a hook on the wall, did not appear pleased to be detained. “What is it?”
“You knew how bad the African-American community felt about the Z Club. Surely you must have guessed people would take issue over the fact that you accepted a promotion a week after fourteen people died there.”
“My promotion didn’t have a thing to do with the Z Club.”
“We all know that. You work hard, and you’ve been around a long time. You deserve a promotion. That’s not the issue. The question I’m posing is, Did it not occur to you or Chief Smith that people in the community would question the timing?”
“You said yourself I deserved the promotion.”
“I’m asking if you had any second thoughts in view of the fact that it took place a week after the Z Club.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with the Z Club.”
“That’s not the perception in the black community.”
“It didn’t cause any uproar.”
“Oh, but it did. Your promotion is one of the key points brought up when people sugg
est the fire department is callous and dismissive of the black community.”
Trey was correct on that front. People were outraged that Chief Fish had been promoted, instead of reprimanded or even fired.
“I didn’t do anything wrong at the Z Club, and I resent the implication.”
“You preside over a fire in which fourteen people die, and a week later Chief Smith says, ‘Hey, I think I’ll make you a deputy.’ And it doesn’t occur to either one of you to put it off even a couple of weeks? That he maybe could have placed you in an administrative assignment in the wake of the Z Club, the way cops work at a desk after they’re involved in a shooting?”
“Listen, I didn’t shoot anybody, and my daughter is waiting.”
Captain Brown stepped aside and Chief Fish stalked out, slamming the door. I said, “That certainly went well.”
Trey turned and gave me a look with the barest hint of amusement. “Don’t you think it odd that they didn’t think about it?”
“It doesn’t make any difference to how the fire was run. Why did you even ask?”
“Because it bugs me.”
“He’s going to have a chip on his shoulder next time we talk.”
“No, he won’t.”
“You seem a little put out with Fish. I mean, other than this beef you just had over his promotion.”
“What makes you think I was put out with him?”
“While he was talking I was watching your reflection in that window over there.”
I saw Trey check out the window, which because of the light was acting like a mirror, and watched him realize with a start that I must have also seen him looking at me when he thought I wouldn’t know. All day he had pretended not to notice I was a woman, but I’d caught him noticing, and I could tell it bothered him.
