Earl W. Emerson

by The smoke room: a novel of suspense

  “You say another word, I’m going for a cop,” I said. “I’d rather spend the rest of my life in a box of dirt than see somebody else get hurt.”

  Tronstad stared daggers at me. “You didn’t tell him about Abbott, did you?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “It didn’t even come up. I’m not telling anybody about that.”

  “He make any calls after you spilled your guts?”

  “To the dispatcher. They told him we were coming here.”

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  “There’s a coupla deputy chiefs over there,” said Johnson. “Maybe he’s telling them right now.”

  Tronstad looked across the street. “Not bloody likely. He tells them, they tap us out of service. He’s not going to do anything to get shuffled out of here. He sees a fire like this, he gets a woody. We either get rid of him or we split and grab the bonds, divide them, and blow town. Those are our choices. Maybe you should tell us where you hid the merchandise, Gum.” Tronstad bobbled his black eyebrows as if this were a joke, as if he were my friend again, as if I hadn’t ratted him out and he hadn’t hit me.

  “Your mother’s place?”

  “No way I would hide anything at my mother’s.”

  “I can’t blow town.” Johnson looked at me beseechingly. “I’ve got a wife and a little girl.”

  “They’re bearer bonds, Robert. Use your noggin.” Amazed at our lack of imagination, Tronstad’s brown eyes were large and wet now, cow eyes.

  “They’re good anywhere. Take your family to Brazil and live like a king. In Brazil you could have a girlfriend on the side, put her up in a condo, buy her a little convertible, get her a boob job, all for just pennies a day. Hell, you could go ten years and barely touch those bonds. You could have two girlfriends on the side, one on each end of town. The women are beautiful down there, and they’re all poor as church mice. Fuck you for a smile and a used bus ticket.”

  “You know I’m not like that,” Johnson said.

  “Goddamn it, Gum! Tell us where they are!”

  Johnson looked at me. “We get there first, we’ll only take our share, right, Tronstad?”

  “Right as rain.”

  Now that I’d given up my next few years of freedom, I was even more reluctant to abandon the single piece of leverage I had. Or maybe I was sick of seeing people around me doing the wrong thing. I knew this much: I didn’t want the two of them blundering through Iola’s property in the middle of the night. If Iola or her father came out and confronted them, I couldn’t be sure what Tronstad might do.

  “So where’s the booty?” Tronstad asked, feigning gaiety. “Tell us so we’ll all know. That’s only fair.”

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  “Not tonight.”

  Tronstad’s lugubrious mien morphed into a vision of pure evil. From the moment I took possession of those bonds, our relationship had changed. I’d felt it that morning and again when he showed up at my house and every minute since. In the past we’d been mentor and student, seasoned firefighter and tyro, but now we were antagonists. I’d seen the sea change in some of Tronstad’s other relationships; Tronstad tended to love you or hate you, never a lot of ground in between.

  “Know what Sears told me tonight after we prayed?” Johnson said.

  “He said Abbott brought him in to clean house.”

  “Motherfucker,” said Tronstad, staring across the road at Sears.

  “What do you mean by ‘clean house’?” I said.

  “Abbott didn’t want us at Twenty-nine’s. He told Sears to find some excuse to transfer us.”

  “That can’t be right,” I said. “Sears told us he was going to turn us into the best crew in the city.”

  “What he actually said was that I was worthless as a driver and didn’t have the brainpower to learn my district. He said Tronstad took drugs off shift and had more than once come to work doped up, although he couldn’t prove it.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. Robert was the worst driver I’d ever worked with. And whatever the reason, he did not know his district. We all knew his wrong turns and zigzag routes would eventually cost a life, if they hadn’t already. And from things Tronstad said, I was fairly certain he was taking drugs. As far as I was concerned, Sears had portrayed the two of them with uncanny accuracy.

  “Know what he said about you?” Johnson asked.

  “Me?”

  “He said you were a natural-born fuckup. Said you could fuck up a wet dream. That he thought you should have been terminated in drill school. He said his goal from the first was to get rid of all three of us and bring in a crew that could do the job, but once he got there, he decided you would be first.”

  “He’s an asshole,” Tronstad muttered.

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  Abbott or Sears happened to be watching, but they made me nervous and I was new.

  “You thought that dickhead was your friend?” Tronstad said. “I can see now we weren’t doing you any favors holding this back. You want to know what he said about you? He was asking if we knew anybody who wanted your spot after he bumped you to another station. Isn’t that right, Robert?”

  “He mentioned it a couple of times.”

  None of this was fair. I hadn’t stolen anything. I wasn’t a thief. I hadn’t bought a new car, nor had I made plans to move to Rio de Janeiro and take a string of mistresses. At least now I knew, perhaps, the reason Sears had turned against me so quickly: it wasn’t a novel posture he’d adopted today, but rather an attitude he’d been entertaining and concealing from me for months. All along I thought Sears had favored me above the others. When he approached a few minutes later, I was still stunned by the revelations.

  “Come on, guys,” Sears said, happily. “I got us an assignment. Get up, Gum. You can sit on your butt some other time.”

  “We’re not due up,” Tronstad said. “Some crews here have been waiting half an hour.”

  “I jumped the line. Sue me.” Sears walked ahead of us, carrying his portable radio in one hand, a six-volt battle lantern in the other.

  “What’re you going to do?” Johnson asked Tronstad.

  “Fuck if I know.”

  “You’re not going to do anything,” I said. “I’ll be watching.”

  Wearing our MSA bottles and backpacks, the three of us headed toward the fire building, Sears marching in front like a duck leading his sullen brood.

  20. HEY, LADY, QUIT SMOOCHING ON THAT OLD FART

  W THE FIRE B UILDINGSsat between Aurora Avenue and Dexter Avenue, both arterials. Another arterial, Mercer, ran along the south side, near the fire complex, and it was on this road that a task force of six engines from regional fire districts south of Seattle was waiting in a long line, black smoke smothering their vehicles and personnel. I couldn’t think of a worse place to post them.

  Knowing this was the last night I would wear turnout gear or be part of this army of hose jockeys, I tried to hardwire it all into my memory, soaking in the ethos, color, and sensibility of my firefighting life. After two years I was only just getting used to all this, and tomorrow it would be gone.

  I felt a wave of melancholy over the fact that I’d let my mother down. Just as surely as she’d devoted her life to making certain I got a solid foundation, I’d devoted the past month to bankrupting her efforts. Worst of all, her last days would dwindle away in isolation. City Light workers had killed the power to the fire building and the nearby streetlights, but on Dexter the flames along the face of the building provided so much light that a hundred feet away you could read a newspaper by it. I counted six teams of firefighters spaced on the street outside the building wall, most of them holding down two-and-a-halfinch hose lines or hunkered on monitors. The two-and-a-half-inch nozzles dispensed three hundred gallons per minute, the monitors eight hundred gallons per minute, and the back pr
essure from these appliances was such that at least one firefighter, and sometimes two, had to babysit them to keep them from kicking back or sliding around. At the far corner of the building, firefighters had strung lines out of every conceivable port on two pumpers, until the hose in the street looked like a plate of spaghetti. There were spots in the roadway where 136

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  the layers of cylindrical hose were two or three feet deep, where you had to step over the hardened hose the way you stepped over a fence, and where water got trapped inside the twisted stacks and formed pools a child could dog-paddle in.

  In the dark along the south side of the building, a crew from Engine 6

  dragged hose to a point at the southeast corner of the fire building, where they’d been told to set up a monitor for us. Sears informed us we were to man this monitor as soon as Engine 6 got water to it. Johnson and I dragged hose while Tronstad traipsed alongside griping, occasionally filming us with the small video camera he sometimes carried. It was vintage Tronstad: all mouth, no work. “Jesus. Why don’t they man it?”

  “They’ve got other jobs,” snapped Sears. “We don’t.” You could tell he’d about had it with Tronstad, too frustrated to even try to make him help. When you thought about it, this was a bizarre situation. Any other officer in the city would have turned us in back at the station, but our lieutenant couldn’t stand the thought of missing out on a 4-11. Micromanaging each phase of our task, Sears gave a series of unnecessary instructions but studiously ignored Tronstad’s lack of cooperation. When the monitor was set up, he watched for a few minutes as we poured water into the flames, then lost interest and wandered off, moving up the line of heavy appliances, chatting with the other crews. There was a time when he would have been pulling hose alongside us, when our sweat was his sweat, but we were lepers now. It was hard to blame him. I had no wish to be associated with this triumvirate of greed and folly, either. After thirty minutes of holding down the monitor alongside Robert Johnson, I approached Tronstad, who was forty feet away, and asked if he needed help with the two-and-a-half-inch line he was manning.

  “Fuck you, ya little snitch.” He put the video camera on me and began taping. He’d been taping us on and off all day.

  “Okay. Yeah. Sure.”

  “No. I mean it. Get the fuck out of here. I can’t stand to look at your face. Move.”

  He continued to film me as I walked back to the monitor, where

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  Johnson was adjusting the stream, taking his job conscientiously, in contrast to Tronstad, who hadn’t moved his nozzle once. The fire continued to burn unobstructed, and in fact to grow, while we pumped half of the Cedar River Watershed into it. One way or another, most of the water we poured in flowed back out of the building, flooding the street and sending waves of lukewarm water up into our bunking pants and boots as we sat on the hose. My socks were sopping. At the hour mark we saw no signs that the water was having any salutary effect other than to keep nearby buildings from igniting. From time to time Sears showed up, gave more unnecessary instructions, watched for a minute or two, then rambled away as if he had another task on the other side of the building, which he didn’t.

  “He’s like a flea, ain’t he?” Johnson said, his face glowing sepia in the orange-yellow light from the flames. “You ever notice how he can’t sit still? It’s almost as if he thinks he’s in charge of the whole fire, you know. He talks about Tronstad having Attention Deficit Disorder, but he’s got it worse. Can you imagine being in a cell with him? He’d drive you nuts.” Johnson laughed dismally. “ ’Course, he’s not going to be in a cell. We are.”

  “I blew it. I’m sorry.”

  Johnson sighed. “We both blew it. We never should have let Tronstad keep those bags. I guess if I’ve learned one thing in life, it’s that you make your choices and you take your consequences. We threw the dice, and they came up snake eyes. ”

  “Speak for yourself. I didn’t roll any dice.”

  “Sure you did, Gum. You knew the right thing was to turn us in, but you didn’t do it, did you?”

  “You didn’t do the right thing, either.”

  “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you. ”

  “I shouldn’t even be part of this.”

  “Now you’re whining. You hid those bags. You covered up a crime. Then you came back from our four-off and found out the government was looking for Ghanet’s money. You had another opportunity to make a phone call. You didn’t, did you?”

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  “I couldn’t throw you guys in the clink. Not after you saved my bacon at Arch Place.”

  “I appreciate that, but people don’t get fired for missing a single alarm. You should know that. We didn’t save you from anything but a spanking.”

  Much as I hated to admit it, Johnson was right. Failing to override my own timidity and taking the easiest path was my biggest flaw, and this time it had been fatal.

  After another half hour sitting on the appliances, it became apparent the other crews on the street were being rotated out and we weren’t. “He volunteered us to skip the normal rest periods, didn’t he?” I said.

  “Would you expect anything less?” Johnson said.

  “This bottle’s killing my back.”

  Flames curled high and licked the night sky, alternating colors in a myriad of hues as diverse types of materials in the structure were consumed. “Sure is pretty. You kind of wish we could have a fire like this about once a week. People forget how splendiferous a tragedy can be,”

  said Johnson.

  I was in so much trouble. I was in as much trouble as if I’d taken a gun and robbed a branch of the Treasury. Once, years ago on my skates, after I zipped out into the street on Alki without looking carefully, a car struck me and I went tumbling over the hood. The feeling I’d had for those few seconds as I flew through the air was a lot like the feeling I’d been having for the last hour tonight—acute disbelief. A feeling that it couldn’t be happening. That it couldn’t be real. That this couldn’t be my life. Maybe somebody else’s life, but not mine.

  Even if I managed to talk my way out of a jail term for the bonds, there was still Chief Abbott’s death to worry about. As the hours passed, the puddles in the street grew deeper and broader, and as happened sometimes at big fires, the water runoff itself became one of the problems.

  “You know, Gum, I’ll be seeing my attorney, J. P. Gibbs, first thing in the morning. You should see yourself an attorney, too.”

  “No shit.”

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  By ten o’clock the fire hadn’t diminished. In fact, shortly before we were relieved, another interior wall collapsed and prompted a flare-up that shot over a hundred feet into the night sky. We oohed and aahed like schoolboys and then carefully redirected our streams to tamp down the hot spots, though our water was about as effective as a BB gun against a charging moose.

  Toward the end, I went back to Tronstad, who was getting weary and didn’t refuse my help this time, although after a moment he said, “You are just the biggest friggin’ jackass I’ve ever known. You never should have said a word to Sears.”

  “You’re right. I should have turned you in that first night, at Ghanet’s house.”

  Tronstad held my eyes for a few seconds, then burst into anguished laughter. “That’s right. That’s exactly what you should have done.”

  After the crew of Engine 11 relieved us, the four of us trudged over to the rest area and took off our MSA backpacks and bottles. Sears crossed the street to the command post and began communing with a chief he knew. Johnson sidled up to another black firefighter and began talking in low tones, while Tronstad downed Twinkies and a Coke. I wasn’t able to force down anything but a cup of Gatorade. Afterward, I stood off by myself in a funk. I was angry with myself. With Sears. Tronstad. At my dumb luck for having been assigned to Station
29 out of drill school. We were in the rest area fifteen minutes before I spotted someone I recognized in the crowd on the other side of the yellow fire-scene tape. I walked over and stood in front of her for a nanosecond before her eyes came to rest on mine. When she realized who I was, she gave a little jump. The old guy she’d wrapped herself around wore a disheveled suit, his tie unknotted. He was maybe sixty or seventy. Hard to tell. I’d only seen him once before, the afternoon the pig fell through their roof, and his eyes looked dead then, too. They were black and flat tonight and never looked at you directly, always surveying some object in the distance. Bernard Pederson. Daddy.

  Iola wore tight designer jeans, high-heeled boots, and a fancy coat. When she spotted me, Iola whispered something into Bernard’s ear, 140

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  sending him on an errand, and as he turned and lumbered gracelessly through the crowd, she gave him a pat on the butt. I was pretty sure he hadn’t recognized me.

  After he was gone, Iola turned to me, stepping forward until she was pushing against the yellow ribbon.

  “Firefighter Gum. How nice to see you in all your gear.” She whispered, “You know how hot that gets me.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “We came to see the fire. We were on our way home from Carmelita’s. A little celebration.”

  “What’s all the smoochin’ on the old guy?”

  “The old guy? That’s funny. I suppose from your perspective, he does look old. Surely you remember Bernard.”

  “Bernard’s not . . . but you call him Daddy. ”

  Stepping forward, she cupped my face in her cool palms. “A lot of wives call their husbands that. Don’t be upset. I think it’s sweet that you didn’t realize he’s my husband. I mean, that’s what I liked about you from the beginning. Your naiveté. I suppose it’s only fair to tell you I’m tired of it now.”